Author: Sarah Sargent

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Arts Culture

Conjuring the curriculum

In “Curriculum Vitae,” Kristopher Castle puts his own clever spin on things as he revisits objects and ideals, producing provocative work that honors Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village (as physical space and educational model) and Castle’s own relationship to it. Image courtesy of the artist.

With the series of paintings that make up Kristopher Castle’s engaging show “Curriculum Vitae” at Phaeton Gallery, the artist explores Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village and his innovative ideas for education. As the title suggests, the exploration is not a discourse on the UVA founder’s achievements, but rather the artist’s deeply personal relationship to Jefferson’s ideals and his university.

Quorum Pars Fui (“Of which I was also a part”) pays homage to that. In the work, a disembodied hand, Castle’s own, holds the end of a diaphanous ribbon that weaves through the colonnade that runs along the top of UVA’s Lambeth Field. A metaphor for Castle’s life, the fabric references his close ties not only to Lambeth, where he spent the summer of 2001 working at UVA’s costume shop during the Heritage Repertory Theatre’s season, but also, the larger university and Jefferson himself. That summer was a seminal experience for Castle, introducing him to Jefferson and his university, and charting the course that would eventually lead Castle back to the area to live.

Initius (“Commencement”) revisits the fabric of life motif. Here, the fabric’s tail can be seen at the far end of the colonnade that runs along the side at the base of the Rotunda. It’s fluttering away from us, about to leave the Academical Village to commence its existence outside those hallowed walls.

Ab Eo Libertas A Quo Spiritus (“The spirit comes from him from whom liberty comes”) updates the seated statue of Jefferson from the west side of the South Lawn, so that he is shown having just broken a tiki torch across his knee. The allusion is to the assault on the university that occurred in 2017, when protesters wielded these hitherto benign objects in an action that recalled Nazi Germany’s torch-lit parades, albeit with a Walmart touch. Jefferson’s left foot rests on volumes of Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, all major figures of the Enlightenment. This movement, so influential to Jefferson (and other founding thinkers like Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and John Adams), featured rationality and knowledge as its basic tenets.

Castle performs a similar treatment on George Washington in his version of the statue that sits on the east side of the Lawn. Exitus Acto Probat (“The outcome is the test of the act”) depicts Washington covering the Washington Monument, a phallic symbol representing the American patriarchy, with his cape. Castle places tomes by Foucault, Derrida, and Marx—all of whom, according to Castle, would “celebrate [a] critical and punitive reevaluation of [Washington’s] efforts”—at the base of the statue. They are teetering precariously, held in place by Washington’s cane, suggesting he is tolerating them despite their criticism. With this iconography, Castle reminds us of Washington’s integrity. Committed to the freedoms laid out in the First Amendment (freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to protest peacefully and petition the government), Washington led selflessly—twice renouncing absolute power. These are important considerations in both assessing Washington’s record, as well as the current events surrounding the 2020 election and January 6.

Inexplicabilis Libertas (“Illimitable freedom of the human mind”) alludes specifically to Jefferson’s vision for his institution of higher learning. For Jefferson, the expansive vista of the Blue Ridge Mountains, once visible beyond the south end of the Lawn, was a tangible representation of the illimitable freedom of the human mind, which is why his original plan kept the area opposite the Rotunda open. It remained this way until Old Cabell Hall, designed by Stanford White in 1898, was erected. Castle paints the building as a transparent ghost of itself through which we can see the view Jefferson always wanted us to see. The nocturnal scene also includes Castle as a young man, exercising his own form of illimitable freedom in the form of streaking the Lawn, a time-honored tradition at UVA.

Omnium Curriculum Gatherum (“Gather all the history”) is arguably the apotheosis of the show. A quintych composed of five panels, the work gives Castle plenty of room to depict Jefferson’s vision for the Academical Village made manifest in both its educational and physical forms. In his rendering, Castle makes it clear that his vision is not sealed in amber, but is changing and flourishing—a fundamentally viable and timeless approach to education and society that has bent, adjusted, and endured. 

Castle has a great time conjuring Jefferson’s original course curriculum (anatomy and medicine, fine arts, ethics and grammar, modern languages, zoology and botany, ancient languages, physio-mathematics, history and government, pure mathematics, natural philosophy, and law) with a diverse cast of human counterparts dressed in modern clothes. Castle’s professional experience as a costume designer comes in handy here in his selection of clothing and accessories that identify the various disciplines represented. His admiration for Jefferson’s architecture is evident in his detailed rendering of the Rotunda and pavilions I-IV, which feature respectively the Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Doric (again) architectural orders used by Jefferson with the intention of educating and elevating the student body. In the painting, the pavilions appear left to right: III, I, II, IV.

Rounding out the show are Castle’s riffs on the secret society emblems seen on various surfaces around Grounds. These delightful trompe l’oeil works of writing on brick play with the original symbols turning the esoteric into the often amusing contemporary reference.

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Arts Culture

Identity and magic

Megan Marlatt paints between the lines of fantasy and reality in “Mummers,” her solo show at Second Street Gallery through November 18. Images courtesy of the artist.

It feels like Carnival time at Second Street Gallery. Megan Marlatt’s vibrant paintings and eye-popping big head sculptures are on view and the space sings with boisterous energy. Festival themes loom large in her show entitled “Mummers,” and though Carnival doesn’t officially begin for a couple of months, its fall equivalent is happening right now. As we head into winter, we celebrate seasonal change with Halloween and Día de Muertos, which, like Carnival, feature magic and costumes.

For an artist like Marlatt, who has built her career as a painter, her big heads may seem like a departure, but from the moment she first saw a capgrosso (“big head” in Catalan), she was smitten. Her fascination prompted her to travel to Spain in 2010 to learn how to make capgrossos from renowned folk artists Ventura and Hosta. 

“Through the big heads, I became very interested in the rituals of European carnivals,” says Marlatt. In 2018, she returned to Europe, this time to Belgium, where she studied Carnival culture at the International Carnival and Mask Museum.

