Tag: Fine Arts

“I’ve been drawing for 65 years. That’s not an exaggeration. I have a pile of stuff. In the end, I know they’re gonna pull a dumpster up, and there goes the stuff.“ Saul Kaplan, artist and poet, paused as he opened his self-published volume of drawings, ceramics, and paintings. “The way I explain it is, I could either produce a legacy in this book or have a fancy coffin,” he said. 

At home with his wife at Lake Monticello, the 85-year-old Kaplan maintains the creative practice he kept during various turns as a student, mechanic, teacher, and high school assistant principal: drawing, painting, and writing poetry amid the flurry of life.

Kaplan recently decided to curate his work in a book, Life Drawing: A Legacy, for his three sons and grandchildren. He asked Michael Hoover, a friend and collector of his work, to look through his catalogue and choose the right pieces. “Mike and his wife looked through 1,000 drawings, and I just got out of their way,” Kaplan said, and the pair selected nearly 100 sketches, paintings, and pen-and-ink works. 

“If you want to get into the artist’s heart, you go to their drawings,” Kaplan said. “Michelangelo threw away his drawings because he didn’t want anybody to see his suffering, his agony.”

Paging through the book, he lit on a small scribbled butterfly. “It shows in little sketches, little doodles,” said Kaplan. “This is my signature.”

That signature includes single or multi-planed faces, people in conversation or wrapped around one another, defined by strong lines and cross-hatching and rhythmic curves. He often hears viewers compare his neo-cubism to Picasso’s, but he rejects the idea of imitation.

“I draw in ovals because that’s how I draw,” Kaplan said. “The intellectual painter is not a painter. It’s not formulistic. It’s facing that blank canvas and spilling your guts.”

Kaplan’s introduction to professional art-making came in 1948 at the prestigious Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts.

“I got thrown into the art world,” Kaplan said. “I was in the middle of the abstract expressionist movement, De Kooning was down the street, and I didn’t know what was happening.”

On a scholarship, he studied drawing under Hofmann, who was a contemporary of Henri Matisse. Kaplan quickly learned the value of muscle memory, drawing the same figure over and over for 20 hours a week, and the discipline required to fail repeatedly on the path to success. “There was an artist who did my portrait in charcoal, and he could get the likeness of anybody. I asked him how he did it? His leg had been blown off in the war, and they put him in the hospital for six months, and he drew and he drew and one day he got it. So I learned how to do the head from him, and the head became my obsession.”

He paused. “You know how art is,” Kaplan said, pointing to a finished painting in his book. “This is a hole in one. I can’t do it again. I did this in just a few minutes. It’s luck, work, luck.”

Kaplan first reflected on the impermanence of art when flooding destroyed many of his paper works. He began creating plates and pots and three-dimensional sculptures because “unless they get smashed, nothing can happen to ceramics,” he said.

Now his studio is a blend of paper and clay, tools that preserve the memories of his artistry. “When the apocalypse comes, this will outlast everything,” he said, touching a dish with an image of two figures intertwined. “You know what most artists do? They fill up space. It’s how they say, ‘I was here.’”

Saul Kaplan’s work is on view at Vivian’s Art for Living on the Downtown Mall. 

Art History Remix, now on view at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, presents 20 collages by Earl Gordon that are rich in meaning and contain lively dialogues between Western and African art, contemporary and traditional approaches, and drawn motifs and collage.

Gordon’s work provides an interesting contemporary counterpoint to the Joseph Cornell show now on view at the Fralin Museum. Like Cornell, Gordon appropriates found papers, old photographs and bits of fabric collected over the years to create potent little vignettes. Gordon intersperses his collages with intricately drawn patterns and figures that look like colored chalk on a blackboard. He also adds sequins and feathers and shiny foil paper. His opulent surfaces are celebrations of texture, pattern, and color where jostling zigzags, chevrons, and tessellations warp and pulse for a dynamic funhouse effect. These complex, heavily worked surfaces force you to slow down and really look, allowing the visual image and its colorfully descriptive title to sink in.

All these vibrant visual hijinks produce a many-layered depth of field that belies the works’ flat surfaces. Gordon clearly enjoys manipulating space, using angular shapes that resemble shards of splintered glass to direct the viewer from one area of the composition to the next and rhythmically forcing the eye to the center.

