Detailed at Telnets.org, a fan of Valve’s Portal series converted his computer room into a full-blown Aperture Laboratories office complete with a Cave Johnson oil painting, Test Chamber sign, lemon grenades and even a hidden message within the room. After leaving the home office beige for the last three years, he decided to give the entire room a theme rather than simply changing the paint color. While Nintendo’s Mario franchise was definitely in the running for a theme design, he eventually decided on Portal after seeing other DIY Portal designs on the Internet. For instance, Vector Farr’s bedroom made headlines after appearing on YouTube during late 2011.
The main focal point of the room is the Test Chamber accent wall with a giant Aperture Laboratories logo. After designing a scale mock-up of the wall using CorelDraw, he masked off panels using string guides as well as painter’s tape before painting select panels to match the design of a typical Aperture Laboratories room. Using a vector copy of the logo, he shopped around with local sign makers until finding a company that would provide a paper template of the logo for less than $100.
The entire cost of the logo with painting supplies was $142 and he even had enough paint left over to create a hidden message within the closet. Painted in a similar fashion to the messages hidden within the Portal 2 environment, it says “Though Earth and Man are gone, I thought the cube would last forever. I WAS WRONG.”
To the left of the accent wall, he wanted to hang a Cave Johnson oil painting. Voiced by actor J.K. Simmons within Portal 2, Cave Johnson is the founder and CEO of Aperture Science. While Thinkgeek has a similar portrait for sale, the Portal fan wanted to create something more unique for the home office.
He hired an artist to create an oil painting of Cave Johnson from a photograph and mounted the finished version inside a 16”x20” wooden frame. At the bottom of the frame, he also fixed a brushed gold nameplate that says “Cave Johnson: Science isn’t about why, it’s about why not!” This portion of the project cost $105 plus shipping for the print.
Next to the main desk on the opposite side of the accent wall, he mounted a lighted Test Chamber sign identical to the one found within the Portal games. With a budget of less than $100 for this portion of the project, he started with a 16”x31” shadowbox frame which he painted gray. To light the inside of the box, he used a 10 meter strip of LED lighting mounted to white foam core board which reflects much of the light when turned on.
After acquiring a sheet of translucent white plexi-glass that was cut to the right size, he found the Test Chamber icons in vector format on the Web as well as the font used within Portal. After working up the project to scale in CorelDraw again, he sent off the layout to a friend with a vinyl cutter and eventually applied the sticky film to the front of the unit.
The final DIY addition to the the Portal-themed home office are two lemon grenades. Taking about an hour to create, he purchased two fake plastic lemons from a crafts store as well as two inert grenades that he found at a local army surplus store. After applying a coat of paint to the top of the grenades, he cut holes in each lemon and screwed in the grenade tops as well as adding a bit of adhesive caulking. Using the vinyl cutter again, he created a stencil of the Aperture Laboratories circular logo and airbrushed that onto the side of the lemon. The entire project cost approximately eight dollars per lemon grenade.
Other Portal-themed additions to the room include a Companion Cube cookie jar converted to a planter, a set of Portal bookends, a GLaDOS model and a “Don’t drink the water!” drink coaster. A full gallery of the project’s creation can be seen here.
2012年1月31日星期二
2012年1月30日星期一
‘Doubt’ display celebrates uncertainty
Blurred images and hazy landscapes dominate “Beauty in Doubt,” a Ruffin Gallery exhibit featuring the unconventional oil paintings of Tom Burckhardt , who abandons the canvas for cast-plastic backgrounds. Burckhardt’s new work underscores the doubt present in the things we see around us and the things we attempt to construct.
Even in a time when digital photography and modern sculpture tend to eclipse more traditional art forms, for Burckhardt, the evolution of painting has a lot of room for growth . In fact, painting is more important than ever to illuminate the absurd nature of how we live today.
The most immediately striking thing in viewing his work is the proclamation of his paint, which Burckhardt achieves by using bright gradients and bold colors. In certain Burckhardt paintings the effect creates a sense of exaggerated reality. Houses are not green, faces are not red, patterns do not suddenly appear, but maybe, if the viewer squints hard enough or looks long enough, these things might eventually emerge.
In works such as American (2011) and Rakish (2011) , Burckhardt pursues the concept of fragmented reality . The face only half exists , to the point where the viewer often is not sure what Burckhardt is trying to display. The doubt comes back, not to mock the modern notion of painting, but rather to play with it, to display its flexibility.
In addition to their common theme of doubt, Burckhardt’s paintings also use pareidolia. Pareidolia, seen in Rorschach’s inkblot tests, describes the psychological situation in which people perceive vague or random images as significant. In Burckhardt’s pieces, faces appear out of patterns, colors and shapes. An intriguing aspect of these works is this exact paralleling of patterns and colors. By default, our minds attempt to work out some significance in the way these elements are put together. We see faces and houses where objectively there are only green lines and black triangles. Burckhardt has described the process of realizing these images as though “they grow into individuals, as paintings, by growing into individuals as representations of faces.”
Artists have not completely rejected cast-plastic and cardboard, but these types of mixed media are frequently considered to be a lower-class form of art. Certain factions of the artistic world praise such works, but many critics bemoan this alleged “fall” of the artistic form from its historic pedestal. Burckhardt focuses on the middle ground between these two attitudes. Burckhardt has seen the life cycle of painting occur many times over and he seems to show amusement in the face of its repeated death and resurrection. The hazy distortions of Burckhardt’s paintings seem to dismiss the existence of previous works of the more academic artistic canon.
Conceptual quibbling aside, Burckhardt’s interplay of colors and patterns is beautiful in its own right. Notions of doubt and historical ambivalence, however, underlie any sense of simplicity in his pieces. They are by no means immediately attractive, but their meditations on absurdity, doubt and the artificiality of conventional beauty make them fascinating fodder for both thought and sight.
Even in a time when digital photography and modern sculpture tend to eclipse more traditional art forms, for Burckhardt, the evolution of painting has a lot of room for growth . In fact, painting is more important than ever to illuminate the absurd nature of how we live today.
The most immediately striking thing in viewing his work is the proclamation of his paint, which Burckhardt achieves by using bright gradients and bold colors. In certain Burckhardt paintings the effect creates a sense of exaggerated reality. Houses are not green, faces are not red, patterns do not suddenly appear, but maybe, if the viewer squints hard enough or looks long enough, these things might eventually emerge.
In works such as American (2011) and Rakish (2011) , Burckhardt pursues the concept of fragmented reality . The face only half exists , to the point where the viewer often is not sure what Burckhardt is trying to display. The doubt comes back, not to mock the modern notion of painting, but rather to play with it, to display its flexibility.
In addition to their common theme of doubt, Burckhardt’s paintings also use pareidolia. Pareidolia, seen in Rorschach’s inkblot tests, describes the psychological situation in which people perceive vague or random images as significant. In Burckhardt’s pieces, faces appear out of patterns, colors and shapes. An intriguing aspect of these works is this exact paralleling of patterns and colors. By default, our minds attempt to work out some significance in the way these elements are put together. We see faces and houses where objectively there are only green lines and black triangles. Burckhardt has described the process of realizing these images as though “they grow into individuals, as paintings, by growing into individuals as representations of faces.”
Artists have not completely rejected cast-plastic and cardboard, but these types of mixed media are frequently considered to be a lower-class form of art. Certain factions of the artistic world praise such works, but many critics bemoan this alleged “fall” of the artistic form from its historic pedestal. Burckhardt focuses on the middle ground between these two attitudes. Burckhardt has seen the life cycle of painting occur many times over and he seems to show amusement in the face of its repeated death and resurrection. The hazy distortions of Burckhardt’s paintings seem to dismiss the existence of previous works of the more academic artistic canon.
Conceptual quibbling aside, Burckhardt’s interplay of colors and patterns is beautiful in its own right. Notions of doubt and historical ambivalence, however, underlie any sense of simplicity in his pieces. They are by no means immediately attractive, but their meditations on absurdity, doubt and the artificiality of conventional beauty make them fascinating fodder for both thought and sight.
2012年1月29日星期日
Artist finds her inspiration in a close call long ago
When the shouts and the screams faded away and she was alone out on the water where the rip current had carried her, Cheryl Dyment thought back to what she’d been taught in swimming lessons years earlier. The teenager lay on her back and floated.
The sun made the water sparkle like diamonds, and she could see the curvature of the earth. “I can smile when I think about it. [Floating] was a beautiful thing. I never felt scared; I never felt panicked. I was just appreciating being in the moment, I guess.’’
At least until an arm came out of nowhere and tried to grab her. The arm belonged to a lifeguard, who helped her back to shore with the aid of a tow rope and probably saved her life. According to Dyment’s recollection, several other people were also caught in the current on that sunny day in August 1969 at Good Harbor Beach in Gloucester, and one drowned. But she shook it off and went on with her life.
It wasn’t until 2009 that she realized how profound her experience alone on the ocean had been. A successful landscape painter in oils, she was used to beginning her paintings on scene, “en plein air.’’ But she changed track one day in her home studio in Middleton and decided to paint from memory a floater’s-eye-view image of sky and water.
That painting, “Regression (or the Day I Didn’t Drown),’’ was quickly followed by more. Now they make up the bulk of her exhibition, “The Importance of Floating and Other Lessons,’’ which opens at the Firehouse Center for the Arts in Newburyport on Wednesday and runs through March 11.
The Good Harbor experience, she said, is “like this place that I can go back to, like a well, and just pull stuff out.’’
Told that the ripples at the center of “Regression’’ make it appear that she has, indeed, gone under, Dyment, who is 61, shrugged and smiled. “I was supported by the water,’’ she said, “but I felt like I was of the water.’’
Dyment grew up in Melrose. She and her friend, Mary Garden, then both 19, figured they could enjoy a warm Saturday at their favorite beach. Dyment brought along her 10-year-old sister, Beverly. Mary, who drove, brought her brother, Eddie, also 10. Eventually they left the kids to play on the sand and headed into the water.
Dyment soon felt the current pulling her away from shore. Remembering a safety lesson, she tried to swim parallel to it, but kept getting pulled away. She heard Mary getting pulled under, but what really scared her was when some “grown men’’ nearby began screaming for rescue as well.
The sun made the water sparkle like diamonds, and she could see the curvature of the earth. “I can smile when I think about it. [Floating] was a beautiful thing. I never felt scared; I never felt panicked. I was just appreciating being in the moment, I guess.’’
At least until an arm came out of nowhere and tried to grab her. The arm belonged to a lifeguard, who helped her back to shore with the aid of a tow rope and probably saved her life. According to Dyment’s recollection, several other people were also caught in the current on that sunny day in August 1969 at Good Harbor Beach in Gloucester, and one drowned. But she shook it off and went on with her life.
It wasn’t until 2009 that she realized how profound her experience alone on the ocean had been. A successful landscape painter in oils, she was used to beginning her paintings on scene, “en plein air.’’ But she changed track one day in her home studio in Middleton and decided to paint from memory a floater’s-eye-view image of sky and water.
That painting, “Regression (or the Day I Didn’t Drown),’’ was quickly followed by more. Now they make up the bulk of her exhibition, “The Importance of Floating and Other Lessons,’’ which opens at the Firehouse Center for the Arts in Newburyport on Wednesday and runs through March 11.
The Good Harbor experience, she said, is “like this place that I can go back to, like a well, and just pull stuff out.’’
Told that the ripples at the center of “Regression’’ make it appear that she has, indeed, gone under, Dyment, who is 61, shrugged and smiled. “I was supported by the water,’’ she said, “but I felt like I was of the water.’’
Dyment grew up in Melrose. She and her friend, Mary Garden, then both 19, figured they could enjoy a warm Saturday at their favorite beach. Dyment brought along her 10-year-old sister, Beverly. Mary, who drove, brought her brother, Eddie, also 10. Eventually they left the kids to play on the sand and headed into the water.
Dyment soon felt the current pulling her away from shore. Remembering a safety lesson, she tried to swim parallel to it, but kept getting pulled away. She heard Mary getting pulled under, but what really scared her was when some “grown men’’ nearby began screaming for rescue as well.
2012年1月19日星期四
Yorkshire roots dab Hockney’s canvas
Bradford-born David Hockney, considered to be one of the greatest British artists alive, dazzles with his innovative approach to natural beauty in his stylised landscapes, mostly of his native Yorkshire, in his exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, due to open on Saturday in London.
The exhibition, jointly curated by independent curator Marco Livingstone and Edith Devaney of the Royal Academy of Arts, focuses on oil paintings by Hockney, but includes charcoal and iPad drawings, sketchbooks, photographs and films too.
Hockney, who was invited to hold the exhibition of his landscapes at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2007, was very clear that he did not want it to be a retrospective of his work. He created huge iPad prints of Yosemite Valley in California, a recreation of 17th century French painter Claude Lorrain’s The Sermon on the Mount and a set of paintings of Yorkshire’s Woldgate Woods.