“In Binche, Carnival participants carry little brooms, which they use to sweep the ground,” says Marlatt. “They’re sweeping away the evils of winter to make way for spring. If they don’t do this, winter will never go away. In Bulgaria, they use sticks to beat the ground, waking spring up. 

“These are pagan rituals adopted by the church. So Lent … coincides with the time when food supplies would be running low. When Carnival occurs, it’s not yet spring, the vernal equinox hasn’t happened. It’s the in-between time when it’s not one thing or the other, and it’s during this liminal period that magic happens.” 

Transition is not just evident in the shifting in-between-time, but also in the act of donning a mask and changing one’s identity. For Marlatt, this is a powerful exercise in empathy. “What I love about masks (and big heads) is they‘re empathetic,” she says. “They erase age, species, race, gender. They allow you to play at being someone else, get inside their skin and empathize with their lot.” Marlatt explores these ideas further in her paintings of Wysteria Ivy, who, as a drag queen, both occupies a transitional space and assumes another identity.

On display are both animal and human heads—there’s a hare, a rooster, the Belgian painter James Ensor, sisters Salt and Pepper, and even a heavenly host of angels. Instantly appealing, the heads seem benign at first. But there’s something sinister and manic about them. Marlatt employs the masks in various ways: some are one-offs that she uses in her Big Head Brigade parades and performances, while others, she incorporates into her paintings, where they sometimes appear as masks worn by figures. Some have entirely morphed into otherworldly creatures.

With its vivid palette and striking imagery, “Wysteria Ivy and the Woodland Creatures” is a captivating and glorious work that presents its subject lounging odalisque-like on a picnic table within a covered shelter. Perched astride the roof, a grinning red bunny sports track shoes, while two mischievous mice tiptoe around the sides of the structure. Marlatt conveys the atmospheric elements in the painting with complete authenticity, which anchors the work in reality. 

We are coaxed by familiarity into accepting the fantastical elements as Marlatt creates a space of transition between reality and fantasy using ordinary references—the table and shelter and the familiar clothes her animals wear root the picture in the here and now. She performs a similar thing with her big heads, which each sport some real item—a crocheted hat (made by local artist Eli Frantzen), a scarf, or a bell—all of which enhance their immediacy.

“Near Gloaming” offers a crepuscular yin to the sunny yang of Wysteria Ivy back at the picnic grounds. The two paintings are the same size and each feature spindly trees that rise across the picture plane in dynamic vertical rhythm. Here, the fairy tale forest is alight with fireflies. Wysteria Ivy, holding a sunflower, crouches on the ground, gazing at the viewer warily. Disturbing the idyll, a figure wearing a hare mask stands to her right. Smudges of lemony paint between the trees suggests the sun’s last light, blurred by misty air.

In these two paintings, Wysteria Ivy is painted outdoors—an unusual place for her to be. According to Marlatt, Wysteria Ivy assumes her persona only in the safe space of her bedroom, interacting with the outside world exclusively online. In Marlatt’s version, she is able to step outside her protected realm and roam free.

While she acknowledges that her work possesses surreal elements, Marlatt resists being classified as a surrealist. Perhaps magical realism is a more accurate description of an artist who feels “the world is full of mythologies and miracles.”

“Those who would follow a hard stoic line of practicality and logic are just fooling themselves,” says Marlatt. “They think they’re above mystic thinking, but then often they acquire a drinking problem for all their logical realism. They believe they can get rid of mythology in their life, but all we really can do is replace one mythology with another.”

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Arts Culture

An artist’s perspective

Lincoln Perry will appear on October 22 at New Dominion Bookshop to launch his debut essay collection Seeing Like an Artist: What Artists Perceive in the Art of Others. Supplied photo.

Lincoln Perry has been a prominent figure on the Charlottesville art scene since the mid-1980s. An acclaimed muralist with significant work in landscapes, figurative paintings, and sculpture, Perry’s murals grace walls around the country including the Met Life building in St. Louis and at the University of Virginia. “The Student’s Progress,” in UVA’s Old Cabell Hall, follows the journey of a fictional student named Shannon from her undergraduate days into her adulthood when she becomes a professor at the university. Consisting of 29 panels, the piece took 16 years to complete.

Perry first visited Charlottesville in 1970, and returned 15 years later to fill in for Philip Geiger, teaching drawing for a semester at UVA. It was during this time that he met his wife, author Ann Beattie, who was also teaching at UVA. After about a decade, the couple left Charlottesville, but returned in 2001. Both held teaching positions until 2012. They now divide time between Maine, Virginia, and Florida.

 C-VILLE caught up with Perry in Maine, where he was fresh off an interview with the local NPR affiliate, to talk about his new book, Seeing Like an Artist: What Artists Perceive in the Art of Others. He will discuss the book at New Dominion Bookshop on the Downtown Mall on Saturday, October 22.

C-VILLE Weekly: I think of you as a painter. Have you always written?

Lincoln Perry: No, in fact, I just came across a notebook I kept in 1981 that’s really badly written. So, somewhere along the line, I think maybe from living with Ann, I must have improved.

I was struck by the quality of your writing. There are numerous beautifully written paragraphs—I loved, in particular, your descriptions of the Bruegels. I also liked the way you integrated modern references and popular culture into your writing, it struck me as akin to what you did with paint in the Cabell Hall mural.

That’s actually interesting. I hadn’t even thought of that.

I would think your narrative talent would serve you well helping you
conceive of murals.

Yes. I wish I could do more of them. The hard part is getting the job. I was just a finalist for a courthouse in Alabama. It would have been fun. I enjoy the external collaboration of projects like that.

Are you continuing to write, and if so, how do you balance that with artmaking?

I can only paint for so long and I can only sculpt for so long, or draw for so long. Writing is a way to fill in the chinks between those other bricks.

I love the way the little sketches included in the book make us see the art through your eyes and pay attention to what you are looking at.

Some part of me thought I should make them more diagrammatic, but then I decided that doesn’t do justice to the things, so, I did my best to do copies.

