Tag: Fine Arts

The creative process requires commitment to an idea, openness to feedback, repeated attempts (a failure or two) and adaptation. When approached thoughtfully, it offers space for new ways of understanding the world, engaging in a community and expressing the emotions that otherwise go unsaid. Just ask Paul Beyer, founder and director of Charlottesville’s Tom Tom Founders Festival. Ramping up for its third year, the festival’s infancy has been a case study in the creative process.

Launched in 2012, Tom Tom came into being as an attempt to develop a creative catalyst for Charlottesville. Since then, the festival has rigorously sought community input and worked to engage new partner organizations and businesses in co-programmed events. The outcome thus far is a nimble and adaptive organization that strives to strike a balance between celebrating the arts and innovation that thrive locally and injecting fresh perspectives brought by regional and national talent. Arguably, the most interesting evolution within the festival lies in a new series of events this year, dubbed City As Canvas. Sure, this series consists of traditional arts programming like talks and a student art showcase, but it also focuses in large part on public art and creative placemaking.

Creative what? The National Endowment for the Arts defines creative placemaking as initiatives that “strategically shape the physical and social character of a neighborhood, city or region around arts and cultural activities.” In Charlottesville, this has long remained an area of planning that is, at best, disorganized if not overlooked entirely. However, a coordinated effort to re-imagine Charlottesville as a creative destination would generate an increased sense of community pride and improved grassroots neighborhood planning involvement, among other benefits.

Including public art of all kinds (from murals to sound installations or pop-up performances) spread throughout the city, engagement activities that welcome people to interact with art freely, and creative designs that are woven into everything from public parks to manhole covers and bike racks, this sort of effort would bring Charlottesville’s creative spirit into broader view.

Tom Tom’s City As Canvas programming is beginning to meet that need. “The entire City As Canvas project is meant to inspire people to see the city as a stage on which they can create,” said Beyer. “The project’s ‘impact’ ultimately comes down to visibility and participation. Do people feel empowered to reimagine and use public spaces, to become creators of their city? With Tom Tom, I hope the answer is ‘yes.’”

Helping lead the charge for City As Canvas is Richmond-based artist, Mickael Broth, who is one of the festival’s artists-in-residence. A muralist, Broth is also the organizer of Welcoming Walls, a Richmond initiative that seeks to beautify the city’s entry corridors with murals.

Broth does not overlook civic responsibility in leading these efforts. “I worry that much of the mural work I see created in Richmond (and worldwide) is nothing more than decorative, meaningless imagery that doesn’t offer any challenges to the viewers.”

He combats his concern through a unique partnership with the city’s Valentine Museum. All Welcoming Walls artists are given access to the museum’s archives for inspiration and contextualization, enabling historic and local relevance within each mural design. When the opportunity to work with Tom Tom presented itself, Broth signed on to bring his community-oriented creative process to Charlottesville. “The goal of building community and showing the world what your city has to offer seemed to be an obvious overlap in what we’re all working on,” he said.

Near the end of March, Broth and a team of volunteers dove into his first project for the festival: a three-dimensional, bus-sized mural. In fact, the mural actually covers the outside of a 35′ Charlottesville Area Transit (CAT) bus. Colorfully decorated with imagery inspired by Broth’s experiences in Charlottesville, the newly painted bus is a jolt to the eyes, a rush of creative inspiration in the left turn lane. “Public art democratizes the creative process and makes it approachable,” said Broth.

It’s hard to think of a piece of art that’s more approachable than a bus that will quite likely drive by you at least once in the coming weeks. And Tom Tom is betting that this changes the way you live in Charlottesville.

“A giant psychedelic art bus rolling down Main Street will change people’s ideas of what is possible to create here,” said Beyer. Certainly, there is a greater need than can be met by this effort alone, but the collaborative approach to creative placemaking and public art exhibited by City As Canvas is a thoughtful and strategic step forward in the ongoing process to define our city.

