Tag: Fine Arts

Feel free to slurp, I’m a big fan of slurping,” said Alp Ilsin of Budala Pottery in Belmont. So I slurp. Loudly.

We drink a lot of tea out of exquisitely crafted pottery—tea cups or mugs, some with handles, some without. We drink so much tea I have to sheepishly excuse myself a few times during the interview before my bladder explodes.

Ilsin pours more tea from his one-of-a-kind teapot into one of his signature teacups, and it occurs to me that he gets to eat and drink out of beautiful, hand-crafted pottery on a daily basis.

“There’s no way I can drink out of a regular mug now, right? It’s such a repulsive experience for me, I would rather just not have anything,” he said, laughing. “I don’t know how people necessarily do it. But at the same time, I didn’t think about it until I got into it.”

Ilsin is part of a new generation of local ceramic artists drawn to a scene that began in the mid-’70s. After decades of being consigned to craft markets, pottery is catching on again, in part because it’s an age-old practice that intersects with our everyday lives. You can call it a craft or an art, a skill or a medium. The potters I interviewed for this story learn from and teach one another. Their work is turned into vessels their friends eat and drink from. They compose forms from spit, clay, water, and fire.

“Pottery is a lifestyle as much as it is anything else. You’re not going to get rich doing that but it can be very satisfying,” Tom Clarkson said. “And I like the tradition of the village potter, you know, making pots for people as favors, for friends to use.”

Clarkson, who is well-known as a kind of father-of-pottery in town, opened his studio in 1978 and then began teaching ceramics at Piedmont Virginia Community College. His pottery proteges include Ilsin and Suzanne Crane of Mud Dauber Pottery in Earlysville, among others.

Along with Nelson County pottery guru Kevin Crowe of Tye River Pottery and potter Nan Rothwell of Nan Rothwell Pottery in Faber, Clarkson has been here since the inception of the present day potter community in Charlottesville and the surrounding areas, back when such a community was non-existent. As I dug for the roots of the pottery scene, nearly everyone I spoke to asked me if I had spoken to Crowe yet. If Clarkson is the teaching father of the community and Rothwell its mother, then Crowe is the high priest. He arrived in Nelson County in 1976 at a time when people wanted to get back to the earth, back to living off the land and self-sustaining.

“I wasn’t very interested in being self-sufficient,” Crowe said. “I was interested in making pots, and the only way I could afford to do that was to buy a piece of land really cheap and build my own house and studio, and I didn’t know how to do either one of those, but when you’re young, you have got this beautiful nexus of complete ignorance and overconfidence.”

So he built a house. And a studio. It took four years, during two of which he lived in a tent on the property and went three-and-a-half without electricity. And this was the guy who was not very interested in communing with the earth.

“I think that regardless of who we are, where we are, every artist is looking for their voice, and you already have it,” Crowe said. “You need a certain amount of time in solitude to hear that voice and work with it, and that’s another challenge in the digital age, because we’re so available that it’s difficult to create a space in which you’re uninterrupted and can actually be comfortable being alone with yourself.”

Back to the land

When I went to visit him at his home, Crowe’s beautiful earthy mugs, plates, and bowls lined his kitchen shelves.

“I like the idea of making objects that will support the ritual of sharing a meal together,” said Crowe. “And in that conversation about the relationship we have with each other, about what’s on the plate, all those things are a byproduct of actually slowing down to be attentive to the experiences that we’re having at the moment, almost like civil disobedience in this vast age.”

The potters’ everyday use of their own work makes it clear that pottery is different from many other art forms. Over the past four decades, Crowe’s property in Nelson County has certainly given him solitude and the space to create, but it has also given him a site for his kiln.

Firing the kiln only happens twice a year, but when it does, it is a momentous occasion. Most potters fire a few hundred pieces at a time, but Crowe’s wood-fired kiln holds a couple thousand pieces of pottery which take 10 days to load. The firing itself can last eight days, but the real fun begins when the crew shows up around the fourth day.

“For us, stacking the kiln is just as important as throwing the pots,” Crowe said. “When we throw them and they’re ready to go in the kiln, they’re only barely half done. Everything is contingent on the stacking and the firing. And in my case, it’s really contingent on having a really good crew.”