What are you looking for when you look at art?

The book was originally going to be called Stealing from Museums, but the trouble was they thought it would be put in the crime section. But that’s really what it’s about—how painters and potentially non-painters learn to see in different ways. I think a lot of people are intimidated by visual art; they think there’s something they’re supposed to be getting. It’s a visual experience first. Let it wash over you and take pleasure in it. The idea is not to be intimidated or exhausted. It’s best to see some things well as opposed to trying to see everything. When I first went to Italy, I had one of the Blue Guides and I thought, because it was in the book, I had to go see it, and it became insane. Eventually, I realized that you can get more out of less.

I didn’t realize, until I read the book, that you sculpted. Is that something you’ve always done?

That started about 30 years ago. Difficulty interests me. Making a sculpture that’s legible and enticing from 360 degrees as opposed to, say, one view or two views is really difficult. About three years ago I started carving marble, which is ridiculously difficult. It’s almost too much: I feel like, c’mon, I’m too old for this. The stuff weighs a ton and is hard as a rock. But it does make me realize I spend at least as much time in museums looking at sculpture as I do paintings. They have to be seen in the round and, as I say in the book, you really have to be there in “the presence of” in order to read them properly. Which is also true of paintings, more than people know.

Describe a dream art-viewing trip.

A dream trip would be returning to the Villa Valmarana ai Nani in Vicenza, Italy, to see the Tiepolo frescoes. I also want to see Naples again because of the museums there.

As a successful creative person married to a successful creative person, how do you give equal opportunity to your respective practices?

Well, I read everything she writes, but not until she feels it’s done. It’s harder for me to lure her into the studio. She has a very good eye, but she’s really more interested in photography; she takes beautiful photographs—I think she should publish them. Painting’s a little mysterious to her and she wishes I wouldn’t carve marble because I’m getting old and I’ve got arthritis and she wonders what I’m doing this for. I totally respect what she does. I enjoy writing these essays but I cannot imagine writing fiction, and she can’t imagine painting. I suppose there are happy marriages among two painters or two writers, but in our case, it works well that we’re in different fields. 

Any upcoming exhibitions?

I’ll be in “Home and Away,” organized by Robert Stuart at the Beverley Street Studio School Gallery in Staunton, which runs from November 18 to January 2.

I hope the last line of the book sums it up. (“This isn’t the anxiety of influence; it’s the joy of influence.”) This is all supposed to be about the joy of influence. Rather than feeling oppressed or confused or intimidated by our tradition, we’re allowed to love it and enjoy it because it’s beautiful. It’s something we’ve done as humans that we can actually be proud of.

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Arts Culture

Keen on Keene

Steve Keene paints eight hours a day, five to six days each week. He goes through five gallons of latex and acrylic paint on a typical day, and produces about 50 works. Photo: Daniel Efram.

If you lived in Charlottesville in the early ’90s, you’re probably familiar with Steve Keene’s art. Keene worked as a dishwasher at Monsoon Café, which opened on the Downtown Mall in 1992, and owner Lu-Mei Chang gave him free rein to paint the walls, tables, and chairs.

Chang’s early efforts to promote Keene are immortalized in an essay by her daughter, Elle, which appears alongside terrific pieces by Sam Brumbaugh, Shepard Fairey, and Ryan McGinness, among others, in The Steve Keene Art Book, produced by Daniel Efram.

Efram spent six years gathering material from art collectors, friends, and associates of Keene’s to create this comprehensive survey of his career. The book comprises 265 pages, over 200 of which are images of Keene’s work drawn from more than 600 submissions from around the world.

Spencer Lathrop of Spencer’s 206, a funky second-hand CD purveyor and coffee shop that was situated on the ground floor of what is now Common House, was an early Keene promoter. At Lathrop’s comfy, casual, and authentically hip establishment, you could browse the selection of used CDs, or get a coffee and sit in one of the mismatched chairs by the plant-filled window.

Along with the coffee and CDs, Lathrop had bins of Steve Keenes for sale. In nice weather, he’d move the bins outside with an honor system box where you’d slip in the money. The paintings, almost always on plywood panels, cost a dollar, sometimes two.

Daniel Efram spent six years gathering material from art collectors, friends, and associates of Keene’s to create The Steve Keene Art Book, a comprehensive survey of the artist’s career. Photo: Daniel Efram.

I was drawn to the unusual flickering quality of the paint and arresting subject matter paired with enigmatic titles. And the price was right. As I filled up my arms, shelling out the requisite bills, I didn’t think much about the work beyond its aesthetic appeal (which has held fast all these years). I was not alone. You began to see Steve Keene paintings popping up all over Charlottesville. To paraphrase Keene, it was bleeding into the landscape. “I was obsessed with leaving a mark, leaving a trace of me,” says the man whose goal was to be the Johnny Appleseed of art.

After his wife, Star, finished architecture school, the Keenes left town and the continuous supply of paintings dried up. The couple had been immersed in Charlottesville’s music scene and had UVA student friends who’d go on to form the bands Silver Jews and Pavement. In New York, they were swept up into the burgeoning indie music scene. “The music world was my world,” says Keene, 64. “That was our community, and so my art kind of mirrored that community.” The Steve Keene Art Book captures the era’s atmosphere with vivid descriptions of the Threadwaxing Space, an alternative art and live music venue in downtown Manhattan that “was regularly packed with Keene’s bright, inexpensive paintings, and everyone bought one—or five.”

While continuing to make his art, Keene worked with musicians on album covers and merch. He also continued painting portraits of album covers, an ongoing project commenced during his days as a DJ at WTJU. As the book points out, Keene has always painted pictures of pictures, or more precisely, pictures of the simulated world, selecting images that were designed to be seen. Knowing this, you can see the particular appeal of album covers.