Broth will paint another mural on the wall at the corner of Sixth Street and Garrett Street in mid-April, coinciding with the official start of the 2015 Tom Tom Founders Festival. Additional City As Canvas programs include a Graffiti Art Battle under Belmont Bridge, Pop Up Parks that re-imagine parking spaces as public arenas for creativity, and Poetry on the Trolley, which will be held on the CAT bus covered in Broth’s artwork.

What types of public art would you like to see more of in Charlottesville? Tell us in the comments.

Three years ago, no one knew what to expect when homebuilder and former City Council candidate Paul Beyer laid plans for a festival celebrating the birth of Thomas “Tom Tom” Jefferson.

Now in its fourth year, the Tom Tom Founders Festival makes sense. It’s a week-long mash-up of local art, innovation and music designed to get everyone talking. And it’s bigger than ever thanks in part to deepened investment from UVA, 384 participants and a $50,000 grant from the Virginia Tourism Board that matches one marketing dollar to every $2 spent in 2014 and 2015.

Like most artists, Malena Magnolia has been drawing and painting for as long as she can remember. But unlike the galleries and fine art materials most dream about in childhood, she now creates assemblages of mud and dirt on concrete sidewalks and the sides of buildings.

“I want to make art that is accessible to everyday people, not just folks who have an art background,” she said in a recent interview. “There is a very small demographic who attend galleries. To reach more people, it makes sense to put it on the street. And the fact that it washes away over time is a perk because it’s not permanently altering something and is environmentally friendly.”

Reaching as many people as possible is at the heart of Magnolia’s mission to share messages of social justice and foster change through her work. Her interest in art “that affects people on a deeper level” began at Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she was introduced to feminism during her freshman year. Raised Mormon, Magnolia said that feminist theory “made sense to me. My religious background was restricting and didn’t see me as an equal, and I’m not the kind of person who takes that.”

At first, she applied feminist concepts personally, “exploring gender with myself and what it means to be a powerful woman in charge, or just in charge of her life.” Now, she said, she sees feminism as the intersection of conversation and action—an ideology to be lived as well as talked about. She described the connection between gender-based and sexual violence, its ties to race and class, and how she makes art to empower as many people as possible.

When Magnolia creates a new piece, she develops a stencil and uses mud instead of spray paint to fill it, then leaves the final product right there on the street. She usually hears about a new work’s reception through word of mouth.

“Not all of my art is blatantly political—sometimes I use these floral designs,” she said. “People might stop as I’m putting it up and say ‘Oh, that’s really cool.’ If there’s any sort of political rhetoric or text about women’s lib, I get a lot more pushback, but that’s only within a couple of minutes. The work that’s more blatant, that’s usually the work that gets added to or defaced.”

She described a college project in which she made a mud stencil of an average-sized, curvy woman and the words “There’s nothing wrong with you, it’s society that’s f&@*ed.” “I put that up on canvas, and someone else made a stencil over the top that put a McDonald’s icon on her butt and then wrote ‘But the scale doesn’t lie, fatty,’” she said.

Magnolia said she welcomes this type of interaction. “Usually when people deface my work it proves why the work is necessary,” she said. “I just leave it. It’s interesting. That’s part of the beauty of street art—my work isn’t a commodity—anyone can deface it or interact with it. I don’t get paid for it, but I don’t care. I think that’s a beautiful thing.”

Magnolia’s latest work revolves around a project she’s leading through The Bridge PAI. “No More Violence: A Community In Recovery And The Struggle For Safety” is an ongoing series of community-led artistic projects designed to address and challenge sexual violence in our area.

Based on the statistic that every 107 seconds, someone is sexually assaulted in the U.S., Magnolia created 107 Seconds, an event in which she mounted onto the back of her truck a mud stencil that read “Stop rape, believe survivors,” then drove around the UVA campus 107 times—once for every passing second—clocking a total of 14 hours of road time. She also spent a day photographing 80 people holding this same sign around Grounds.

