Author: Elizabeth Derby

“I used to go to my mom’s office, which smelled like wool and fabric, and the copy machine, like hot ink and hot toner,” said Amanda Wagstaff.  “She would give me grid paper, the kind designers would use to mark out different patterns, to draw on and play on to keep me occupied. I can’t get away from the grid now.”

A Virginia native and New City Arts Initiative’s current artist-in-residence, Wagstaff found that her memories of life as the daughter of a textile designer and a carpenter came back as she worked on her latest project “Complete Thought,” which will be on display this week at The Haven.

The work is a 14′ “quilt” made of 90 pieces of loose-leaf paper sewn together by hand with dozens of white, pink and blue threads that echo the colors of the paper itself. In it, Wagstaff sees her childhood—and the declaration of her own unique voice.

“I took a poetry class over the summer at WriterHouse, so I was making drawings and visual poems out of loose-leaf paper,” she said. “At some point, I had one of those revelations where you’ve been looking at something for so long you see it in an entirely new way. I realized the paper was a loom.”

Wagstaff gave herself a few loose rules, including following all the pink lines, top and bottom blue lines, and filling each hole with a crystal bead. But her lines also curve and wander, since the pieces of paper don’t always line up properly and the five-month “meditative process” naturally included human error.

In its exhibition, the quilt will be draped along a 10′-long table (a collaborative design between the artist and a family friend), with each end touching a chair. “It’s not just the quilt and connecting all these pieces of paper, it’s also the chairs and the table. It’s the idea of a conversation, completing a thought.”

The work is semi-autobiographical, the latest of many subtle connective breakthroughs for Wagstaff. During her years as an undergrad at The College of William & Mary, she became an art major only when she realized she’d maxed out her course credits. She believed she couldn’t make a career of art for several years after graduation, a perception that changed after she spent a summer working in a private studio in Ireland. When she decided to get her MFA in fine art at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, she was still a painter.

“I was really struggling with painting, but I felt like that was all I knew how to do,” Wagstaff said. “A lot of professors tried to help me overcome those self-imposed limits. Eventually I abandoned painting and focused on the core of my work being drawing, the extended possibilities of what drawing could be. I have a natural urge to hold things in my hands, so I started working with the materials and the process.”

Grad school, she said, was the final step in breaking apart the internal dialogue that dictated what she could and could not do, but it didn’t hand her a road map of next steps.

“Any doubts that I had about what I wanted to do I have no more,” she said. “In grad school, you don’t really come to any conclusions. You get torn apart, you get advice, you hear conflicting things, and you become more sure of yourself. The work that I’m making now I think is the work that I’m meant to make.”

Amanda Wagstaff’s “Complete Thought” will be on view in a pop-up exhibit on March 11 from 5-7 p.m. at The Haven Sanctuary.

There’s something about the trees.

As I walk through the exhibit, I pause to study each painting, but the trunk of a pastel pine tree stops me. Every stroke on its limbs is a living gesture, each green leaf and blue shadow a flick. The pastel landscape glows with the artist’s movements, each tree a reservoir of long-spent attention.

“Buddhism is about the moment, about detachment, observation and compassion. Frank [Riccio] lived all of these things,” wrote Joseph Beery, a printmaker and longtime friend of the artist’s, in an essay that accompanies his posthumous exhibit currently on display at McGuffey Art Center.

“He was a compulsive sketcher. Pen or pencil in hand, he engaged the moment, quietly observing the details which others might miss,” Beery added. “As we multi-task away through a maze of sensory overload, he stood to one side and watched. Then, through the dynamic act of drawing he would navigate the tangled connections of the instant.”

Riccio’s intense focus is an unmistakable thread running through his work, which ranges from thickly illustrated en plein air pastels to bright illustrations of fantastical worlds. In many, a figure standing on a barren landscape sees a world rich with color and life.

“Frank was a pretty quiet guy,” Beery told C-VILLE. “He didn’t have a lot to say. He mostly put it down in images.”

Their decades-long friendship began shortly after Beery began what would become the Virginia Arts of the Book Center (VABC). In 1995, UVA was dumping a few letterpresses, so Beery and a few book advocates rescued and donated them to the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. He enlisted Riccio, a new-to-town illustrator who ran a small publishing company with his wife, to help him hold space at McGuffey, where they could teach letterpress and printmaking and encourage people to use those vehicles as an outlet for their own writing.