It’s tempting to label Keene’s work as outsider art or visionary art on account of its DIY, raw, manic quality. But Keene holds an MFA from Yale (he went to VCU for his BA). Far from being a naïve artist, Keene incorporates conceptualism, installation, and performance art into his work. His low prices and enormous output is a revolutionary act, defying the established art world with its preciousness and “the ‘pickled’ coolness” of its denizens, ensuring that his art is accessible to nearly anyone. To date, Keene has produced over 300,000 paintings. But for the artist, it’s been one big painting. “The individual plywood panels are just puzzle pieces that together make up one great masterpiece,” he says.

Keene’s Brooklyn studio is a large cage of sorts, constructed of cyclone fencing that provides 80 linear feet in which to work. He paints assembly-line fashion on plywood boards hung in multiples on the fencing, producing the same image simultaneously. 

Photo: Daniel Efram.

He moves down the row adding the same dab of paint until he reaches the end. Going back to the beginning, he takes another color and repeats the cycle, over and over until the group is completed. Though the image is the same, the works aren’t identical; variations occur as he goes down the line. 

He paints eight hours a day, five to six days each week. It’s physically demanding and obsessive. On an average day, Keene runs through five gallons of latex and acrylic paint and produces about 50 works. “It’s like making a hundred pizzas or a hundred birthday cakes at the same time,” he says. And when he finishes painting, the job’s not done—Keene packs and ships about 18-20 orders each week.

Though he’s garnered plenty of attention, with museum exhibitions in Cologne, Germany, and Melbourne, Australia, as well as Los Angeles, Houston, and Santa Monica, along with appearances in Time magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and on NPR, Keene has never cashed in in the way art stars Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons did. His model of cheap multiples doesn’t support their kind of revenue. 

Keene is after something more enduring than money, and he may just achieve it. Certainly, The Steve Keene Art Book goes a long way toward elevating his profile and providing context for the prolific artist.

Keene considers the demand for his work an affirmation and enjoys hearing where his paintings end up, such as the late Dennis Hopper’s L.A. bathroom, and in the hands of influential New York Times art critic Roberta Smith. 

Original Steve Keenes can still be ordered from his website stevekeene.com. For $70, he’ll send you a random selection of six paintings, sometimes more. There’s a backlog of orders, but knowing Keene’s character and workmanlike approach, you’ll get them eventually.

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Arts Culture

Joys and sorrows

“silent dialogues” drawings, monotypes, and paintings by Polly Rebecca Breckenridge is at McGuffey Art Center through August 14. Supplied photo.

“Polly came into this world an artist,” says Carol Grant, speaking about her daughter Polly Breckenridge. “It was apparent from a very young age that she loved creating things out of whatever was available to her. That was her joy.” 

Breckenridge, who died unexpectedly on April 22, 2022, is the subject of a memorial show at the McGuffey Art Center.

Deborah McLeod, director of Chroma Projects Art Lab, says of Breckenridge, “Polly’s work came from an honest and personal place deep within her psyche. She was a bright and perceptive figurative artist who painted the truths of her own life; her struggle as a deeply sensitive young woman constantly coming to terms with what that meant. She depicted the release of joy as often as she painted the confinement of sorrow. She knew both and she gave them to us delicately and with beauty.”

Born on May 4, 1975, in Towson, Maryland, Breckenridge was a graduate of VCU’s art education program. She was a resident artist at McGuffey Art Center and exhibited her work frequently. In addition to her own art practice, Breckenridge was a beloved art teacher at Village School and Walton Middle School, where she taught for nine years.

She incorporated a wide variety of materials and techniques into her work—acrylics, watercolor, inks, and printmaking, or gold leaf, mirror, and glitter for added zing. “She reached for whatever she felt would do the job,” says Grant.

The McGuffey show consists of paintings, drawings, monotypes, artist’s books, and an assortment of journals, doodles, and notes positioned on a kind of altar. “Monotype Play” comprises a light box and cut-out images that Breckenridge used to create her monotypes. Visitors are invited to make their own arrangements. 

“The Collector”

Breckenridge was concerned with the human condition. Her many subjects seem to be grappling with an enigmatic situation or force beyond their control. There’s alienation, but also connection. Though obviously human, her curious, attenuated figures are featureless, without faces, gender, or even race. Breckenridge wanted to eliminate these distinguishing factors, so that anyone could identify with them. 

This inclusiveness and connectivity are underscored by the recurring mesh or bubble-like motif that skims across figures and surfaces in numerous works—most obvious in “Catch and Release” and “Stretch.”  Composed of many circles (individual circles also appear often in Breckenridge’s work), the mesh suggests energy, or aura, magnified by repletion. It emanates from and encompasses the figures like a net connecting all living things. 

Despite her figures’ stylized appearance, Breckenridge’s compositions reveal a deep understanding of how the human body works. This is apparent in “The Collector,” where the eye is drawn to the legs, knees, and wonderfully individualized feet rendered with ease. A striking painting, Breckenridge relaxes her perspective so the figure seems about to be dumped out from the splayed chair, and pairs a deep carmine background at the bottom with acid green and white stripes up top. These elements strike notes of discord that set the emotional tone of the piece. The subject, whose head is disproportionately small, is holding what appears to be a gold-filled purse in the right hand and a figurine in the left, perhaps weighing one against the other. 

Another figurine lies discarded on the floor, and three others—two standing and one about to fall—are positioned on a blue-draped table. It’s unclear whether these are objects, or meant to represent people, or, perhaps, souls.

At the bottom of the piece, Breckenridge’s distinctive mesh appears to emanate from the head of the figurine on the floor, traversing up the central figure and continuing to the upper edge of the painting. It’s as if this figurine’s gilded disc has burst, leaving behind a trail of golden effervescence.

Breckenridge wrote prolifically. Only a small number of the many journals and sketchbooks she produced are on view, but they provide a fascinating window into the creative process and Breckenridge’s outlook and state of mind. She wrote freely, not expecting others to read what she wrote. “It’s the way she processed, the way she thought,” says Grant. “In her sketchbooks, her writing overlaps her drawings; they move together.”