“No More Violence” projects include a series of safe space discussions about the ways these events have affected the community, what must be done to alter a culture of rape, and workshops led by Magnolia for anyone who wants to create their own stencils to combat sexual violence.

“Most people who came to these meetings are survivors of sexual assault, and as I’ve led these workshops more people have come to me in confidence. It’s overwhelming and heartbreaking how common it is.”

The Bridge PAI will host an exhibit made by the community, plus a stencil that “traces the roots of sexual violence back to valley hunting and Thomas Jefferson,” Magnolia said. “I don’t think anything in the present is separate from its history. I’m doing a 5′ long mud stencil of Sally Hemings in front of Monticello, focusing on her as a survivor and not focusing on Thomas Jefferson, which is what we always see in Charlottesville.”

During the exhibition, The Bridge will also offer a space in its gallery as a “therapy wall” with assorted markers, paints and brushes for people to anonymously (or not) share quotes, feelings or thoughts about their experiences.

“This series uses art to engage with history, to challenge the current system as it deals with sexual assault, to take back our community and public domain, and to act as a vehicle of healing,” Magnolia said. “It gives voices to survivors who will no longer be silenced.”

Contemporary artist Susan Northington specializes in capturing her Central Virginia surroundings in exaltations of personal expression. Her abstract interpretations of the Blue Ridge Mountains and flat horizon lines aim to evoke the emotion of a place, rather than the physical reality of location. Northington’s works are currently included in the McGuffey Art Center’s collaborative exhibit “Anew,” which features images of the garden from local artists’ perspectives. Over 20 artists are participating in the show and all of their entry fees benefit the City Schoolyard Garden.

First Fridays is a monthly art event featuring exhibit openings at many Downtown art galleries and additional exhibition venues. Several spaces offer receptions. Listings are compiled in collaboration with Piedmont Council for the Arts. To list an exhibit, please send information two weeks before opening to arts@c-ville.com.

First Fridays: April 3, 2015.

The Bridge PAI 209 Monticello Rd. “No More Violence: A Community In Recovery and the Struggle For Safety,” featuring a cohesive mud stencil composed of stencils made by community members and another stencil tracing sexual assault back to the era of Thomas Jefferson. 5:30-8pm.

City Clay 700 Harris St. Suite 104. “Out of the Heart and Into the Fire,” featuring wood fired pottery by Kevin Crowe. 5-7pm with an artist talk at 6pm.

C’Ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 East Main St. “A Candle in the Darkness,” featuring artwork by Terri St. Cloud. 6-8pm.

JMRL Central Library 201 E. Market St. A mixed media exhibit by Sara Gondwe. 5:30pm.

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Constructed Meditations,” featuring works from 1995 to 2015 by Susan Bacik. 1-5pm.

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. “Keeping It All in the Family: Where Art is in the Genes,” featuring works by resident artists in the Sarah B. Smith Gallery and Upper Galleries; “Anew,” a garden inspired collaborative art show in the Lower Hall Galleries. 5:30-7:30pm.

Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. “Regina Miele: Meridians” and “Edward Thomas: Praxinoscopes,” featuring oil, watercolor, ink and charcoal works by Miele and oil paintings in series displayed in turntable praxinoscopes by Thomas. 6-7:30pm with artist talk at 6:30pm.

Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St. “Springtime at Spring Street,” featuring oil on canvas works by Abby Ober Liable. 6-8pm.

OTHER EXHIBITS

CitySpace 100 Fifth St. NE. “Arts Fusion: The Power of Creativity in Dementia Care,” organized by the Alzheimer’s Association Central and Western Virginia, with a reception on Friday, April 10, 5:30-7:30pm.

Fellini’s #9 200 Market St. “Art and Music: Above and Beyond,” featuring works by Lee Alter and students, with a reception and live music on Wednesday, April 1, 6-8pm.

Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia 155 Rugby Rd. “What is a Line?,” featuring a voter-chosen collection of works, and “The Body in Motion,” featuring an intern-curated collection of 20th century photography, with a reception on Friday, April 24, 5:30-7:30pm.

Hot Cakes 1137 Emmet St. N. “Romance of the Sea,” featuring acrylic landscapes by Nanette Morrison.

Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection 400 Worrell Dr. “New Narratives: Papunya Tjupi Prints with Cicada Press,” and “Art and Country.”

Loving Cup Vineyard 3340 Sutherland Rd., North Garden. “Moments in Time,” featuring oil works by Julia Kindred, with a reception on Friday, April 10, 5:30-7:30pm.

Oakhurst Inn 100 Oakhurst Circle. An exhibit of contemporary figure paintings by Jeffrey Stockberger, with a reception on Thursday, April 2, 6-8pm.

PCA Office Gallery 100 Fifth St. NE. Work by PCA member artist Eve Watters, with a reception on Friday, April 10, 5:30-7:30pm.

Southern Cities Studio 214 W. Water St. “The Five,” featuring work by Bill Atwood, Michael Bednar, George Beller, Warren Boeschenstein and Nina Ozbey, opening April 27.

The Garage 100 E. Jefferson St. “Moonlight Silhouettes,” featuring photographs by Rich Tarbell in collaboration with circus performers Stephanie Helvin and Mallory Paige, with a reception on Friday, April 10, 5-7pm.

Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church 717 Rugby Rd. A retrospective exhibition of the paintings of Bennett Curtis, with a reception on Sunday, April 5, 12:30pm.

Warm Springs Gallery 103 3rd St. NE “Around Town,” featuring oil paintings by Elaine Lisle, with a reception on Friday, April 10, 6-8pm.

WVTF & Radio IQ Studio Gallery 216 W. Water St. “Line & Color: A Willco Studios Collaborative Show,” featuring oil and mixed media paintings, works on paper, gouache on claybord and sumi ink on paper by Stephanie Fishwick, Ken Horne and Cate West Zahl, presented by New City Arts, with a reception on Friday, April 10, 5-7pm.

Yellow Cardinal Gallery 301 E. Market St. “Duet: Landscapes Real and Imagined,” featuring new works by Krista Townsend and J.M. Henry.

“I feel like an old soul in general. If I’m shopping, I’d rather buy something old and upcycle it or do something that appreciates the value of what it used to be,” said Charlottesville- based alternative photographer Cary Oliva. “Things were just more beautiful back in the day.”

The intrigue of age surfaces in the majority of Oliva’s work. Her alternative photography manipulates instant film formats to create ghostly, watercolor-like images with textural imperfections and light flares. Image transfers and emulsion lifts, her primary methods of photo art, interrupt the development process to achieve a washed-out patina in contemporary photographs (think local farmland or a palm tree-strewn beach).

A long-time devotee of Polaroid, which famously went bankrupt in 2009, Oliva routinely makes art out of leftovers. These days, she’s forced to negotiate a seriously curtailed supply of film, but her interest in vintage mediums for photography was piqued more than two decades ago.

“I moved to New York City [from Virginia] in the late ’90s and wanted to take pictures of everything,” she said. “I studied fine art in school, but photography felt impulsive, with an intuitive draw.” She quickly fell in love with the painterly effects achieved by alternative photography, and after deciding to teach herself the craft, “went thrift store shopping to find a camera.”

One of her favorite early art forms was Polaroid manipulation. “I absolutely loved that ’70s film, the kind you’d shake. If you kept it warm, you could manipulate the gel from the outside and create these little brightly colored paintings. I remember sitting in my car in the summer or, if it wasn’t warm enough outside, rigging the electric outlets so I’d have a little hotplate to keep the film warm.”

Eventually, Polaroid stopped producing that particular kind of film. By that point, though, Oliva had expanded her repertoire to include image transfers, which create subtle painting-esque imagery by disrupting film development.

