Living Twyla Tharp’s “The Creative Habit”

 

Twyla Tharp writes in this “practical guide” to living a creatively engaged life about a “blank space” that every creative person faces: “the task of starting with nothing and working your way toward creating something whole and beautiful and satisfying.”

I’m beginning a new cycle of creative exploration. I know I am because I feel like an infant again rather than someone who has been working with creative process for close to two decades. In this beginning place, where I’m heading is a mystery, spurred only by the raw material of an idea, an image, a phrase or thought.

So I do the only thing I know how to do. Begin somewhere. Make samples. Let the ideas simmer and expand. I don’t start with a completed vision of a masterful work of art, only a crumb of an idea that teases and tugs at my consciousness.

 

Growing from this scrap of a beginning takes work. Lots of it. Not the straight line, numerically-ordered, step-by-step, “man she knows what’s she doing” type of work. More like the “crawling on one’s knees in the dark feeling with one’s hands to find a way forward” work. But I do have an inner compass that guides this, one that trusts both the process and my skills enough to make me believe that I will indeed find a sure footing, an engagement with an idea that will lead to more focused action and work.

Twyla Tharp starts a new dance piece with what she calls “scratching”. “A dance doesn’t hit me whole and complete. Inspiration comes in molecules of movements, sometimes in nanoseconds…You can’t imagine the work, you can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas…when you actually do something physical.”

I’ve learned this. So I improvise. I create small studies. I listen to the thoughts that pop into my head just as I am waking. They whisper golden suggestions. “Create a thread map of the neighborhood you lived in as a child” was yesterday morning’s.

Today’s was “write your blog about this beginning place and how you don’t know whether you will fail or succeed, but you know you are committed to keep creating because this is who you are and this is what you do.”

 

First Friday Open Studio: Behind the Scenes, Before the Crowds Arrive

 

Since not everyone can come to Hungerford for one of our First Friday Open Studio nights (just had this one Friday, May 4), here’s a virtual tour of my studio waiting for the fun to begin:.

First stop, the door to my corner studio on the third floor of the building. Just freshly painted green, with blue panels on either side. Of course it will be open wide to welcome everyone as soon as I’m done shooting this picture. By next month, a sign – and possibly some bright Mexican tiles along the green trim – will be added to welcome you!

Once you open the door, there’s a small entryway. My husband just painted it too so now it serves as an additional small gallery space. On the right, a quick view of my new “Big, Bold Life” painting.

Look to the left, and you see “Fall Equinox” and two 12” x 12” pieces from the “Notations” series.

Just inside the entryway, the wall on the right has another painting, “Spring Equinox”, plus one of my Book of the Ancients pieces and three small framed works.

Facing you is the dark charcoal accent wall with another “Book of the Ancients” piece.

Most everyone who comes in loves the space and comments on how wonderful the natural light is.  I love it too, but on First Friday open studio nights I wish I could wave a magic wand and create more wallspace!

Close up of the pieces in front of the east wall bank of windows.

If you stand in front of that east wall bank of windows and face the west end of my studio, you’ll see the entryway on the left again and my design wall, which gets commandeered as another display space on First Fridays.

So there you go – in just an hour or so after I shot these pictures, the halls began to fill and interesting, delightful people got to visit the many unique studios and meet the artists who work in them. What a great way to spend a Friday evening.

Do come join us if you’re ever in the Rochester area!

Slow Art Day April 28 at MAG in Rochester, NY

 

Over 94 locations all around the globe are joining together this Saturday, April 28 to participate in Slow Art Day with one goal: slow down and take more time to really look at art. I admit it, I’m guilty, I rush through  many art exhibitions, overstimulated and overwhelmed in trying to take it all in.

The founder of Slow Art Day observed the same and decided to create an event that would encourage all of us to approach art with a slower, more contemplative mindset. A simple idea with incredibly rewarding results!

In Rochester, the Arena Art Group and Memorial Art Gallery are partnering to host the first Slow Art Day event in our area. Two of our Arena Art Group member artists, Liz Durand and Sid Roepke, will be on hand to facilitate observation and appreciation of five works in the gallery’s collection.

Three of us did a slow walk-through yesterday to chat about the works we had selected for viewing and the more we looked, the more we began to see in each painting. From the formal aspects of composition to questions of narrative and emotional tenor, the more time we spent looking and discussing, the greater our appreciation and connection grew to each work.

Alone, I might have spent two minutes with each of these works, but as the three of us discussed and shared our observations, I gathered more and more information and insight into each one.