Citing such diverse influences as Hans Holbein, Duchamp, Lucas Samaras, and Man Ray, Gordon is obsessed with the Harlem Renaissance and Josephine Baker as well. According to Jefferson School director Andrea Douglas, Gordon’s collages suggest “his biographic affinities to both Western and African art, as well as relationships between artists whose connections are not widely known. While such moments could imply a degree of pictorial cohesion, in these works, Gordon’s representations are fragmented as if a crucible has been broken apart and each element exposed to encourage more direct scrutiny.”

Spiritual guides are an important subject for Gordon, and they crop up again and again in his pieces. “We live in a wounded world. These past years have been hard what with the economy and the wars,” said Gordon. “Everyone I know has been in need of spiritual healing of some sort.”

“Staying Up All Night Long Dancing and Carrying on in Manhattan” refers to the expeditions that Gordon and graduate school friends would take into New York to go clubbing, returning to New Haven just in time for the next morning’s class. The composition vibrates energy with jagged shapes that seem to represent music radiating outwards from the LP record framed within a raised square of paper denoting its importance. I love Gordon’s rendering of the album, an image that occurs repeatedly in his work and for him is symbolic of the healing power of music. “When I’m feeling under par, I can put on certain music and it will do a great deal for me, taking me back in the past and reminding me of experiences,” Gordon said. “I also think vinyl records are beautiful.”

Gordon has a real interest in hands. Three of the works have depictions of actual hands in them, but many of his motifs are hand- or finger-like. “Hands Painted by Hans Holbein, or Tom Fahey I bet you wish you could paint like this,” refers to a running joke Gordon shares with a VCU colleague. 

Hands are notoriously hard to paint. So much so, that if the attribution of a painting is ever in doubt, experts often look at the hands for clues. Gordon traces his interest in hands to childhood. “When I was a kid I used to see these palm reader signs all over the place,” he said. “That bold hand was always something very powerful to me.”

At first you understand Gordon’s collages as works on paper, but you soon realize that Gordon’s deliberate approach to the framing transforms them into sculptural objects where the frame is an integral part of the artwork and not just an embellished add-on. “I think people find the frames a little disconcerting at first,” said Douglas. “But you have to realize they’re part of the conversation Gordon’s having with Western art history. These particular frames evoke a kind of quasi-gentility or sensibility. And because they’re the kinds of frames you buy at Michael’s, they reference our age of consumerism.” 

The show represents a homecoming of sorts for Gordon, a Charlottesville native who attended the first through twelfth grades at the Jefferson School. He received his BFA in sculpture from VCU and his MFA in painting from Yale University, studying under Charlottesville’s own Robert Reed among others. Thereafter Gordon pursued a 30-year career teaching painting and sculpture.

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: May 2, 2014.

Angelo 220 East Main St. “Landscape Sketches,” paintings by John A. Hancock. 5-7:30pm.

BON 100 W South St. Open house and art workshop. 5:30pm. $5.

BOUTIQUE Boutique & The Shoe Store Next Door 411 East Main St. “The Art of Private Devotion” and “The Roadside Art by R.A. Miller.” 5-7pm.

BozART Gallery 211 West Main St. “Great Things in Small Packages,” group exhibit by Matalie Deane, Julia Kindred and Virginia Ashby. 6-8pm.

The Bridge PAI 209 Monticello Rd. “Wood Ear,” photography and sound installation by Peter Traub. 5-8pm.

CitySpace 100 Fifth St. NE. “Artquest,” artwork from the Charlottesville City School students and artwork by Michelle Regine in the PCA office. 5:30-7pm.

C’Ville Arts 118 E. Main Street. “Playful Paper Creations” by Joanne Frazier. 6-8pm.

FIREFISH Gallery 108 Second St. NW. “Under the Big Top,” mixed media works by Kristin Rexter. 5:30-7:30pm.

The Garage 250 First St. N. “Gather Gatherer,” an exhibit of silkscreen plywood collage by Travis Robertson. 5-7:30pm.

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. “Ghosts of Logic,” multi-layered mixed media works by Ed Dolinger in the Sarah B. Smith Gallery; “Local Color,” a collaborative art show celebrating Charlottesville’s full spectrum of characters by 18 local artists in the Lower Hall Galleries; Artwork from 9 regional High Schools in the Upper Hall Galleries. 5:30-7:30pm.

Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. “Wax Lines,” sculptures by Mary Early. 5:30-7:30pm.

Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St. “Abstract Impressionist Paintings,” featuring acrylic paintings by Karina Bell. 6-8pm.

Telegraph 110 4th St. NE. “Prince Tribute Show” with screenprint posters by Michael DeForge, Sam McKenzie, Natali Martinez, Ming Doyle, and Kali Ciesemier. 5-10pm.

Top Knot Studio 103 5th Street SE. “Form and Freedom, Order and Chaos,” works by Wolfgang Hermann. 5-10pm.

Vinegar Hill Cafe at Jefferson School City Center 233 Fourth Street NW. Photographs of Charlottesville’s linen building by June Collmer. 5:30-7pm.

Warm Springs Gallery 105 Third St. NE. “Rhythm and Motion” by Joseph Holston. 6-8pm.

WriterHouse “Scratching the Surface: The Art of Printmaking,” a group printmaking exhibition. 5:30-7:30pm.

WVTF and Radio IQ Studio Gallery 216 W. Water St. “A Take on Spring,” oil paintings by Isabelle Abbot. 5-7pm.

OTHER EXHIBITS

Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society 200 Second Street NE. “Strong Men and Women in Virginia History.”

“Creperie Gallery” at The Flat 111 Water St. E. Recent paintings by Randy Smith.

Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia 155 Rugby Rd. “Jasper Johns: Early Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation,” “Portraying the Golden Age: Drawings from the Maida and George Abrams Collection,” and “Joseph Cornell and Surrealism.”

Green House Coffee 1260 Crozet Ave, Crozet. “Talking Landscapes,” oil paintings by Julia Kindred.

Hot Cakes 1137 Emmet Street N.  “Vernal,” photographs of local native wildflowers by Bill Mauzy.

Jefferson School African American Heritage Center 233 4th St. “Art History Remix,” paintings by Earl Gordon. Opening reception May 11, 6pm.

Kiernan Gallery 1709 Old Forge Rd. Photographs by John Grant, presented in the artist’s garden and studio. Opening on May 3, 6pm.

Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection 400 Worrell Dr. “having-been-there” by Nici Cumpston.

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Road. “Still Life and Other Subjects,” paintings by Trisha Orr. Opening May 16, 5:30.

Martin Luther King Jr. Performing Arts Center 1400 Melbourne Rd. “Charlottesville High School Faculty Art Exhibit.”

Piedmont Virginia Community College V. Earl Dickinson Building, 501 College Dr.  Student art exhibition.

Pigment 1229 Harris St. #13. “Summer Colors,” mixed media works by Sarah Boyts Yoder. Opening reception May 10, 4-6pm.

Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church 717 Rugby Rd. “Marriage, Love and Weddings” by Wendy Repass. Opening reception May 4, noon.

Trisha Orr’s complex, tour de forces of fabric, objects, and flowers have earned high critical praise for many years. They are beautifully rendered, dispassionate works, and they reveal very little about the artist except that she is technically gifted and admires beauty.

Growing up in a demanding family and going to art school in the ’70s, a challenging time for women, Orr was both striving for artistic excellence and mindful of keeping emotion in check. “I didn’t know if I could make the leap from talented art student to really good painter,” she said. “One way to do it, I thought, was to master technique. This concept of ‘mastery’ was central to my art making. It made me feel safe from attack, and I held back the emotion because women were widely considered too emotional to make good artists when I was starting out.”

After several decades painting in this manner, Orr grew restless. “I was boring myself to tears with the mastering stuff,” she said wryly. “I’d been looking around for a while, for other ways of working, and had done some paintings incorporating my husband’s [poet Gregory Orr] poems into them.”

In these early poem paintings, the words were somewhat obscured. You could sort of read them and sometimes not—you had to tease them out from the paint. “Then in 2009, I had an illness, and through the illness the experience of working with the poem paintings became much less about mastering and more about what the poems meant to me and how they opened me up,” said Orr. “I became a better painter.”

Collaborating (which they have done four times) has been inspiring for both husband and wife. At first, Greg worked off Trisha’s paintings. But for the love letter invitational at Second Street Gallery in 2006, Trisha decided she wanted to switch things around. At the time, she was having so much trouble believing in her paintings that the idea of them being creative fodder for her husband seemed somehow dishonest. A friend mentioned de Kooning’s tip about how, when stuck, one should go back to the grid, so Orr began making grid-based paintings finding an emotional equivalent to the meaning of her husband’s words in color, light, space, and paint.