Instant film, like the Polaroid 669 Oliva favors, functions as a reactive sandwich. Each piece has a positive and a negative side, and once a photographer takes her shot, the film gets pulled through rollers that squish positive and negative chemicals together, triggering the reaction that slowly develops the image’s colors.

Normally, Polaroid photographers let this film develop for several minutes, but Oliva pulls the print out before the image has a chance to finish and applies the negative, complete with its in-process inks, to a piece of treated paper where it finishes developing.

The result is an image transfer and “a one-time thing,” Oliva said. “I can’t take that negative and reuse it again. It’s not a transparency, it’s just the inks, so each transfer is an original. You can’t recreate it, but you can scan them, like I do, and bring them into Photoshop and make them into prints.”

The process takes an incredibly long time, Oliva said, and requires a number of delicate conditions to be met. Art paper must be treated with just the right amount of water, and the separation of positive and negative is exacting. To minimize the difficulties of working “in the field,” she uses a unique system that assembles old school parts.

Today, Oliva takes most of her images with slide film using her 35mm SLR film camera, though she also owns a 1960s vintage Polaroid camera that’s been rigged to accommodate a modern battery. She exposes the slide images onto the peel-apart film using a “portable darkroom.” In just a few seconds, she’s able to expose the slide onto the Polaroid film within the machine and then create an image transfer.

But no amount of innovation can slow the passage of time that’s steadily chipping away at Oliva’s most critical resource. “I can only buy [Polaroid 669 film] on eBay, and it’s all expired,” she said. “The final images are often too brown, and I’m not happy with it. There’s also a group called The Impossible Project that’s created film for SX-70 camera, and they market it as being the same,” she said. “But it doesn’t work the same way.”

Like most artists given limiting parameters, Oliva has creative solutions. “I’ve been teaching myself how to use Fujifilm. It’s new to me, but it’s still really old school,” she said. “I’ve saved a lot of images, the positives of images I’ve used before, and I’m reinventing them as emulsion lifts.”

To create an emulsion lift, she soaks the 3.25″ x 4.25″ positive in near-boiling water, then slowly takes a small brush and pushes the emulsion off from the backing paper. What’s left is a very delicate, onion skin-style image that she transfers into a vat of colder water, then lifts off the back onto another substrate, like metal, rocks or cloth.

“It has this very interesting, dreamy quality in a different way than anything else,” Oliva said. “An emulsion lift isn’t perfect. It’s just what’s left. The edges curl up, it gets wrinkled and it has movement and other elements you just don’t get in a transfer.”

In general, photographers rely on the accuracy of their film, but it’s the instability of her alternative forms that cements Oliva’s loyalty. She spent a week at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina refining these new processes, which she plans to teach in the spring.

“I’m on Instagram a lot lately using the hashtag #filmisnotdead,” she said. “This work helps me slow down and be more mindful about the things I do in life. I love sharing it. If people have never seen the process, they’re usually amazed.”

If you ever come across a herd of nerds walking around Charlottesville with expensive-looking cameras, do not fear. They’re just photo walkers. And while their numbers are growing, they’re mostly harmless.

Charlottesville has at least two groups that regularly hold photo walks, and the phenomenon has gained worldwide traction. Scott Kelby, considered by some the godfather of photo walking, organizes an annual Worldwide Photo Walk that last year drew 20,148 participants to 1,052 walks around the globe.

It was inspiration from groups like Kelby’s that prompted C’ville photographer Stuart Holman to start a local version. He’s done five of them under the name Block: Photography Community for Creatives.

“The people that I have met through [online] communities have allowed me to meet people in Charlottesville,” Holman said. “It is really cool to come full circle and find people that share the same passion.”

Holman and a group of passionate shutterbugs’ next trek will wind three miles from the Rivanna Trail entrance near Riverside Lunch to East Main Street. Holman said he’ll bring along a few props—steel wool that’s lit aflame and twirled about, smoke bombs and sparklers—to enhance the experience.