“The biggest artistic influence on Hockney has been Picasso,” reveals Livingstone, adding that Hockney, who had moved to California in 1964, was drawn back to his Yorkshire roots when he moved back for six months in 1997 to spend time with his dying friend, Jonathan Silver.
Hockney was inspired by his stay in Yorkshire to paint the landscapes of his native county from memory, a combination of his daily visits from his mother’s home to his ill friend’s house and his childhood reminiscences.
“By moving to painting landscapes, I am sure at the back of his mind he must have had a small thought about how he would be able to free himself of Picasso’s influence,” said Livingstone, adding that his use of bold and striking colours is “a way of inviting spectators into the personal space of the painting and experience the feeling for themselves.”
Hockney, who has been living and painting in Bridlington, the seaside town in Yorkshire, which time forgot, as the 74-year-old artist likes to say, has been focusing on examining the same place at different times of day and seasons.
“The quality of light in that part of East Yorkshire is close to magical,” says Edith Devaney, adding that Hockney is completely attuned to the changes brought about by time and seasons.
The changes in the Yorkshire seasons, the cycle of growth and variations in light conditions are best captured in the section of paintings on hawthorn blossoms, the ephemeral white flowers, he refers to as “nature’s erection.”
The centrepiece of the exhibition is the huge The Arrival Of Spring In Woldgate, East Yorkshire painting made up of 32 separate canvases surrounded by 51 iPad drawings of the transition from winter to spring on one small road.
The exhibition has many paintings by Hockney where he has used his oft-repeated grid, dividing a large imposing painting into multiple smaller canvases to give a collage-like image to the painting.
Hockney has carried on this technique, which he developed as part of his early photocollages, to his experimental films on his art too. “The influence of his links to theatre has led to his conviction that his art must be seen and be visible from far, at every level, giving it a grandness very rare to see,” says Devaney.
The exhibition, jointly curated by independent curator Marco Livingstone and Edith Devaney of the Royal Academy of Arts, focuses on oil paintings by Hockney, but includes charcoal and iPad drawings, sketchbooks, photographs and films too.
Hockney, who was invited to hold the exhibition of his landscapes at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2007, was very clear that he did not want it to be a retrospective of his work. He created huge iPad prints of Yosemite Valley in California, a recreation of 17th century French painter Claude Lorrain’s The Sermon on the Mount and a set of paintings of Yorkshire’s Woldgate Woods.
“The biggest artistic influence on Hockney has been Picasso,” reveals Livingstone, adding that Hockney, who had moved to California in 1964, was drawn back to his Yorkshire roots when he moved back for six months in 1997 to spend time with his dying friend, Jonathan Silver.
Hockney was inspired by his stay in Yorkshire to paint the landscapes of his native county from memory, a combination of his daily visits from his mother’s home to his ill friend’s house and his childhood reminiscences.
“By moving to painting landscapes, I am sure at the back of his mind he must have had a small thought about how he would be able to free himself of Picasso’s influence,” said Livingstone, adding that his use of bold and striking colours is “a way of inviting spectators into the personal space of the painting and experience the feeling for themselves.”
Hockney, who has been living and painting in Bridlington, the seaside town in Yorkshire, which time forgot, as the 74-year-old artist likes to say, has been focusing on examining the same place at different times of day and seasons.
“The quality of light in that part of East Yorkshire is close to magical,” says Edith Devaney, adding that Hockney is completely attuned to the changes brought about by time and seasons.
The changes in the Yorkshire seasons, the cycle of growth and variations in light conditions are best captured in the section of paintings on hawthorn blossoms, the ephemeral white flowers, he refers to as “nature’s erection.”
The centrepiece of the exhibition is the huge The Arrival Of Spring In Woldgate, East Yorkshire painting made up of 32 separate canvases surrounded by 51 iPad drawings of the transition from winter to spring on one small road.
The exhibition has many paintings by Hockney where he has used his oft-repeated grid, dividing a large imposing painting into multiple smaller canvases to give a collage-like image to the painting.
Hockney has carried on this technique, which he developed as part of his early photocollages, to his experimental films on his art too. “The influence of his links to theatre has led to his conviction that his art must be seen and be visible from far, at every level, giving it a grandness very rare to see,” says Devaney.
2012年1月18日星期三
Marciano friend is also a gifted artist
As Brockton prepares to honor homegrown boxing legend Rocky Marciano, a boyhood friend and his art are also getting some overdue attentions.
John Jantomaso, 91, whose “best pal” was Marciano trainer Allie Colombo, started painting when he was selected in middle school as one of two students to receive free lessons from the art teacher at Brockton High School.
“I did an oil with him,” said Jantomaso. “We had it three-quarters done; we went to continue it, and somebody stole it.”
His teacher felt so bad about it he made Jantomaso the subject of a portrait that continues to hang in the living room at his Westwood Avenue home.
After marrying at the age of 26, Jantomaso began to lose interest in his artistic endeavors and did not paint or draw for more than 40 years.
That changed three years ago after health problems forced him to give up golf, one of his favorite pastimes.
“My health stopped me from playing golf the way I used to,” said Jantomaso.
“I had to consume my time in another manner, and I said, ‘I’m going to start drawing’”
Jantomaso’s work is heavily inspired by photographs he sees in magazines. In a three-year period, he has sketched famous figures such as Halle Berry; Tom Brady; Ronald Reagan; golf writer and Brockton native Herbert Warren Wind, who coined the term the “Amen Corner” and, of course, “The Rock from Brockton.”
Phil Sheppard, the executive director of external relations at Massasoit Community College, had a chance meeting with Jantomaso at Thorny Lea Golf Club and was amazed when he saw his work.
“It absolutely took my breath away,” said Sheppard. “He does marvelous work.”
Sheppard recently brought a group of art experts from the college to Jantomaso’s basement studio so they could see the quality of his work.
“Representing the college, representing myself, I want to do something to honor John to honor his work, particularly this year with the Rocky Marciano statue coming to Brockton,” said Sheppard, “He’s a Brockton institution.”
Brockton is planning a serious of events to commemorate Marciano, culminating in the statue dedication ceremony at Brockton High School on Sept. 1.
John Jantomaso, 91, whose “best pal” was Marciano trainer Allie Colombo, started painting when he was selected in middle school as one of two students to receive free lessons from the art teacher at Brockton High School.
“I did an oil with him,” said Jantomaso. “We had it three-quarters done; we went to continue it, and somebody stole it.”
His teacher felt so bad about it he made Jantomaso the subject of a portrait that continues to hang in the living room at his Westwood Avenue home.
After marrying at the age of 26, Jantomaso began to lose interest in his artistic endeavors and did not paint or draw for more than 40 years.
That changed three years ago after health problems forced him to give up golf, one of his favorite pastimes.
“My health stopped me from playing golf the way I used to,” said Jantomaso.
“I had to consume my time in another manner, and I said, ‘I’m going to start drawing’”
Jantomaso’s work is heavily inspired by photographs he sees in magazines. In a three-year period, he has sketched famous figures such as Halle Berry; Tom Brady; Ronald Reagan; golf writer and Brockton native Herbert Warren Wind, who coined the term the “Amen Corner” and, of course, “The Rock from Brockton.”
Phil Sheppard, the executive director of external relations at Massasoit Community College, had a chance meeting with Jantomaso at Thorny Lea Golf Club and was amazed when he saw his work.
“It absolutely took my breath away,” said Sheppard. “He does marvelous work.”
Sheppard recently brought a group of art experts from the college to Jantomaso’s basement studio so they could see the quality of his work.
“Representing the college, representing myself, I want to do something to honor John to honor his work, particularly this year with the Rocky Marciano statue coming to Brockton,” said Sheppard, “He’s a Brockton institution.”
Brockton is planning a serious of events to commemorate Marciano, culminating in the statue dedication ceremony at Brockton High School on Sept. 1.
2012年1月17日星期二
David Hockney's Yorkshire
It might seem unlikely but the west coast of America and the east coast of Yorkshire have something in common. According to David Hockney, it's "big skies" and you get a sense of what he means at his new exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Better still, if you go to the Yorkshire Wolds, not only do you see what he means but you're also rewarded with an unheralded and unspoilt slice of England.
David Hockney: A Bigger Picture is both a celebration of the artist's return to his roots and of a subtle, spacious and remote landscape. Hockney once drew inspiration from the exotic climes of Los Angeles, but for several years he's been back in England, living and working in Bridlington (he was born in Bradford). Explaining what drew him to East Yorkshire and the Wolds, he said: "It's a landscape that I've known since childhood [he used to work in the fields and cycled the roads as a teenager], so it has meaning, but I never thought of it as a subject until 10 years ago. It is full of lovely little valleys and not many people."
Perhaps surprisingly, it's a region that never previously troubled great landscape painters such as Turner and Constable, but this exhibition at the Royal Academy, comprising some 150 works, the majority inspired by East Yorkshire and dating from the past four years (and quite a few from the past 12 months), shows the area in a new light.
Clearly Hockney, now 74, has been energised and enthused by the task, which has allowed him to explore his fascination with landscape and the seasons, and to capture them in a variety of media, from oil and watercolour to iPad, computer and on film.
I began my Hockney trail away from the Wolds in West Yorkshire at Saltaire, not far from Hockney's birthplace. Here Salts Mill, a beautifully restored Victorian textile mill, houses the world's largest permanent collection of Hockney's work.
The mill, a painting of which features in the RA exhibition, was the brainchild of Titus Salt, a Nonconformist mill owner and philanthropist who also built houses for his workers – still there and now privately owned – a fine Italianate church, a school, a hospital and a lovely park. Sobriety and hard work were all he asked in return.
In the 1850s, Salts Mill was the largest factory in Europe and the fact that it is still standing proud is down to the foresight of the late Jonathan Silver, an entrepreneur and friend of Hockney who bought the building in 1987 and created what it is today: a gallery and arts centre run by his family with several high-end shops, a restaurant and a smart café.
Like Hockney, Silver was born in Bradford and it was he who was instrumental in getting the artist to use Yorkshire as a subject once again. That was back in 1997 following a prolonged stay in his home county by Hockney, who then painted the Wolds from memory when he returned to Los Angeles.
However, it is not just the landscape that is eye-catching. As we wound our way through the lanes we passed a host of architecturally impressive villages, such as Lund (home of The Wellington, an excellent pub), South Dalton (where you'll find the Michelin-rated Pipe and Glass Inn, recently voted the UK's pub of the year, and St Mary's Church with a spire once described as "an arrow in the breast of the Wold"), Londesborough (fine parkland) and Warter (outside of which Hockney painted his vast canvas Bigger Trees Near Warter, currently on show at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery in Bradford).
There are country houses too, none better than Sledmere House, owned by Sir Tatton Sykes, whose family have been important players in the region since the middle of the 18th century. Although gutted by a fire in 1911, the Georgian house was beautifully restored and Hockney, a friend of Sykes, celebrated his 70th birthday there.
Not to be outdone, the estate village of Sledmere itself is another attraction, with its immaculately kept red-brick houses and a fine pub, The Triton Inn.
Leaving Saltaire and heading across Yorkshire towards the Wolds – a crescent of chalk hills and dry valleys running from the Humber Estuary to Flamborough Head – you begin to discover what Hockney sees in the area: a "spatial experience", as he has put it.
Edith Devaney, co-curator of the RA exhibition, said the reason he left England was for "the light and space of America's west coast. Now he has come back and found it here." West Yorkshire may be wilder (and attract more people), but here on the east coast this undulating, manicured, arable landscape offers a kind of freedom and wide-open views, while the changeable weather, distinct seasons and light (because of the proximity to the North Sea) have also fuelled the artist's vivid imagination. It's also a region that Hockney defends passionately; last year saw him attacking plans to build several "ugly" wind turbines in the Wolds.
With many foot and cycle paths, it's not a difficult place to explore but we did it an even easier way – by car. In the company of two engaging locals, David and Susan Neave, historians and friends of Hockney, I headed for the particular spots that have inspired him, driving along Woldgate, a quiet country road, that has been a fruitful source of work: The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, for example, forms the centrepiece of the RA show and comprises one huge oil painting and 51 iPad prints.
David Hockney: A Bigger Picture is both a celebration of the artist's return to his roots and of a subtle, spacious and remote landscape. Hockney once drew inspiration from the exotic climes of Los Angeles, but for several years he's been back in England, living and working in Bridlington (he was born in Bradford). Explaining what drew him to East Yorkshire and the Wolds, he said: "It's a landscape that I've known since childhood [he used to work in the fields and cycled the roads as a teenager], so it has meaning, but I never thought of it as a subject until 10 years ago. It is full of lovely little valleys and not many people."
Perhaps surprisingly, it's a region that never previously troubled great landscape painters such as Turner and Constable, but this exhibition at the Royal Academy, comprising some 150 works, the majority inspired by East Yorkshire and dating from the past four years (and quite a few from the past 12 months), shows the area in a new light.
Clearly Hockney, now 74, has been energised and enthused by the task, which has allowed him to explore his fascination with landscape and the seasons, and to capture them in a variety of media, from oil and watercolour to iPad, computer and on film.
