Art and Photography Blog

Karen Ay’s October London Art Exhibits

My London friend, Karen Ay, is showing at two upcoming shows in London.  I have written about her on numerous occasions. See for example, TangentProjects is going to Venice with Invasive Alien Species, and Great Upcoming London Sculpture Show. She combines a sense of humor with art that makes you think but does not dictate the process. 

Karen also has a new blog, Worth a Look, which deserves just what the title suggests. 

Her new work, Terra Infirma  will be at The Multiple Store: Multiplied Contemporary Art in Editions Fair at Christie's South Kensington, 85 Old Brompton Road, 
London SW7 3LD
,  October 12 – 15. Admission is free. As Karen describes it, “The contents of a pocket world atlas, hand cut into tiny pieces, are contained in a glass sphere that rotates. The fragments overlap, intermingle and scatter, creating incongruous associations and connections as they circulate. Localities, once easily defined, become fluid; our understanding of territory is disrupted, reinterpreted, redistributed, repositioned.” Below is an image.

In addition, her neon installation neon installation, YesYesOhhYes, shown below, will be in the group show, ALTER
at VEGAS Gallery, 
Private View:  Thursday October 11^th.  The shows runs October 10 - 3 November 3.  The VEGAS Gallery is located at 274 Poyser Street, London E2 9RF.

Interesting Show - Parts of a Whole - Sweibel and Butler

My friend Liz Sweibel and Ben Butler are presenting an interesting art show: Parts to a Whole. It opened on September 22 at the Medicine Factory, located at 85 Virginia Ave. West, Memphis Tennessee.  As the invitation describes it, “In Parts to the Whole Butler and Sweibel present sculpture and drawings referencing ideas of gathering, systems, materiality and form.  Sweibel and Butler both create their work through an accumulation of parts.  However, the methods and sensibilities with which they approach the material yield very different work.”

I have covered Liz’s work before and she does very thoughtful works that allow you to think. See for example, Many Kinds of Nothing Creates a Nice Art Space and Liz Sweibel’s New Art Web Site and Blog. Below is one of Liz’s works from the show.

The site goes on to describes her work as follows: “Sweibel, like Butler, also arrives at a formal conclusion through the act and labor of making.  While Butler’s work references order, classification and systems, Sweibel works from a more visceral  - yet still formal - place, referencing more poetic ideas of absence, longing, and relationship.  Sweibel writes, “My pieces are intimate records of activity that draw attention to attention - given received, withdrawn, absent.  The visual and visceral impact of each tiny point of contact, overlap or disconnect are what the work both reduces and expands to.  It matches my experience of the world as the accumulation and juxtaposition of small decisions and acts that seem simple but aren’t.”

If you are in the Memphis area, I certainly encourage you to take in this show

 

My New Art Heroes: Richard Diebenkorn and Emily Eveleth

My friend Liz Sweibel, an excellent artist herself, introduced me to two artists whose work I now greatly admire and find inspirational, Richard Diebenkorn and Emily Eveleth.

 With Richard, I like his work that is more representational such the smaller tomato and knife to the left than his abstract expressionism and the well-known Ocean Park paintings. Here is another example, Cityscape 1963, a larger scale 60 ¼ “ by 50 ½ “ found in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (image form Wikipedia).

With Emily, the painterly realism of common objects and the style of the figures are truly an inspiration. I also like the scale as you can see in the installation view from the home page of her web site showing some giant jelly donuts.

 

I like exploration of the details of figures in a style that reminds me of Sargent, and before him Velazquez.  Here is another image from her web site.  Emily went to the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, as did my friend Liz. I used to teach education there in the art education department in the late 70s. She now shows at the Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston. I hope to get there to see some of the paintings and go beyond just seeing images.

 

I do want to paint more textured and closer to the style shown in Emily’s figure above and will someday make the switch to oils primarily for this reason.  I often start out textured and then smooth it out as I try to paint what I see. But I often think maybe I should stop at the more textured stage.  Below is a painting I did that also explores some of the details of a figure in a style inspired by Sargent.

 

 

Gustave Caillebotte, An Impressionist Friend

I have seen Caillebotte's paintings before and liked them but could not remember his name. The New York Times recently did a nice review of a Gustave Caillebotte show through July 5 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park; (718) 638-5000. There is a useful set of nine images of his work I especially liked The Floor Scrapers,” “House Painters,” and “Oarsmen Rowing on the Yerres.” All three have a very strong use of color and interesting perspective. Some of the others are more diffuse and are not as strong in my view. This is a show I want to see in person.