Crowe’s crew ranges in age from 18 to 73, and now after his 25th firing, about 60 percent of the crew come from the Charlottesville area. The process requires eight people, two at a time working six-hour shifts. The firing is meticulously planned so that each pot interacts with the flame, but at the same time, because each piece of burning wood is different, so will each pot be unique and impossible to duplicate.

“You have to surrender to something larger than yourself when you’re firing a wood kiln,” Crowe said. “You’re firing everybody else’s pots and not just yours. There’s an element of surrender, there’s an element of magic and surprise, but all that is also based on careful planning, careful stacking, and understanding what a combustion cycle is.”

Here the world slows down to tending to the kiln and spending six hours with one other person while the rest of the world sleeps. The world created by Kevin Crowe and his crew during that week of firing is about delicious vegetarian food, laughter, renewing relationships, and making pots.

“What unites everybody is the pots, the firing. So you have younger potters starting out on their aesthetic journeys talking to people who have been down that road a long time, and I think it’s really great for the younger potters to see we older potters still as excited as they are about the possibilities,” Crowe said. “That that creative process matures and it gets richer but it doesn’t really wane much. That desire to go back and get it right will keep you coming back to the kiln time after time.”

Potters value this ethos of sharing between generations in a way that perhaps other types of visual artists do not.

“I have friends who are painters who say, ‘Painters don’t get together and share recipes or talk about places to sell,’ and I think the overwhelming ethic among potters is ‘get it right and pass it on,’” said Crowe. “Because everything that I do is the result of having received information and techniques from the old ones that are long gone, and passing that on to the next generation is my responsibility.”

Rather than hoard their personal recipes for success, potters of that founding generation in Charlottesville truly want to spread their knowledge around.

On a weeknight in late November, local filmmaker Brian Wimer gathered a large group together at the Al-Hamraa restaurant in the Ix Building to share his vision for the future of the space.

The Ix is a large complex south of Downtown which has housed dozens of business and art projects since the original Frank Ix and Sons fabric factory closed in 1999.

Wimer, along with arts patrons Beatrix Ost and Ludwig Kuttner (who is one of the owners of the building) and sculptor Christan Breeden, hope to transform a large part of the space into an art park.

While the idea of a publicly accessible, privately funded art park is a laudable one, I had a great many reservations about the idea. Foremost is the concern about how the project might affect the surrounding community. All around the country, art initiatives have been used as the vanguard of gentrification in impoverished neighborhoods, appealing to higher-income transplants and driving up property values while driving out long-time residents.

Intentionally or otherwise, could the same thing happen in Charlottesville? Wimer’s presentation repeatedly cited projects like the Burning Man festival in Nevada and the High Line in Manhattan, but both of those projects cater only to the interests of the wealthy. What about people who don’t have as much time and money to devote to the arts, like many living in the nearby neighborhoods?

It’s clear that Wimer has his heart in the right place—at the meeting, he repeatedly cited the need for a space that was not based on commerce, noting that “the Downtown Mall works very well, but if you’re not paying, then you’re not necessarily always welcome. And you don’t necessarily always have a place to sit down.” The attendants of the meeting were almost entirely people of privilege—the group was racially diverse, but almost all of the attendees had a college education or higher, and were all already heavily involved in Charlottesville’s arts community.

A month after the meeting, I sat down with Wimer to discuss those concerns, as well as his broader vision for the project, and what form things had taken in the interim.

Wimer, tall, bearded, and wild-haired, comes off as a cross between a motivational speaker, a cheerleader for the arts, and a madman. But beneath his talkative, enthusiastic demeanor lies many insights about how the arts can break barriers and build communities, and he cites numerous examples from his extensive travels around the world.

“Each of us have different notions of what the place that we want to live in is gonna look like, feel like, act like,” said Wimer. “It’s our dream place—some of us have to move away to find that. But a lot of us have ties here, and say, ‘When is that place gonna happen, the place that everyone’s been talking about?’”

Kuttner is donating a majority of the vacant property on the Ix site to the project, which now has a steering committee of five members. But despite the free rent, the project will still have many expenses. “Our funding expectations are still somewhat nebulous,” Wimer said. “It could be anything from $40,000 to $40 million, depending upon the scope of what we intend to happen.”