In one striking passage Breckenridge writes: “We are temporary vessels for the containment of pure energy and spirit. Things happen through us.” It provides insight into Breckenridge’s perspective, and is also an apt descriptor of her art, where her figures could be interpreted as vessels and the actual subject matter deals with intangible forces that exist beyond the physical. 

According to Grant, the printmaking process, which Breckenridge took up a few years ago, really resonated with her. “I think she was just at the start of something truly satisfying to her and her followers; a way of working that could bring together her love of the visual and her love of the written word.” 

A celebration of Breckenridge’s life will take place on Sunday, August 14, at noon at McGuffey Art Center. Cellist Catherine Monnes will perform, and the ceremony will conclude with Breckenridge’s signature gesture of giant bubbles—her own kind of effervescence—released to the sky from the front lawn of McGuffey.

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Arts Culture

Sense memory

For her show “Second Nature,” Krista Townsend worked with acrylics on paintings such as “Ferns and Moss,” and boosted the vibrancy with florescent color. Photo courtesy of the artist.

With three shows scheduled for 2022, Krista Townsend found herself in an enviable position as an artist. But she had a problem: She needed work to exhibit. “I realized I had to speed up my process,” says Townsend, who’d primarily worked with oil paint. “I decided to explore using acrylic paint to block in the composition and then work on top of that with oil.” 

Working with acrylics entailed a bit of a learning curve as Townsend adjusted to the new medium. Along the way, she discovered that the shorter drying time gave her an advantage. “It was really satisfying to make those marks and then be able to come back quite soon afterwards and work on top of them,” she says. “I soon realized I was sticking with the acrylics longer before putting the oils on top and I just kind of fell in love with them.” 

Initially worried that the colors wouldn’t be the same as oil, she ended up being pleasantly surprised. “I love the vibrancy of acrylic colors,” she says. “Especially pinks and reds. I’ve always struggled with getting the reds to sing the way I see them in nature. I also love that I can thin the paint with water and create drips and translucent areas without using toxic oil paint thinners.” Townsend even branched into fluorescent colors, not available in oil. “I bought a few and started to play around with them using them as the underpainting. So, then they were on my palette and I started mixing them with other colors. Some of those purples I can come up with are so vibrant and so much fun. I’ve moved away from using fluorescent colors on their own, but I mix them with other colors to punch up the vibration and make the colors come alive.”

When standing in a room of Townsend’s work at Charlottesville’s new Phaeton Gallery, there’s certainly an abundance of color and texture, but there’s also a potent immediacy. You feel it in the physical way Townsend paints, revealed by the remarkably animated gestural marks, but it’s also there in the way nature is presented. Townsend has a deep relationship with nature, taking daily walks in the woods and meadows surrounding Charlottesville. 

On these walks, she absorbs the sights, smells, and feelings of being outdoors in wild places. She takes photographs as reminders of where she’s been and what she’s seen, but mostly she paints her sensory responses to what she’s experienced. 

There are so many splendid details in “Ferns and Moss,” an the acrylic on canvas—the wonderfully expressive zigzagging lines of the fern fronds, the mix of moss and plants drooping over windfall and rocks, and the twiggy nest-like accumulation in the lower right. The eye is drawn to bright globs of orange and red paint—a mixture of florescent magenta with cadmium yellow and cadmium red light—of the rotting trunk and branch near the center of the composition. Townsend uses black to great effect here to both describe the dark shadows beneath the plants and to set them off. She effectively brings the woods to you, providing not only a beguiling sylvan vignette, but also inspiring a sense memory of the feel and smell of moist woodsy air.  

“Managed Wild Flowers, Early Fall,” an acrylic on canvas, features a muted palette. The painting seems to be composed of separate horizontal zones. Dashes and blobs of paint form the grass and delicate flowers along the bottom. Just above, things get really interesting with a riotous interplay of stalky vegetation and maroon flowers. Above this, a flat expanse of olivey ochre reads like a field of tawny grass. Beyond it, scrawls of greens, browns, and tans describe a tree line set before narrower bands of green, blue, turquoise, and gray that represent another field, distant mountains and sky. 

“New Growth” (oil on canvas) depicts an area in Glacier National Park following a controlled burn. The scene could be bleak, but Townsend’s use of color and gesture imbues it with vitality. The bright green at the bottom, signifying the new growth, adds just the right counterpoint to the more subdued palette of the burned area. Townsend finds beauty and drama there with slashes of orange foliage and skeletal charred trees silhouetted against the background.   

With “Field of Flowers and Trees” (oil on canvas), Townsend has relinquished all but the scantest narrative elements. There’s much to admire in this glorious work: the color, the texture, the extraordinarily inventive brushwork that captures the exuberance of painting. There’s something captivating about the repeated vertical lines running along the lower part of the painting, representing the stems of flowers, but also providing a pleasing staccato rhythm. Townsend maintains the visual excitement with the fierce tangle of slashes and streaks that constitute the greenery at the top. 

Townsend’s paintings are the work of a supremely confident artist who is at the top of her game. In nature, she has found an endlessly inspiring muse that challenges her every day to use talent and intuition to interpret and convey the essence of what is there. 

Krista Townsend, “Second Nature”

Phaeton Gallery
Through July 1
Categories
Arts Culture

With feeling

Rosemarie Fiore paints with smoke from one of her handmade tools. Fiore and Ana Rendich combine technique and emotion in a dual exhibition at Les Yeux du Monde through June 26. Photo courtesy of the artist.

For Hagan Tampellini, the current Les Yeux du Monde show felt right. “Modern Alchemy: Rosemarie Fiore & Ana Rendich” is the first exhibition conceived and curated by Tampellini, the gallery’s director and daughter of LYDM founder, the late Lyn Bolen Warren. 

“Many of the shows we’re having this year are ones my mother was in the process of planning, but this is new,” she says. “These two artists made so much sense to me. Their works communicate so well with each other in the gallery space.” 