And what exactly is that experience? According to Rick Stillings, who runs monthly photo walks through his non-profit, the Charlottesville Photography Initiative, it’s all about building the community of photographers and sharing inspiration and insight.

“We’re trying to foster an environment where there is collaboration, sometimes mentoring,” Stillings said. “Photography for a lot of people is a solo activity. You go out and shoot things or events, and for the most part we don’t work as a group or socialize as a group.”

Stillings said he likes to organize his participants into small groups of two to five. That way those who have “just taken their camera out of the box” can get some help from the old pros, and likewise the old pros might benefit from the newbies’ fresh perspective. Like Holman, Stillings said he tries to find interesting subjects for the walks—his group once did a tour of a retired insane asylum, and the next one is scheduled for April 4 at the St. Albans Sanatorium in Radford. Stillings’ largest photo walk, a 33-person event he organized in conjunction with a dance organization, was an outlier, but he said he has no trouble finding a dozen or so avid photographers for each tour.

“Most of our groups are amateur to semi-pro,” he said. “They look forward to the idea of just getting out and hanging out with other photographers.”

Holman said he believes online photo sharing has been instrumental in driving the number of hobbyist photographers who are up for photo walking. The relative ease of modern camera use and lack of need for film don’t hurt either.

“The automatic settings on the SLRs are easy to use,” he said. “Everyone is picking up these cameras, and that’s what is making photography just boom. People see these awesome pictures and ask, ‘What kind of camera are they using?’”

Holman and Stillings agree a fancy SLR camera isn’t required, though, and they’ve both had participants show up with iPhones on occasion. Holman said he’d even accept camera phone images for a book of local photography he’s developing as an offshoot of his photo walks—so long as the images show a unique perspective and interesting subject, of course.

The idea behind Block: The Photobook, Holman said, is to give local picture-taking enthusiasts an avenue through which to share their work other than online sites like Tumblr or Instagram.

“I see this image in my head of this thick black book of full-page images of the Albemarle County area, from photographers I know, and you know,” he said. “It gives me a very good feeling.”

Holman said he’ll be collecting images from local photographers through March 31, and the book could be available as soon as a month after that, depending on how many submissions he has to parse. He said he’ll likely be partial to images that capture a bit of local iconography, such as the UVA Lawn, and he favors a personal touch, applied at the time of the shot or using editing software. Each 20-page coffee table book will be printed to order and should cost about $30, he estimated.

Holman, who is a full-time administrator for Blue Ridge InternetWorks, isn’t looking to make any money from the books. Rather, the goal is much the same as that of a good photo walk: Find something beautiful and share it with others.

“It’s about getting out and photographing your city and environment,” said Stillings, who by day is on the systems staff in UVA’s Department of Computer Science. “We don’t do it to make any money, and anyone is welcome to join us.”

Do you have a favorite photographer in the community? Share it with us in the comments.

“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.

Give her a home where the buffalo roam and Christen Borgman Yates will paint the iconic American beast every day.
Her original contemporary works in oil and watercolor ask viewers to consider how they relate to landscapes and livestock in an increasingly urbanized world. Her most recent series, “Agrarian Icons,” on display at WVTF & Radio IQ Studio Gallery in March, brings the sheep, cattle and goats of the Blue Ridge Mountains to life, encouraging audiences to actively engage with the subjects. Although the UVA grad resides locally with her husband and four children, this is her first solo exhibition in Charlottesville.

First Fridays: March 6, 2015.

C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Casa Mia: The Art of Spring Cleaning,” featuring locally crafted natural home remedies by Brigitte Rau. 6-8pm, with a demonstration of products and techniques.

City Clay 700 Harris St. Suite 104 “Material Matters,” featuring salt and soda fired pottery by Judd Jarvis. 5:00-7:00pm with an artist talk 6-6:30pm.