Wimer hopes the project will be in alignment with other current plans for the city such as the Create Charlottesville arts study, the Strategic Investment Area development plan, the proposed re-design of the Avon Street Bridge, and the talk of “daylighting” the Pollock’s branch underground stream.

“We’ll want to give an honorarium to the artists who are involved,” Wimer said. “We’re going to need money for the resources to build. All of it’s going to cost something. But we’re trying to see what’s that balance, because I don’t want it to be that you can only have art and culture if you have $40 million.”

He also hopes to involve local schools, ranging from the public schools to PVCC to UVA to private high schools. “Really, all it takes is the combined will of enough people,” he said.

At the same time, he also hopes to find local artists whose creative vision can guide the project, give it coherence, and creative credibility. “We didn’t want to create something that was designed by committee,” he said. “Because I think that the role of artists is to provide vision. Artists provide a vision that is outside our scope of knowledge right now.”

Wimer said one potential idea involves bringing in picnic tables and asking the community to help paint them, with the hopes that a new lunch spot will make the space inviting.

“If we surveyed the immediate residents of the surrounding property, the first thing on the list would probably not be, ‘what we need is an art park,’” said Wimer. “So we have to kind of start from saying, ‘we’re creating something that is not on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.’”

Wimer also plans to hold regular events to keep the space active and busy, rather than vacant and “sketchy.”

“Hopefully, with respect and ownership, the community will self-police this space, to a certain extent,” he said.

Wimer said his collaborators have also cited concerns about local homeless occupying the building, but he sees that as just another opportunity for community outreach. “God forbid, there might be some homeless people who have some incredible skills!” he said. “And it isn’t like, ‘let’s put them to work,’ but let’s allow them to utilize their skills in a community-building effort.”

Wimer is candid about how he fits into the equation. “I come from a privileged place, and I have a lot of opportunities, and I believe that I can do anything,” he said. “But I’m a privileged white guy in America. I can believe it, because I’ve already got several steps ahead.”

Seeing the project through holds personal value for Wimer. “We can live in a world of fear, and just build a wall around yourself and protect that, but that’s not a community that I want to live in, and I don’t think that’s a community that’s healthy.”

Share your suggestions for the Ix building in the comments section below.

Gift-giving season inspires the creativity in all of us, though Pinterest DIY fails are a painful reality for most. Discover talented local crafters at the C’ville Holiday Craftacular, a two-day show featuring handmade gift items by regional artisans. Unique items from hand-woven chainmail and forged jewelry to homegrown herbal beauty products and handbags, as well as children’s clothes and toys will be for sale. A portion of all proceeds will benefit Piedmont Council for the Arts so you can support local small business and engage the creative arts—no Mod Podge or paintbrushes required.

Friday 12/13 & Saturday 12/14. Free, Friday 10am and Saturday 9am. CitySpace, 100 Fifth St., NE. 971-2787.

The “Dean Dass: New Paintings and Works on Paper” exhibition on view at Les Yeux du Monde offers the double pleasure of Dass’ luscious landscapes paired with his more mystical media-rich works on paper.

A professor of printmaking at UVA, Dass took up landscape painting in 1994 while on sabbatical in New Hampshire. He was drawn to the austerity of the “lonely” northern landscape, an affinity that continues to this day in his paintings of Virginia, Ireland, and Lapland.

Dass seems drawn to transitions of seasons and times of day and he’s very good at conveying them. He paints places (beaches, marshes, riverbanks) where color is naturally restrained. Umbers, grays, lavenders, and olives are his hues of choice, and yet Dass is not shy when it comes to water and light. His blue is dazzling and dead-on in “Mechums River.” And so too are his reflections on a wintery pond, and the peachy glow of the rising sun lining the horizon of “Allendale Pond.”

The paintings are abstract compositions of brushstrokes, which coalesce into a recognizable scene at a distance. “Caherciveen” is a blurry, nearly non-objective work that somehow resolves itself into a seascape that could only be Ireland. “Lake Michigan” is basically an abstract study of gray lines, and in “Blue Hole” Dass blocks out snow and rocks using a dynamic pattern of jagged splotches of pigment in white and russet.

Dass is a master of atmospheric effects, which add mood and veracity. “Stream Above the Upper Moormans” captures one of those moments that is both crystalline and hazy, with sunlight filtering through misty air above the river.