Caillebotte became an artist late in life, enrolling at the École des Beaux-Arts, but soon left. He was largely self-taught and moved back and forth between Paris and the family estate in the village of Yerres, painting what he found. He was rich so he just did what he wanted. The Times writes that, “he visited the first Impressionist salon in 1874. When the second one took place two years later, the artists involved, including Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Cézanne and Degas, welcomed his participation.”

Gustave repaid their hospitality with patronage. “He organized exhibitions for them, promoted their careers, paid their rent (Monet survived on his generosity for years) and bought their paintings, amazing things, out of the studio. He bequeathed his collection to the French government, with the stipulation that it be put on public view. Part of it became the foundation of what is now the Musée d’Orsay.” This is one of my favorite museums so I am grateful for this effort. Calliebotte did not paint long so I ma also grateful for this show which mostly came from private collections.

Edward Weston at the Big Sur

I have always been a great fan of Edward Weston from my early days in photography. The New York Times published a nice article, In Point Lobos, Where Edward Weston Saw the World Anew and slide show, The California Coast Through Edward Weston's Lens. There are ten excellent examples of his work in the slide show. His son, Kim Weston, provides commentary on the slides.

The travel article, starts, “One exception to this biographic amnesia, and a worthy candidate for a plaque from the National Register of Historic Places, is Edward Weston’s house on the Monterey Peninsula. If American modernist photography can be said to have a spiritual birthplace that can still be visited, it’s his home on Wildcat Hill in Carmel Highlands where he lived off and on from 1938 until his death in 1958.”

The house is in the slide show. Many of his great photos were taken in the area and he made many of his prints in the house. This is a beautiful part of the world. His life is an inspiration to any artist. I would love to live in a place that I can paint and photograph.

Particles, Particles Exhibit at Surface Gallery, Nottingham, UK

As stated in Facebook, as part of the new exhibition programme for 2009, Surface Gallery sees the first curated exhibition; ‘Particles, Particles’ within its new venue. The show consists of a diverse range of media; from painting and sculpture to performance and installation, featuring an array of international artists, brought together from Italy, Norway, Japan and the UK. The gallery is located at 16 Southwell Road, Nottingham, UK. Wish I could be there.

The exhibition projects an ambitious light on the range of skills and values present in an artist’s capabilities today, and the intensity of one’s own intellect. A nostalgic, almost surreal presence floats over the “particles” foundations, with something we can all relate to - yet at times it is unclear just where we felt those sensations at a previous moment, or how close to us those moments are.

Christina Bryant will be performing exclusively at the Surface Gallery for the private view. She will be responding spontaneously to the audience in her role as ‘the drawer’ (in which she will be situated within a white cube), inviting, through the action of a live drawing, the audience to literally be drawn into the piece. The Norwegian artist Tone Holmen considers the impact of consumption in relation to climate change. Through transforming non-degradable materials into sculptures of poignant meaning, she addresses key issues that are relevant to us all. Sam Clift explores the visual perception and connotations of materials once they are taken out of their original context; transforming them into an altered state quite different from the source. Japanese artist Yuko Takemura’s interactive installation explores the inner mind of one’s self, through interacting with the viewer’s senses; it evokes recollections of thoughts, daydreams and past times.

Featured artists include: Chris Loukes, Caroline Elliott, Robert Lang, Sam Clift, Christina Bryant, Kate Walters, Joanne Wilton, Helen Dryden, Yuko Takemura, Tone Holmen, Lorena Carbonara Kaoru Shimadam and my friend Karen D’Amico.

To celebrate the opening of the exhibition, Surface Gallery are collaborating with Brass Monkey cocktail bar to host the after party at their venue in the Lace Market, from 9pm onwards. They will also kindly be providing drinks at the opening of ‘Particles, Particles’, whilst Edin's Deli Café have generously contributed to publicity costs.

The Private View will be held on the 6th February 6-9pm, where you will be able to come along to view the work and meet participating artists whilst also having the opportunity to partake in a live performance!