Fiore and Warren studied under groundbreaking art historian Lydia Gasman. “Rosemarie learned about Wolfgang Paalen and the fumage technique from Lydia,” says Tampellini. “Ana, another artist in my mother’s intellectual orbit, is someone whose work we’ve represented and championed for some time, so this show felt both true to our roots and a fitting way to usher in our next chapter.” 

Fiore, who graduated from UVA, where she was awarded an Aunspaugh Fifth-Year Fellowship, creates paintings using colored smoke. She designs and builds tools (sculptures really) with resin, plaster, wood, metal, and other materials that hold smoke bomb canisters connected by a series of linked fuses. The tools allow Fiore to control the smoke that’s emitted when the bombs are ignited. She gives her over 200 tools/sculptures curious names: Burl, Quad Axel, or Shapeshifter, and decorates them individually so she can identify them when things are moving fast. The largest tool weighs 400 pounds, can hold 150 canisters, and requires a forklift to operate it. When lit, the smoke is expelled with great force from the containers. The artist has about two minutes to manipulate the tool across the canvas. 

Fiore also uses acrylic paint, which she applies using silkscreen, partly to keep the surface as smooth as possible. This is a necessity, as smoke is very responsive to topography. The interplay between the two mediums gives the work dimensionality and helps achieve what Fiore calls “a sense of both motion and weightlessness.” The effect is clear in “Smoke Painting #71,” with its intersecting fractured shards that, with the swirls of smoke, create a spinning vortex.

“Smoke Painting #70” is a wild, exhilarating work that has so much going on it’s amazing Fiore manages to maintain control. Somehow the broad planes on the left, with their interesting blooms of paint and smoke, are balanced by the almost marbleized effect of the ground down surface on the right. At the center, yellow rays are interrupted by giant swirls of graffiti-like indigo smoke. 

“Much of my smoke painting process is out of my control,” says Fiore, who compares it to lighting fireworks. “They’re all built differently and don’t perform the same way… It’s really about orchestrating chaos.”

According to Anne Carson in Grief Lessons, tragedy exists because we’re full of rage and we’re full of rage because we are full of grief. For Rendich, this resonates profoundly. “Grief has tremendous power,” she says. “It can paralyze and blind us from other possibilities. I see my works, which I think of as spaces, like open windows that bring in light. It’s light emerging from grief, grief that the viewer doesn’t see. It’s not because the grief has gone or has eroded, it’s because I cope with it by creating spaces of hope. 

Originally from Argentina, Rendich grew up under a military dictatorship. In 1984, when she was 23, she and five other art students were summoned to an industrial complex on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. When they arrived, there was a line of family members of the “Disappeared,” the 30,000 civilian noncombatants who were kidnapped and murdered by the military following the 1976 coup d’état. Rendich spent three days listening to the families and trying to capture their loved ones on paper.

Rendich’s work is both spare and sumptuous. Her mixed-media panels, arranged in pairs and multiples, suggest minimalism, but possess a deep emotional element. Each panel is composed of layers of oil paint and resin. It’s how Rendich achieves her rich color and glossy surfaces.

Each layer of resin takes at least seven days to fully cure, and the oil can take from three days to two weeks, depending on the color and temperature of the room. One piece may take anywhere from one to three months to complete.

Rendich’s combinations cause the viewer to pause. You can see this in “Yellow and Red,” where the yellow, really a creamy white, is so unexpected next to the deep carmine. It makes you stop to consider it, thinking how unusual it is, and admiring the subtle boldness of the pairing. 

Recently, Rendich introduced marks into her work. In “Radar II,” the green panel features a spiral that represents our going around and around, whether it’s school shootings or war. “Amapola” (Poppy), a large tondo adorned with frilly disks of Japanese paper, is about how we take something pure and make it dirty. In this case, the poppy flower is tainted by the heroin trade blighting South America.

In Rendich’s shiny surfaces we see reflected not only ourselves, but also our surroundings. We recognize both, and even though they look utterly different from reality, we get an inkling of what she means about changing grief into hope. As she builds the pieces up layer by layer, she turns the heartache she carries into beauty.

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Arts Culture

Seeing the divine

“Turn on the Light!” at Les Yeux du Monde honors gallery founder Lyn Bolen Warren with works by 57 artists, including Elizabeth Bradford’s “City Lights.” Image: Courtesy of the artist

“A few months before she passed, my mom told me she’d had a dream that she was supposed to have a show called ‘Turn on the Light!’ It would be in January of the new year, manifesting our emergence from COVID and hope for our brighter future, and she would ask each artist she represented to contribute a piece that was light-filled or light-inspired,” says Lyn Bolen Warren’s daughter Hagan Tampellini. 

Instead, “Turn on the Light!” at Les Yeux du Monde honors the gallery’s late founder with a group show of Charlottesville artists, as well as artists Warren represented from farther afield. The exhibition brings together 57 artists, including Picasso, whose inclusion acknowledges Warren’s involvement with the Lydia Csato Gasman Archives for Picasso and Modernist Studies, which she helped found and co-directed.

“The show is a reflection of the magnitude of her career as a gallerist and breadth of artists whose work she fostered,” says Tampellini, who has taken over the gallery. “It’s come together in a very cohesive way despite the diverse mix of artists and styles represented.”

Millicent Young’s “An Origin Story from the Sixth Extinction,” a luminous column of horsehair that rises from the black void of a ceramic vessel, was created specifically for its spot in front of a long window, where it takes advantage of natural light. Young painstakingly sewed strands of dark horsehair onto white to express the transition from darkness into light that is the show’s theme. 

A melding of minimalist design and delicate ornithological rendering, Cary Brown’s “Dove for LBW” speaks to the endurance of the soul. According to Tampellini, “My mom envisioned her father as a dove. After he died, she saw doves everywhere. She believed they were her father visiting her. She was spiritual in many different ways, and saw the divine in many things.” This particular dove grasps a four-leaf clover in its beak. Tampellini explains that her mother had the ability to look at the ground and find four-leaf clovers. It’s something she inherited from her grandmother, who reputedly could spot a four-leaf clover from astride a horse. And with Tampellini’s brother also blessed with the trait, four-leaf clovers have enormous significance for the family. 