These are contemplative works evoking stillness, quietude, and a reverence for nature that recalls 19th century notions of the sublime. But unlike 19th century artists who focused on majestic scenery, Dass chooses ordinary scenes of nature available to any of us if we wander into the woods, pass by a marsh, or stroll on a beach.

His lyrical approach draws attention to the beauty and numinous quality dwelling in serene, often overlooked, corners. Looking at these works, one understands there is more going on here than just a beautifully painted landscape. I think of Emerson and Thoreau and am reminded of the great art historian Barbara Novack’s thesis concerning the deep spiritual significance of the land for 19th century Americans and how, in essence, without a religious art tradition in America, landscape filled that role with contemporary artists acting as interpreters of and conduits to the divine.

At the same time that he was producing these potent odes to nature, Dass was also working in a more stylized direction with his “Clouds” series. Begun in February 2007 when he was in Finland on the bleak Russian border, these works on paper harken back to his earlier prints. Indeed, Dass said, “They are what have happened to the prints. They’re a continuation of something I’ve done ever since the ’80s.”

Using kaolin (white porcelain clay), marble dust, and titanium white pigments, he applies what he describes as a “heavy mineral slurry” between layers of the delicate Japanese papers to build up the surface and add texture. He also uses inks to add diffused color—the “memory of a color”—flowing in different, unexpected ways “much like sediment flowing in a stream,” and creating the curious radiating cloud shapes. Dass thinks of them as creature-like and has said they are about love spreading in all directions.

While you or I might see two distinct bodies of work with different styles, media and technique in his clouds and landscapes, Dass acknowledges this dichotomy, but maintains that the two are closely tied. “It’s always been the question that everyone asks, that I ask myself, even,” said Dass. “What am I doing, what are these two things going on? But formally they’re coming together more, though that’s not something I focus on.”

From Dass’ perspective the two subjects are natural choices. “The clouds take place in the heavens and the landscapes are on earth that’s really how I think about it,” he said. “The two kinds of painting—clouds and landscapes—keep outflanking any definition of what I think they are or are doing. I think they are slippery categories.”

Despite the stylistic and technical differences of the work, gallery director Lyn Warren noted a link: “Even though Dean works in so many different media, from oil to prints, sculpture, and books, they all have something similar. I think it’s the quality of light, something evanescent maybe. I find it interesting how he almost wants to reverse certain properties: his clouds are earthy, made with minerals. They have more weight, symbolically, visually and physically than the paintings. Yes, they’re on paper, but they’re put on panel so that makes them heavier. The paintings end up looking more ethereal than the clouds do.”

On a chilly Friday in late November, Ross McDermott of the Charlottesville Mural Project gathered a large group on the railroad crossing at First Street to dedicate the organization’s newest mural, designed by local artist Kaki Dimock.

The mural’s theme is the Rivanna River, a subject originally proposed by Rose Brown of the organization StreamWatch, who contacted the Mural Project with the idea.

“We knew we had to find an artist that would do a good job of representing the life that might be represented in the Rivanna, if you could go underwater and look at it,” McDermott said, “and I immediately thought of Kaki Dimock—she’s the perfect artist. She usually involves the animal kingdom, and often underwater scenes as well.” Development on the project took two years, and was sponsored by StreamWatch, the Rivanna Conservation Society, and the Rivanna River Basin Commission. “Public art really takes the whole community to make it happen,” McDermott said. “This mural was funded by a Kickstarter campaign, that raised $11,000—we were only going for $8,000, but we raised 11. And we had over 150 people from the community give money to support this mural. So this really is a group effort from our community.”

Facing the train tracks on the back of a Pilates classroom may not seem like the ideal spot for a large public mural, but the First Street crossing, located two blocks south of the mall between ACAC and South Street does get a lot of heavy foot traffic—after the dedication, I spotted three different acquaintances who happened to be passing by. Its location, and sufficient distance from the Historic Downtown zone, frees it from needing the approval of the Board of Architectural Review, who have clashed with McDermott over specifics in the design of past murals. Matt Pamer’s 2012 design for “Kingdom Animalia,” at West Main Street and Sixth Street, underwent multiple revisions before approval. Dimock’s is the fifth public mural for McDermott’s project, and seventh overall, if you include the two recent murals at Buford Middle School and St. Anne’s Belfield.