Karen D'Amico - London Artist and Designer

I have written about my friend’s blog before – see Fluid Thinking – Karen D’Amico’s Artist Blog – but I have not covered her graphic design and art so here are some thoughts. She has a new site for her graphic design work, D’Amico Design. I think the entry page is a great example of focus as there is an interesting image that takes a minute to figure out and then a simple objective statement below that draws your eye after seeing the banner.

The “about section” covers her 18 years in the design and print industry including Karen’s technical and design capabilities, as well as her services. She also mentions that she is a practicing artist, and maintains a studio in Hackney. I certainly agree with Karen’s statement, “I like the fact that the boundaries between fine art and design are often blurred. I consider both professions to be innately creative, requiring lateral thinking and the ability to find unique solutions.” Too often fine art looks down on design work. I see them as peers and the ability to create just the right simplicity required to convey a message through good design is something I have great respect for.

In Karen’s portfolio I especially like the Glitter and Grime series in Portfolio One. It is design for an artist’s book with many street scenes. Karen said she had complete autonomy on the design effort. I think the text and the illustrations work as equals with neither fighting the other. I also like the design work in her own ezine, Tangent Projects, seen in Portfolio Three. Here you also see a balanced relationship between text and images. The art of occupation invitation makes a strong conceptual statement and then you notice the balanced design that drew your attention to the conceptual centerpiece.

Karen’s art site contains the statement that her “art practice focuses on the devising of various groupings and systems as agencies of connecting and interpreting notions surrounding identity/legacy, accumulated histories, and sense of place. By incorporating maps, text, assemblage and the photographic image in her work, she juxtaposes and manipulates objects and images in an attempt to order, contain and re-present them in various contexts.”

One project that conveys this message is the collaborative Travellers Secret Box 2005- 2007. It “sought to explore, locate, identify and perhaps dissolve some of the seemingly undetectable territories existent in terms of art and culture, social inclusion and the ever-shifting locality of identity as well as notions of home.” In 2008 this concept was extended to the Sandwich Box, another group effort that Karen is the co-curator. Karen often works at boundaries and her champagne army is another wonderful example I wrote about before. I find her work a nice balance of accessibility and complexity.

The images section presents a wide variety of work. I was struck by “Outpouring,” a mixed media work; “burnt offerings,” an assemblage; “time trap,” another assemblage; “no such place,” a digitally manipulated photograph that looks like an aerial image but is really a micro-world. There are many others but I will stop here and recommend that you take a look.

National Geographic Releases Reza War + Peace: A Photographer’s Journey

National Geographic recently sent me a much appreciated review copy of REZA WAR + PEACE, a large format 30-year retrospective of the work of the award-winning photojournalist and humanitarian Reza. As their release states, he has “devoted his life to bearing witness through his camera to the struggles and hopes of oppressed people around the world…this remarkable photographer chronicles his travels to places of conflict through exquisite images that pair turmoil with hope, joy with despair.” I would have to agree. The book is full of moving images from the Middle East, Africa and other places in conflict. It is certainly a page turner in the best sense of the word, except that you also want to go slowly to absorb each image.

The introduction is written by the novelist, Sebastian Junger who wrote The Perfect Storm. Sebastian writes about the experience he shared with Reza in northern Afghanistan in 2000. They were in the middle of conflict, traveling with Ahmad Massoud, an anti-Taliban leader. He writes about the depth of Reza’s connection to those he photographs and his unwillingness to back these people more abstract as a psychological self-defense. As a result his pictures achieve a greater emotional depth as well as a more profound artistic accomplishment.

The book site writes that “Reza’s journey has taken him from his native Iran, where he was jailed and tortured because of his photography, to dozens of countries gripped by turmoil — from Kurdistan to Egypt, Lebanon to Turkey, China to Israel, Somalia to South Africa. Through his lens, which captures not just conflict, but friendship, loyalty, family life and love, he takes us to such regions as northern Pakistan, where cultural shock and mutual incomprehension are deepening the gap between the American military and people in the tribal zones; Libya, a country making strides in economic and social well-being, but not in basic freedoms; Saudi Arabia, ruled by oil-rich princes whose opulent lives are in stark contrast to those of the “guest workers” who serve them; and Afghanistan, whose land and people have deeply touched Reza, helping him find his way in the labyrinth of his own nomadic life.”

