Faith: Fused Murrini Assemblage

I finally completed this panel, 22 x 28" assemblage of fused murrini, leaded with the copper foil technique. This piece is a translation from my charcoal portrait of Faith Ringgold completed earlier this semester. This actual piece will not be brought to the upcoming residency per considerations of the cost of shipping and fragility of the work. I am off to have this piece printed to actual scale and the print shipped to residency.

James Esber makes the NY Times

One of my references this semester has been James Esber, his exhibition at the Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn made the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/23/arts/design/23chance.html?_r=1

Diptych II: Intuitive Painting/Drawing

Diptych II: Intuitive Painting/Drawing on canvas, 6'x 4'

(Painting with two details)

Early in the semester with my first meeting with my mentor, she seemed to like these paintings more than anything else I was exploring. We discussed later at our 4th meeting that with the larger pieces, these diptychs I was beginning that I might leave areas which would not be drawn on. Out of all the intuitive painting/ drawings I have completed this semester, this one is my least favorite. I do not like this new silver I have been using this time. I feel it leaves the painting too dark, for the lightness and ethereal sense, I was trying to achieve in these, nor feel a sense of success as within the other prior paintings.

My treatment with the overlying pencil in this one, I do not feel gratified with. I have learned a little about what works best, and does not work with these paintings. I would like to attempt at least one more diptych next semester, but then a lot is dependent right now on how my critiques develop and what kind of feedback I get.

My prayer for this one is an intercessory homage for my soul sisters, those that have struggled with breast cancer. I have known so many friends, especially lately, that have lost their battle. This painting was completed the night before Elizabeth Edwards passed. As I looked at it that evening, I struggled with whether it was complete or not. As and an analogy, this is a little bit like life, we do not know when we are done.

This piece does not have the harmony as the others do, and I think my dislike is also analogous to life, we are not always in harmony, and all of life is not always beautiful or peaceful.

Faith Ringgold: Vitreous Painting on Glass

Faith Ringgold

8x 10", Vitreous Painting on Glass

As a final painting on glass with vitreous paints this semester, I have revisited Faith Ringgold. At the outset of investigating portraiture through the medium of vitreous painting, I did not envision working with my Art Heroes. But the more I painted and started to come up with ideas for a thread of portraits, I decided that I should at least do a few.

I do not want to get too far along with developing this thread until after my second residency which is upcoming in a few weeks. I am pleased to see how far I have come with these portraits. I have enjoyed working with these, and hope to be able to do more.

I have dialogued about Faith a few times prior in my blogging this semester through the charcoal portrait of her as well as the murrini portrait. It only seemed fitting to complete Faith in a vitreous painting as well.

For me, Faith epitomizes the concept for my Uomini Famosi: My female art heroines are ones that have made strides within their lifetime to express or communicate something that the world needs or needed to hear. These heroines should not be forgotten, and as the Uomini Famosi of the heroes' portraits of the Middle Ages, that lined the palace walls, so should these heroines line the walls of the museum.

James Esber' Exhibition at Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn

Jaycee Dugard, 2010, Plasticine on PVC board

James Esber at Pierogi | Pierogi Gallery

www.pierogi2000.com

A Facebook friend posted this and I am please to see how Esber's work has progressed since I worked with him a few years ago. For the plasticine portraits he creates, he seems to have created a substructure, making these more of a three-dimensional relief. I also like the anamorphic shapes that he has created for these. As an initial reference for my murrini portraits it is great to see his new work. I wish I could get to NY to see the actual work.

Press Release

In his new work, James Esber continues to address notions of distortion and perception by mining the pawed-over icons of popular culture. His fourth one-person exhibition at Pierogi will include three new projects woven together in a two-room installation. In new paintings on canvas, Esber presents an array of visual puzzles; cutting, fragmenting and distorting found images before remaking them in calligraphic layered strokes of paint. These paintings invite the viewer to embrace absurdity or force a remedy by mentally bandaging holes and reconfiguring forms.

In Esber’s new work in plasticine, figures who have accidentally stumbled into the media spotlight are faintly depicted within heavily textured and undulating surfaces. The new pieces are meant to change drastically during the course of a day, their subjects surfacing and retreating into shadowy clay skins. The ghostlike quality of these images stands in stark contrast to the physicality of clay, and the pulsing nature of their presence and absence makes them seem alive. Teetering evenly between illusionism and objectness, these works are both permanent monuments to the individuals they portray and reminders that pictures are first and foremost objects whose recognition is subject to the vagaries of context and light.

For his third project, This is Not a Portrait*, Esber has enlisted a broad range of people (young and old, artists and non-artists), to translate his 2005 pen and ink drawing of Osama Bin Laden. Esber wants to “create an arena in which the distinction between skilled and unskilled hands is irrelevant and personal touch becames paramount. In the process of remaking every line, each participant may or may not be thinking about Bin Laden; the paper may be turned sideways or upside-down.” The final product is in no sense a conventional portrait. It is arguably not a portrait at all, but the re-presentation of a portrait image. Our emotional connection, or lack of it, effects how we relate to the work as both image and object. It is the question of connection, or perhaps the concession of disconnection, that ultimately becomes the subject.

James Esber’s work will be featured in a one-person exhibition at The Aldrich Museum opening January 2011. He received his BFA at the Cleveland Art Institute and studied at Skowhegan.