I began my Hockney trail away from the Wolds in West Yorkshire at Saltaire, not far from Hockney's birthplace. Here Salts Mill, a beautifully restored Victorian textile mill, houses the world's largest permanent collection of Hockney's work.
The mill, a painting of which features in the RA exhibition, was the brainchild of Titus Salt, a Nonconformist mill owner and philanthropist who also built houses for his workers – still there and now privately owned – a fine Italianate church, a school, a hospital and a lovely park. Sobriety and hard work were all he asked in return.
In the 1850s, Salts Mill was the largest factory in Europe and the fact that it is still standing proud is down to the foresight of the late Jonathan Silver, an entrepreneur and friend of Hockney who bought the building in 1987 and created what it is today: a gallery and arts centre run by his family with several high-end shops, a restaurant and a smart café.
Like Hockney, Silver was born in Bradford and it was he who was instrumental in getting the artist to use Yorkshire as a subject once again. That was back in 1997 following a prolonged stay in his home county by Hockney, who then painted the Wolds from memory when he returned to Los Angeles.
However, it is not just the landscape that is eye-catching. As we wound our way through the lanes we passed a host of architecturally impressive villages, such as Lund (home of The Wellington, an excellent pub), South Dalton (where you'll find the Michelin-rated Pipe and Glass Inn, recently voted the UK's pub of the year, and St Mary's Church with a spire once described as "an arrow in the breast of the Wold"), Londesborough (fine parkland) and Warter (outside of which Hockney painted his vast canvas Bigger Trees Near Warter, currently on show at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery in Bradford).
There are country houses too, none better than Sledmere House, owned by Sir Tatton Sykes, whose family have been important players in the region since the middle of the 18th century. Although gutted by a fire in 1911, the Georgian house was beautifully restored and Hockney, a friend of Sykes, celebrated his 70th birthday there.
Not to be outdone, the estate village of Sledmere itself is another attraction, with its immaculately kept red-brick houses and a fine pub, The Triton Inn.
Leaving Saltaire and heading across Yorkshire towards the Wolds – a crescent of chalk hills and dry valleys running from the Humber Estuary to Flamborough Head – you begin to discover what Hockney sees in the area: a "spatial experience", as he has put it.
Edith Devaney, co-curator of the RA exhibition, said the reason he left England was for "the light and space of America's west coast. Now he has come back and found it here." West Yorkshire may be wilder (and attract more people), but here on the east coast this undulating, manicured, arable landscape offers a kind of freedom and wide-open views, while the changeable weather, distinct seasons and light (because of the proximity to the North Sea) have also fuelled the artist's vivid imagination. It's also a region that Hockney defends passionately; last year saw him attacking plans to build several "ugly" wind turbines in the Wolds.
With many foot and cycle paths, it's not a difficult place to explore but we did it an even easier way – by car. In the company of two engaging locals, David and Susan Neave, historians and friends of Hockney, I headed for the particular spots that have inspired him, driving along Woldgate, a quiet country road, that has been a fruitful source of work: The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, for example, forms the centrepiece of the RA show and comprises one huge oil painting and 51 iPad prints.
2012年1月16日星期一
A Bigger Picture, Royal Academy of Arts, review
It is 50 years since David Hockney graduated from the Royal College of Art wearing a gold lame jacket. Within a few years he had earned a reputation as an enfant terrible whose risque autobiographical work touched upon the taboo subject of homosexuality. With his oversized spectacles and hair dyed silvery blond, he became Brit art’s first celebrity: a charmer whose personality beguiled the public as much as his work.
Fast-forward half a century, and Hockney is still feted and adored. He shed his skin of provocative wunderkind long ago, fashioning instead a role as a plain-speaking chain-smoker specialising in common sense. Following the death of Lucian Freud, he is routinely described as Britain’s greatest living painter. He is certainly the most popular: there have reportedly been more advance ticket sales for his new exhibition at the Royal Academy than there were for the gallery’s blockbuster Van Gogh exhibition in 2010.
David Hockney: A Bigger Picture is devoted to a single genre: landscape. It came about after the artist showed Bigger Trees near Warter – a gargantuan landscape covering 50 canvases that is now in the collection of the Tate – at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2007. After it caused a splash , the RA offered Hockney the full suite of main galleries for a show of landscapes. The resulting exhibition contains more than 150 works, mostly created within the past decade.
Many were painted outdoors and depict the countryside around Bridlington, the small Yorkshire seaside town where Hockney has lived for seven years. There are bright oil paintings of wheat fields and tree-lined country lanes. There are multi-canvas vistas of woodland seen in different seasons. There are watercolours of hedgerows and haystacks, charcoal sketches of copses and logs, and more than 50 colourful “drawings”, created using an iPad and printed on to paper, documenting the onset of spring along an old Roman road that runs out of Bridlington. There are even nine- and 18-screen video works that record the fluctuating appearance of Woldgate Woods: captured using high-definition cameras ingeniously rigged on to Hockney’s Jeep, they subject the natural world to the kind of scrutiny that the German artist Albrecht Dürer once lavished upon a clump of turf. Generally the mood is upbeat, homely yet wonderstruck. I half expected to hear a cuckoo sing. The colours are citrus-sharp.
You would be forgiven for asking: what happened? After all, Hockney is best known as the raunchy Californian sensualist who painted sun-kissed boys gliding through the azure swimming pools of Los Angeles in the Sixties. And yet here he presents himself as a modest pastoralist, content to hymn the bounty of nature with quiet exultation – dancing, like Wordsworth, among the daffodils. Once inspired by distant destinations such as Egypt, China and America’s West Coast, he now seems happy pottering about a neglected nook of England. The prodigal son has returned to within 65 miles of Bradford, where he was born in 1937, and settled down. The internationalist has turned parochial. The radical has come over all conservative.
As if to explain this transformation, the second room of the exhibition presents a mini-retrospective of earlier landscapes. We see two dingy paintings from the Fifties, a smattering of stylish canvases from the Sixties and Seventies, and several views of California and the Grand Canyon, including one gigantic work full of oranges and reds so scorching you can practically feel your retina burning up. The gallery functions as a kind of airlock, inviting us to shed our perceptions and consider Hockney afresh as a landscape artist, before venturing forth to look at his more recent work.
Whether or not we accept this argument, the simple truth is that the show is far too big. Like a sprawling oak in need of a tree surgeon, it required a stronger curator prepared to lop off the deadwood. I could happily have done without the watercolours recording midsummer in east Yorkshire in 2004, or the suite of smallish oil paintings from the following year.
Perhaps it’s a generational thing, but I don’t understand paintings like these. Fresh, bright and perfectly delightful, they are much too polite and unthinkingly happy for my taste: if they offer a vision of arcadia, it is a mindless one. Moreover, they resemble the sorts of landscapes that we expect from amateur Sunday painters. Hockney is anything but that – yet whatever game he is playing here eludes me.
The iPad drawings from 2011 are similarly irksome. Some people get excited because they were made using a piece of fashionable technology . Yet the technique is surely immaterial – as Hockney says, an iPad is just another tool for an artist, like a brush.
What’s important is how they look: competent, easy on the eye ,but flat as though drawn with felt-tip pen. Some of the earlier pictures in the sequence, featuring tumbledown brick walls and tree stumps, look like illustrations for horror fiction. The later ones, full of frothy blossom and unfurling buds, have a trite cheeriness. They would look wonderful on the walls of a hospital, but the prominence they are given here is baffling. They appear to ignore an entire century of modern art — a narrative, incidentally, with which Hockney is fully up to speed. Why would someone so clued up wilfully paint as though surrealism, colour-field abstraction, minimalism and all the rest hadn’thappened? These images are so passe they feel like a provocation. I don’t get it.
The memorable pictures are those in which the prevailing note isn’t cheeriness, but something much stranger, more ferocious and intense. There is a room full of paintings of hawthorn blossom. It looks like a patisserie in which someone has run amok: thick slugs of primrose pigment representing blossom have been slathered on to the canvases like icing and whipped cream.
May Blossom on the Roman Road is palpably odd. The trees and shrubs have strong, simple silhouettes, like ornamental topiary. Beneath an animated sky awash with swirling blue and mauve marks, like something out of late Van Gogh, they appear to creep and throb, as though imbued with extraterrestrial life. This large work, painted upon eight canvases, transforms a mundane annual occurrence into something spectacularly weird.
Another series, Winter Timber and Totems, introduces a touch of foreboding and forlorn melancholy. We are in the woods. Using an extreme Fauvist palette, Hockney paints tree stumps and felled logs. The culmination of the sequence is the 15-canvas oil painting Winter Timber (2009). An imposing magenta stump dominates the foreground. Next to it, piles of orange logs stripped of their bark lie beside a road that leads off into the distance. The track is flanked by slender blue trees, some of which start to bend and curl into a disconcerting vortex as they approach the horizon. Thanks to the preternatural colours, the scene feels uncanny, suffused with the intensity of a vision. It doesn’t take long to read the stump and logs as reminders of mortality, or to understand that Hockney has transformed a humdrum wintry scene into a gateway to the afterlife. The motifs – a backdrop of bare trees and piles of logs – made me think of Paul Nash’s unsettling Landscape at Iden (1929), another mysterious painting fraught with psychological disturbance, though recast with the bold colour combinations and simplified shapes of late Matisse.
Fast-forward half a century, and Hockney is still feted and adored. He shed his skin of provocative wunderkind long ago, fashioning instead a role as a plain-speaking chain-smoker specialising in common sense. Following the death of Lucian Freud, he is routinely described as Britain’s greatest living painter. He is certainly the most popular: there have reportedly been more advance ticket sales for his new exhibition at the Royal Academy than there were for the gallery’s blockbuster Van Gogh exhibition in 2010.
David Hockney: A Bigger Picture is devoted to a single genre: landscape. It came about after the artist showed Bigger Trees near Warter – a gargantuan landscape covering 50 canvases that is now in the collection of the Tate – at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2007. After it caused a splash , the RA offered Hockney the full suite of main galleries for a show of landscapes. The resulting exhibition contains more than 150 works, mostly created within the past decade.
Many were painted outdoors and depict the countryside around Bridlington, the small Yorkshire seaside town where Hockney has lived for seven years. There are bright oil paintings of wheat fields and tree-lined country lanes. There are multi-canvas vistas of woodland seen in different seasons. There are watercolours of hedgerows and haystacks, charcoal sketches of copses and logs, and more than 50 colourful “drawings”, created using an iPad and printed on to paper, documenting the onset of spring along an old Roman road that runs out of Bridlington. There are even nine- and 18-screen video works that record the fluctuating appearance of Woldgate Woods: captured using high-definition cameras ingeniously rigged on to Hockney’s Jeep, they subject the natural world to the kind of scrutiny that the German artist Albrecht Dürer once lavished upon a clump of turf. Generally the mood is upbeat, homely yet wonderstruck. I half expected to hear a cuckoo sing. The colours are citrus-sharp.
You would be forgiven for asking: what happened? After all, Hockney is best known as the raunchy Californian sensualist who painted sun-kissed boys gliding through the azure swimming pools of Los Angeles in the Sixties. And yet here he presents himself as a modest pastoralist, content to hymn the bounty of nature with quiet exultation – dancing, like Wordsworth, among the daffodils. Once inspired by distant destinations such as Egypt, China and America’s West Coast, he now seems happy pottering about a neglected nook of England. The prodigal son has returned to within 65 miles of Bradford, where he was born in 1937, and settled down. The internationalist has turned parochial. The radical has come over all conservative.
As if to explain this transformation, the second room of the exhibition presents a mini-retrospective of earlier landscapes. We see two dingy paintings from the Fifties, a smattering of stylish canvases from the Sixties and Seventies, and several views of California and the Grand Canyon, including one gigantic work full of oranges and reds so scorching you can practically feel your retina burning up. The gallery functions as a kind of airlock, inviting us to shed our perceptions and consider Hockney afresh as a landscape artist, before venturing forth to look at his more recent work.
Whether or not we accept this argument, the simple truth is that the show is far too big. Like a sprawling oak in need of a tree surgeon, it required a stronger curator prepared to lop off the deadwood. I could happily have done without the watercolours recording midsummer in east Yorkshire in 2004, or the suite of smallish oil paintings from the following year.
Perhaps it’s a generational thing, but I don’t understand paintings like these. Fresh, bright and perfectly delightful, they are much too polite and unthinkingly happy for my taste: if they offer a vision of arcadia, it is a mindless one. Moreover, they resemble the sorts of landscapes that we expect from amateur Sunday painters. Hockney is anything but that – yet whatever game he is playing here eludes me.
The iPad drawings from 2011 are similarly irksome. Some people get excited because they were made using a piece of fashionable technology . Yet the technique is surely immaterial – as Hockney says, an iPad is just another tool for an artist, like a brush.