“He would sit in the back drawing,” Beery said. “He most often drew us, sitting and talking, and the people who stopped by. Pen and ink and watercolor pencil were the ways Frank engaged the world around him.”

For 20 years, Beery hosted drop-in “block nights,” and Riccio was his most loyal supporter. He illustrated dozens of VABC broadsides and art books in addition to his own oil paintings, pastels and ink illustrations. In the course of his lifetime, he created hundreds of works, each thickly illustrated with brushstrokes and artistic attention.

Riccio began his prolific career in high school, where he excelled through the art department, then studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and immediately began receiving commissions for commercial illustrations. His work appeared in several columns in Gourmet and Sports Illustrated magazines as well as many children’s books, including Conversations with God, Johnny Appleseed and The Spirited Alphabet. He even illustrated a Barnes & Noble campaign with various authors on a worldwide map.

“He had one project where he worked with the founders of a chain of coffee houses called Café Gratitude in Berkeley,” said Beery. “The concept was that people can be more thankful for the things they have. They put money up to have him illustrate a board game called The Abundant River, which was painted on all the tables of the coffee houses. He also made a set of illustrated game cards and all of the posters and graphics—the entire inside of this coffee shop, basically.”

With the rise of digital stock illustrations, Riccio saw a significant number of projects sold to stock agencies and offshore groups, though commissions swelled again with the rise of fantasy and young adult books. The new focus was a good fit, since he loved fantasy, whimsy and children, but he also made a graphic novel about the experience of seeing his livelihood outsourced.

“He made a lot of graphic novels about personal experiences, including grade school and high school and raising children,” Beery said. “He was always drawing and painting and doing personal work, and he expected his employment to be putting pencil and pen and brush to paper.”

When Riccio died unexpected in 2014, he left hundreds of artworks behind. “He only has one heir, a daughter who is 21 years old, and it’s not her focus to curate his work right now,” Beery said. The illustrator’s current exhibit at McGuffey, where he was an associate member, is just a very few pieces that were hanging in his house.

“First and foremost he was a sketchbook artist,” Beery said. “Those ideas were the springboard for larger personal projects, but he always had a pencil and notebook in hand, observing and sketching and drawing and responding to the page in front of him. To get down what was happening, distill it, make notes about it.”

Those sketchbooks remained private until Riccio’s death. Though they’re still privately owned and have not been reproduced at McGuffey, I was able to look at a handful of sketches from them.

Notes accompany watercolor and ink illustrations on subjects like networking, “recalcitrant” letterpress rollers, Virginia Tech orientation and his daughter’s spring piano recital. His lines are deft, colors vibrant, energy loose but unmistakable. The world has been folded into Riccio’s pages, and it feels like he’s standing right here.

“His journals,” Beery said. “They are what he was about.”

See Frank Riccio’s work on display at McGuffey Art Center through March 1.

Do you have a favorite illustrator? Tell us in the comments.

Imagine entering a cave-like studio, its floor spotted with rags and walls textured with years of paint flicked off a loaded brush. You’re naked when you climb onto a small, sheet-covered bed, fully prepared to hold your pose for hours. Standing just a few feet away, an artist scrutinizes your body as he prepares to etch its lines into a copper plate—and when he does, you know he’ll capture your true essence in that moment.

Such was the reality for the subjects of celebrated British artist Lucian Freud (a grandson of Sigmund Freud), whose subjects included Kate Moss, Jerry Hall and ordinary people like his children, his art dealer and the local welfare benefits distributor. The Fralin Museum’s latest exhibition, “Lucian Freud: Etchings,” offers a collection of rarely seen prints and one painting from the last two decades of Freud’s life.

“An etching is made when an artist uses a needle to push forward lines on a wax- covered copper plate,” said Jennifer Farrell, curator of the exhibit and the newly appointed associate curator of modern and contemporary prints and illustrated books at The Metropolitan Museum in New York. “When it’s taken to the master printer, it’s immersed in an acid bath that bites into the plate. What’s right will be left, and what’s light will be dark, and then what the work really looks like will be revealed. As Freud described it, ‘One dip, really quick and dangerous.’”

