Homage to Kollwitz: Stages of Painting

This evening I began my first layer as an underground for my Homage to Kollwitz. There is nothing like dripping a white oil ground onto a 6 foot canvas after a day of teaching. The thunder and lighting set a an ambiance for some visceral expression and movement. I am planning layers of underground with oil color and pastel, before the actual layered oil painting with collage elements will begin.

I am really attempting to document the stages of my paintings this semester, although I may not blog each stage specifically.

You can follow the stages of this painting at: https://picasaweb.google.com/113967877601706753492/HomageToKollwitzStagesOfPainting#

Here also is a link to an audio lecture at MOMA by Kathe Kollwitz and Frida Kahlo of the Guerilla Girls: http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/audios/76/155

Sofonisba Anguissola: Vitreous Painting on Glass

Sofonisba Anguissola, Vitreous Painting on Glass, 8 x 10"

(1532-1625)

Sofonisba was one of the first women to gain a international reputation as a painter. She studied under Campi until he moved away and this established a precedent of encouraging male painters to take on female students. Michelangelo even sent her some drawings, which she copied and sent back to him for criticism. She was a prolific painter: more than 30 signed pictures survived from her years in Cremona, with a total of about 50 works that have been securely attributed to her. Late in her life she was visited by a young painter Anthony van Dyck. A drawing of her appears in his sketchbooks, along with excerpts of the advice she gave him about painting. Nevertheless it is clear that she was an innovative portraitist, whose international stature inspired many young women to become painters. For more information on Sofonisba visit: http://clara.nmwa.org/index.php?g=entity_detail&entity_id=116 See the archive in progress of my Uomini Famosi at: https://picasaweb.google.com/113967877601706753492/UominiFamosi_VitreousPaintingsonGlass#

2nd Meeting with Mentor today/ 1st layer of silver on Munter Homage painting

Homage to Munter (in progress) / 1st layer of silver, oil on canvas, 4' x 6'

See link of stages of this painting at:

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

I had my 2nd meeting with my mentor, Glenda Wharton, today. I had an intense time sharing all my work with her that I have completed thus far, and that is in process, than when we met a month ago. All my work is unified around a concept that is deepening, going in varied tangents of media. Discussion and formative critique bear additional ideas for exploration and expression. I felt as if it was a positive session with affirming feedback on my progress thus far. We are planning to meet again before the mid-term evaluation due on 3/25, and before my trip to NYC that I am leading with my students, March 25-29.

Glenda gave me some feedback, advice and expectations on an exploration of an idea that sprung from my research on paintings aesthetics from Lee Krasner to Julian Schnabel and my current explorations with planned works of painting/collage/photo transfer, and would like to see me experiment with that idea on a smaller scale. I doubt I will be able to propel in that direction before our next meeting, but definitely will begin to do so, probably in early April.

Gabriele Munter: Vitreous Femmage

Gabriele Munter: Vitreous Femmage, 10" x 10"

Finally after more trial and error with process and technique I have completed the first piece of what I am now calling 'vitreous femmage'. Femmage is a term that one of my Uomini Famosi, Miriam Schapiro' coined.

Femmage- A kind of feminist sewn collage made by Miriam Schapiro in which she assembles fabrics, quilts, buttons, sequins, lace trim, and rick-rack to explor hidden metaphors for womanhood, using techniques historically associated with women's crafts (techniques and media not elevated to the status of fine art). (Gardner)

While I am not using fabrics to convey this portrait of Munter, I am using a medium that has historically been used for decorative and functional purposes.

The portrait with focus upon the eyes and lack of a mouth connotes a message that needs to be retold until the canon accepts and rewrites the history of art to include women as contributors.

The millefiori used as the primary collage media also conveys a connotation about the female gender, and is used as a painting media with pixelated pieces of color within the composition.

Last semester I blogged about the artist, Liza Lou who uses millions of sequins and beads to create her installations. In reflection I see an evolving connection from Schapiro's work to Liza Lou's, and a connection to what I am trying to do with the millefiori/ murrini assemblage as again what I am beginning to call a 'vitreous femmage'- a collage using glass pieces with a feminist art connotation.

I have endured much trial and error in the firing process and the annealing of these pieces. I think I have finally arrived at the firing cycle for a positive outcome. I began with Munter for her story is engraved on my heart, and I am currently working on a homage painting of her. Her eyes are most provoking and haunting, and help to tell her story.

I have already blogged on the biography of Munter, but here is a great artful video dedicated to her at: http://tv.jazzcorner.com/view_video.php?viewkey=b1d7d1bb73bbbe14e0e3

Vitreous Femmage

It has been a busy and productive weekend, from painting the Munter homage to working on the first of my Vitreous Femmage, also on Munter. A study for the 2nd vitreous femmage has been done on Kollwitz. The first one can be seen above in process, it is now in the kiln.