What’s important is how they look: competent, easy on the eye ,but flat as though drawn with felt-tip pen. Some of the earlier pictures in the sequence, featuring tumbledown brick walls and tree stumps, look like illustrations for horror fiction. The later ones, full of frothy blossom and unfurling buds, have a trite cheeriness. They would look wonderful on the walls of a hospital, but the prominence they are given here is baffling. They appear to ignore an entire century of modern art — a narrative, incidentally, with which Hockney is fully up to speed. Why would someone so clued up wilfully paint as though surrealism, colour-field abstraction, minimalism and all the rest hadn’thappened? These images are so passe they feel like a provocation. I don’t get it.
The memorable pictures are those in which the prevailing note isn’t cheeriness, but something much stranger, more ferocious and intense. There is a room full of paintings of hawthorn blossom. It looks like a patisserie in which someone has run amok: thick slugs of primrose pigment representing blossom have been slathered on to the canvases like icing and whipped cream.
May Blossom on the Roman Road is palpably odd. The trees and shrubs have strong, simple silhouettes, like ornamental topiary. Beneath an animated sky awash with swirling blue and mauve marks, like something out of late Van Gogh, they appear to creep and throb, as though imbued with extraterrestrial life. This large work, painted upon eight canvases, transforms a mundane annual occurrence into something spectacularly weird.
Another series, Winter Timber and Totems, introduces a touch of foreboding and forlorn melancholy. We are in the woods. Using an extreme Fauvist palette, Hockney paints tree stumps and felled logs. The culmination of the sequence is the 15-canvas oil painting Winter Timber (2009). An imposing magenta stump dominates the foreground. Next to it, piles of orange logs stripped of their bark lie beside a road that leads off into the distance. The track is flanked by slender blue trees, some of which start to bend and curl into a disconcerting vortex as they approach the horizon. Thanks to the preternatural colours, the scene feels uncanny, suffused with the intensity of a vision. It doesn’t take long to read the stump and logs as reminders of mortality, or to understand that Hockney has transformed a humdrum wintry scene into a gateway to the afterlife. The motifs – a backdrop of bare trees and piles of logs – made me think of Paul Nash’s unsettling Landscape at Iden (1929), another mysterious painting fraught with psychological disturbance, though recast with the bold colour combinations and simplified shapes of late Matisse.
2012年1月15日星期日
Jazz played like rock in a trio of new releases
Intertwining jazz and rock is not itself a novel idea. From Miles Davis to Weather Report to Last Exit to the Bad Plus, it has been going on for more than 40 years. But artists are constantly finding new ways to bring elements of rock into the folds of jazz.
Sidony Box - saxophonist Elie Dalibert, guitarist Manuel Adnot, and drummer Arthur Narcy - refers to itself as a power jazz trio. Posed on the jacket of their new album in hooded sweatshirts and unshaven faces like the Beastie Boys, they are clearly aiming for a young audience. Their music, which blends shoegaze and modern prog-rock with jazz improvisation, feels expansive. “Pink Paradise’’ (Naive Records) pleads to be popped in a car stereo and played at high volume on the open road.
With droning guitar and undulating waves of rhythm, the music is textured and layered, so much so that it sounds like a few more than three musicians. Dalibert’s alto sax is alternately melancholy and aggressive on tunes like “Suédois.’’ Despite the instrumentation, the trio draws on the aesthetics of certain rock bands - Radiohead, Tortoise, and Sonic Youth, in particular - as it constructs songs. (And these are structured songs, not aimless jams.) Sidony Box’s ethos crystallizes on the 10-minute drone “Léman’’ and on “Ultimate Pop Song,’’ a tune with a gorgeous hook that evokes both the melodicism and the expansive sound of Sigur Rós.
Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer has forged his identity by bridging the worlds of jazz and electronic music. And it is the best of both: Molvaer pits the warmth and freedom of improvisation against the intense drama of ambient, electronica, and trip-hop. Indeed, he turns the cold, unwavering structure of that world on its head.
It is easy to imagine Davis, if he were still alive, making the kind of music one hears on “Baboon Moon’’ (Thirsty Ear). Molvaer, guitarist Stian Westerhus, and drummer Erland Dahlen construct barren, dark, and dirty audio-scenes that draw direct lineage to bands like Massive Attack. Molvaer blows in a stark, detached manner over the dystopian backdrop of “Mercury Heart,’’ a faint kick drum acting as a heartbeat. Westerhus’s harsh guitar - which also manages to provide the bass line - fuels the rocker “Recoil.’’ In between the abrasives, rhythmless ambient soundscapes like “A Small Realm’’ and “Prince of Calm’’ offer much-needed buffer zones.
Brian Landrus - who plays baritone saxophone, bass clarinet, and bass flute on “Capsule’’ (BlueLand Records) - creates a very special kind of music with his band The Landrus Kaleidoscope. It is modern and contemporary - indeed, pop oriented - but it doesn’t give in to the artificial-sweetener trappings of smooth jazz. No, this quintet, which includes pianist Michael Cain (mostly on Fender Rhodes), guitar Nir Felder, bassist Matthew Parish, and drummer Rudy Royston, makes an organic fusion that ignores the boundaries that supposedly separate jazz, rock, pop, and R&B.
Forget that the music has a backbeat. It’s bona fide jazz, and the openness of tunes such as the driving “Striped Phrase’’ and the reggae-based “Like the Wind’’ provide ample space for wise improvisation. He doesn’t swing like Gene Krupa, but Royston’s drumming is crisp and smart; on “Striped Phase’’ he lapses into an alternative time signature for a few bars while the rest of the band keeps stride. Landrus’s bass clarinet wraps phrases, vinelike, around the skittering drums and airy electric piano chords of “Beauty.’’ The buildup of the soft R&B number “I Promise’’ is so patient and romantic that you half expect Barry White to start singing, but there is no need: Landrus’s clarinet is every bit as sultry. “Capsule’’ achieves a rare feat: It’s easy on the ears and nourishing for the brain.
Sidony Box - saxophonist Elie Dalibert, guitarist Manuel Adnot, and drummer Arthur Narcy - refers to itself as a power jazz trio. Posed on the jacket of their new album in hooded sweatshirts and unshaven faces like the Beastie Boys, they are clearly aiming for a young audience. Their music, which blends shoegaze and modern prog-rock with jazz improvisation, feels expansive. “Pink Paradise’’ (Naive Records) pleads to be popped in a car stereo and played at high volume on the open road.
With droning guitar and undulating waves of rhythm, the music is textured and layered, so much so that it sounds like a few more than three musicians. Dalibert’s alto sax is alternately melancholy and aggressive on tunes like “Suédois.’’ Despite the instrumentation, the trio draws on the aesthetics of certain rock bands - Radiohead, Tortoise, and Sonic Youth, in particular - as it constructs songs. (And these are structured songs, not aimless jams.) Sidony Box’s ethos crystallizes on the 10-minute drone “Léman’’ and on “Ultimate Pop Song,’’ a tune with a gorgeous hook that evokes both the melodicism and the expansive sound of Sigur Rós.
Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer has forged his identity by bridging the worlds of jazz and electronic music. And it is the best of both: Molvaer pits the warmth and freedom of improvisation against the intense drama of ambient, electronica, and trip-hop. Indeed, he turns the cold, unwavering structure of that world on its head.
It is easy to imagine Davis, if he were still alive, making the kind of music one hears on “Baboon Moon’’ (Thirsty Ear). Molvaer, guitarist Stian Westerhus, and drummer Erland Dahlen construct barren, dark, and dirty audio-scenes that draw direct lineage to bands like Massive Attack. Molvaer blows in a stark, detached manner over the dystopian backdrop of “Mercury Heart,’’ a faint kick drum acting as a heartbeat. Westerhus’s harsh guitar - which also manages to provide the bass line - fuels the rocker “Recoil.’’ In between the abrasives, rhythmless ambient soundscapes like “A Small Realm’’ and “Prince of Calm’’ offer much-needed buffer zones.
Brian Landrus - who plays baritone saxophone, bass clarinet, and bass flute on “Capsule’’ (BlueLand Records) - creates a very special kind of music with his band The Landrus Kaleidoscope. It is modern and contemporary - indeed, pop oriented - but it doesn’t give in to the artificial-sweetener trappings of smooth jazz. No, this quintet, which includes pianist Michael Cain (mostly on Fender Rhodes), guitar Nir Felder, bassist Matthew Parish, and drummer Rudy Royston, makes an organic fusion that ignores the boundaries that supposedly separate jazz, rock, pop, and R&B.
Forget that the music has a backbeat. It’s bona fide jazz, and the openness of tunes such as the driving “Striped Phrase’’ and the reggae-based “Like the Wind’’ provide ample space for wise improvisation. He doesn’t swing like Gene Krupa, but Royston’s drumming is crisp and smart; on “Striped Phase’’ he lapses into an alternative time signature for a few bars while the rest of the band keeps stride. Landrus’s bass clarinet wraps phrases, vinelike, around the skittering drums and airy electric piano chords of “Beauty.’’ The buildup of the soft R&B number “I Promise’’ is so patient and romantic that you half expect Barry White to start singing, but there is no need: Landrus’s clarinet is every bit as sultry. “Capsule’’ achieves a rare feat: It’s easy on the ears and nourishing for the brain.
2012年1月12日星期四
Presidential Portrait Stolen From Southgate House
A former American president has gone missing from the Southgate House. Owners say someone took off with an original oil painting of Andrew Jackson.
The painting is believed to have been taken sometime between December 15th and 16th. Local 12 News Reporter Rich Jaffe has more on the mystery of the missing man.
The painting is part of a collection of 8 portraits of Presidents who were believed to have visited the Southgate House during the life of it's original owner, Richard Southgate. The paintings were commissioned by the most recent owner Ross Raleigh...and no one can figure out how something so big made it out of there when the place was full of people.
The set of Presidential portraits hung in Juney's Lounge on the first floor of the Southgate House. The missing portrait used to hang in the middle of a wall, above the bar's piano. It's an oil painting of President Andrew Jackson and it's surrounded by an ornate wooden frame. Painted by Kentucky artist Jerry Bond, it's hung there since they were painted in the late 80's early 90's and "We've never had anything happen to the paintings before."
Ross Raleigh commissioned the paintings because the artist was a personal friend and he wanted to share the buildings history with his faithful patrons. The portrait somehow disappeared between 7 pm December 15th and 5 p.m. on December 16th during business hours. Adding to the mystery is the fact that while the club was open there was a bartender in the room, and a security guard at the front door. "We all sat there...how did this happen, how did they get it out...why did they want to do it? Did they particularly want Andrew Jackson as opposed to the other Presidents because out of all of them Abraham Lincoln would be the most desirable to a Presidential painting collector."
Knowing the club was closing, the speculation is someone wanted their own personal piece of memorabilia. But the theft was a double blow to the club owner Ross Raleigh. "We were having to leave the building, he had Jerry paint these specifically for him. Jerry passed away in 2004 so it's not like he can have him paint another one for him so it was very heartbreaking for him."
Raleigh tells me the painting's worth about $3500 but clearly the emotional value of it since it was done by his friend is a lot higher. The owners considered taking the paintings down just before the theft, but they wanted patrons to be able to enjoy them through the last evening. Southgate House closed on New Year's Eve.
The painting is believed to have been taken sometime between December 15th and 16th. Local 12 News Reporter Rich Jaffe has more on the mystery of the missing man.
The painting is part of a collection of 8 portraits of Presidents who were believed to have visited the Southgate House during the life of it's original owner, Richard Southgate. The paintings were commissioned by the most recent owner Ross Raleigh...and no one can figure out how something so big made it out of there when the place was full of people.
The set of Presidential portraits hung in Juney's Lounge on the first floor of the Southgate House. The missing portrait used to hang in the middle of a wall, above the bar's piano. It's an oil painting of President Andrew Jackson and it's surrounded by an ornate wooden frame. Painted by Kentucky artist Jerry Bond, it's hung there since they were painted in the late 80's early 90's and "We've never had anything happen to the paintings before."
Ross Raleigh commissioned the paintings because the artist was a personal friend and he wanted to share the buildings history with his faithful patrons. The portrait somehow disappeared between 7 pm December 15th and 5 p.m. on December 16th during business hours. Adding to the mystery is the fact that while the club was open there was a bartender in the room, and a security guard at the front door. "We all sat there...how did this happen, how did they get it out...why did they want to do it? Did they particularly want Andrew Jackson as opposed to the other Presidents because out of all of them Abraham Lincoln would be the most desirable to a Presidential painting collector."
Knowing the club was closing, the speculation is someone wanted their own personal piece of memorabilia. But the theft was a double blow to the club owner Ross Raleigh. "We were having to leave the building, he had Jerry paint these specifically for him. Jerry passed away in 2004 so it's not like he can have him paint another one for him so it was very heartbreaking for him."
Raleigh tells me the painting's worth about $3500 but clearly the emotional value of it since it was done by his friend is a lot higher. The owners considered taking the paintings down just before the theft, but they wanted patrons to be able to enjoy them through the last evening. Southgate House closed on New Year's Eve.
