Author: C'Ville Art Blog

The Émilie Charmy retrospective currently on display at the Fralin Museum of Art is perplexing.

Most of her paintings have a fierce inquisitive quality. Her application of paint gives expressive life to simple compositions. Single thick brush strokes resolve into a small elegant wrist or a delicate twist of hair. Although a few paintings, like “Nu tentant son sein,” appear fast and crude, her work cultivates a rough and layered visceral quality. The show culminates with a painting so thickly built, it brings to mind the Balzac story “Unknown Masterpiece.” Mounds of paint construct an obscure image, a self-portrait which viewers experience more as brush stokes than a foggy-edged figure haunting the picture plane.

While Charmy’s craft is fascinating to explore, her content is slightly odd. Her paintings initially seem to be an artifact of her times, nudes reminiscent of Manet’s Olympia and blocked color scenes recalling the primitivism of Gauguin’s landscapes. As one studies the paintings, however, it seems that Charmy shifts the focus on the female-body-object to include immediate sensuality. She also creates distinct moments which build notes of fashion and character in her figures. These notes are subtle, and her images threaten to settle into the niche of patriarchal misogynist tropes which dominate much of art history and particularly the canvases of Charmy’s contemporaries. This is not inherently bad, it is only to say that Charmy is more distinct for her rugged love and care for painting than for the fact that she was a female artist during the time in which she lived.

As such, the Fralin does Charmy a disservice when it describes her as “one of the most original female voices of modern art in Paris during the first half of the 20^th century.” Rather Émilie Charmy should simply be described as one of the most exquisitely inquisitive and visceral voices in modern expressive painting.

~Aaron Miller and Rose Guterbock

This week we’re sharing our write-up of a studio visit with local artist Nancy Bass.

On a grassy knoll just south of town sits Historic Anchorage House, a landmark on the National Historic Register of Places. Built in 1825 by John White, this beautiful building now functions as the studio space of local artist Nancy Bass. I visited with her to meet her beloved cows and to learn more about her work.

C’ville Arts Blog: Tell us a little about yourself as an artist. Why animals?

Nancy Bass: I think I’ve been painting since I was really young. My first memory is from when I was about three years old and I wanted to have a pet. At the time, my parents were struggling financially, and my father just didn’t want a pet. My mother bought me one of those huge boxes of crayons, one of those really big ones with all the different colors, and I figured out how to draw a pink poodle because I really wanted one. After that I started making poodles in every different color so that I could put them all around my room. That’s my first memory. It’s just so funny to me because it hit me one day when I was giving a talk to little children that I am doing the same thing I was doing when I was three years old. I’ve come back around.

I wasn’t always painting animals. When I was in my twenties I was doing portraits for people, and when I moved here in the early ’80s I started painting landscapes. At first the cows would be in the background, very small, in the style of a typical landscape. As time went on, the cows got bigger and bigger in the composition until they reached the size of what I paint currently. Now my pieces have become portraits of the individual animals. So I went back, in a sense, to what came naturally to me as a child, which is really loving animals and really liking the personalities of the individual animals.

At the same time, I really like abstraction. I feel like the genre of painting animals has a lot of historical basis in the tradition of the British horse painters like George Stubbs. But I wanted my work to be contemporary, to be of the time that we are living in and reflect the current movements in art.

Why abstract backgrounds?

When I was in college, I had a professor who I remember because she was a color field painter. We were required to go to her retrospective at the Des Moine Art Center in Iowa. It was three gigantic rooms of these paintings that were made up of little lines only and for some reason I just could not “get” it. I wondered “How could anyone paint only little lines for thirty years?”

Then, about six years ago, there was a large retrospective exhibit of color field paintings in D.C. Although I didn’t see it, I read about it, and it made me think about my old professor. That was when I started thinking about the conflict between realism and abstraction. I thought about how the whole idea in color field paintings was not to have anything that could be identified as realistic in any way. I wanted to combine that somehow into my realistic paintings. I had played with abstraction before and that is how I got into this, by playing with it.

It’s worked really well for me because every animal, in light and shadow, picks up different colors. I pick out different colors from the animals, or from the story of the animal or the name of the animal, to use in my backgrounds. For example, I have a painting of one of my calves. She is the whitest calf I have ever owned, so I named her Snow White. I knew I wanted to paint her, and I made it so the background colors reflect the kind of cow that she is.