Dimock is indeed a great choice of artist for the subject. She’s well-known in the local art community, often working in ink and watercolor, and her work is more masterful than it might appear at first glance. Rather than perspectival representation, Dimock extrapolates from a child’s style of drawing landscapes. A pseudo-cutaway with a river basin at the bottom and the elements drawn in proportion to their significance rather than their visual size are executed with attention to detail and a composition that recalls pre-Renaissance European religious and iconographic painting. “The animal world is drawn in huge, out-of-perspective format,” Dimock said, “because I think that’s how important the animal world is.”

The central design element of the mural depicts the shad species of fish, which recently returned to the Rivanna after the Woolen Mills Dam was removed in 2007. “Shad are a bellweather species,” Dimock said. “They only live in waters that are really clean, well-oxygenated, the right chilly temperature, moving at the right speed. So it’s an important indicator of our success in restoring any given river, whether the shad want to come back and live there. In this image, the shad are back and the other fish are welcoming them there. You’ll also see that there’s a giant squirrel celebrating above Monticello, there’s a squirrel driving a tractor, there’s a frog eating a donut. The design really evolved over these incredible conversations with people who know about the river, and know about the species that live in the river, and then we took great creative liberties with that.”

Like so many other local art projects, the mural also received assistance from developer Gabe Silverman, who passed away last month. “[Gabe] was a longtime supporter of the mural project,” McDermott said. “He donated a free space for us to paint this mural, off-site, because we couldn’t paint it right next to the railroad tracks. We’re very grateful to him and his support for the arts in Charlottesville.”

Because the location is so close to the train tracks, it took a bit of convincing. “We had to work closely with Buckingham Branch Railroad, who at first didn’t like our presence on the tracks,” McDermott said. “But we worked with them, and we’re thankful for their cooperation.”

The project was also covered by an insurance policy under the city’s Neighborhood Development Services thanks to Jim Tolbert. Blue Ridge Builders Supply donated Benjamin Moore paints at a discounted price. “It was painted on a cloth called parachute cloth, and then basically glued to the wall in one day,” McDermott said. “There’s four long panels, and we sliced it up and pieced it back together, with the help of some good installers.” The initial installation date had to be postponed because the weather on the initial date made it too cold to apply the glue.

On November 22 McDermott and Dimock led a dedication ceremony for the mural, along with several representatives and sponsors of the project including Robbi Savage of the volunteer group the Rivanna Conservation Society, Marvin Moss of the state organization the Rivanna River Basin Commission, and David Hannah of StreamWatch, all of whom spoke at the dedication. In addition to many of McDermott and Dimock’s friends and supporters from the arts community, there was a surprise appearance by a class from the nearby Village School, whose students brought handmade signs bearing pro-environmentalist messages about water conservation.

See more by the Charlottesville Mural Project.

I was completely captivated by Millicent Young’s radiant show at Chroma Projects. Composed of horsehair and found wood, Young’s work thrums with nature and speaks to ancient mysteries that our modern selves can only dimly grasp.

“The known, the unknown, and the unknowable is a trinity that has been with me a very long time,” Young said. “What is folded into this work, the mystery is also the unknowable. I am interested in contributing to the vocabulary that will tell a new collective story: a new mythology that redefines mystery, sensuality, beauty, stillness, and imagination as crucial to our earthly co-existence.”

For Young, the mythology we’ve had in place for thousands of years is failing us. “We are now on this precipice of destruction,” said Young. “Something is wrong here and so in thinking about a new mythology, I thought to myself ‘we can’t possibly know what that is,’ but we have to go into that place of not knowing, that place of uncertainty, that place that every artist goes into, and every mystic goes into.”

Young began clipping chunks of hair from horses of hers that had died as commemorative relics. She continued this practice in the remote part of the Piedmont where she used to live, snipping off parts of the tail of a deer she’d come across that had been slaughtered in a wanton, rapacious, and illegal way (out of hunting season), as a means of honoring these wild beings, later incorporating the fur into brushes and rope.

One day, after the hanks of horsehair had been hanging around her studio for quite some time, she decided to incorporate some of the horsehair into a wooden sculpture she was working on. At first, it was an ancillary material used like string to bind the work together. Gradually it moved to the forefront as she began to see the potential of the material, the process of gathering it, the way it behaved, how it responded to light, and the rituals around washing, preparing, and finally using it.