There are portraits of leaders such as Yassar Arafat, Benazir Bhutto and Indira Gandhi. I was especially moved by the images of Benazir Bhutto, given her fate. The vast majority of pictures are of unnamed and unknown people who serve as representatives of their fellow country men and women, boys and girls, and even animals. The latter comes through clearly in a picture of boy and his large white horse in Turkmenistan. Here the horse captures the boys attention while the horse looks into the camera to hold ours. There are pictures of joy like two smiling girls dancing in front of what looks like a distant explosion in Turkmenistan and a boy playing with a balloon in Turkey. There are many pictures of people looking directly and intently into the camera who convey a sense of connection with the photographer that can extend through him to the reader. There are also many pictures of the tragedy that conflict brings. Reza provides the context in narratives on many of the pictures. This is a moving book that I highly recommend.

Four Pioneers in Photography and Travel Journalism from National Geographic

Here is another great photography book from National Geographic, Odysseys and Photographs. I was kindly sent this book for a review. (see my past reviews of Visions of Paradise from National Geographic and The Life of a Photographer – Sam Abell.) In this case the book shows the works of four great National Geographic “field men”: Maynard Owen Williams (1919 – 1953), Luis Marden (1934 – 1976), Volkmar Wentzel (1937 – 1985) and Thomas Abercrombie (1956 – 1994). All four also wrote the stories they photographed. If you are a fan of classic National Geographic photography this is a book for you.

I have saved many of my old National Geographics as a subscriber since the 1970s. I have also picked up some older ones at second hand book stores. This book is like a greatest hits from that collection, which it is in fact. I could not stop looking at the wonderful pictures of exotic locations from the 20th century, especially the first half.

It was hard to pick a favorite. I started liking Maynard Owen Williams as he represented the oldest grouping of pictures. Seeing exotic places in the 1920s and 30s remains hard to top. I especially liked the pictures he took on the first overland expedition across Asia since Marco Polo’s efforts. He was the lone American in this group sponsored by Andre Citroen, the French automaker. They departed in 1931 and encountered numerous adventures, including a 2,300 mile retreat from a Chinese war lord.

However, as I looked at each one it became impossible to pick a favorite. It is hard to top Thomas Abercrombie’s picture of an elderly shepherdess with her small flock as the spot lighted foreground for a panoramic view of lamasery in the high mountains of northern India.

Sam Abell wrote the epilogue and discussed the inspiration that these four photographers provided to his generation. The book tells their story and provides highlights of their work. It is treasure that calls for frequent visits.

What is Your Vision of Paradise? National Geographic Provides Some and Asks for Yours

Here is a beautiful new book from National Geographic. Visions of Paradise contains 155 images from 82 well known photographers divided into three themes: land, water, and air. The sections are introduced by a writer on the topic. Linda Kulman describes the critical issues facing the land and how we need to change our ways to keep it healthy. Joel Bourne Jr. points out the bleak state of the world's water, but offers some hopeful solutions. Brian Doyle covers the miracles of air in a lyrical manner. The photographers include Sam Abell, who I recent interviewed (see Sam Abell Talks about Photography and Life) after I reviewed his book (The Life of a Photographer – Sam Abell).

The site says, “The photographers at National Geographic—some of the most peripatetic and adventurous people on Earth—reveal wonders of nature so uniquely beautiful that we're filled with hope and inspiration to celebrate and protect the world's environments. Visions of Paradise is the magnificent result of their work. Through breathtaking images from across the globe, and stories as exquisite as the glance of a leopard seal, these men and women share the places they have personally found to be Heaven on Earth.”

I would agree. Sam selected a photo of a school of migrating and a salmon in Australia under a breaking wave. The contrast between the breaking wave an the drama underneath is very striking and the composition follows the rules conveyed in his interview with me. There is a centrality, the fish under the water, with the breaking wave serving as the horizon.

I was struck by the diversity of visions. It made me reflect on what could be considered paradise on earth. There are probably as many visions as there are people. This book provides 155 versions from many different locations and perspectives. I highly recommend it. The book is one that you will savor in small doses.  You can see a video description of the book on YouTube.

National Geographic also has a related Visions of Paradise photo contest. Entries will be accepted from Oct. 21 to December 21 at the Visions of Paradise web page.  Enter your vision of paradise. Each week, the public can vote on their favorite images. Entries will also be judged by an expert panel of photographers and art directors. Three winners will be selected for each of the nine weeks of the competition, with the first week's winners announced on Nov. 3. Winners will receive a customized edition of VISIONS OF PARADISE with their photograph as the cover image.