I try to let the colors of the figure inform my background. In doing so, it picks up mood and personality and a story line. Even though it looks simple, it’s extremely challenging for me to make the color fields work with the animal. I have to decide the direction of the lines, the breakup of the space, and come up with a background that even without the animal in it could be interesting all by itself. That is important to me as well. But putting the animal in the picture makes the piece comes together and makes the composition whole. That’s where I’m working right now.

Sometimes the colors change and become bolder, sometimes the color field becomes smaller or enlarged, and this group of diagonal paintings that I am working on now uses color blocks. I’m trying to achieve the same thing with those blocks as in color fielding, but it allows me to play with a quilt-like background instead. It still reads as a contemporary painting while allowing me to build up texture and play. The blocks are a little bit freeing, and I can put lettering and things in there, so it’s just another change in the same direction.

Once in a while, for practice, I’ll still do your very traditional landscape, although I don’t do it very often. It’s just so different to go backward and to do a cow in the landscape. For me, it just doesn’t pop the same way. It’s just not as exciting. But I still like to do it for practice.

Ultimately, I think that using an abstract background highlights the animals more, whereas they are just part of the whole of the landscape when they are in the landscape. When they are against an abstract background, they become more iconic.

I like that people read my paintings in different ways. I’m not giving you all the information, so people will walk in and come up with a story, saying “Oh, it looks like they are standing against a barn” or “It looks like they are standing against a wall with wallpaper.” People say all kinds of different things, and I think that that’s what art is about. Art shouldn’t give you the whole story, so I like that I can play with people’s perceptions.

Do you have any formal training?

I studied art in high school and then I went to college. I went to Drake in Des Moines, Iowa, to study art. But it was in the days when you really didn’t learn anything, back in the 70′s. You just went in and made something and you didn’t learn technique or anything about materials. So I got out and didn’t feel like I knew anything. But I started painting and since then I’ve taken workshops. I’ve studied with Janet Fish twice and I’ve studied with some local people, even with Yvonne Jacquette. So I would go and take a workshop once a year and feel that in one week I had learned more than I ever did in college. I still do that once in a while if there is something that someone knows that I would like to know. I’ll just go and study that specific thing. Of course, now you can get so much information on the web, too.

What would you call your style?

Contemporary realism. I think that’s what I would call it.

What is your medium?

I love oil paint, and I use walnut oil for my medium. It is a traditional medium that is not used very much. The materials I use are completely eco-friendly and as environmentally nontoxic as possible. Obviously some of the paints contain metal, but I’m not a sloppy painter and I like to keep the environment in which I paint safe. I also love to work on wood board in the style of Renaissance painting. With canvas, you always have to build up enough paint to get up over the tooth. On wood board, it’s already smooth, and it just works for me. I love it.

What is your method of working?

I usually start with a very simple sketch. I find a lot of times that the sketch doesn’t translate into the painting, but I have to play with the idea and the cropping a little bit. I work on wooden panels, and the first thing I do is paint them all orange after I put an additional coat of gesso on. I like the bright orange because it bleeds through underneath and gives me that glow and a lot of brightness. I always use that for my mid-tone. Then I’ll do a sketch of the painting on the orange panel, and when I feel that I have it right I start my under-painting. For my under-painting, I use the opposite color. So, for example, anything that would end up in a warm, light yellow tone would have been under-painted in a purple tone. I do the whole painting that way. After that dries, I start going back in with the colors that I’m going to use and working up the layers on the animals. I usually start darker and then go to the highlights. In the end, it ends up being tons of layers.

I am usually working on three paintings on a time to allow the various layers to dry enough before I go back and continue working on a piece. My layers usually dry within a day or two. It takes a lot of layers to make the fur look like fur, and the color fields also need to be painted up enough that they develop a surface that feels right to me. That of course allows me to play with texture. I’m currently playing with screen; I take a piece of screen and push paint through it to build up layers. I’m also doing different fun things like incising into the paint, just experimenting and having fun. I always work on the figure and ground simultaneously. In the figures, I start with the big shapes and then work down to the little ones.

Do you use photographic sources?