You can view studies for my vitreous femmage and the developing series at:

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

Dorothea Lange: Vitreous Painting on Glass

Dorothea Lange, Vitreous Painting on Glass, 8 x 10"

I remember the first time that I saw the photographic images on Dorothea Lange's work. I was a graduate student, in art education with a studio major in glass at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia. Known then before the merger with the performing arts school as the Philadelphia College of Art. The year I think was 1981, and the University Gallery brought in an exhibition of her work. As a young artist, I recall how strong her images struck me, as they do for most people. Her documentary archive of migrant workers, the poverty stricken, the Japanese Internment camps trace a part of American history that most of her generation turned their backs on. What a courageous woman and artist she was!

Dorothea Lange is the 6th vitreous painting on glass within

my forming archive installation of my Uomini Famosi.

You can view my forming archive at:

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

Biography

Photographer, 1895-1965

“This is what we did. How did it happen? How could we?”

Dorothea Lange was born in Hoboken, New Jersey. She studied photography at Columbia University and worked at a New York portrait studio until 1918 when she began to travel. Stranded in San Francisco, she continued studio work during the 1920’s. With her husband, the painter Maynard Dixon, she traveled the southwest, photographing Native Americans. She believed that the camera could teach people ”how to see without a camera.”

The social upheaval brought on by the Great Depression led Lange to take her camera into the streets where she documented the sufferings of the dispossessed, in breadlines and labor strikes, in the wrenching drama of endless waiting. In 1935 with her second husband, Paul Schuster Taylor, a labor economist, Lange was employed by the California and Federal Resettlement Administration (Later the Farm Security Administration) to record the Dust Bowl exodus when drought and hard times forced thousands of farm families to move west in search of work. Her most familiar image, “Migrant Mother, Nipoma, California, 1936,” now in the Library of Congress collection, derives from this assignment. Of her work during this era Lange said: “The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects. So that no one would say, ’how did you do it, where did you find it, ‘ but they would say that such things could be.”

During World War II Dorothea Lange documented the internment of Japanese-Americans in camps and then turned her lens on women and members of minority groups at work side by side in California shipyards. Following the war, she covered the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco. The first woman to be awarded a Guggenheim fellowship (which she was unable to complete because of illness), Lange traveled widely during the 1950’s and 1960’s. She visited Vietnam, Ireland, Pakistan and India, doing many photographic essays for Life magazine.

Dorothea Lange’s work reflects insight, compassion and profound empathy for her subjects. Her photographs are reproduced in books and housed in museum collections, most numerously in the Oakland Museum of California. Although she did not consider herself to be an artist, she said of her work: “To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable…But I have only touched it, just touched it.”

For more on Dorothea Lange and her images visit: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug97/fsa/lang.html

Viewed two exhibits/ receptions: A Yadkin River Story and The Trains That Passed In the Night

Last night, I was able to view the Yadkin River Story exhibit and attend the reception at the Sawtooth Center Gallery. It is really enjoyable to get out and immerse myself in the art community. I was introduced to one of the artists, Christine Rucker, whose rich and beautiful black and white photographs reminded me of one of my AIB colleagues. I need to write her and tell her about this artist, that she may want to include as a reference for her work.

Christine was also intrigued by my Tau cross, and asked me if I was a Franciscan. After replying affirmatively she introduced her mother to me, who was present, and a 'sister' from the fraternity in Charlotte. Small world, but that Tau cross is an instant connection for those professed to the order (SFO).

Following the reception at Sawtooth, my daughter and I headed over to Reynolda House, Museum of American artist to view the exhibit of photographs by O. Winston Link, The Trains That Passed In The Night. These photographs mostly from the years 1956-57, were also rich with narrative, composition and aesthetic of the black and white photograph. These photographs were deeply nostalgic and made me consider the world and culture of the time I was born into.

At the reception at Reynolda House, I was able to visit with my past mentor as well as others, and meet a new artist/ art professor from a local university, who was a professor of my student student teachers last school year. We discussed the proposed devastation to budgets of our state institutions and how they will impact the art departments.

Among other things we also discussed the ever ending discussion about 'what is art', and who gets the funding and why.

In reference to the outstanding exhibits, both made me reflect on the 'archive' and Critical Theory II: An archive from the past, and an archive from the present. Both with strong evident marks of visual culture.

More on these exhibits below:

Yadkin River Story Exhibit

Yadkin River Story comprises the work of Christine Rucker--photographs, Phoebe Zerwick--essays, and Michelle Johnson--multimedia.

A River of the People

Welcome to Yadkin River Story, (see link at http://yadkinriverstory.org/yadkin.html) a multimedia project about the people who have made the river a part of their lives. The Yadkin has its source beside a resort hotel in Blowing Rock, N.C., then flows east for nearly 100 miles before turning south at the East Bend. This project focuses on the region near the East Bend and tells the river’s human story—of fishermen and farmers, immigrants and worshippers, mothers and sons—of people whose lives are defined one way or another by the river. Their stories are meant to be seen and heard. We hope the river speaks to you as it has to us.

Trains that Passed in the Night: The Photographs of O. Winston Link, Reynolda House Museum of American Art: features photographs drawn from the collection of O. Winston Link's former assistant Thomas Garver and circulated by the Center for Railroad Photography & Art. The exhibition is on view Feb. 19- June 19 in the main gallery of the Babcock Wing. The exhibition includes 50 black-and-white gelatin silver photographs, all printed during Link's lifetime and signed by the artist. The gallery also will feature images of Link staging his highly technical photographs, and a multimedia area where visitors can listen to recordings of steam engines and watch film of the Norfolk & Western Railway.