2012年1月11日星期三
Life through paintings and paperworks
Their reflections on life, memories and hopes, happiness and sorrows are all there, at David Hall, Fort Kochi, in colours bright and dull, on canvas and paper. The quartet, who are showing their works are N.N.Mohandas, K.P.Pradeep Kumar, Joshy T.C. and Benny K.A. Of the 21 works in the show called ‘Paintings and Paperworks', 12 are oil paintings of Mohandas, both big and small.
The middle aged Mohandas, who has gone through several artistic phases, strikes one as different from the crowd. He does not resort to bombastic explanations about his work, or seek to portray ‘in vogue' views, that he does not sincerely hold. “When people say they want to see my paintings, then I am a success. Otherwise, it's my fault if people do not want to see them. Children always understand the language of pictures. They enjoy what I paint, and I am happy,” says the maverick, most of whose works exhibited here are in pastel shades, symbolic of the man, never loud.
The frames carry a street, park or a wayside cafeteria, always with people sitting in different postures. It could be either leisure or laziness, but the mood of the people, abstract forms, sitting on the benches or chairs is far from stressed out, so that the easy going ambience is infectious and seeps into the viewer.
Mohandas says that artists of the earlier generation like K.C.S. Panikkar and Ramkinkar Baij did so much for fellow artists and opened so many doors to them.
“In Baroda, where I studied, we were allowed to grow as we wanted. Nobody forced anything on us. We were just guided by our teachers.” Art has moved on, but Mohandas is of the view that a painting is much more than an investment. But often it's factors other than artistic that prod people to buy works of art. Snob value counts much. The name, the signature is what sells after a point, not the work. There are artists and artists. The chasm between the haves and the have nots among them is widening, just as in the larger global scene.
All these realities make many works at any show pictures of sadness, of frustration and doubt. There are very few ‘happy' paintings. In K.P.Pradeep kumar's huge green canvas, in the centre of the gallery, women in orderly rows and an equal number of umbrellas over them dominate, speaks of spiritual crisis, says the artist. Titled transfiguration, the umbrella is a recurring motif in all five of his works here. Four works, in this series, are circular, pastels on rice paper and feature a prominent motherly figure, or a younger woman, on a tight rope, with snakes somewhere in the frame, the threatening JCB, et al. There are men, at work on grinding mortars, all within the circle, almost like a celebratory flower carpet, but portraying stark doubts. Pitted amongst unfamiliar urban surroundings and manners, the rural soul seeks to go back to the roots. The angst comes through in the drawings.
Joshy T.C has two acrylics which portray the December sky above and the Xmas stars below. Solitude is effected through the lack of human figures and the all pervading darkness.
Benny K.A, who works with ‘Uravu' in Wayanad, has put up two untitled works which are autobiographical, he says. The use of space and airspace strikes you. A world where roads, people, buildings etc go unconventionally haywire. A big green cricket out of proportion with the rest, sits in one corner of the frame. I would love to believe that the artist is trying to tell the world about the disproportionate space that we give for the game of cricket in our lives, wasting umpteen man hours in the process, contributing nothing to the lives of fellow beings. All the four artists have exhibited in and outside the State several times, both solo shows and groups. Their works will hang on the David Hall walls till January 24.
The middle aged Mohandas, who has gone through several artistic phases, strikes one as different from the crowd. He does not resort to bombastic explanations about his work, or seek to portray ‘in vogue' views, that he does not sincerely hold. “When people say they want to see my paintings, then I am a success. Otherwise, it's my fault if people do not want to see them. Children always understand the language of pictures. They enjoy what I paint, and I am happy,” says the maverick, most of whose works exhibited here are in pastel shades, symbolic of the man, never loud.
The frames carry a street, park or a wayside cafeteria, always with people sitting in different postures. It could be either leisure or laziness, but the mood of the people, abstract forms, sitting on the benches or chairs is far from stressed out, so that the easy going ambience is infectious and seeps into the viewer.
Mohandas says that artists of the earlier generation like K.C.S. Panikkar and Ramkinkar Baij did so much for fellow artists and opened so many doors to them.
“In Baroda, where I studied, we were allowed to grow as we wanted. Nobody forced anything on us. We were just guided by our teachers.” Art has moved on, but Mohandas is of the view that a painting is much more than an investment. But often it's factors other than artistic that prod people to buy works of art. Snob value counts much. The name, the signature is what sells after a point, not the work. There are artists and artists. The chasm between the haves and the have nots among them is widening, just as in the larger global scene.
All these realities make many works at any show pictures of sadness, of frustration and doubt. There are very few ‘happy' paintings. In K.P.Pradeep kumar's huge green canvas, in the centre of the gallery, women in orderly rows and an equal number of umbrellas over them dominate, speaks of spiritual crisis, says the artist. Titled transfiguration, the umbrella is a recurring motif in all five of his works here. Four works, in this series, are circular, pastels on rice paper and feature a prominent motherly figure, or a younger woman, on a tight rope, with snakes somewhere in the frame, the threatening JCB, et al. There are men, at work on grinding mortars, all within the circle, almost like a celebratory flower carpet, but portraying stark doubts. Pitted amongst unfamiliar urban surroundings and manners, the rural soul seeks to go back to the roots. The angst comes through in the drawings.
Joshy T.C has two acrylics which portray the December sky above and the Xmas stars below. Solitude is effected through the lack of human figures and the all pervading darkness.
Benny K.A, who works with ‘Uravu' in Wayanad, has put up two untitled works which are autobiographical, he says. The use of space and airspace strikes you. A world where roads, people, buildings etc go unconventionally haywire. A big green cricket out of proportion with the rest, sits in one corner of the frame. I would love to believe that the artist is trying to tell the world about the disproportionate space that we give for the game of cricket in our lives, wasting umpteen man hours in the process, contributing nothing to the lives of fellow beings. All the four artists have exhibited in and outside the State several times, both solo shows and groups. Their works will hang on the David Hall walls till January 24.
2012年1月10日星期二
Sentimental journey
Ah, sentimentalism, it is a balm, it is a trap. It is the comfort food of emotions, the ready pleasure of the fattening bite that we forgive even as it turns to flab. If only it worked so well in art, where even a little flab is enough extra weight to bring you crashing down from the wall.
It’s one thing to have sentimental feelings when seeing a piece of art — say, you see a painting of a farm, and you grew up on a farm so you savour a moment of nostalgia, though your feelings will not be shared when the painting is seen by the next person, who did not grow up on a farm.
The trouble begins when there are no layers other than sentimentalism or nostalgia, and the singular purpose of the painting is to evoke sentimental feelings, to churn up the comfort-food of warm memories. That’s why I cringed when I read the news release for Crystal Beshara’s exhibition of new paintings at Orange Art Gallery in Ottawa. The release says, “It is with this brand new body of work that she shares a cosy slice of nostalgia.”
When I read the words “new paintings” on the same page with the words “cosy slice of nostalgia” I want to run away, fast and far. I’m glad I didn’t, because Crystal Beshara is learning to tame her sentimental heart, and the artistic growth can be seen in the paintings — some strong, some not so much — now at Orange Gallery.
Beshara grew up on a farm in the Ottawa Valley and those memories are, naturally enough, impressed into her work. All of the paintings in this exhibition, which is titled Winter’s Promise, reflect farm life, from the portraits of owls to the larger paintings of cattle that are the centrepieces of the show, and the latter do it most successfully.
The smaller painting Barn Owl is oil on wood, with most of the board left bare, which forces the eye to focus strongly on the owl itself. To withstand this scrutiny the owl needs a fine detail that it lacks, so the whole thing has an unfinished look, as if the artist hoped its presence alone — the owl’s sentimental place as a character of barn life — would be compelling.
Another oil on wood, titled Jersey , shows a floppy-eared, doe-eyed calf also set against a background of bare, negative space. The image veers dangerously towards cute, which has in the past been, depending on your perspective, a good or bad thing in Beshara’s work. Hey, I like cute as much as the next person, but in its place. Cute is not profound or even meaningful in any way and, therefore, it is not the basis of compelling art.
That’s not a problem in another of her bare-board paintings, titled First Frost, which is a close-up of a dead sunflower in the field. Here the aspect of farm-life shown is inevitable death, and cute is replaced by melancholy, which is always more interesting. Beshara’s sunflower is well composed, though the painting was undermined by the touches of gold-leaf that reflected the gallery light in a most distracting fashion.
She uses gold leaf elsewhere to better effect and, like all the most successful paintings in the exhibition, it is not on wooden board but on canvas. The larger painting Into the Mist , shows a heard of cows crossing a stream and slowly disappearing into the icy mist over a frozen field. Here Beshara presents a scene that is at once nostalgic for her but still offers something substantial to the majority of viewers who did not grow up on a farm.
She hits all her high notes with her large paintings of cows. Winter Storm shows three rather woolly cows (don’t ask me what kind, I’m a city boy) standing in the greyness of a winter storm and staring — silent and placid — at the viewer. I could almost feel the cold, moist air, and the cocoon-ish effect of standing outdoors in a snowstorm. Beshara has allowed a few drips of grey paint to flow from the sky down over the snowy ground and here the deliberate lack of finish is more effective, as if to knock the viewer out of a reverie.
Black Angus (40 by 60 inches, oil on canvas) is the centrepiece of the exhibition and deservedly so. Here a single, black cow stands before a leafless woodland wrapped in icy mist and next to a dirty, half-frozen pool of water. Beshara has painted the water with broad, messy strokes and it creates an intriguing contrast with the detail on the rest of the canvas. The painting isn’t cute and it sure isn’t cosy, but it is compelling. It may be sentimental and nostalgic, but it’s more than that and it’s Beshara’s best work to date.
It’s one thing to have sentimental feelings when seeing a piece of art — say, you see a painting of a farm, and you grew up on a farm so you savour a moment of nostalgia, though your feelings will not be shared when the painting is seen by the next person, who did not grow up on a farm.
The trouble begins when there are no layers other than sentimentalism or nostalgia, and the singular purpose of the painting is to evoke sentimental feelings, to churn up the comfort-food of warm memories. That’s why I cringed when I read the news release for Crystal Beshara’s exhibition of new paintings at Orange Art Gallery in Ottawa. The release says, “It is with this brand new body of work that she shares a cosy slice of nostalgia.”
When I read the words “new paintings” on the same page with the words “cosy slice of nostalgia” I want to run away, fast and far. I’m glad I didn’t, because Crystal Beshara is learning to tame her sentimental heart, and the artistic growth can be seen in the paintings — some strong, some not so much — now at Orange Gallery.
Beshara grew up on a farm in the Ottawa Valley and those memories are, naturally enough, impressed into her work. All of the paintings in this exhibition, which is titled Winter’s Promise, reflect farm life, from the portraits of owls to the larger paintings of cattle that are the centrepieces of the show, and the latter do it most successfully.
The smaller painting Barn Owl is oil on wood, with most of the board left bare, which forces the eye to focus strongly on the owl itself. To withstand this scrutiny the owl needs a fine detail that it lacks, so the whole thing has an unfinished look, as if the artist hoped its presence alone — the owl’s sentimental place as a character of barn life — would be compelling.
Another oil on wood, titled Jersey , shows a floppy-eared, doe-eyed calf also set against a background of bare, negative space. The image veers dangerously towards cute, which has in the past been, depending on your perspective, a good or bad thing in Beshara’s work. Hey, I like cute as much as the next person, but in its place. Cute is not profound or even meaningful in any way and, therefore, it is not the basis of compelling art.
That’s not a problem in another of her bare-board paintings, titled First Frost, which is a close-up of a dead sunflower in the field. Here the aspect of farm-life shown is inevitable death, and cute is replaced by melancholy, which is always more interesting. Beshara’s sunflower is well composed, though the painting was undermined by the touches of gold-leaf that reflected the gallery light in a most distracting fashion.
She uses gold leaf elsewhere to better effect and, like all the most successful paintings in the exhibition, it is not on wooden board but on canvas. The larger painting Into the Mist , shows a heard of cows crossing a stream and slowly disappearing into the icy mist over a frozen field. Here Beshara presents a scene that is at once nostalgic for her but still offers something substantial to the majority of viewers who did not grow up on a farm.
She hits all her high notes with her large paintings of cows. Winter Storm shows three rather woolly cows (don’t ask me what kind, I’m a city boy) standing in the greyness of a winter storm and staring — silent and placid — at the viewer. I could almost feel the cold, moist air, and the cocoon-ish effect of standing outdoors in a snowstorm. Beshara has allowed a few drips of grey paint to flow from the sky down over the snowy ground and here the deliberate lack of finish is more effective, as if to knock the viewer out of a reverie.
Black Angus (40 by 60 inches, oil on canvas) is the centrepiece of the exhibition and deservedly so. Here a single, black cow stands before a leafless woodland wrapped in icy mist and next to a dirty, half-frozen pool of water. Beshara has painted the water with broad, messy strokes and it creates an intriguing contrast with the detail on the rest of the canvas. The painting isn’t cute and it sure isn’t cosy, but it is compelling. It may be sentimental and nostalgic, but it’s more than that and it’s Beshara’s best work to date.