CitySpace 100 Fifth St. NE. “Book Arts Exhibit: Miniature Books,” organized by the Virginia Art of the Book Center. 5-7pm.

Fellini’s #9 200 Market St. “Images of Ireland,” featuring watercolors by Sarah Hasty-Williams. 5:30-7pm.

Java Java 421 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Reinventions,” featuring Polaroid transfers and lifts by Cary Oliva. 5-6pm.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Performing Arts Center 1400 Melbourne Rd. “VSA Charlottesville/Albemarle Showcase,” featuring work from over 100 artists. 6:30-8pm.

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. “Bound: The Artist’s Book” in the Sarah B. Smith Gallery; “Etta Levine: Colorscapes 2” and “Susan Patrick: For the Trees” in the Lower Hall North Gallery; “Charlene Cross: Glass. Metal. Fire” in the Lower Hall South Gallery; and “C2D2015,” sponsored by Art In Place, in the Upper Hall North and South Galleries. 5:30-7:30pm

PCA Office Gallery, 100 Fifth St. NE. An exhibit by photographer Stacey Evans. 5-7pm.

Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. “Susan Bacik: Constructed Meditations, 1990-2015,” featuring mosaics, assemblages and installations from the past 25 years. 6-7:30pm with an artist talk at 6:30pm.

Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St. “The Wild Kingdom,” featuring oil on canvas works by Anne Marshall Block. 6-8pm.

The Women’s Initiative 1101 E. High St. An exhibit of 15 women artists featuring watercolors, photography, oils, acrylics and pastels. 5:30-7:30pm.

Warm Springs Gallery 103 3rd St. NE “Paper Works,” featuring artists Diane Ayott, Meredith Fife Day, Barbara Grossman, Sydney Licht, Marlene Rye and Eve Stockton. 5:30-8pm.

WriterHouse 508 Dale Ave. “Looking to the Past,” featuring collages from the ’60s and ’70s by Betsy Ballenger. 5:30-7:30pm.

WVTF & Radio IQ Studio Gallery 216 W. Water St. “Agrarian Icons,” featuring paintings by Christen Yates. 5-7pm.

Yellow Cardinal Gallery 301 East Market St. “Duet: Landscapes Real and Imagined,” featuring new works by Krista Townsend and J.M. Henry. 4-6:30pm.

OTHER EXHIBITS

Chroma Projects 107 Vincennes Rd. “Genius Loci,” featuring landscapes by Jeanette Cohen and Joan Elliott, with a reception on March 22, 3:30pm.

Focus Contemporary Art 385 Valley St. An exhibit by Robert Strini, Linda Wachtmeister and Michelle Gagliano.

Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia 155 Rugby Rd. “Lucian Freud: Etchings,” and “A Portrait of the Artist, 1525-1825.”

Hot Cakes 1137-A Emmet St. An exhibit of watercolors by students of Lee Alter through March 28.

Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection 400 Worrell Dr. “New Narratives: Papunya Tjupi Prints with Cicada Press,” and “Art and Country.”

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Selections 2015,” featuring works by Pam Black, Peyton Hurt Millikan, Kris Iden, Ann Lyne, David Summers, Theo van Groll and Sanjay Vora, on display through March 8. “Susan Bacik: Constructed Meditations, 1990-2015,” featuring mosaics, assemblages, and installations from the past 25 years with a reception Friday, March 13, 5:30-7:30pm.

Sojourners United Church of Christ 1017 Elliott St. “BozART Group,” featuring contemporary religious art, landscapes and mixed media works.

Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church 717 Rugby Rd. An exhibition of paintings by Donna Redmond with a reception on March 1, 12:30pm.

 

First Fridays is a monthly art event featuring exhibit openings at many Downtown art galleries and additional exhibition venues. Several spaces offer receptions. Listings are compiled in collaboration with Piedmont Council for the Arts. To list an exhibit, please send information two weeks before opening to arts@c-ville.com.