We’re starting with more representational works and then moving to abstract:

Night Before the Battle, 1865 by John Henry Beard. This representational painting has a strong narrative. A cloaked skeletal form sits quietly gazing out over the rampart, his hands resting on the cannon while the first hints of dawn appear over the far horizon and a small group of soldiers lie sleeping, waiting for the battle to begin.

Jonas Lie, Morning on the River, circa 1911-12. Moody, atmospheric, the raw chill of a winter morning is palpable in this artist’s perspective of the Brooklyn Bridge on a cold, wintry morning.

John Koch, Interlude, 1963. This painting hangs next to the Hans Hofmann piece, below, and although the subject matter and degree of abstraction are certainly at opposite ends of the spectrum, the same careful thought has gone into the compositional choices each artist has made.

Hans Hofmann, Ruby Gold, 1959. I confess to breezing by this particular painting for years. Yesterday, the more time I spent with it, the more I recognized how the colors orchestrated a variety of emotional,non-verbal responses in me. I began to fully appreciate the intentionality of the impasto palette knife marks and the interactions of the color fields and shapes. So if you are one of those people who says,“my five year old could paint that”, you would reconsider that opinion if you spent careful time observing this painting.

This feast for the senses art experience will ends with discussing a work by Louise Nevelson, Dawn’s Landscape XL, 1975. This is a complex and intriguing work that rewards the slow viewer with intricate compositions within compositions. The urban influence is apparent in this work, along with intriguing compositional details that can suggest a myriad of interpretations.

These images just don’t do the works justice. Join us this Saturday at Memorial Art Gallery, 11-AM – 1 PM. Program free with paid museum admission.

If you live elsewhere, check out the Slow Art Day site and see if there is an event happening in your area!

Fiber Art Philadelphia: “Mending = Art” at Borowsky Gallery

Guest curator and participating artist Diane Savona gathers together twelve artists in “Mending=Art” on display through May 6 at the Gershwin Y, Borowsky Gallery, 401 South Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA. Open Mon- Sun,  9 AM – 5PM,

Savona writes that mending has been historically viewed at the low end of craft, “merely a humble necessity.” The artists that she has selected for the show “invert that scale, using mending as an art process, as social activism and as a statement of personal identity.”

 Diane Savona, Repair Manual, silkscreen and sewing on fabric, bound in spiral notebook, 12” x 24”. Sections of text about mending are interspersed with line drawings and text about retinal surgery.

Selections from Erin Endicott’s “Healing Sutra” series. The artist stains and embroiders vintage family textiles, signifying the healing of old emotional wounds.

 

This traditional Japanese boro (heavily darned old garments) from the early 1900’s is an exquisite example of the care that once went into preserving personal possessions.

                                        Detail of the mended cloth on the pant leg.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dorothy Caldwell, Lake, wax resist, discharged cotton, stitching, earth, 13” x 13”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dorothy Caldwell, Bowl, wax resist, discharged cotton, stitching, earth, 13” x 13”

 Dorothy Caldwell shines in any exhibition with her powerful works. Ideas of darning, mending and sewing combine with observations of the rural landscape and its cycles of plowing, planting and harvesting. The small punctuations of color seem to signify homesteads on the vast surface of the landscape.

Libbie Soffer’s Journal from the Studio, 35 pieces approximately 14” x 14” each. Muslin, silks, rayon, silkscreen, embroidery, heat transfer, marker, cotton, sewn with red thread. Using fragments from garments and old textiles, the artist creates a visual journal of women’s lives.

The artists in “Mending=Art” are: Dorothy Caldwell, Erin Endicott, Janet Haigh, Amy Houghton, Ilaria Margutti, Wolfie E. Rawk, Diane Savona, Barbara Shapiro, Libbie Soffer, Sally Spinks, Michael Swaine, Jan Vormann.

Fiber Philadelphia 2012: Snyderman-Works

 

I drove to Philly for the SAQA/SDA conference last weekend and joined other attendees on Saturday trying to fit in as many gallery visits as possible offering Fiber Philadelphia exhibitions. Since there were over 40 scheduled exhibitions for this bi-annual event, time did not permit my visiting more than a small selection of the venues in one day. I’ll plan to spend more time there in 2014.

The 8th International Fiber Biennial at Snyderman-Works runs through April 28. It is a stunning show in an attractive, generous space that presents both large and small scale works beautifully. Dorothy Caldwell’s large-scale new piece, below on the right, had ample space to be viewed and appreciated.