O. Winston Link’s photos are one-frame narratives of 20th-century transportation. An American photographer, his images capture the last days of the steam operation on the Norfolk and Western Railway in the late 1950s. Link said he wanted “to preserve a beautiful era” and show “how the railroad interacted with the people who lived along the line.” The combination of Link’s technical expertise and sensitivity as both artist and documentarian has earned him a place in photographic history.

In 1957, Thomas Garver assisted O. Winston Link in his documentation of the last years of steam power on the Norfolk and Western Railway. Garver will give a well illustrated lecture on the development of Link's photographic style and technique, and show how he brought his skills as a commercial photographer to the project.

Garver contributed to Link’s first book, Steam, Steel & Stars, published in 1987, and authored a second book of Link’s railroad photographs, The Last Steam Railroad in America, published in 1995. Now retired, Garver served as organizing curator of the O. Winston Link Museum, located in the former Norfolk and Western Railway passenger station in Roanoke, Virginia.

Glenda Wharton: Review in the Winston Salem Journal

My mentor made the Sunday paper yesterday in the Winston Salem Journal. See Tom Patterson's review at: http://www2.journalnow.com/lifestyles/2011/feb/13/wsliving01-exhibits-celebrate-black-artists-ar-775730/

Munter Homage_Underpainting:

Homage to Gabriele Munter: Underpainting, 4' x 6', Oil

I have been working up an underpainting for my Munter homage. I started out with a pastel underground on oil primed canvas referencing one of her painting compositions, and have now been layering expressionistic color to her enlarged partial portrait.

I will continue to work on this with predominantly white paint layers, from the technique explored last semester with my intuitive paintings. Pousette-Dart in the exhibition at the Phillips did have some paintings that at the outset were abstract but that the deeper and longer you looked were subjective in nature.

Painting and contemplation go hand in hand with this process.

Studies for Eye Portraits: Uomini Famosi

A study for my first eye portrait of my Uomini Famosi, Gabriele Munter.

See this sketchbook series develop at:

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

These eye portraits will be translated into an assemblage painting using millefiori and vitreous paint.

Studies for Kollwitz Homage

Studies for Kollwitz Homage

Where do all the women who have watched so carefully over their loved ones get the heroism to send them to face the cannon? I toy with the thought (of) . . . mothers standing in a circle defending their children, as a sculpture in the round. --Kollwitz

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Kollwitz believed that art should reflect social conditions in one's time. The Nazis forbade her work to be displayed, and banished her work to the cellar of the Crown Prince Palace, declaring "In the Third Reich mothers have no need to defend their children. The State does that." Kollwitz Museum, Berlin

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I have been working on studies for the "Kollwitz Homage", which is being planned as a stained glass assemblage. These studies of mothers and children will have an underlaying of photo transfer collage beneath the figurative work. The figurative work as in the studies will be painted on glass with vitreous paint.

The photo transfers are images of mothers, children, families of hunger and poverty prior to and during World War II, and images from the Holocaust.

These first studies are from Kollwitz' work, "Widows and Orphans". I will also reference and create studies from her work, "The Survivors".

My cartoon for the piece can also be seen in this album which shows the contour lines for the glass shapes of the composition. The photograph of this pencil cartoon is light, and more information can be seen in the detail shots of the composition.

Miriam Schapiro: Painting on Glass

Miriam Schapiro, Painting on Glass with vtireous paints, 8 x 10"

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This is the first painting on glass with vitreous paints of the 2011 Spring semester. I am hoping through the semester to make good headway on this installation piece that is evolving on my Uomini Famosi. Inspired by my mentor artist's work with transparent and translucent layering, I have been playing with process and underground layers on the glass through sand etched treatments of the glass, prior to painting and after the painting and firing of the glass has been completed.

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Miriam Schapiro: Biography

Born in 1923 in Toronto, Ontario.

Schapiro found success early as a hard-edge geometric-style painter. Influenced by the feminist movement of the early 1970s, she changed her style radically, embracing the use of textiles as symbolic of feminine labor. She is credited with establishing the movement called Pattern and Decoration (or P & D). This art movement challenged traditional Western European art by foregrounding decorative patterns and textiles from other cultures such as Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and Mexican. Schapiro coined the term "femmage," which stands for the female laborer's hand-sewn work (such as embroidery, quilting, cross-stitching, etc.) that rivals and precedes the "high-art" collage. Schapiro often combines pattern with painting. Schapiro comments, "I felt that by making a large canvas magnificent in color, design, and proportion, filling it with fabrics and quilt blocks, I could raise a housewife's lowered consciousness." Her involvement with consciousness-raising efforts, for which she traveled nationwide encouraging women to form support groups and emerge from isolation, earned her the nickname Mimi Appleseed.

For more about Miriam Schapiro visit : http://www.nwhp.org/whm/schapiro_bio.php

AIB Sketchbook: Partial Portraits

A few sketches done this week: Link to sketchbook