Susan McAlister’s charming bouquet of cut paper flowers, “Led by the Light I,” seems to burst forth from the picture plane. The work has a fresh, fun quality with its breezy palette and layering of differently shaped blooms that compose the arrangement. It was Warren who encouraged McAlister to explore cut paper forms in the tradition of Matisse, a fact the artist alludes to with her title.

Kurt Steger’s handsome “Magician” suggests both a human figure and a ritualistic object. Constructed of wood and paper, the piece evokes cubism with its dynamic rhythm of abutting three-dimensional planes that resemble stone. While “Magician’’ boasts a jute-covered handle and is filled with found objects from Nepal that rattle when it’s shaken, one may also interpret the figure as Warren, with the title alluding to the magic she created. 

Trisha Orr infuses “Dutch”’s ordinary scene of quiet domesticity with unexpected power. Wielding her brush with utter confidence, she slashes yellow across the mirror to connote reflected light, dashes off strokes of gray, blue, lavender, and yellow to describe the Venetian blinds, and scrawls purple across a plate to create the effect of light and shadow on shiny ceramic. The thick fringe of eyelashes and the lips pressed against the child’s head, are small details that reveal authentic and arresting aspects of the sitter’s psychology and the deep bond between mother and child.

Russ Warren’s series of portraits of his late wife highlight different aspects of her spirit. These works are rendered with bold lines and strong color on newspaper. In “Lyn 2,” she stares resolutely out at the viewer while also looking off to the side, revealing her strength and depth of character. In “Lyn 3,” Warren arranges her encircling arms to create a heart that is both a testament to his love for his wife and a depiction of her as the embodiment of love. 

Mysterious and evocative, Elizabeth Bradford’s dazzling nocturnal view in “City Lights, Algarve” feels both sophisticated and primitive. In the foreground, a series of deftly painted rocks front a rise where a shaggy tree is silhouetted against a vivid midnight-blue sky. Bradford ups the drama with pricks of white denoting stars and bright beads of yellow pigment representing the haloed glow of city lights.

Looking at “Last Light,” you can marvel at the gorgeous autumnal scene Karen Blair has created. Her juxtaposition of colors—here, primarily ochre, brown, green, and blue—is mouthwatering. Her inventive application of paint, with flat expanses, lively brushwork, messy streaks, and the scraping off of pigment, used variously to create depth, movement, and texture, is inspired. 

Dorothy Robinson’s ravishing “Oscawana I,” depicts a real place, but does so with very little in the way of representational landmarks. We sense more than see a river, a waterfall, mountains, and trees. Rendered with washes, daubs and drips of paint, that are essentially abstract passages, the light-infused work evokes the romantic energy, atmospheric effect and idealized reality of a 19th-century landscape.

To achieve the blurry effect of “Frank (2),” Pam Black uses PanPastels (soft pastels), which are applied with sponges. A figure, positioned far off to the left within a wide expanse of empty space, is isolated and indistinct. Though he appears like an out-of-focus photograph, and his face is shadowed by a cowboy hat, we can intuit his weathered grit and, perhaps, his incorporeality. Whoever this man was, we know, like Warren, he cast a long shadow.

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Arts Culture

Color rush

Charlottesville’s Priscilla Whitlock and Richmond-based artist Mary Holland complement each other’s work in a dual exhibition at Quirk Gallery. Photo courtesy of the artists

As daily temps start to climb, and we await the vibrant colors of spring, Quirk Gallery offers a visually stunning show celebrating the work of two artists, Priscilla Whitlock and Mary Holland, whose work is guaranteed to lift winter’s gray grip. 

Whether producing vignettes of her garden, open meadows, or mountain vistas, Whitlock’s “Eden” conveys with paint the essence of a place—not just its physical manifestation, but also the experience of being there. She clearly revels in depicting nature, and her manipulation of paint and her lively gestural style expose a deep appreciation for the purely visual aspects of painting, too.

The trio “Spring, Greens,” “Goldenrod Thistles” and “Wild Field, Mustard” are heady depictions of a world in full bloom. The paintings buzz with life. Whitlock captures the effects of nature—wind, shifting light and shadow, and the sense of ever-present insects—to reflect this bombinating sensation, but her painterly approach infuses the works with vitality. With “Spring, Greens,” Whitlock zooms in beyond the vegetation depicted in the other two works and emphasizes the riotous sensual quality of the place as a whole.

“Dogwoods, Spring Mountain” has an entirely different mood. Its muted colors suggest dawn or dusk, a quieter, more somber time. In the work, a vista of mountains rises above a grove of dogwood trees. The mountains are rendered in broad mauve and blue brushstrokes. Whitlock uses jagged lines to describe variations in the terrain, but for the most part this area has a distinct serenity as compared to the foreground. Visually, this situates the mountains in the distance, but it also fittingly depicts their grandeur and permanence. In front, the trees of the title are animated with wind and light. They seem to bend and twist before our eyes, brought to life by Whitlock’s adept handling of the paint. 

Photo courtesy of the artists

With the showy “Bee Balm, My Garden” and “Blues, Pinks, Whites, My Garden,” Whitlock ventures closer to the world of abstract painting. Yes, these works are representations of plants in the patch of earth by her studio, but how she arranges her composition and the way she applies paint demonstrate an emphasis on the formal aspects of painting. Just look at the riotous blobs of pigment in “Blues, Pinks, Whites,” and the daubs of scarlet, green, and blue overlaid with the scrawl of oil stick in “Bee Balm.” 

Like her paintings, Whitlock’s monotypes (unique images printed from a plate that has been painted by the artist) are about putting pigment down on a flat surface. These delightful, small-scale works possess a thrilling freshness and dynamism that holds its own against the larger works. “Flow,” “Spring, Peaches” and “Orchard, Spring” are visually striking examples, but I was particularly taken with the perfectly balanced “Water, Blues” and “My Garden.”