I take photos all the time. I have storage files for images of my heifers; I have files for images of my calves; I even have them all broken down into categories online, too. I’m constantly taking photos to build up resource materials to work from. So if I have an idea for a painting, then I’ll need images of a particular cow and I’ll need to find the right light or the right direction. Probably everybody who paints animals will use photographic resources.

How do you choose your subject matter?

I’ve always loved animals since I was really young, but I never really thought I would end up painting animals. I think raising them here, I’ve just fallen in love with them. I never really had an attachment to cows, but coming here and having them, I’ve realized that they’re just wonderful animals. They are great mothers, they are beautiful to look at, and I guess I’ve just become enchanted with them.

I have my own herd, and the herd is based on my painting. Unlike most people who are picking cows to be good milkers or good beef cattle, my cows are all about painting. So I have all different breeds, and I interbreed for a variety of looks and colors leaving me with a crazy-looking herd, all different colors, shapes and sizes. I like cows with very sweet personalities that are also interesting looking.

I will also go to other farms since we have so many wonderful artisanal farms doing heirloom varieties of everything. That’s where I will go to take photographs of other subject matter like sheep or pigs.

How long does it normally take you to finish a piece?

Maybe a couple of moths for a bigger painting. Partially because of the number of layers in the painting, but I will also live with a painting for a while to decide whether or not it is finished. Even if I think a piece is done, I will usually figure out something that I don’t like about it, so it’s a process. If it’s a really small painting than it will take me a shorter time to finish and others take longer.

How regular is your studio practice?

I work in my studio pretty much every day.

Who do you consider to be your audience?

While I was at the McGuffey, I was very successful with a particular clientele that likes landscapes. So when I switched and started doing abstract work, I really lost that audience. They would come into my studio and ask “where are the landscapes?” But I was at the point where I wasn’t feeling satisfied with my work, so I knew that I had to change. Being inspired is not a production factory type of thing, so it’s never really been part of the equation for me. But I do have an audience, and what I like about it is that it’s a younger audience. Young people in their thirties or forties have really enjoyed the work and that has been fun for me. They understand it.

Also, when I am near to finishing a painting, I take it out to my house and I hang it over my mantle and decide whether or not I like it enough that I want to live with it. That’s my criteria. If it makes me happy, then it is finished. If it doesn’t, then it comes back to the studio, and I work on it some more. So I do work that I love and that I can live with and that makes me happy. That is just the nature of who I am. My audience are people who are pretty much like me. They are animal lovers and they love color. But I also really want my work to be unique. You’ve got to find your own voice as a writer or an artist and figure out who it is that you are. So you have to get away from the pleasing thing and be willing to go out there and just create.

What is your favorite Bodo’s bagel?

Once a year I allow myself to go and have egg and cheddar cheese on a whole wheat bagel. That’s my favorite.

Visit Nancy Bass online at http://nancybassartist.com.

~ Rose Guterbock and Aaron Miller

This summer, I’ve noticed art in unlikely places around town: local hospitals.

McGuffey Art Center member artist Lindsey Oberg had new mixed media works on display at Martha Jefferson Hospital in June. “In the Country” by Richard Bednar and “Sightings,” a collection of photographs by Frank Feigert, have been featured in UVA Medical Center’s Main Hospital lobby during the summer months. In addition to these featured shows, UVA Medical keeps a surprising amount of artwork on permanent display as well.

There was a time when hospitals were crisp, clean, immaculately sterilized, and notorious for “that hospital smell.” Now it seems that ideas in medicine are changing. Aesthetics are upheld more frequently, and there is a higher appreciation for the impact of our surroundings on our psyche and mental well-being.

There are several examples of art therapy practices in which the experience of beauty is used to aid traditional medicine. Recently, several window washers visited Penn State Hershey Children’s Hospital as superheroes, bringing smiles and joy to the patients. UVA Medical Center also has a group of “clowns” that volunteer on a weekly basis. (“Compassionate Clowning” provides comfort and emotional support to patients and family by creating an environment that alleviates anxiety and stress.) A recent study even found that patients undergoing surgery while music plays remain calmer and cope better during their recovery compared to patients who are operated on in silence.

It might be easy to conclude that showing art in a medical setting may have similar effects. The previous example of window washer heroes bears resemblances to happenings from the 1980’s. Art is a very broad medium of expression, and through the very crafting process itself, it can showcase, embrace or entice a huge array of emotions.