Included in the show at Les Yeux du Monde through May 11 are the “body/soul” paintings made during Orr’s recovery. These depict various vessels: pitchers, teapots, and vases (representing the body) in fine porcelain, earthenware, and glass that contain flowers (representing the soul). She said that in these works she is exploring “the relationship between this thing that is of the earth and this other thing that comes out of it.” Her earlier still lifes are chockablock full, with every edge jammed against every other edge, but here, it’s a single object “gathering its atmosphere around it. It’s all about the relationship between this thing and its atmosphere, rather than things pressed so tightly together that they can’t breathe,” said Orr.

The “body/soul pieces,” the poem paintings, and her garden works all have dramatically different surfaces from her pristine still lifes. “Working with Greg’s work, I began to build up layers, trying to make the paint itself part of the story, which, somehow for me, it hadn’t been.” Orr uses a palette knife to lay down the paint, sanding the surface to create a scumbled effect that is pleasingly gritty. She likened these works to an urban wall where the graffiti and the posters and the crumbling seem to make something intentional “that absolutely seems to be talking to you—like, you.”

Re-energized and inspired by this breakthrough, the past few years have been a productive and joyful period for Orr, as she feels her way through her artistic journey, no longer so concerned with being unassailable. She’s learned to let go of the tightly controlled in favor of a more relaxed, open approach. “Sometimes, I have no idea what I’m doing,” Orr said. “At certain points I’ll just scrape the painting down, turn it around and work on it that way, keeping at it until it clicks.”

What really spoke to me was Orr’s artist’s book. It’s the ultimate breakthrough for someone once afraid of exposing herself. The incredibly personal work contains a series of sketches in ink and pastel of family photographs she found while clearing out her mother’s house. These rough, somewhat messy drawings pulse with vitality. Paired with Orr’s astringent commentary, they’re simply wonderful. Funny, sad, shocking even, they ooze humanity with an immediacy and rawness that reminded me of William Kentridge.

In this show, you get the sense that after years of trying to please others, Orr is finally pleasing herself. It’s exciting to see her pushing in new directions even as she retains vestiges of the old. “It’s not that I don’t want to work on complicated still lifes anymore,” she said (and there are several in the show). “I just think I’ll work on them in a different way.” One looks forward to what she’ll come up with.

If you’ve heard the name Jen Sorensen, it may be because she’s the 2014 winner and first female recipient of the prestigious Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning—or because she’s been published in C-VILLE Weekly for more than a decade.

“I went to UVA as an undergrad and wound up sticking around Charlottesville for many years after I graduated,” Sorensen said in a recent phone interview. “I think it was in 2002 that I wound up coming into the C-VILLE Weekly office for a meeting with Cathy Harding, the editor then. It was kind of scary, but she gave me a chance, and it was the beginning of my getting published by alt weeklies.”

Today, Sorensen’s work appears in The Progressive, The Nation, The Austin Chronicle, NPR, Ms., Politico, activist website Daily Kos, and alt weeklies around the country. She’s known for pointed observation of thorny issues like gun control, racism, income inequality, health care, and sexism.

After being a finalist for the Herblock in 2011, Sorensen told the Washington Post that she admired the prize’s eponymous artist because “he cartooned from a definite moral perspective—and a good one, at that. Too many daily editorial cartoonists go for the easy-breezy sight gag or contemporary movie reference without actually saying much. Herblock took the job seriously.”

Sorensen often tackles the telling of difficult truths with a strong first-person narrative. Her point of view is an easy stand-in for “the little guy,” oft-maligned by big business or murky government policy, and her careful explanations of complicated issues expose convoluted logic for easy scrutiny. The results are factually substantiated arguments for or against politically controversial subjects. Take her widely read 2012 piece “An Open Letter to the Supreme Court About Health Insurance.”

“I drew [‘An Open Letter’] right before the Supreme Court was ruling on the Affordable Care Act,” Sorensen said. “I just wanted to say that as a self-employed person I’d had a lot of problems with health insurance over the years. My husband got denied because he had plantar fasciitis. My insurance costs were skyrocketing.”

The piece went on to win a Robert F. Kennedy journalism award for editorial cartooning, and her 2014 follow-up comic, “My Experience with Obamacare: A Freelancer in Texas Applies for Health Insurance,” went viral after being featured on NPR.