Freud worked from direct observation, so his perspective was the single lens through which every relationship was filtered. “Freud wanted to capture the essence of his exchange with a person, animal or scene,” said Farrell. “He famously described his work as autobiographical. Quite frequently, he would go out to dinner with his subjects—not the horses and the dogs—because he could see their small gestures or the way they read a menu.”

In his later years, Freud’s heavy impasto (the build up of paint as a textural element on the canvas) stood in direct opposition to seamless, invisible brushstrokes of many of his peers.

“There’s a famous story that he painted a portrait of Queen Elizabeth, and this was a huge deal, of course,” Farrell said. “He painted it in his own manner, and people complained and said that it was an insult and he made her look older and her skin look unappealing. What’s interesting is that one of his associates later took a picture of the Queen, a color photograph, and held half of that up next to the painting of the Queen, and it matched almost exactly.”

Freud refused to create an idealized version of people. He also refused commissions, which allowed him to choose his subjects, cultivate relationships and explore the intimate artist-sitter dynamic in his work.

“Many subjects have their eyes closed, which gives us as viewers permission to look closely at their bodies,” Farrell said.

Freud was also interested in etching women who were heavily pregnant. “He depicted Jerry Hall when she was eight months pregnant. You see that fatigue from not only posing but from being so pregnant, and he really captures that exhaustion and excitement, the contradictory feelings of the moment.”

Etching was an edgy process for Freud, who thought of the medium as an alternative to painting. “He wasn’t interested in Aquatint or wood blocks or learning how to make prints, but Freud was a well-known gambler, and prints are about gambling,” Farrell said.

“Lucian Freud: Etchings” will be on exhibition at the The Fralin Museum of Art through April 19. Learn more about the artist’s life and practice on March 21, when Freud’s former assistant, David Dawson, visits UVA for a lecture.

It’s a cold world out there for trash. The wrap on your grab-and-go sandwich, the scratched CDs and ’80s Walkman, the broken toys and worn-out furniture and colorful detritus of rich, fast-paced lives are doomed to collect in landfills, antique shops and garbage-strewn street corners—unless an artist comes along.

“In 1992, my neighbor was throwing out a piece of scrap metal in his trash. I thought it was kind of interesting and random, so I brought it into my studio,” said Michael Fitts, a Charlottesville-based artist whose photorealistic Pop Art-inspired oil paintings on metal can be seen in Piedmont of Virginia Community College’s upcoming show, “A Necessary Fiction.”

“I did an abstract painting on it, and even though abstract art is not a natural fit for me, I kept the piece,” he said. “I knew it was something that would be with me a long time.”

Fitts, who worked as graphic designer and art director for years before his retirement in 2013, began collecting interesting pieces of scrap metal wherever he could find it: local scrapyards, junk shops, construction sites. “I’m constantly on the hunt, driving down country roads looking for barns that have collapsed. There are guys who do construction or roofing work and know I’ll pay them for metal if they lob it into my yard.”

It can take months before he decides which object he wants to paint onto his found canvas. When he does, it tends to be a consumable object that reminds him of childhood: a needle and a spool of thread, a box of Junior Mints, a collapsed can of Orange Crush.

Fitts said he avoids dark subject matter in favor of levity. “I did a painting of a ketchup pack that had exploded, which was an idea I’d had for a while. I remember being a kid in the cafeteria at school and stomping on a ketchup pack and getting in trouble for it,” he said. “People said they burst out laughing when they saw it.”

Kim Boggs, a mixed media artist whose sculptural assemblages will be shown alongside Fitts’ work, shares his appreciation for found materials—and the un-serious nature of juxtaposing these objects with artistic intention.

“When I was a little girl, my mom took me to garage sales and antique shops. She liked intricate silver spoons whereas I liked the dirty, rusty, not-completely-in-one-piece things. I was always attracted to patina and aging wood and metal and the crackling of paint that happens with age,” she said.

For years, Boggs collected objects and never used them—until 2007, when a switch flipped in her mind. “I remember thinking, ‘You know what, I’m ready to alter these.’ Things had always been precious in their original form to me, but now I saw their potential to be combined with other things and I was willing to slice them up.”