 

My first introduction to Lanny Bergner’s work , above, was at a lecture he gave at the 2011 Surface Design Association Conference in Minneapolis. I loved the display of his mesh “containers” in heat-treated copper.

Equally exciting were Warren Seelig’s new steel and rock “weavings”. Above is a detail shot. The full work is easily 5 x 7 feet.

In addition to the gallery, there is also a wonderful gift shop adjacent to the downstairs gallery that offers unusual fine contemporary crafts for sale.

This year’s invitational artists at Snyderman Work’s Fiber Biennial are: Adela Akers, Kate Anderson, Lucy Arai, Dorothy Gill Barnes, Pamela Becker, Lanny Bergner, Mary Bero, Karin Birch, Yvonne Bobrowicz, Dorothy Caldwell, Kai Chan, Sonya Clark, Lia Cook, Virginia Davis, Carol Eckert, Katie Henry, Lissa Hunter, Susan Iverson, Michael James, Christine Joy, Nancy Koenigsberg, Lewis Knauss, Gyongy Laky, Ed Bing Lee, Jacqueline Rush Lee, Mi-Kyoung Lee, Pazia Manella, Margarita Cabrera, Shizuko Kimura, John McQueen, Nancy Merritt, Dorie Millerson, Norma Minkowitz, John Paul Morabito, Marilyn Pappas, Leslie Pontz, Jill Powers, Ann Coddington Rast, Joh Ricci, Jon Eric Riis, Betsabee Romero, Amanda Salm, Joyce Scott, Piper Shepard, Hisako Sekijima, Cynthia Schira, Tilleke Schwartz, Warren Seelig, Joseph Shuldiner, Hillary Steel, Wendeanne Ke`aka Stitt, Louise Strawbridge, Jo Stealey, Missy Stevens, Deborah Warner, Katherine Webb, Jeanne Williamson, and Grethe Wittrock.

 

 

Arena Art Group Reception at FLCC

 

The Arena Art Group’s  opening reception on Friday March 23 at Finger Lakes Community College’s Williams-Insalaco Gallery 34 showcased 15 of our members’ works beautifully. Above is one of a series of ceramic sculptures by Nancy Valle. My work is behind it on the left and Dan Neuberger’s photography piece behind it on the right. The gentleman talking with two visitors is Stu Chait, an architect who creates abstract compositions on canvas by pouring layers and layers of watercolors.

 

This intriguing oil painting by Wendy Menzie sold quickly.

Jeffery Young, left,  the group’s treasurer, is a photographer and yoga teacher.

FLCC hired professional photographer Rikki Van Camp to take images at the opening. She spent time with each exhibiting artist and took shots of them in front of their works. This is Zanne Brunner in front of one of her gouache paintings of a tree spirit.

This image shows a mask piece from a new ceramic series that Richard Harvey, a mixed media artist, has been exploring.

The Arena Art Group’s next exhibit together will be in June, a show called “Anything Goes” at the Black Radish Studio in Rochester.

Inspired by the Masters: An Atelier Class Experience

 

 

I am intrigued by figure drawing and try to attend a figure drawing session in my building several times a month. Drawing hands has been one area that has frustrated me. When my upstairs studio neighbor, talented portrait artist Suzi Zefting Kuhn, offered a one-day class in her studio recently to “demystify” and draw the human hand, I knew I wanted to attend.

We met in the Rochester Art Club gallery space on the fourth floor of the Hungerford Building, where I have my own studio on the third floor. Suzi offered the class the choice of working  from photographic images that she had selected or from a plaster cast. Since I had never tried drawing from a plaster cast and it is already three dimensional, I chose that for my reference.

 

My perspective on the plaster cast from where I sat.

 

Suzi, our teacher, is standing at the right. Pat Tribastone, left, who works in oil and pastel and creates beautiful still life oil paintings, has a studio two doors down from mine.

 

At the end of the day, the class members displayed their drawings. Each one of us gained greater understanding of the hand’s anatomy and how to simplify and draw its shapes. Can you guess which drawing is mine???

There will be more drawing classes in my future. It truly heightened my sense of observation as well as offered me the opportunity to appreciate and learn from a wide variety of drawing styles.

 

Here’s my first drawing of a plaster cast hand! I kept wondering why it seemed so stiff and expressionless and then I realized – it’s a plaster cast!! It doesn’t HAVE any expressiveness. Next time I’ll work from a real one or a photo!!