2012年1月9日星期一
Jimmy’s tribute to KP people through his brushstrokes
The artist says the exhibition is a tribute to the people of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa for rendering great sacrifices in the wake of current wave of militancy in Pakistan.
“The exhibition will reflect the courage of people of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in their fight against terrorism besides showing they have a desire to live a full life,” said Mian Iftikhar Hussain, the provincial minister for information and culture. The event is jointly organised by the provincial department of information and culture, the department of archaeology and youth affairs and the University of Engineering and Technology, Peshawar.
Mr Hussain, Jimmy Engineer and UET vice-chancellor Imtiaz Hussain Gilani addressed a joint press conference here on Sunday and explained the spirit behind the event.
The paintings depict themes such as Pakistani architectural composition, international architectural composition, poverty and plight of refugees at the time of Pakistan’s coming into being in 1947.
Paintings titled ‘Sunset’, ‘Hut by the Sea’, ‘Fishermen with boat’, ‘My Palette’, ‘Banyan Tree’, ‘Donkey Cart’, ‘Running Horse’ and many other would be on display to attract visitors.
Speaking on the occasion, Mr Jimmy said he had never organised exhibitions for commercial gains. “I have contributed 70 per cent of the money raised through my previous exhibitions to causes such as for children, human rights etc,” he said.
Mr Gilani said that the event was a joint effort to highlight the cultural history and architecture of the country. He said the event was a tribute to the people of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa for showing resilience in the face of militancy.
Minister for information Iftikhar Hussain thanked the artist for dedicating the exhibition to people of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, who steadfastly supported the government in the fight against terrorists. He said that such cultural events promoted pluralism and were essential to thwart militants’ threats.
The minister said that the government fought militants on different fronts simultaneously in an effort to keep people united, counter militants’ influence, and protect the cultural norms and values.
“They (militants) were taken as heroes,” said the minister, adding “We changed that wrong perception through our media policy that encouraged people to speak against militants on TV and write in newspapers”.
He said the government’s bold policies helped in restoration of cultural activities. “Now there is not a single day when Nishtar Hall goes without a cultural function,” he said. Mr Hussain also renewed the provincial government’s offer to militants for finding a negotiated settlement to the current situation.
The provincial government is not afraid of militants; it endured their threats and fought bravely against them, winning back the area they had taken over, he said.
“Too much bloodshed has taken place in our area and now there must be an end to it,” Mr Hussain said, emphasising negotiations to come out of the current crisis.
He said that Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and its people had taken a ‘beating’ and it’s time to win back peace so that our children could get education.
“We took the thrashing because we believe in peace and that’s why we think a negotiated settlement is the best option to end the crisis,” Mr Hussain said. He, however, expressed doubts about success of the reported US-Taliban contacts for negotiating peace in Afghanistan.
The minister said that any peace talks without involving Pakistan and Afghanistan would not succeed. “Unless America takes Pakistan and Afghanistan into confidence, negotiations (between US and Taliban) cannot meet success,” he said.
Pakistan or Afghanistan, too, could not succeed in case they pursued talks with Taliban individually without taking all the stakeholders into confidence, he said.
Answering a question about early elections, Mr Hussain said that parliament was not so weak to necessitate early polls and it should complete its term.
“The exhibition will reflect the courage of people of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in their fight against terrorism besides showing they have a desire to live a full life,” said Mian Iftikhar Hussain, the provincial minister for information and culture. The event is jointly organised by the provincial department of information and culture, the department of archaeology and youth affairs and the University of Engineering and Technology, Peshawar.
Mr Hussain, Jimmy Engineer and UET vice-chancellor Imtiaz Hussain Gilani addressed a joint press conference here on Sunday and explained the spirit behind the event.
The paintings depict themes such as Pakistani architectural composition, international architectural composition, poverty and plight of refugees at the time of Pakistan’s coming into being in 1947.
Paintings titled ‘Sunset’, ‘Hut by the Sea’, ‘Fishermen with boat’, ‘My Palette’, ‘Banyan Tree’, ‘Donkey Cart’, ‘Running Horse’ and many other would be on display to attract visitors.
Speaking on the occasion, Mr Jimmy said he had never organised exhibitions for commercial gains. “I have contributed 70 per cent of the money raised through my previous exhibitions to causes such as for children, human rights etc,” he said.
Mr Gilani said that the event was a joint effort to highlight the cultural history and architecture of the country. He said the event was a tribute to the people of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa for showing resilience in the face of militancy.
Minister for information Iftikhar Hussain thanked the artist for dedicating the exhibition to people of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, who steadfastly supported the government in the fight against terrorists. He said that such cultural events promoted pluralism and were essential to thwart militants’ threats.
The minister said that the government fought militants on different fronts simultaneously in an effort to keep people united, counter militants’ influence, and protect the cultural norms and values.
“They (militants) were taken as heroes,” said the minister, adding “We changed that wrong perception through our media policy that encouraged people to speak against militants on TV and write in newspapers”.
He said the government’s bold policies helped in restoration of cultural activities. “Now there is not a single day when Nishtar Hall goes without a cultural function,” he said. Mr Hussain also renewed the provincial government’s offer to militants for finding a negotiated settlement to the current situation.
The provincial government is not afraid of militants; it endured their threats and fought bravely against them, winning back the area they had taken over, he said.
“Too much bloodshed has taken place in our area and now there must be an end to it,” Mr Hussain said, emphasising negotiations to come out of the current crisis.
He said that Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and its people had taken a ‘beating’ and it’s time to win back peace so that our children could get education.
“We took the thrashing because we believe in peace and that’s why we think a negotiated settlement is the best option to end the crisis,” Mr Hussain said. He, however, expressed doubts about success of the reported US-Taliban contacts for negotiating peace in Afghanistan.
The minister said that any peace talks without involving Pakistan and Afghanistan would not succeed. “Unless America takes Pakistan and Afghanistan into confidence, negotiations (between US and Taliban) cannot meet success,” he said.
Pakistan or Afghanistan, too, could not succeed in case they pursued talks with Taliban individually without taking all the stakeholders into confidence, he said.
Answering a question about early elections, Mr Hussain said that parliament was not so weak to necessitate early polls and it should complete its term.
2012年1月8日星期日
Plinker, painter
He required much less time to master the skills necessary to become a top-flight portraiture artist.
Wyse, who splits his time between his family home at Cape Elizabeth and his personal home and studio in Ontario, Canada, recently made the news when Steinway Hall in New York unveiled his oil portrait of rock star Billy Joel.
Also in 2011, the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., acquired two of his portraits of the famous pianist and Kennedy Center Award winner Leon Fleisher. One is an oil painting, the other a drawing. The painting likely will be exhibited later this year or in 2013, said National Portrait Gallery chief curator Brandon Fortune.
Wyse, 41, has spent most of the past decade in a wildly successful pursuit of painting, specializing in portraits of famous musicians. He spent most of his life studying classical piano, and still performs in concert halls around the globe.
He went to Deering High School, attended music classes at the University of Southern Maine, and studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Montreal, where he earned his doctorate in music.
All along, he harbored a desire to paint. But it wasn't until he studied left-brain/right-brain thinking in musicians that painting became a passion for him.
In his studies, he posited that an accomplished musician could become an accomplished painter because of the similar methods of thinking and analysis that go into both art forms. How a painter shades a surface or manipulates light are not dissimilar to the decisions composers make about structure of music and placement of notes.
"Sometimes I think I studied music just so I could do this," he said, gesturing to a completed portrait of Franz Liszt on the easel of his Cape Elizabeth studio. "In fact, I think I couldn't have done this without studying music. I have a facility with this, and I come to this with a set of thoughts and a set of skills and a long history of having thought about art. It's almost as if I just had to learn the technical side of it to do it."
When he was younger, Wyse often responded to his piano teachers in visual terms. He would say, "It looks like this," or "I see it like that." His visual language frustrated his teachers. They wanted him to use different words that more closely expressed musical ideas.
"But that is how I saw music," Wyse said.
Such intellectual dexterity makes mere mortals quake in his presence, joked Ron Losby, president of Steinway & Sons of New York.
"He's a consummate artist in both respects," Losby said. "I had lunch with him last week, and I asked him, 'What do you prefer: Painting or playing?' His answers are interesting. He said, 'Right now, I really enjoy painting, but I could never not play the piano.' "
As a pianist, Wyse is an official Steinway artist. Steinway confers the honor on pianists of every genre who achieve a masterful level of performance. Only after Wyse became an official Steinway artist did the piano maker learn that he also painted.
When it came time for a portrait of Fleisher, Steinway commissioned Wyse to do one, and he later completed a painting and drawing of Fleisher for the National Portrait Gallery. This past year, Steinway hired him to do the Billy Joel portrait.
Wyse impressed Fortune when she spent time with him a few years ago. "We walked through the galleries, and talked about approaches, settings and other elements about the art of portraiture," Fortune said. "He was just sort of drinking it in, and it was lovely to see that much intense interest in the art of portraiture from someone who was still learning."
The Smithsonian was drawn to Wyse for his ability to tell Fleisher's story through visual narration. For the setting for his portrait, he chose a concert hall at Syracuse University. Wyse painted Fleisher at the keyboard performing.
"We love to find a portrait that gives a visitor something more than a likeness. Sometimes that is all we have -- a face. But when we can, we like to expand that vision to add to the experience for visitors," Fortune said.
Joel is just the second living artist honored with a portrait at Steinway Hall, at 57th Street in Manhattan. Fleischer is the other.
Wyse did not receive special consideration for the painting jobs because of his association with Steinway, Losby said. He got the painting jobs because of his skills with the brush.
"His world of classical music and portrait painting coalesced so brilliantly," he said. "Of all the famous artists who have painted for us -- Wyeth and all the others -- no one has ever been a pianist, or a good pianist, as well as a portrait painter. He is very special."
In his research about art and music, Wyse found many artists who both play and paint, going back to Leonardo da Vinci. Someone more modern struck a chord with his sensibilities: John Singer Sargent.
Sargent was the leading portrait painter of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and strongly influenced Wyse's classical painting style. He considers Sargent an idol, and noted that he also had a special fondness for painting portraits of musicians.
Wyse prepared for his Joel portrait by spending the better part of a day with the rock star at his Long Island home. They hit it off well, and traded stories about playing. Over the course of several hours, he got to know Joel, and developed a feel for the singer's home.
He took many photos, then returned to his studio to begin preparatory sketches. Joel was involved throughout the process. He conferred with Wyse about poses, settings and other details. In the final painting, Joel stands off to the side of his piano, arms crossed and looking away. He is dressed casually in a leather jacket.
The painting is large -- 7 feet tall and 3 feet wide.
"He was a pleasure to work with, and surprisingly camera shy," Wyse said. "A lot of people assume celebrities would be perfectly comfortable having their portrait done, but that is often not the case."
Wyse described Joel as gracious and kind.
"We talked about music a lot," he said. "I grew up on Billy Joel music, so it was fun for me. He was my generation, for sure. When I was a teenager, he was the Lady Gaga of today."
Somewhat reluctantly, Wyse acknowledged to Joel his own skills on the piano.
Wyse, who splits his time between his family home at Cape Elizabeth and his personal home and studio in Ontario, Canada, recently made the news when Steinway Hall in New York unveiled his oil portrait of rock star Billy Joel.
Also in 2011, the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., acquired two of his portraits of the famous pianist and Kennedy Center Award winner Leon Fleisher. One is an oil painting, the other a drawing. The painting likely will be exhibited later this year or in 2013, said National Portrait Gallery chief curator Brandon Fortune.
Wyse, 41, has spent most of the past decade in a wildly successful pursuit of painting, specializing in portraits of famous musicians. He spent most of his life studying classical piano, and still performs in concert halls around the globe.
He went to Deering High School, attended music classes at the University of Southern Maine, and studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Montreal, where he earned his doctorate in music.
All along, he harbored a desire to paint. But it wasn't until he studied left-brain/right-brain thinking in musicians that painting became a passion for him.
In his studies, he posited that an accomplished musician could become an accomplished painter because of the similar methods of thinking and analysis that go into both art forms. How a painter shades a surface or manipulates light are not dissimilar to the decisions composers make about structure of music and placement of notes.
"Sometimes I think I studied music just so I could do this," he said, gesturing to a completed portrait of Franz Liszt on the easel of his Cape Elizabeth studio. "In fact, I think I couldn't have done this without studying music. I have a facility with this, and I come to this with a set of thoughts and a set of skills and a long history of having thought about art. It's almost as if I just had to learn the technical side of it to do it."
When he was younger, Wyse often responded to his piano teachers in visual terms. He would say, "It looks like this," or "I see it like that." His visual language frustrated his teachers. They wanted him to use different words that more closely expressed musical ideas.
"But that is how I saw music," Wyse said.