Now she creates hanging sculptures that layer drawers, toys, boards, Industrial Revolution-era foundry molds and other antique wooden objects, often in unusual and hard-to-find shades of peeling paint. “I go searching for colors,” she said. “I found a pinball board from the ’50s in all these gorgeous colors and wooden drawers that were painted with a mustard color I’d never found anywhere else.”

Boggs’ magpie tendencies allow a similar approach to Fitts’. “My very first official show was in 2012 at the Bridge, and it was all about toys and art as play. I believe that art can be elevated, but it should also have joy to sustain the artist.”

“A Necessary Fiction” opens on January 23 at the PVCC Gallery. The exhibit will be on display through April 1 alongside the group show “Summer of Love.” Info at www.pvcc.edu.

Photos of secluded beaches, colorful fishing boats and turquoise waves hang on the walls of Second Street Gallery, which has been temporarily overrun with harbor themes: a white ship-shaped structure from which dozens of folded origami boats dangle and twirl, a wash of sand and seashells across the gallery floor, a navy blue wall bearing chalk outlines of tall ships and two flat screen TVs on which foaming waves crash repeatedly onshore.

The exhibit, “Portraits of Yemaya” by Atlanta-based artist and scholar Dr. Arturo Lindsay, first appears to be an ethnographic travel diary, cataloging the sun-worn face of a fisherman as he tosses a glittering net over the sea, arranging the small ebony statue of a woman nursing a child. But for Lindsay, who has spent the last three-and-a-half years researching the spiritual and aesthetic retentions and reinvention of the African Diaspora in contemporary American culture, the show paints an image of God.

A native of the Panamanian port city Colon, Lindsay is a self-described believer in the Ifá spiritual traditions of the Yoruba, a West African ethnic group largely enslaved and brought to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade. In his artist statement Lindsay wrote that “Yemaya is the Yoruba Orisha (maternal Deity) whose domain is the sea. Her colors are blue and white and her temperament is gentle and loving until provoked.”

Many of these images come from field research in port cities throughout the Americas, Africa and the Middle East, including Portobelo, a 16th century Spanish colonial village on the Caribbean coast of the Republic of Panama, where Lindsay is building a year-round residency for international artists and environmentalists.

Lindsay’s projects often include workshops with children from underserved communities. His wood-and-origami sculptural piece, titled “The Dream Machine,” was created in collaboration with approximately 20 children between the ages of 7 and 11 in Cairo, Egypt, in 2012.

“When I met the kids [in Cairo], one of the questions I started asking was ‘what is the Egypt you would like to live in?’” Lindsay said. “This is right after the revolution, when energy was high and people had dreams, and I think these were orphans or children in one parent homes. They started to call out things. Things like ‘clean streets,’ ‘no more bullying’ and ‘everybody getting along together.’ There was such an outpouring—you could not hold these kids back.”

He told them they folded their dreams into every paper boat and promised to showcase their work in future exhibits. Their ideals no doubt resonated with his own experience as a junior in high school, when “an anti-poverty program office of economic opportunity created a Brooklyn theater for kids in Brooklyn [where Lindsay migrated with his family at age 12]. You had to audition for it, but it got us off the street and into the discipline of art.”

While studying theater at Central Connecticut State University, he began to paint as well. After hanging his work at the student center, a group of visiting student directors took interest and he began receiving exhibition requests. Soon the self-taught artist was accepted to University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

While Lindsay seeks to capture divinity in his work, he continues to use art as a vehicle for bringing about positive social change. On January 16, he will lead kids from Charlottesville’s Boys & Girls Club in a workshop to fold origami boats and arrange them in a circle in front of “The Dream Machine.” “It will become ‘The Circle of Hope,’” he said. “My handler [in Egypt] is going to appear via Skype. The children will hear someone in Egypt, their minds will be transported to Cairo, and the kids in Cairo will know I kept their promise.”

Arturo Lindsay appears at Second Street Gallery on January 16 at 5:30pm for a discussion with curator Tosha Grantham.

Every week for the last 10 months, I’ve interviewed area artists for this column.

Over coffee and phone lines I’ve been privileged to speak with writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers, actors and mixed media creators. We’d talk for an hour, I’d write for three more, and in the process I’ve found a few themes that cause ordinary people with recognizable lives to wake up every day and slip on the artist’s mantle because they feel they must.

