Pilgrim's Progress

As the weeks churn on and rapidly bring us to the end of the semester, I am reflecting on my progress and all that yet needs to be completed before its conclusion in early June.

Above is a photograph of the progress I have made on my Kollwitz Homage that is a stained glass assemblage. The photo depicts the glass pieces being ground, at about 75% completion at this stage. I am looking forward to the next stages whereby pieces will be painted on with vitreous paint and an underground of a photomontage will be created.

The progress of this Kollwitz Homage can be viewed at:

https://picasaweb.google.com/113967877601706753492/DrawingsCartoonAndStudiesForKollwitzHomage#

Below is my most recent Artist Statement in a first draft form. I decided to go ahead and begin working on this as the semester seems to be grinding to a halt, and everything needs to be ready for the same date. With my 3rd research paper having been written and submitted to the Writing Center for their suggestions of revision, I thought writing this draft for my current artist statement would be a good idea while these concepts are fresh in my mind. I am sure it will be revised a few times before June.

Artist Statement Draft_4/11:

This past semester my work has been devoted to the meta-narrative of women artists. I have taken on the mission statement of the Guerilla Girls, an activist feminist group fighting for the rights of women artists, past and present.

Women artists have been historically written out of the art canon. My archive presented and which is forming allows the medium of stained glass, through vitreous paintings on glass to present the heroines of art, as patronesses of art.

Utilizing a metaphorical parody with both the historical traditions of the icon and traditional portraiture, in addition to the symbolic nature of the medium of stained glass, I am embracing a concept from the sacred to the secular.

The archive forming presents the icons as honestly and forthright as possible to convey the seriousness of my intent. Through a metaphor of hypertext that is found electronically on my blog, the key to the archive can be found and understood. Hypertext as a contemporary notion alludes to the code and meaning of these collective images as a gestalt, to further tell the story of the meta-narrative and women artists of generations, represented through the varied intensities of glass, color and light.

Furthering the meta-narrative of my work, in an attempt to conceptually bring together my vitreous paintings on glass, vitreous femmage, stained glass assemblage, and mixed media/ oil paintings, I have explored the idea of the ‘homage’ to further extract and tell the stories of heroines of art. The homage paintings stemming technically and aesthetically from my intuitive paintings from last semester as visual prayers, places the meta-narratives of these paintings to ask, “So what shall we pray for?”

Frida Kahlo: Vitreous Painting on Glass

Frida Kahlo, Vitreous Painting on glass, 8 x 10

I can't say that Frida has inspired my work directly, but I have always been drawn to her work and have a great empathy for the suffering she endured during her lifetime. I do consider her to be one of my art heroes. I was fortunate to see her solo exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art a couple of years ago.

Biography:

Frida Kahlo, in full Frida Kahlo de Rivera, original name Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón (born July 6, 1907, Coyoacán, Mex.—died July 13, 1954, Coyoacán), Mexican painter noted for her intense, brilliantly coloured self-portraits painted in a primitive style. Though she denied the connection, she is often identified as a Surrealist. She was married to muralist Diego Rivera (1929, separated 1939, remarried 1941).
In 1925 Kahlo was involved in a bus accident that so seriously injured her that she had to undergo some 35 medical operations. During her slow recovery from the trauma, Kahlo taught herself to paint. She showed her early efforts to Rivera, whom she had met a few years earlier, and he encouraged her to continue to paint. After their marriage, Kahlo traveled (1930–33) with Rivera, who had received commissions for murals from several cities in the United States. In 1938 she met André Breton, a leading Surrealist, who championed her work; both Breton and Marcel Duchamp were influential in arranging for some of the exhibits of her work in the United States and Europe. In 1943 she was appointed a professor of painting at La Esmeralda, the Education Ministry’s School of Fine Arts. Her house in Coyoacán is now the Frida Kahlo Museum. The Diary of Frida Kahlo, covering the years 1944–54, and The Letters of Frida Kahlo were both published in 1995.

For more information on Frida Kahlo visit: http://www.nmwa.org/collection/profile.asp?LinkID=471

To view my growing Uomini Famosi archive visit: https://picasaweb.google.com/113967877601706753492/UominiFamosi_VitreousPaintingsonGlass#

Stained Glass: Workmanship

The photo above depicts my studio, now back to functioning as a stained glass studio. Last Summer and the early Fall, it had been converted into a painting studio, but as my paintings got larger and my daughter moved out to her own new home, I now have a new space to paint.

So this space downstairs was left unoccupied as a stained glass studio for many months. This is actually the first piece I have built since the last commission I had completed and installed in February of 2010.

My adult students in stained glass at a local community college empathize with my withdrawal symptoms of not working in the medium. While I am stretching in other directions, I have greatly missed working in a medium that I consider to be my primary one.