Such intellectual dexterity makes mere mortals quake in his presence, joked Ron Losby, president of Steinway & Sons of New York.
"He's a consummate artist in both respects," Losby said. "I had lunch with him last week, and I asked him, 'What do you prefer: Painting or playing?' His answers are interesting. He said, 'Right now, I really enjoy painting, but I could never not play the piano.' "
As a pianist, Wyse is an official Steinway artist. Steinway confers the honor on pianists of every genre who achieve a masterful level of performance. Only after Wyse became an official Steinway artist did the piano maker learn that he also painted.
When it came time for a portrait of Fleisher, Steinway commissioned Wyse to do one, and he later completed a painting and drawing of Fleisher for the National Portrait Gallery. This past year, Steinway hired him to do the Billy Joel portrait.
Wyse impressed Fortune when she spent time with him a few years ago. "We walked through the galleries, and talked about approaches, settings and other elements about the art of portraiture," Fortune said. "He was just sort of drinking it in, and it was lovely to see that much intense interest in the art of portraiture from someone who was still learning."
The Smithsonian was drawn to Wyse for his ability to tell Fleisher's story through visual narration. For the setting for his portrait, he chose a concert hall at Syracuse University. Wyse painted Fleisher at the keyboard performing.
"We love to find a portrait that gives a visitor something more than a likeness. Sometimes that is all we have -- a face. But when we can, we like to expand that vision to add to the experience for visitors," Fortune said.
Joel is just the second living artist honored with a portrait at Steinway Hall, at 57th Street in Manhattan. Fleischer is the other.
Wyse did not receive special consideration for the painting jobs because of his association with Steinway, Losby said. He got the painting jobs because of his skills with the brush.
"His world of classical music and portrait painting coalesced so brilliantly," he said. "Of all the famous artists who have painted for us -- Wyeth and all the others -- no one has ever been a pianist, or a good pianist, as well as a portrait painter. He is very special."
In his research about art and music, Wyse found many artists who both play and paint, going back to Leonardo da Vinci. Someone more modern struck a chord with his sensibilities: John Singer Sargent.
Sargent was the leading portrait painter of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and strongly influenced Wyse's classical painting style. He considers Sargent an idol, and noted that he also had a special fondness for painting portraits of musicians.
Wyse prepared for his Joel portrait by spending the better part of a day with the rock star at his Long Island home. They hit it off well, and traded stories about playing. Over the course of several hours, he got to know Joel, and developed a feel for the singer's home.
He took many photos, then returned to his studio to begin preparatory sketches. Joel was involved throughout the process. He conferred with Wyse about poses, settings and other details. In the final painting, Joel stands off to the side of his piano, arms crossed and looking away. He is dressed casually in a leather jacket.
The painting is large -- 7 feet tall and 3 feet wide.
"He was a pleasure to work with, and surprisingly camera shy," Wyse said. "A lot of people assume celebrities would be perfectly comfortable having their portrait done, but that is often not the case."
Wyse described Joel as gracious and kind.
"We talked about music a lot," he said. "I grew up on Billy Joel music, so it was fun for me. He was my generation, for sure. When I was a teenager, he was the Lady Gaga of today."
Somewhat reluctantly, Wyse acknowledged to Joel his own skills on the piano.
2012年1月5日星期四
Dennis artist creates mural for new Osterville Library
Walking into Lance Walker’s Fine Art Gallery in Post Office Plaza in Dennis Village during the past two months, one could not help notice the large painting sitting on two milk cartons in front of the other fine art on the walls.
On second look, it’s clear the painting is a work in progress with lots of green and blue open space between the two big buildings on the canvas. The red brick building with a cupola at the top and lots of white trim and windows is the clue what this oil painting is about.
The Osterville Village Library awarded Walker a commission to paint a mural to be hung in the new $5 million library, which is scheduled to open in late February or early March.
“I’m not a mural artist, but I can paint big,” Walker says. The canvas is 7 feet by 5-feet, but this is not your typical mural depicting identifiable buildings and scenes of an area.
Instead, what Walker has created a series of fine illustrations or vignettes of the village on the Cape’s south shore over a nautical chart backdrop of olive green and sea blue. That explains all the blue expanses that show Osterville’s several bays and the downward fingers that depict the water depth. “I’m a map person; I love charts, “Walker says.
“A lot of thought went into it. I was nervous at first,” he admits. “I wanted it to be special.”
Walker started the mural in Nov. 9 and has put in 160 hours on the “basically finished” product as of this week. He has worked on it three hours a day from 6 to 9 a.m.
When Walker entered the new library for the first time while it was under construction, it had no interior walls or the cupola on top or landscaping. He had to envision much of it.
In addition to the library, the only other major building in the mural is the Crosby Boatyard, which Walker points out is the only business depicted. “It’s more of an icon,” he says.
Walker wanted the mural to have life, so he included people walking to the library, sitting in the adjacent park and golfing on the Wianno golf course. Dowses Beach in the lower half of the mural has tiny figures, which Walker says is intentionally low enough for a 3-year-old to see.
“The whole thing takes on the time of year when people are excited,” he says. Other details will include a windmill, a compass rose, the drawbridge and some sea birds and flags.
Only one sailboat is prominent on the mural, the Wianno Senior, on which former President John F. Kennedy was filmed and photographed during his visits to Hyannis Port.
The Kennedys are significant to Walker, who received a commission from Judge Edmund Reggie, the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s father-in-law, to paint a large portrait of the senator’s boat, the Mya, for the senator and his daughter, Vicki Kennedy. Sen. Kennedy died before the painting was finished, but the judge gave it to his family as a Christmas present, Walker says.
The library’s capital campaign committee selected Walker for the mural even though he had not submitted an application. Someone recommended him, so he submitted a sketch he completed in an hour along with a proposed size, cost and how he would deliver and hang the mural.
Laurie Young, head of the committee, said the members selected Walker unanimously from among four finalists because they “felt his artistic proposal was the best fit for the new library.” She added, “It was a difficult selection due to the high quality of the other submissions.”
The criteria for selection included: previous experience with scale of work, artistic style, some form of realism (as opposed to massively contemporary); Cape home base and artistic reputation; fit of proposed image for a library setting.
Walker, 49, is primarily a landscape and seascape painter and largely self-taught. He dabbled a bit in drawing, but says he never did it seriously while he was a drummer in a band in Pennsylvania. He submitted a drawing to a contest and it won first place. That was 23 years ago.
Puerto Rican artist and singer Gilbert Colon noticed his work and asked if he wanted to paint with him. After two years, Walker says, “I started to grasp it and Colon said, ‘Lance, it’s the beginning of your journey. I think you have the tools.’”
Walker left the music business and went into architectural and technical drafting for nine years. “I had an eye for detail,” he said, which is evident in the library mural and much of his work.
In 2000, Walker moved to the Cape to pursue his art and met his wife, Linda Medeiros, who runs the business side of the gallery, which represents 12 artists with different styles. He shares the building with Ron Lindholm’s Cape Cod Picture Framing. Walker also does some framing. He is a member of the American Society of Marine Artists.
Young’s mural will hang on the library’s second floor at the top of the elevator landing in front of the large Wianno Avenue window. Names of “mural wall” contributors to the new building will flank the painting.
The cost of the mural is being donated by the four children and four grandchildren of the late Janel Kisker Kesten, an avid reader who introduced her children to the Hyannis and Osterville libraries. She and her husband, Robert, moved to Osterville in 1965 to buy and operate the East Bay Lodge. Their four children, Laurie Kesten Young, Donna Kesten Greene, Robert Kesten Jr. and John Kesten all live on the Cape or retain Cape ties. The four grandchildren are Kelley Ervin, Janel Kesten, Ryan Kesten and Samantha Kesten. Mrs. Kesten died in 1967.
“Her children felt this mural was a fitting memorial to her love of reading and libraries,” Laurie Young, one of the children, says.
On second look, it’s clear the painting is a work in progress with lots of green and blue open space between the two big buildings on the canvas. The red brick building with a cupola at the top and lots of white trim and windows is the clue what this oil painting is about.
The Osterville Village Library awarded Walker a commission to paint a mural to be hung in the new $5 million library, which is scheduled to open in late February or early March.
“I’m not a mural artist, but I can paint big,” Walker says. The canvas is 7 feet by 5-feet, but this is not your typical mural depicting identifiable buildings and scenes of an area.
Instead, what Walker has created a series of fine illustrations or vignettes of the village on the Cape’s south shore over a nautical chart backdrop of olive green and sea blue. That explains all the blue expanses that show Osterville’s several bays and the downward fingers that depict the water depth. “I’m a map person; I love charts, “Walker says.
“A lot of thought went into it. I was nervous at first,” he admits. “I wanted it to be special.”
Walker started the mural in Nov. 9 and has put in 160 hours on the “basically finished” product as of this week. He has worked on it three hours a day from 6 to 9 a.m.
When Walker entered the new library for the first time while it was under construction, it had no interior walls or the cupola on top or landscaping. He had to envision much of it.
In addition to the library, the only other major building in the mural is the Crosby Boatyard, which Walker points out is the only business depicted. “It’s more of an icon,” he says.
Walker wanted the mural to have life, so he included people walking to the library, sitting in the adjacent park and golfing on the Wianno golf course. Dowses Beach in the lower half of the mural has tiny figures, which Walker says is intentionally low enough for a 3-year-old to see.
“The whole thing takes on the time of year when people are excited,” he says. Other details will include a windmill, a compass rose, the drawbridge and some sea birds and flags.
Only one sailboat is prominent on the mural, the Wianno Senior, on which former President John F. Kennedy was filmed and photographed during his visits to Hyannis Port.
The Kennedys are significant to Walker, who received a commission from Judge Edmund Reggie, the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s father-in-law, to paint a large portrait of the senator’s boat, the Mya, for the senator and his daughter, Vicki Kennedy. Sen. Kennedy died before the painting was finished, but the judge gave it to his family as a Christmas present, Walker says.
The library’s capital campaign committee selected Walker for the mural even though he had not submitted an application. Someone recommended him, so he submitted a sketch he completed in an hour along with a proposed size, cost and how he would deliver and hang the mural.
Laurie Young, head of the committee, said the members selected Walker unanimously from among four finalists because they “felt his artistic proposal was the best fit for the new library.” She added, “It was a difficult selection due to the high quality of the other submissions.”
The criteria for selection included: previous experience with scale of work, artistic style, some form of realism (as opposed to massively contemporary); Cape home base and artistic reputation; fit of proposed image for a library setting.
Walker, 49, is primarily a landscape and seascape painter and largely self-taught. He dabbled a bit in drawing, but says he never did it seriously while he was a drummer in a band in Pennsylvania. He submitted a drawing to a contest and it won first place. That was 23 years ago.
Puerto Rican artist and singer Gilbert Colon noticed his work and asked if he wanted to paint with him. After two years, Walker says, “I started to grasp it and Colon said, ‘Lance, it’s the beginning of your journey. I think you have the tools.’”
Walker left the music business and went into architectural and technical drafting for nine years. “I had an eye for detail,” he said, which is evident in the library mural and much of his work.
In 2000, Walker moved to the Cape to pursue his art and met his wife, Linda Medeiros, who runs the business side of the gallery, which represents 12 artists with different styles. He shares the building with Ron Lindholm’s Cape Cod Picture Framing. Walker also does some framing. He is a member of the American Society of Marine Artists.
Young’s mural will hang on the library’s second floor at the top of the elevator landing in front of the large Wianno Avenue window. Names of “mural wall” contributors to the new building will flank the painting.
The cost of the mural is being donated by the four children and four grandchildren of the late Janel Kisker Kesten, an avid reader who introduced her children to the Hyannis and Osterville libraries. She and her husband, Robert, moved to Osterville in 1965 to buy and operate the East Bay Lodge. Their four children, Laurie Kesten Young, Donna Kesten Greene, Robert Kesten Jr. and John Kesten all live on the Cape or retain Cape ties. The four grandchildren are Kelley Ervin, Janel Kesten, Ryan Kesten and Samantha Kesten. Mrs. Kesten died in 1967.
“Her children felt this mural was a fitting memorial to her love of reading and libraries,” Laurie Young, one of the children, says.
2012年1月4日星期三
Photographer can spend a day to capture the moment
This area artist captures unique moments of life and preserves them for the future within a frame.
Originally from Michigan, photographer Diane Bush moved to Arizona four years ago. Taking photography classes as a child, she learned the craft at first from her 4-H club.
She is artist of the month for the Casa Grande Valley Fine Art Association.
As she got older, she took more classes but her interests turned to oil painting in the 1970s. Eventually she began selling her paintings from a home studio. Painting is one of her passions.
“I absolutely love it,” Bush said. “I lose everything else that’s going on in the world when I paint.”
In the late ’80s, her love for photography was renewed and she took up that craft again, putting painting on hold. In 1999, Bush began to get serious about her work as a photographer and has done it professionally since then.