They make art for no money (or very little) and range from wide-eyed hopefuls to seasoned vets. They are full-timers and freelancers, parents and children, teenage students and octogenarians, and they measure the meaning of life not by profit or social approval but by something else entirely.

The new year is a time when most of us resolve to improve our lives. If your best life includes viewing your world through an artistic lens, here are 13 of my favorite suggestions for becoming an artist in 2015.

1. Pay extraordinary attention to ordinary things.

“These aren’t just people sharing their stories but what connects us in those stories. Even when these [nonfiction essays] are about a man with alcoholism or a breakup, they’re about me on some level. There’s something to me about paying attention to our experiences and allowing them to be meaningful. Mundane things that happen to us can be transformed if we really notice them.”—Susan McCulley, contributor to the online literary journal Full Grown People, on essay writing

2. Chase experiences, not beauty.

“If people describe my work as pretty, I feel insulted on some level because all it means is that I was present for something beautiful. A picture is what it is, it’s accurate, but the truth of a picture is extremely subjective. I’m trying to harness some sort of visceral experience.”—Photojournalist Philip de Jong on creating beautiful photography

3. Be prolific, not perfect.

“Think about humans versus dandelions. We gestate our young, these singular creatures, and take care of them for years. Some artists work that way, but there’s another way of looking at it. Dandelions release thousands of seeds. The majority don’t survive, but everywhere there can be a dandelion, there will be a dandelion.”—Artist Warren Craghead on his rapid production of mixed media works

4. Tell your truth.

“[Writing is] an act of translating what’s in your head to what someone who’s not in your head can understand. I’m always a little suspicious if there’s a book that everyone loves because it’s probably safer somehow—more eager to please. I don’t think fiction should be likable. I only care if a story is complex and compelling and feels real.”—Elliott Holt, author, on what she’s learned since winning the Pushcart Prize

5. Trust your instincts.

“So much of the work I’m doing now, from teaching to coaching to writing, has been created because of people who knew Dirty Barbie and either wanted to see it again or see more of my work. The biggest lesson has been to be true to my roots, my storytelling and my personality. I hadn’t trusted myself like that before.”—Denise Stewart, writer and actor, on the success of her blog- based, one-woman play Dirty Barbie and Other Girlhood Tales

6. Embrace change.

“Even in real life, we don’t know how much we’re embellishing in our heads. When I try to fact check my memory, I’m shocked by how much it morphs. Art morphs too.”—Writer Araxe Hajian on collaborative non-fiction

7. Create a connection.

“Art has a unique role in claiming what matters, of saying, ‘this is meaningful,’ and bringing the next layer of wonder to those experiences. Whether that’s setting a table or arranging a house—even how I stack the wood I use to heat my home feels like the art of the everyday to me. For all our differences as people, the similarities are what I come to. Human beings want to connect to themselves and each other and plants and something higher than themselves. And growing food and eating it on Sunday nights with my neighbors is one of the most profound experiences I can create.”—Farmer and artist Kate Daughdrill on social sculpture

8. Share your practice with others.

“It’s difficult to make a living wage in this mass-produced society, and I think it’s important to support people who want to make a living from a craft or [art] that they make with their hands. It’s a very human desire to want a tribe, to feel like you’re not alone. I think letting other people see you doing something [creative] can be really comforting. We want people to come up to us and talk to us. That’s the root of why community can be an asset, because you connect with people who can guide you through the good and the bad.” —Amber Karnes on performance knitting

9. Do whatever you want.

“The mediums themselves are nothing but tools, like you’d choose a paintbrush or pencil. Painting is a tool, photography is a tool and the English language is a tool for me to use at my discretion. If I need to write a story, I’ll write a story. Any artist can do anything they want to do at any given time. The art world that I see is just a celebration of that idea.”—Comic artist, musician and writer Andy Friedman on creating through multiple art forms

10. Change your perspective.

“When you focus in on this really small scale your eyes have to adjust. Now, if I brush up against a wall with moss on it, I see a whole microcosm is destroyed. Even while we’re drilling offshore, barnacles are attaching to the ship. Salt is corroding the hull even while we’re destroying the bedrock.”—Sculptor Justin Poe on micro- and macro-landscapes