Mid-month is usually a pretty quiet time in a local art gallery. First Fridays crowds have long since returned home and the promise of free wine and cheese is a faint memory. But the downtown Charlottesville gallery scene isn’t dead between opening and closing receptions. Many would argue that this is the best time to enjoy an exhibit, when no one else is paying attention.

Absent the hordes, you can actually see the art on display. That’s the reason you went to the gallery in the first place, right? Well go ahead, get an eyeful. Having a gallery to yourself is an easily attainable luxury. It’s a unique privilege to have time and space to consider the way the art works together to form the exhibition experience as a whole. Most exhibits benefit from this extra reflection, but this is especially true for “Paper Works,” the current exhibition at Warm Springs Gallery.

Curated by gallery owner Barbara Buhr and her assistant, Elizabeth Flood, this exhibit brings together work by six women artists: Diane Ayott, Meredith Fife Day, Barbara Grossman, Sydney Licht, Marlene Rye and Eve Stockton. All are new to the gallery, and were hand-picked for their unique, well-matched work. Buhr considers herself an art dealer and curator, with more emphasis on the latter.

“Curating takes passion, curiosity and understanding,” she said. “Someone once told me that a good curator is like a good chef. They understand the community’s needs—and fulfill and challenge them. My goal is to make good art available to a wide audience, and to give exposure to undiscovered talent. In turn, collectors want artists who are pushing new ideas, the medium, forward.”

In curating “Paper Works” these factors were given due consideration, resulting in an exhibit that is aesthetically exciting for a casual viewer but also challenging and innovative for the avid collector. “We sought out these six artists specifically for their works on paper,” said Flood. “I found myself so drawn in by their vibrations of color, and the overall energy and movement of the work. The tension of pattern, color and shifting planes within the work really tie them together.”

Indeed, when viewing the exhibit, one immediately notices the lyrical appeal of the ordinary butting up against the magic of the mundane. Each of the artists employs techniques that play with and within the confines of reality, simultaneously representing and challenging it through the use of color, texture and subject.

For example, Stockton’s scientifically inspired woodcut prints embrace a playful approach towards biological representation. They also exemplify a variance and division within existence, using colors that suggest an augmented reality. “A close look at my imagery can reveal dichotomies such as order/chaos, microbial/monumental and familiar/otherworldly,” she said.

Day’s collage paintings also walk the line between two worlds—in this case the external experience of vision and the inner experience of memory. “Wallpapers run the aesthetic gamut—faux brick, athletic team emblems, stuffed teddy bears, you name it,” said Day. “Some, especially those based on historical designs and patterns such as calico, evoke a kind of visual poetry for me. Using these wallpapers is a nod to my inner life, and the memories through which it is filtered.”

Though all of the artists explore similar themes of tension caused by divisions within reality, their techniques are different enough that each visitor will find one artist whose work speaks to them more readily. For me, that is Marlene Rye. Her use of color in portraying seemingly traditional scenes of nature is arresting.

Rye isn’t bashful about this playfulness. “I work hard to create a visual tension,” she said. “The shapes, colors, forms and line push and pull against each other.” This tugging creates a very real sense of movement in each painting. Looking at her work, I come back time and time again to the bend of a certain sapling’s trunk in this painting, the sharp edge of a leaf in that one. Throughout, Rye uses a range of colors that is at once ethereal and yet familiar.

“I purposefully use a palette that is highly saturated so as to heighten the feeling of magic,” she said. “My colors are noticed in nature, but keyed up to be more extreme. The scale is intended to be ambiguous so as to invite the viewer to change sizes when looking at it, something I remember doing as a child when in the woods myself.”

While looking at these paintings head on, it’s easy to imagine walking through and under the graceful lines of their foliage. I get lost in childlike wonder. And it’s this immersive experience of art that only comes with the freedom to sit with an exhibit, to breathe it in, away from the distractions of a crowd.

“Paper Works” will remain on display at Warm Springs Gallery through the end of March.

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.