So why is it that much of the art on display at the hospitals feels like an afterthought? Obviously, our taxpayers may not want to feel as though their money is being used to fund art as opposed to medical research. However the timid patchwork curation which currently inhabits the hospital halls is a far cry from what it could be.

Even if we consider that art in a state-funded hospital must be largely non-confrontational, much of the work on display seems like an apology. Prints are stuck behind glass and unobtrusively hung behind counters. The primary display wall at the UVA Medical Center is a small patch of gray that hugs a corner near the cafeteria entrance. Here and there we find permanent pieces: a bust of Thomas Jefferson by a pillar; an oil landscape by Tom Tartaglino extending across the wall from the Administration Office. A few pieces have been hung in honor of donors or patients, but none appear to be placed with intent, pride, or flourish.

This absence is unfortunate as so much of the work was obviously chosen with care by some unknown person at the hospital. The paintings and sculptures are beautifully crafted. Each brushstroke vibrates with individuality. The bronze castings of heads stare thoughtfully, it is as if the artwork is begging to suddenly become more significant.

Art can be thought of as just another pretty thing to look at or use to cover walls, but it doesn’t have to be that way. In the play of light and form, stories can be told, memories drawn out, and, dare I say it, wounds could be healed.

~ Rose Guterbock and Aaron Miller

An Op-Ed style manifesto and general response to the McGuffey Summer Show

Art in Charlottesville can be characterized by a sort of conservative tameness. Local artists combine quaint country craft with universally pleasing aesthetics to create an experience that is enjoyable but limited to a limbo world of perpetual charm. Limitless talent is channeled into oil, mosaic, and tapestry landscapes and ruggedly constructed objects that easily fit into the idyllic country experience in which we imagine we live. It is a highly marketable image, and artists have to eat.

There are many conceptions responsible for perpetuating this charm-limbo, including several that trickle down from lofty galleries in Manhattan. Such concepts include artistic identification, a lingering Modernist Greenbergian narrative of introspection, and the desire to attain genius status, or to make a living at any rate, through the positive feedback loop of actually selling work. In this way, contemporary gallery exhibitions feature collectability and fashionability but dampen the visceral experience of specific, emotive, and purposeful visual constructions.

The quality of paintings in Charlottesville is good, but considering the level of resident talent, paintings from Charlottesville should be impressive and momentous. Paintings which are or become significant have an aura, a fetishistic quality which is nearly impossible to reproduce: a mixture of purpose, time, mystery, and artistic excellence which can only be viewed in person. Significant paintings necessitate a pilgrimage.

With this in mind we have assembled the following brief message for painters, patrons of painters, and the art community at large:

Stuff style. Stuff originality. Stuff introspection. Find what you love and preserve it in the most impressive manner you can imagine. Make a spectacle. Make pilgrimages. Steal everything.

Make studies, make paintings, and then make better ones.

And after that, make better ones.

~Aaron Miller and Rose Guterbock

The abstract and stylized tapestries of Klaus Anselm and Joan Griffin, currently on display at the McGuffey Art Center, are indisputably beautiful objects. They have clear pleasing palettes, unexpected bright intense colors, soft surfaces, and an odd but familiar resolution. Anselm’s tapestries are mostly geometric abstractions, overlapping squares, curves, and quadrilaterals that fill each composition. Griffin’s tapestries provide a great contrast to Anselm’s. Her organic shapes create recognizable but stylized landscapes which are bright and flowing, however, as a group, the images of each artist vary widely in interest.

The constraints of the tapestry format add particular interest to the exhibition. The low resolution designs recall vintage Nintendo animation and early computer adventure games. The bright oranges and blues in Anselm’s canyon landscapes mimic the brightness of a glowing screen, and many of his designs bring to mind 1980’s imaginative visions of a graphic cyberpunk future. This pixelized retro-futuristic feel is fun and appealing, especially when considering the analog mode of their construction.

Anselm’s canyon images are beautiful and unexpectedly bright with alien towering walls and burning sunlight. Anselm’s geometric tapestries construct interesting imagined abstract spaces with extruding rectangles and walls of cobbled 2D and 3D shapes. A few of Anselm’s works, however, hover on the edge of being overly-decorative. “Concert for Space,” creates a small distortion of space with the twist of each red ribbon, but beyond this, the work provides very little spatial-geometric intrigue to hold the viewer. In this particular work, the scale of the tapestry fights with its composition. The ribbons are cut short in order to fit the square, which limits their ability to enliven the space.