11. Believe in magic.

“In nonfiction, the truth defies belief with much greater regularity than even the most imaginative fiction does. So many of my stories, I’ve thought to myself while writing, ‘There is no way anyone would believe this if I were writing a novel. It doesn’t pass the smell test.’ And yet it happened, and I can prove it.” —Earl Swift, longtime reporter and novelist, on the nature of reality

12. Make your mark.

“I have a pile of stuff. In the end, I know they’re gonna pull a dumpster up, and there goes the stuff. When the apocalypse comes, this will outlast everything. You know what most artists do? They fill up space. It’s how they say, ‘I was here.’”—Saul Kaplan, fine artist and poet, on switching to ceramic canvases after 65 years of drawing

13. Enjoy the process.

“Everyone is doing it for the love, not the money. I think artists get caught up in making art with a capital A, but I’d rather create an experience where people feel relaxed and engaged and invited in, and they can walk away saying ‘That made me think, but I also had some laughs.’ You want the end product to be good, but in the meantime you want to have fun.” —Miller Murray Susen, writer, actor and director, on her work in volunteer theater

“One of my paintings is on the cover of American Psychologist this month, and it shows a man looking out over a field and into the mountains. My feeling was he is in harmony with nature, and if you can just be with him, you can feel that same peace and bliss from the painting,” said painter, singer, writer and clinical psychologist Phyllis Koch-Sheras. “Art is like a Rorschach that way.”

Koch-Sheras, who grew up in Chicago, has been making art in Charlottesville since she moved here in 1974. After years working primarily with acrylics, she switched to watercolor after enrolling her children in watercolor lessons with Lee Alter and signing up for classes herself. During one of Alter’s student exhibitions at The Omni hotel, The Daily Progress published a glowing review of her work “Peacock in Paradise.”

“That’s when I thought, ‘Hey, I can keep doing this,’” Koch-Sheras said. “I took lessons with Jeannine Regan at McGuffey Art Center and just started churning out the paintings. She encouraged me to frame and exhibit them, and one thing led to another. I was an associate member of BozART [Gallery] before it closed and would exhibit there as well.”

Today, her paintings can be found all around Charlottesville, including the current works on display at Arden Place and The Women’s Initiative.

Koch-Sheras’ many creative talents surfaced when she was just a child. “My mother was an opera singer, and she wanted me to concentrate more on the singing. I was blessed with perfect pitch and a voice that was pleasant, and she wanted me to be performing and outgoing, so she stopped the painting lessons and started me in opera lessons. I was singing with the Lyric Opera of Chicago when I was 9 years old.”

At the University of Michigan, Koch-Sheras focused on music and English, receiving a masters in creative writing. “I didn’t pick up my paints again until I got my graduate degree in psychology [from the University of Texas],” she said. “Especially while I was working on my dissertation, which is a pretty anxiety-producing process, I found painting to be a wonderful outlet.”

After living for a few years in Palo Alto, California, she and her now-husband, another psychologist with whom she has authored several books, moved to Charlottesville for jobs at UVA. Her clinical work inspires her art (and vice versa). “Water is in a lot of my paintings. I do a lot of dream interpretation and dream work, and I’ve also painted things from my dreams, which allows me to really connect with that part of my unconscious.”

She said she prefers a Jungian approach to the analysis of her artwork as well as her dreams. “When I work with people, I have them go into whatever they associate with that [subject in a dream] and recognize what that part of them is all about. The associations I have with certain elements are just like my associations with paintings—they don’t necessarily have to mean one thing.”

The majority of her watercolors feature nature and landscapes, and she’s drawn to the beauty of sunrises and sunsets. “There’s such a wonderful energy in these beginnings and endings,” she said. “The sunset especially is a kind of emotional process, a completion of one phase of the day, letting go and moving into the next phase.”

In her 25-year practice of Bon Buddhism, Koch-Sheras said she’s discovered that “the process of non-attachment and the connection of light of day is really what life is all about.” And, she added, “There’s something healing in being able [to use art] to be a part of that process.”

See Phyllis Koch-Sheras’ paintings at the Arden Place Clubhouse through December 31.