Whitlock has been producing monotypes for years. “I’ve stayed with it so long because it’s like playing another instrument,” she says. “You see something new that you wouldn’t have if you just stuck to your primary medium.”

At the other end of the gallery hangs Holland’s “Compositions in Blue: Cyanotype.” Cyanotype is a photographic printing process discovered in the mid-19th century that uses paper coated with a photo-sensitive solution and sunlight to produce an image of a stencil or object. The indigo hue produced by the cyanotype process has profound emotional resonance. Whether it strikes primordial chords within our subconscious, referencing natural phenomena like the night sky or deep water, this bold yet quiet color has an undeniably mysterious and romantic quality.

In 14 works, Holland takes full advantage of this. The reduced palette of blue and white sets off her striking arrangements of both natural and manufactured objects. Some of these she leaves as is. With others, she introduces collage and watercolor, occasionally adding the bling of silver foil to augment the white.

Holland’s assortments of leaves lend themselves well to the cyanotype technique. The veiny beech frond skeletons of “Forest Bathing,” the silvery disks of “Money Plant,” and the graphic power of the fan-shaped leaf blades in “Gingko Pattern,” all present a different kind of foliage. Holland’s approach reveals an affinity for the individual qualities of each specimen. With the first two, she employs collage to enhance the basic thrust of the work, adding silver to underscore the mica-like money plant pods and inserting silver hands in the allegorical “Forest Bathing.” When it comes to the distinctive gingko leaves, she adds nothing, deeming the rhythm of their silhouette powerful enough. 

In other pieces, Holland turns to the world of handicrafts, using antique lace doilies, placemats, and embroidered handkerchiefs as her subjects. These are poetic works that highlight the intricacy of needlework and the filmy quality of fabric. Against the blue field, these stark white pieces are transformed to reveal works of intricate design and superb workmanship. One can’t help thinking about the anonymous creators of these bits of needlework. 

“I think women’s work is undervalued,” says Holland. “Especially old crochet, and lace, and all these things women did. You can pick them up at junk shops and vintage places for very little, which is amazing when you think how beautiful they are and the amount of time that was put into them.” Holland gives these pieces a second chance and shines new light into their origins.

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Arts Culture

All the joys of life

Art historian Lyn Bolen Warren founded Les Yeux du Monde gallery and made immeasurable contributions to Charlottesville’s contemporary art scene. Supplied photo

The Charlottesville arts community lost one of its greatest champions and brightest stars in Carolyn “Lyn” Bolen Warren, who died on Sunday, November 21, at the age of 60 after a valiant battle with cancer.

Warren’s art gallery, Les Yeux du Monde, has been a cherished Charlottesville institution for more than two decades, featuring beautifully curated and thought-provoking shows with work by both established and emerging artists.

Warren opened the gallery in 1995, after receiving her Ph.D. in art history from UVA. In those days, Charlottesville’s arts scene looked very different than it does now—Second Street Gallery, McGuffey and UVA were the only public venues to view art. At first, Warren operated out of her stylish contemporary home just north of town on Wolf Trap Road. Though she moved the gallery into Charlottesville, first to West Main Street and then to The Terraces, just off the Downtown Mall, LYdM eventually returned to its original Wolf Trap setting in 2009, this time situated in a striking building designed by esteemed architect WG Clark. Like all of Warren’s choices, the building is both structure and sculpture, reflecting her imagination and vision.

Whether you were an important client, an artist, or a casual visitor, Warren was equally welcoming. Her passion was art, and her life’s work was sharing that passion. She reveled in the world of ideas and devoted enormous amounts of energy to community outreach, with artists’ talks and trips to studios and museums. She was also generous with her time and resources, supporting artists and collaborating with other organizations like UVA and Second Street Gallery.

“She was a beloved member of the arts community, who is now a kind of icon,” says artist and UVA studio art professor Dean Dass. “What she accomplished here is almost unbelievable.”

Among her many accomplishments, “Hindsight/Fore-site: Art for the New Millennium,” was perhaps the most ambitious. Warren conceived and curated the NEA- funded show and the accompanying publication, “Siting Jefferson,” for the UVA museum in 2000. The exhibition featured over 20 artists including luminaries such as Ann Hamilton, Michael Mercil, Dennis Oppen­heim, and Agnes Denes, whose site-specific work was presented around Charlottesville.

Always gracious and accommodating, Warren moved through the world with an innate elegance. She was full of good cheer and enthusiasm, and was exceedingly kind. She was also uncompromising in terms of the high standards and strong convictions she held, and she helped make contemporary art an active public discourse in Charlottesville.

“We came up in the department together,” says Dass, who joined the UVA faculty at about the same time as Warren began working on her degree. “My wife Patsy put it so well—‘Lyn was not an art historian, she was an art history maker. She affected the careers of many artists and brought Charlottesville to a better place in understanding how to make art a part of life.’”

Warren and Victoria Beck Newman co-directed the Lydia Csato Gasman Archives for Picasso and Modernist Studies. “Lyn and I wrote our dissertations under the legendary Picasso scholar, Lydia Gasman, who maintained that modern art should often be viewed as a quest for a new sacred that was relevant to contemporary existence,” says Newman. “As a brilliant art historian and gallerist, Lyn endorsed that idea by exhibiting and writing about art that had a transformational impact on both viewers and culture. Her deep understanding of art history underlay the authoritative and serious choices she made as a curator.”

Deftly balancing her career with family life, Warren raised two children, Hagan and Ray, by her first husband, Eugene Ray Rushton, who died in 2004. She wed artist Russ Warren in 2005; theirs was a true marriage of the minds. Warren’s warmth and passion brought dozens of others into her fold.

UVA art professor David Summers, who likens Warren to a daughter, sums up her beautiful, enduring spirit. “Lyn completed her art-historical studies with the conviction that art is an unmixed good, not just a reminder of the woes of life, and not just an illusion that makes life bearable,” he says, “but something more like love, spring, and sunshine, all the joys of life, to which we might reasonably think we have a right, and by which she seemed herself to be carried along and sustained.”