Perhaps because we’re accustomed to it—seeing it in violin and cello bows and such—horsehair has none of the creepy overtones we get from human hair woven into Victorian funerary jewelry or hung in great clumps in installations by contemporary artist, Sheela Gowda. Horsehair is clean, pure, and quite simply beautiful, with a peculiar evanescent quality that makes the strands almost seem lit from within.

Young stresses that her fascination with horsehair didn’t stem from her being a horsewoman, although she has ridden all her life—that was kind of irrelevant. She is drawn to it because of its physical quality and she uses it in her work as a potent stand-in for nature.

“We live now in the wake of a Cartesian paradigm,” Young said. “The loss of stillness, imagination, critical thinking, and sensuality are collateral damage in the epidemic of global destruction we have wrought. Collectively, we continue to behave in our destructive ways in spite of the facts. Art and Earth define us as human beings. The rupture of connection with either renders us senseless and therefore only brutal.”

For Young, art is the answer to this “narcosis that numbs us.” Transformative, art—both the making of it and the experiencing of it—gets us back in touch with our inner selves. Young has turned her back on technology, embracing a natural rhythm and approach. Her work is labor intensive and in toiling on it hour after hour, drilling holes, threading hair, pulling knots, she produces work that “forms itself” and “contains the precise moment, emotion, thought, and gesture of its making.”

Looking at the ethereal “Not Known (continuum)” and ravishing “Not Known [(un)furl],” I’m not quite sure what it is, but there’s a “thereness” there. A poet friend of Young’s calls it “the large,” the thing that is greater than the self. I hesitate to use loaded terms, but I will venture to say that it’s something quite holy: the presence of the absence of the horse—and as Young would hope—of nature itself. I was reminded of an article I read in The New York Times (“Where Heaven and Earth Come Closer,” Eric Weiner, March 9, 2012) about the Celtic concept of “thin places” where the distance between heaven and earth is particularly narrow, affording a glimpse of the divine.

“Sit in this extremely uncomfortable place of what’s going to happen next,” said Young. Staring at the blank page if you’re a writer, at the blank canvas if you’re a painter, or for a sculptor basically you’re sitting in an empty space without even materials and that’s the space of not knowing.”

Aside from the elegiac feeling we get looking at these pieces knowing what we know about the state of our fragile planet, perhaps their inherent holiness has something to do with the fact that Young was working on them as her father was dying. Having been through that journey, ushering a beloved parent (actually two) from this world into the next, I can tell you it is a sacred task that brings you right up against the thin membrane separating our existence from that unknown other.

The Garage is primarily recognized as a fun offbeat downtown music venue. However, if you squint and peer behind the lead guitarist, or stumble past on your way to your car on First Fridays, you discover the space also curates monthly art shows. While its shows are fairly difficult to access (the space is closed for the majority of each month), I have found the work on display to be consistently fun and intriguing.

The most recent show at the Garage is a new group of paintings/drawings by Clay Witt. These works have a different feel than his recent show at Second Street Gallery. They depict atmospheric white spaces inhabited by bears, mammoths, and tumultuous erupting steam jets. While they still have the artist’s immaculate attention to surface and texture, they seem more quickly and less preciously resolved. In some paintings, the strong mark-making creates an immediate and emotive legibility, reminiscent of  inked children’s book illustrations. Ursa I and II as well as Danae I and II display this with an etching-like quality.

In some of the larger paintings the graphite marks feel slower and more timid. To compare two polar bears, the slow thin lines in The Meeting are not quite as captivating or emotive as the thick textured hair-marks in Ursa I.

This being said, Witt’s work is gorgeous, and it is brilliant to see new approaches enter his process.

~ Aaron Miller and Rose Guterbock

Craft lovers, get ready to hit the road for the 19th Annual Artisans Studio Tour, a self-guided visit to local studios exhibiting artists works and processes around Charlottesville and the surrounding counties. Showcasing 38 of Virginia’s finest artisans, the tour includes demonstrations, opportunities for hands-on experience, and displays of pottery, furniture, weaving, jewelry, stained glass, clothing, baskets, wood turning, and more.

Saturday 11/9 & Sunday 11/10. Free, 10am. Various locations, see artisanstudiotour.com for details. 295-5057.