“I was trying to combat some of the conventional wisdom about Obamacare and share a story that many people aren’t hearing,” Sorensen said. “Yes, it’s annoying that the website went down yesterday, but I think that pales in comparison to the benefit of people like me being able to receive care.”

Sorensen’s commentary ranges from coverage of Democratic conventions and Sarah Palin rallies to cartoons about “the coup against President Sullivan and the corporatization of higher education,” she said. It’s an evolution she might not have foreseen as an undergrad.

“When I got out of college my biggest influences were Robert Crumb and B. Kliban, people who had an absurdist sense of humor,” she said. “That’s how my strip started out in the late ’90s. Then the 2000 election came along, and the political climate changed so dramatically I felt compelled to draw about it.”

When asked if she misses creating lighter fare, Sorensen mentioned the book of Gary Larson wiener dog art she has lying around her house. “I look at all these fake paintings and think, ‘This is pure humor just for humor’s sake,’” she said. “I still love doing strips about pop culture and technology, but politics are an endless source of inspiration. I can’t help myself.”

Sorensen and Bob Woodward will speak at the annual Herblock Prize ceremony at the Library of Congress on April 29. See page 31 for this week’s comic.

 

*A previous version of this story mistakenly cited Pete Levin, not B. Kliban, as one of Sorensen’s biggest influences.  It also said that Gary Larson art appeared on her walls of her home instead of in a book.

“I recently saw a book of Picasso’s work where they published everything he did, and between two awesome paintings were about a hundred that weren’t so great.” Warren Craghead laughed with what sounded like relief. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, right. This is the real world. I shouldn’t feel so bad about myself.’”

The Charlottesville-based cartoonist has made a creative career of drawing “without thinking,” sketching by impulse during television shows, theater performances, even at stoplights. He also creates more careful and deliberate drawings but commits to execution above all else.

Incredibly prolific, with a pen in hand and pad in pocket at any given time, “I draw all the time,” Craghead said near the end of our phone interview. “I’m kind of drawing right now.”

We discussed a theory I’ve read in Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art: Artists need diligence, to do the work and remain divorced from the outcome. Waiting for the muse is for amateurs, Pressfield said. Consistency predicates success.

“Art doesn’t have to be a rarified space,” Craghead agreed. “I don’t have to go to a studio with my fancy paper and expensive pen. My batting average of good drawings is not better than anyone else’s, but I do more of them. It’s the way I process the world.”

Craghead draws in visceral reaction to the world around him, filtering news through sketches in order to assemble ideas into narrative coherence. “I see these horrible things on the news and feel powerless, so even though it does nothing in the real world I start drawing about it,” he said. His recent book, Untitled, is a collection drawn from images of victims of a gas attack in Ghouta, Syria, and all proceeds from it go to Save The Children’s Syrian Children’s Relief Fund.

Ladyh8rs, a Tumblr Craghead created and dedicated to “grotesque portraits of misogynists,” came to him when “they were contemplating making transvaginal ultrasounds a prerequisite to abortions in Virginia, and I got really mad,” he said. “Unfortunately there are always new people to draw.”

Craghead’s children, Violet and Ginger, are happier subjects of inspection. “Fauves,” a series of RGB-saturated children’s comics, records their actions and conversations in an attempt to capture “the crazy incandescence of kids.”

Not all of his work follows a theme, however. “I started as a painter, so I got used to confusion, being O.K. with chaos and not having everything nailed down,” he said. He often blends language with his sketches, approaching pieces like a poet. “People talk about comics and jump right to graphic novels, but words and images together don’t necessarily have to be a story,” he said.

In fact, exposing art to the world may be just as important as the art itself. “My work insists that art can be accessible, cryptic, and beautiful all at the same time,” reads Craghead’s artist statement, and his brand of “eco-lo-fi-publishing” makes it possible. He sends work out into the world—a concept he calls “seed toss”—as notes for his daughters’ lunches, free print-and-fold art books, drawings on postcards, and sketches on Post-Its that he leaves around town. “I’m sure most of them just get swept aside when someone cleans up,” he said, but permanence isn’t the point.

“Think about humans versus dandelions,” he said. “We gestate our young, these singular creatures, and take care of them for years. Some artists work that way, but there’s another way of looking at it. Dandelions release thousands of seeds. The majority don’t survive, but everywhere there can be a dandelion, there will be a dandelion.”

See Warren Craighead’s exhibit “We Are Waiting in a Forest” at WriterHouse through the end of April.