And, like her painting: “I also lose myself in photography,” she said. “I can be out most of the day trying to capture the one perfect angle that will embody the spirit of what I’m trying to capture. I like to say that I capture one moment in time that will never be the same again. There will never be a photo exactly like another. Every single moment is always completely unique.”
In addition to her painting and photography, Bush is also an avid writer who enjoys creating poetry. She said her photos and words are the two things that will last forever, that she can leave behind.
Her subjects vary based on her moods. Her work consists of everything from portraits and landscapes to textures.
This artist’s work is spontaneous and genuine.
“You just never know what moment will inspire you when you’re out. Sometimes my husband and I will be driving and I’ll make him stop the car so I can get out and take a picture of something that struck me,” Bush said.
Her work has been published and featured in several galleries and art shows. Also, her work has won several awards.
Despite her success with a camera, she has recently turned her attention back to oil painting. Joined by a new friend, Barb Bradley, the pair decided to paint together and sell their work. Bradley is a newcomer to the art world, but Bush is happy to lend her expertise.
Knowing her way around a canvas, Bush uses her photos to paint from.
“I like being able to see the exact picture I want and paint it. If I’m painting outside, the elements are too unpredictable and when I’m using a photo, I already have the exact image I’m looking for,” Bush said.
She also plans to make jewelry in the future. Having many of the materials, she has already done some necklaces and earrings but wants to take a bracelet-making course.
Although there are many media that capture her attention, her first love will always be photography, she said.
“It’s something that makes my life happy,” Bush said. “It cheers me up. And when people say my work is beautiful and tell me how much they appreciate it, it just makes my day. If someone said I couldn’t take another picture, I’d be devastated because it is just such a big part of my life. I love it with all my heart.”
Originally from Michigan, photographer Diane Bush moved to Arizona four years ago. Taking photography classes as a child, she learned the craft at first from her 4-H club.
She is artist of the month for the Casa Grande Valley Fine Art Association.
As she got older, she took more classes but her interests turned to oil painting in the 1970s. Eventually she began selling her paintings from a home studio. Painting is one of her passions.
“I absolutely love it,” Bush said. “I lose everything else that’s going on in the world when I paint.”
In the late ’80s, her love for photography was renewed and she took up that craft again, putting painting on hold. In 1999, Bush began to get serious about her work as a photographer and has done it professionally since then.
And, like her painting: “I also lose myself in photography,” she said. “I can be out most of the day trying to capture the one perfect angle that will embody the spirit of what I’m trying to capture. I like to say that I capture one moment in time that will never be the same again. There will never be a photo exactly like another. Every single moment is always completely unique.”
In addition to her painting and photography, Bush is also an avid writer who enjoys creating poetry. She said her photos and words are the two things that will last forever, that she can leave behind.
Her subjects vary based on her moods. Her work consists of everything from portraits and landscapes to textures.
This artist’s work is spontaneous and genuine.
“You just never know what moment will inspire you when you’re out. Sometimes my husband and I will be driving and I’ll make him stop the car so I can get out and take a picture of something that struck me,” Bush said.
Her work has been published and featured in several galleries and art shows. Also, her work has won several awards.
Despite her success with a camera, she has recently turned her attention back to oil painting. Joined by a new friend, Barb Bradley, the pair decided to paint together and sell their work. Bradley is a newcomer to the art world, but Bush is happy to lend her expertise.
Knowing her way around a canvas, Bush uses her photos to paint from.
“I like being able to see the exact picture I want and paint it. If I’m painting outside, the elements are too unpredictable and when I’m using a photo, I already have the exact image I’m looking for,” Bush said.
She also plans to make jewelry in the future. Having many of the materials, she has already done some necklaces and earrings but wants to take a bracelet-making course.
Although there are many media that capture her attention, her first love will always be photography, she said.
“It’s something that makes my life happy,” Bush said. “It cheers me up. And when people say my work is beautiful and tell me how much they appreciate it, it just makes my day. If someone said I couldn’t take another picture, I’d be devastated because it is just such a big part of my life. I love it with all my heart.”
2012年1月3日星期二
At Artists' Gallery, it's about individual messages
Group exhibits tend to feature an assortment of subjects treated in several different mediums. The "All Member Holiday Show" at the Artists' Gallery in downtown Columbia showcases local artists who instinctively seem to favor the mediums best-suited for their individual messages.
Bonita Glaser's watercolor "Deep Into Winter," for instance, is a landscape that is compositionally anchored by a barn. What really makes this watercolor hold your attention, though, are the blue shadows cast against a snowy field. The watercolor medium lends itself to the gently impressionistic, blue-tinged effects achieved here.
Another medium with softening tendencies is pastel, which Barbara Steinacker deploys in "Nantucket Surf." This atmospheric picture has a yellow sky atop pink-hued waves and shoreline. There is even more pronounced melting in Deborah Maklowski's pastel "Aquifer," in which the landscape amounts to the melding together of various colors.
Just as Maklowski flirts with abstraction, another artist in the show nearly leaves realism behind. Kathleen Schuman's oil and gesso "Ancient Forest" is a densely worked painting whose various shades of brown make it resemble a forest floor whose leaves turned to compost a long time ago.
The artists here who are working in oil generally make paintings that take advantage of the representational clarity that can be achieved with this medium. Even when they deliberately blur portions of the picture for strategic effect, there is a straightforward presentation of the subject matter.
Nancy Lee Davis has a selection of oil paintings whose small size encourages you to pull up close to see subjects including a child in a "Yellow Dress." The title is significant in terms of this artist's intentions, because that dress is much more assertively defined than the indistinctly rendered child wearing it.
Davis works within the venerable still-life tradition in paintings including "Two Cherries" and "Orange," which both seem good enough to eat. She also proves that a painter can make a portrait out of just about anything in "Lurking Cow."
Painted portraits have a way of making you feel as if you are meeting somebody eye to eye — and we're not just talking cows here. One of the best examples in the exhibit is Pat Roberie's oil painting "The Jazz Man," whose gray-haired subject has done some serious living.
By way of contrast to such direct figuration, Myung Kim's ink on rice paper "Floating People" only alludes to the human presence via the scribbled, thin black lines that schematically represent tiny people. The abstracted humans float against a pale green and blue background.
Among photographers in the exhibit, some of the best work comes from those who take full advantage of that medium's crisp and colorful attributes.
John Stier's "Yellowstone in Winter" calls your attention to the craggy details of a snowcapped peak. Ann Eid's "Evening" invites you to peer through a window at a house's lamp-illuminated interior. And Jerry Weinstein's "Rust" presents an old car whose metal body is so completely rusted out that it seems like a 20th-century fossil nestled within a weed-filled yard.
Bonita Glaser's watercolor "Deep Into Winter," for instance, is a landscape that is compositionally anchored by a barn. What really makes this watercolor hold your attention, though, are the blue shadows cast against a snowy field. The watercolor medium lends itself to the gently impressionistic, blue-tinged effects achieved here.
Another medium with softening tendencies is pastel, which Barbara Steinacker deploys in "Nantucket Surf." This atmospheric picture has a yellow sky atop pink-hued waves and shoreline. There is even more pronounced melting in Deborah Maklowski's pastel "Aquifer," in which the landscape amounts to the melding together of various colors.
Just as Maklowski flirts with abstraction, another artist in the show nearly leaves realism behind. Kathleen Schuman's oil and gesso "Ancient Forest" is a densely worked painting whose various shades of brown make it resemble a forest floor whose leaves turned to compost a long time ago.
The artists here who are working in oil generally make paintings that take advantage of the representational clarity that can be achieved with this medium. Even when they deliberately blur portions of the picture for strategic effect, there is a straightforward presentation of the subject matter.
Nancy Lee Davis has a selection of oil paintings whose small size encourages you to pull up close to see subjects including a child in a "Yellow Dress." The title is significant in terms of this artist's intentions, because that dress is much more assertively defined than the indistinctly rendered child wearing it.
Davis works within the venerable still-life tradition in paintings including "Two Cherries" and "Orange," which both seem good enough to eat. She also proves that a painter can make a portrait out of just about anything in "Lurking Cow."
Painted portraits have a way of making you feel as if you are meeting somebody eye to eye — and we're not just talking cows here. One of the best examples in the exhibit is Pat Roberie's oil painting "The Jazz Man," whose gray-haired subject has done some serious living.
By way of contrast to such direct figuration, Myung Kim's ink on rice paper "Floating People" only alludes to the human presence via the scribbled, thin black lines that schematically represent tiny people. The abstracted humans float against a pale green and blue background.
Among photographers in the exhibit, some of the best work comes from those who take full advantage of that medium's crisp and colorful attributes.
John Stier's "Yellowstone in Winter" calls your attention to the craggy details of a snowcapped peak. Ann Eid's "Evening" invites you to peer through a window at a house's lamp-illuminated interior. And Jerry Weinstein's "Rust" presents an old car whose metal body is so completely rusted out that it seems like a 20th-century fossil nestled within a weed-filled yard.
2012年1月2日星期一
Saturday Art programme to resume this week
PARENTS looking to spend valuable time with their children while learning useful skills can accomplish all of these goals thanks to Saturday Art.
Classes resume this Saturday, January 7, with participants learning basic, intermediate and advanced skills in various forms of art including water-colour, acrylic and oil painting; textile design; batik; tie-dye; pottery; basketry; jewellery making; print making and portrait painting.
Speaking to the Barbados Advocate recently at the St. Michael School where the classes are held every Saturday for the year, Co-ordinator Linda Bowen said that the classes are designed to accommodate any individual regardless of the person’s artistic knowledge and the time that they have to spend on these classes.
For small children and adults who have no experience in art other than what they may have done at school, Bowen takes you from the beginning with lines and drawings and introduces you to the colour wheel; while persons who have more experience would be exposed to more advanced material.
There are also inter-lapping class times of 9:00am to 11:00am, 10:00am to 12:00pm and 11:00am to 1:00pm for the children from five to 15 years old, and adult classes which run from 2:00pm to 4:00pm and 3:00pm to 5:00pm.
Bowen explained that the classes, which she describes as “flexi-time,” are done in this way because the persons in each class may be on a different level, so they would be involved in different activities and therefore, you can still have inter-lapping classes as one class would not interfere with another class.
“Flexi-time” also allow persons to come when they have the time and they can come different times each week according to their schedule for that day, explained Bowen.
The classes also involve tours to various public and private exhibitions and organisations where students can see how professional artists in a variety of disciplines work. They also learn about art critique.
Some of the places that participants go are exhibitions held at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre (LESC), the Queen’s Park Gallery and the Grand Salle, and year-round Highland Pottery at Chalky Mount. They also go on tours around the island so that they can paint different sceneries.
Participants are also given an art journal with blank pages for them to put their art work, other pages for them to take notes on the various subjects being taught as well as write their thoughts and emotions when creating each art piece.
Bowen also recognises the connection that the various art forms have to each other, so another technique that she employs in her classes is painting to music. She brings in and plays classical, jazz, modern and other types of music and the participants paint to the sound of the music. Accordingly, these paintings are abstract paintings, stated Bowen.
Classes resume this Saturday, January 7, with participants learning basic, intermediate and advanced skills in various forms of art including water-colour, acrylic and oil painting; textile design; batik; tie-dye; pottery; basketry; jewellery making; print making and portrait painting.
Speaking to the Barbados Advocate recently at the St. Michael School where the classes are held every Saturday for the year, Co-ordinator Linda Bowen said that the classes are designed to accommodate any individual regardless of the person’s artistic knowledge and the time that they have to spend on these classes.
For small children and adults who have no experience in art other than what they may have done at school, Bowen takes you from the beginning with lines and drawings and introduces you to the colour wheel; while persons who have more experience would be exposed to more advanced material.
There are also inter-lapping class times of 9:00am to 11:00am, 10:00am to 12:00pm and 11:00am to 1:00pm for the children from five to 15 years old, and adult classes which run from 2:00pm to 4:00pm and 3:00pm to 5:00pm.
Bowen explained that the classes, which she describes as “flexi-time,” are done in this way because the persons in each class may be on a different level, so they would be involved in different activities and therefore, you can still have inter-lapping classes as one class would not interfere with another class.
“Flexi-time” also allow persons to come when they have the time and they can come different times each week according to their schedule for that day, explained Bowen.
The classes also involve tours to various public and private exhibitions and organisations where students can see how professional artists in a variety of disciplines work. They also learn about art critique.
Some of the places that participants go are exhibitions held at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre (LESC), the Queen’s Park Gallery and the Grand Salle, and year-round Highland Pottery at Chalky Mount. They also go on tours around the island so that they can paint different sceneries.
Participants are also given an art journal with blank pages for them to put their art work, other pages for them to take notes on the various subjects being taught as well as write their thoughts and emotions when creating each art piece.
Bowen also recognises the connection that the various art forms have to each other, so another technique that she employs in her classes is painting to music. She brings in and plays classical, jazz, modern and other types of music and the participants paint to the sound of the music. Accordingly, these paintings are abstract paintings, stated Bowen.
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