Griffin’s tapestries use a great sense of light to construct delicate scenes that are painterly and almost fantastical. “Village Path” show a shadowed overgrown path leading to a stone arch through which we see a brilliant sunset. The image is intriguing and well composed with a bit of sentimentality.  By contrast, “Breeze” is very tightly cropped and autumnal to the point of being tacky, which leaves the viewer with little reason to examine the work further.

Overall, the show is full of well designed tapestries that are interesting objects by themselves. Each image is accomplished with varying degrees of success, and the pixel-like nature of the work manages to create some intriguing and unexpected associations.

~Aaron Miller and Rose Guterbock

What is perception? Philosophers, psychologists, and ophthalmologists have studied this question for years, but none have studied as vividly or exhaustively as visual artists.

Subtle nuances of memory, culture, and aspiration within us dictate how we see the world and how we respond to it. In this way, every artist sees the world differently, but also manipulates the perceptions of the viewer to evoke worlds with distinctive voices and capture alien beauty in a multitude of ways.

Local artist, Ken Nagakui is one such unique individual. His current exhibit, “A Retrospective of Paintings and Ceramics” at the Firefish Gallery offers a distinct view derived directly from Nagakui’s personal perceptions and life experiences that bridge Japanese and American culture.

The exhibit showcases two mediums of the artist’s choice: paintings and ceramics. The paintings are all created in a neutral palette and display the use of quick, short brushstrokes in a painterly fashion. Each piece captures the image of specific trees in various browns, grays, and moss greens. The ceramics also gravitate towards the earthy both in the organic quality of the shapes and the color palette. Amidst the sea of balanced neutral browns, Nagakui’s work could appear dreary. The craftsmanship, however, is impeccable, and each work is activated by subtle nuances and delicate structures which emerge over time.

A native of Japan, Nagakui sees the world from a very distinctive point of view; one that comes to life in the subdued quality of his work. His paintings evoke a strange sense of time and space. Although not overwhelmingly warm or cool in the way that the Western impressionists may have seen it, instead the light is captured as if it is as timeless as a shifting old memory. Every branch, twig, and leaf is captured and rendered with a sense of transience, movement, and life.

Buddhist and Shinto traditions honor the inherent integrity of everything that is natural in its ever-changing state. There is also an element of sadness in the work. According to Buddhism, emptiness, impermanence, and suffering are three traits carried within every sentient being. These qualities also seem to permeate Nagakui’s work in true wabi-sabi fashion. This contrasts with much of the history of Western painting, which is more concerned with capturing and codifying nature than with exposing the frights that lurk deep within forests. 

There is a quality to Nagakui’s paintings that are capable of transporting one to Japan. The brushstrokes weave a quiet memory of a hot summer’s afternoon on a wooded knoll in a rural town. But this is where the real cultural perspective comes into play, as many of the trees in this show are in fact growing locally in Charlottesville.

Nagakui’s show is slow and meditative, and is in many ways reminiscent of process-oriented art. It offers an opportunity to glimpse the work of a dedicated craftsman. Nagakui built his own kiln from the ground up, digs his own clay, and builds his pottery by hand in a style similar to that of the early Jomon people of Japan. His love and reverence of nature is evident both in his work, and the way that he makes his art. The viewer can sense the care and vast experience used to create each object and this sense is what enriches the work in the show, and what makes the work most pleasurable to view.

“A Retrospective of Paintings and Ceramics” at the Firefish Gallery will remain on display through September 1.

 

-Rose Guterbock and Aaron Miller

 

 

For the month of July, five paintings by Rob Browning will be on display at the Warm Springs Gallery alongside other works by Andras Bality and Liz Price . Browning’s paintings are figurative, illustrative works, magnetic from a distance. They appear through the gallery’s window like surreal images from a fantastical children’s book.