I haven't counted the pieces of this window, but I am sure it is close to, if not more than a thousand. In the picture you can see the mound of scrap glass. The cut pieces are now in the stage of grinding each custom to its shape and to each other. The method of fabrication will be a combination of lead came and copper foil. Combining these techniques is what I have come to do normally with my work, although combining these is very non-traditional.

Lead came is an older technique that has been done since the Middle Ages; whereby 'copper foil' is a technique invented by Louis Comfort Tiffany at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The aesthetics of my line drawing for most of my work, organic in nature, lends itself to the copper foil method. Although I enjoy using lead to weight varied lines within the composition to enhance the contour, but favor copper foil lines for the fluidity within my glass assemblage.

During the hours and days I spent cutting these pieces out, I contemplated the notion of workmanship, which is something that was brought to my attention that needs to be justified from my last advisor, Tony Apesos. I have since given this issue much thought especially in terms of the never ending debate of art versus craft, which I am also revisiting in contemplation, thought, research and practice.

I think one of my research papers next semester will be devoted to the concept of 'workmanship'. I have been collecting sources along the way since last semester through the present time.

I must admit, I love the work ethic of manipulating these pieces of glass into a visual form. Although the leading of glass is not so politically correct any longer, with an emphasis on non-toxicity within the studio, I am closest to the epitome of the best in life, when I am in the 'zen' of soldering.

I have often told my students of stained glass, when I am old and gray and senile, just put me in a corner with a soldering iron, and I will be in a happy and content state.

I wrote my last research paper on Stained Glass as an Art. You can read it at:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/52022007/ResearchPaper2-Semester2-3-31-11-BPL

You can see the cartoon and progress of this piece at:

https://picasaweb.google.com/113967877601706753492/DrawingsCartoonAndStudiesForKollwitzHomage#

The term 'cartoon', by the way, is the term for a line drawing for the stained glass assemblage or window. The drawing is light in the photograph, as borrowing cartoons is rampant in the field, which is a disdain I have, which also degrades the medium for the artist. The internet and the availability of designs online has made this practice grow out of control. So I am happy to document the cartoon for the purposes of this program, but not to the degree that it could be stolen and/or used by someone else.

My original charcoal drawing is also within the photo archive of the progress of this piece, at the link above, that was used to provide the information needed for the line drawing or 'cartoon'.

Georgia O'Keeffe: Vitreous Painting on Glass

Georgia O’Keeffe, Vitreous painting on glass, 8 x 10”

Of all the female artists I have now included in my Uomini Famosi, O’Keeffe is one of those artists that has been most influential to my work over a long course of years. I was never formally introduced to O’Keeffe in my undergraduate studies, except that I recall in a Ceramics class when we were assigned to construct a three-dimensional painting, a student colleague was using a painting of hers as an inspiration. I remember being immediately struck by the image and a chord to her aesthetics. Not until years later when we moved back to NC in the early ‘80s did I learn more formally about her life and work through Reynolda House Museum of American Art, where O’Keeffe is a part of their permanent collection. In the summer of 1994, I had the opportunity to travel out west and visit the Georgia O’Keeffe museum in Sante Fe. We also took a stalker tour of her adobe house in Abiquiú and also took some time to explore the surroundings. We saw views that were undoubtedly her inspirations for some of the landscape paintings we viewed at the museum. I still find O’Keefe’s work and aesthetics inspirational to my own work, but in that her reputation is the most profound of American women artists, I have challenged myself to look beyond her for references which embody the fluidity and organic qualities that I seek to integrate into my own work, as a painter and glass artist.

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Biography:

Georgia O'Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887, the second of seven children, and grew up on a farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. As a child she received art lessons at home, and her abilities were quickly recognized and encouraged by teachers throughout her school years. By the time she graduated from high school in 1905, O'Keeffe had determined to make her way as an artist. O'Keeffe pursued studies at the Art Institute of Chicago (1905­1906) and at the Art Students League, New York (1907­1908), where she was quick to master the principles of the approach to art-making that then formed the basis of the curriculum‹imitative realism. In 1908, she won the League's William Merritt Chase still-life prize for her oil painting Untitled (Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot). Shortly thereafter, however, O'Keeffe quit making art, saying later that she had known then that she could never achieve distinction working within this tradition. Her interest in art was rekindled four years later when she took a summer course for art teachers at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, taught by Alon Bement of Teachers College, Columbia University. Bement introduced O'Keeffe to the then revolutionary ideas of his colleague at Teachers College, artist and art educator Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow believed that the goal of art was the expression of the artist's personal ideas and feelings and that such subject matter was best realized through harmonious arrangements of line, color, and notan (the Japanese system of lights and darks). Dow's ideas offered O'Keeffe an alternative to imitative realism, and she experimented with them for two years, while she was either teaching art in the Amarillo, Texas public schools or working summers in Virginia as Bement's assistant. O'Keeffe was in New York again from fall 1914 to June 1915, taking courses at Teachers College. By the fall of 1915, when she was teaching art at Columbia College, Columbia, South Carolina, she decided to put Dow's theories to the test. In an attempt to discover a personal language through which she could express her own feelings and ideas, she began a series of abstract charcoal drawings that are now recognized as being among the most innovative in all of American art of the period. She mailed some of these drawings to a former Columbia classmate, who showed them to the internationally known photographer and art impresario, Alfred Stieglitz, on January 1, 1916. Stieglitz began corresponding with O'Keeffe, who returned to New York that spring to attend classes at Teachers College, and he exhibited 10 of her charcoal abstractions in May at his famous avant-garde gallery, 291. A year later, he closed the doors of this important exhibition space with a one-person exhibition of O'Keeffe's work. In the spring of 1918 he offered O'Keeffe financial support to paint for a year in New York, which she accepted, moving there from Texas, where she had been affiliated with West Texas State Normal College, Canyon, since fall 1916. Shortly after her arrival in June, she and Stieglitz, who were married in 1924, fell in love and subsequently lived and worked together in New York (winter and spring) and at the Stieglitz family estate at Lake George, New York (summer and fall) until 1929, when O'Keeffe spent the first of many summers painting in New Mexico. From 1923 until his death in 1946, Stieglitz worked assiduously and effectively to promote O'Keeffe and her work, organizing annual exhibitions of her art at The Anderson Galleries (1923­1925), The Intimate Gallery (1925­1929), and An American Place (1929­1946). As early as the mid-1920s, when O'Keeffe first began painting large-scale depictions of flowers as if seen close up, which are among her best-known pictures, she had become recognized as one of America's most important and successful artists. Three years after Stieglitz's death, O'Keeffe moved from New York to her beloved New Mexico, whose stunning vistas and stark landscape configurations had inspired her work since 1929. She lived at her Ghost Ranch house, which she purchased in 1940, and at the house she purchased in Abiquiú in 1945. O'Keeffe continued to work until the late 1970s, when failing eyesight forced her to abandon painting. She then became a three-dimensional artist, producing objects in clay until her health failed in 1984. She died two years later, at the age of 98.

For more information on Georgia O’Keeffe visit: http://www.okeeffemuseum.org/biography.html

To view the forming archive of my Uomini Famosi visit:

https://picasaweb.google.com/113967877601706753492/UominiFamosi_VitreousPaintingsonGlass#

Münter Vision: Postcards

So what am I doing up at 3:30 in the morning with a bout of insomnia? ... Making postcards for my Group 2 peeps/ AIB colleagues. We decided as a group to make and send 'art' postcards to one another this semester.

I am a little late getting these out and I only have about half of the amount needed. Sending as they are done; first priority to those that I have already received one from. My little mixed media card is entitled, "Münter Vision".

A Little Diversion

I have taken a little diversion with my work from the homages, and the Uomini Famosi- my ladies. Coming into the program, I had a desire to work more loosely with the concept of my 'Art Heroes' and during Critical Theory I, I had an idea for a piece devoted to the 'Happenings' guys: Claes Oldenburg, Red Grooms and Jim Dine.

I am starting on a triptych of the 'Happenings' guys that I will integrate the title and text, "We Three Kings: Red, Jim, Claes". The idea for this piece has stuck with me, and would like to pursue it this semester, as I know next semester even more cohesiveness, and the narrowing of my concept and direction will be needed. So 'carpe diem', the time is ripe to bring it into fruition!

The image above depicts 'Claes' in progress.

You can see the progress of this piece at:

https://picasaweb.google.com/113967877601706753492/WeThreeKings#

Käthe Kollwitz: Vitreous Femmage

Käthe Kollwitz: Vitreous Femmage, 10" x 10"

Oi... this one like to never get done! I painted and re-fused it so many times, I ended up sandblasting it back down. I re-fused it once more then repainted and re-fired it again. The surface has a strange texture on parts like it is blistered, which is very strange. Nothing like that should have occurred, just bringing the temperature of the kiln to the maturing point for the vitreous paint. It also looks like it cracked again but re-fused. So I am calling this one: "Käthe Kollwitz: Blistered and Broken"

There is something kind of supernatural going on with this one.

Maybe I am feeling this way because I went to see the "Black Swan" last night. I was kind of freaked out that the 'black swan' was named 'Nina', the name of the woman Kandinsky jilted Gabriele for. It seems like there are odd and weird connections within things I am experiencing.

You can view my Vitreous Femmage, studies and developing series at:

https://picasaweb.google.com/113967877601706753492/StudiesForVitreousFemmage#