His works are lonely and contemplative; they depict open rural settings, leisurely paced with blue skies, distant sculptural clouds and a few young figures punctuating the first and last canvases of the series. His figures are alone and appear to be hiding or avoiding the activities presumably happening elsewhere. “Sandwich” is a beautifully composed painting which exemplifies the entire show. A single figure sits hidden in a small oasis carved in a field of wheat. He sits alone holding a sandwich, behind him is a curve of a road which cuts through a field of grain. The road is empty, but we get the sense of distant car noise passing by unseen. Browning’s paintings all effectively illustrate this intentional isolation and singular meditative experience of reality. The paintings reminisce about childhood moments when we built wild forts to conceal our existence from the world.

Each image is thoughtfully composed and well executed, with a slight exception for “Window and Blue Curtains” which, compared with the series, has a few lighting and compositional issues.

His works are crisp and clean, although they seem to be constructed for reproduction. This is to say, while they are highly enjoyable images which appear pristine when photographed, a few technical and formal issues are unavoidable when the paintings are seen in person. His straight architectural lines are formally beautiful, but they leave behind a raised ridge where his masking material lay on the surface. This effect is slightly jarring to come across when immersed in the illustrative moments of the paintings. His edges, especially in his clouds, often threaten to become atmospheric, but never quite reach the appropriate resolution. This isn’t to say that there are not hidden moments of painterly pleasure to be discovered. For example, the sky in “Sandwich” is fantastically activated by short strokes of nearly invisible green paint which float lazily in the thermal currents. It is only to say that Browning has valued swiftness and effectiveness of his images over creating objects which are interesting  from the standpoint of the craft of painting.

Browning’s show is definitely worth a look. The pieces effectively capture quiet contemplative experiences in a stylized and methodical way, and the show is perfectly timed to be enjoyed during the nostalgia filled summer season.

“The Pleasures of Summer” is a group show featuring work by Andras Bality, Rob Browning and Liz Price at the Warm Springs Gallery. The opening reception will be from 6 – 8pm on July 5 and the exhibit will remain on display though July 30, 2013.

-Aaron Miller and Rose Guterbock

The Telegraph is unique in Charlottesville for its wide selection of zines, indie comics, and small press books. Among these are several works by local artists, including a short comic by the young artist Francesca Rowan titled Alencia.

This zine-style stapled booklet contains a short sword-and-sorcery story about a young heroine who uses her skills in magic and fighting to vanquish undead forces. The story is simple and clear, and her character begins to develop in interesting ways by the end of the seventeen pages.

Rowan’s draftsmanship has stronger and weaker moments throughout the story. Her drawings are simple and are influenced by some of the naïveté art styles which permeate indie comics as well as contemporary illustration. The goal of this drawing approach is to reach for emotive clarity rather than representational clarity, which suits the art of storytelling. Some of Rowan’s drawings are confident with clean marks which elegantly depict motions and actions. On page twelve (spoiler alert) the first panel depicts the heroine lopping off the head of a desiccated undead lady-creature. This drawing in particular fantastically captures a slice of time. The image is reminiscent of the graphic stylized drawings of Mike Mignola. Some of Rowan’s drawings, however, are less confident, and revert to generic depictions of faces and objects. This seems to happen most often when Rowan is describing intricate facial expressions or larger environments. In general, she seems most comfortable rendering monsters and small atmospheric moments.

The storytelling, however, is very interesting and well thought out. She leads the viewer through each moment of the story effortlessly. Rowan shows us around each scene using shifting aspects to build suspense as the undead creep from their graves. The drawings and panel compositions direct the viewers to each important moment as it happens, without relying on narration or predictably consistent jumps in time. One of the most fantastic aspects of comics and visual storytelling is that when done well, the craft becomes invisible.

The writing in Alencia reads a little campy. It fits so perfectly and absolutely in the fantasy genre. The dialogue is functional and economic except for an occasional arbitrary exclamation. It seems that the story is designed in an episodic manner. Rowan introduces conflicts which are not resolved and gives small glimpses of characters, like Alencia’s talking cat companion, which we immediately want to know more about. These elements create the beginning of what I imagine could be a fairly interesting story arc. Even the subtitle, “A Noble Deed – First Story,” suggests additional chapters to follow.

Alencia is not a masterpiece, but the work is lighthearted and fun to read. There is no mention of when future stories or chapters will be released, however this sort of work only gets better the longer an artist pursues it. I look forward to reading future installments.

-Aaron Miller and Rose Guterbock