Tag: Fine Arts

For years, people around the country have been participating in Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs), programs where locavores and the green-minded can subscribe to weekly shares of local produce. Now The Bridge PAI is launching its own CSA: Community Supported Art. “You already eat local; it’s about time you ART local!” is the slogan.

The program is based on a national model originated by Minneapolis’ Springboard for the Arts organization and is already used in over 20 cities. Fifty subscribers to The Bridge’s CSA buy a $200 share, which then goes to fund the work of four local artists, handpicked by a committee from a pool of over 45 applicants. The Bridge is hosting an event in November where the subscribers can meet the artists and see works in progress, and in December they receive a box containing completed work from all four.

“I think the biggest thing about that project is trying to lower the hurdle for people to collect art, to make it really accessible to people,” said The Bridge’s Director, Matthew Slaats. “It’s intimidating to walk into a gallery and just plop down $300 on a print of some sort. One of the hopes is that this program would sort of lower the barriers, and use this cultural model to get people excited about collecting art. There’s a bunch of them around the country that have been going on, so it’s exciting to see that here, and for us to be a part of it. And that’s something we’ll be doing every year, starting this year.”

The artists are sculptor and installation artist Aaron Fein, known for his long-running “White Flags” piece, which reproduces all the flags of the United Nations in white; spoken-word performer Bernard Hankins, host of the monthly Verbs & Vibes event (now relocated to The Bridge after a long tenure at Random Row Books); Terri Long, who makes collages and sculpture out of found objects (who recently had her wonderful Ex Ex Libris show at The Bridge in March), and illustrator Salena Hitzeman, a McGuffey Arts Center resident who makes accurate, evocative ink drawings from the natural world.

It remains to be seen precisely what these artists will produce for the CSA’s shareholders, but plans are already under way. In terms of how to translate Hankins’ work into a saleable object, Slaats explained, “We’ll be doing really unique events where the shareholders will get invited to a specific location, where he’ll be doing a performance for them. His work is very performative; it’s not enough, I think, to just have him write something down on a page and print it and give it to someone. We’ll do a series of short performances—you’ll get a text in the morning, show up at a certain site, and then we’ll record those, and edit them down, and give copies of them to the shareholders.”

According to Slaats the Bridge has sold 26 shares out of the 50. “We’re doing really well, and it’s only been three weeks,” he said.

For the buyer, it seems like a great way to meet and support local artists directly. But I was surprised when I saw the breakdown of the financial numbers for the project, in a copy of the budget that Slaats provided me. (It’s based on the model budget provided by Springboard for the Arts.) Only 40 percent of the $10,000 raised by selling 50 shares will go directly to the artists. The remaining 60 percent is retained by The Bridge, the majority of which goes towards operational and promotional costs for the CSA. Of the $4,000 budgeted for the artists, it will be divided four ways. And since each artist only receives half of their $1000 up front (the other half upon completion), that leaves them each with only a $500 budget to produce 50 pieces of art — which seems like a difficult arrangement for working artists.  One initially selected artist chose to withdraw upon realizing that the stipend being offered wasn’t sufficient enough to fund his proposal.

When I asked Slaats if he thought that budgeting arrangement would prevent artists from participating, he responded, “Yeah, totally. It’s kind of a limited program. There’s only so much we can give to the artists. We’re trying to cover the costs and promote them as much as possible. But one of the things we didn’t do a good job of upfront was telling the artists that they would get paid, and how much they would get paid.”

He’s already considered how to make the program better. “One idea for next year is that we’re going to switch it up, and have a higher price point, include eight artists, but lower the amount of production,” he said. “This year is a total experiment. We’re trying to figure out how this works in Charlottesville.”

Slaats feels that the program will go a long way in building goodwill within the art community. “This is also one way to make an effort to sort of rebuild the relationships with people, to rebuild some of the trust that’s eroded,” Slaats said. “For a long time, artists had been asked to give free work to the art auctions. This way, we can do it so that there is a stipend covering production and time.”

The meet-the-artist event is tentatively scheduled for early November. Shares are available through The Bridge’s website, by e-mail, phone, or in person at The Bridge. “I’m really looking forward to getting feedback at the end of the year, to hear how it all worked, and how good it felt for [the artists],” Slaats said.

Share your thoughts on supporting local art through CSAs in the comments section below.

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.

Born in 1878 in the town of Saint-Étienne near Lyon, France, Émilie Charmy was groomed for the proper profession of teaching. But Charmy, whom I had never heard of before the Fralin show, had other ideas, taking up painting instead. Initially, she focused on traditional scenes of domestic life in an Impressionist style. But, she soon began painting subjects that had been the province of male artists. One of the first paintings in the show, Charmy’s shimmering “The Salon,” c. 1900, features naked prostitutes in a brothel—though you might never know it, given the decorous soft focus with which they’re painted.

Charmy must have been something to set up her easel in a house of ill repute at age 22. At the time, female artists were banned from art classes with live models, so her behavior would have been deeply shocking. But from Charmy’s perspective, painting in a bordello was practical in that it provided access to the nude models she yearned to paint. One of the impressions that bounces off the Fralin walls, and that is borne out by this example, is how very ambitious Charmy is. Not in an obnoxious, dog-eat-dog way, but you can see how she constantly challenged herself. She wanted to be a really good painter and achieve equal footing with her male counterparts.

So instead of enchanting studies of women and children that would have been her expected lot, Charmy gives us a morphine addict. The figure in “Woman in an Armchair,” c. 1897-1900, reclines in a narcotic fog. A whisper of a handkerchief is clutched in her hand, and the tools of her addiction are on the table beside her. Charmy’s brushwork matches the mood. In the sitter’s daringly strapless dress, the paint has a leaden quality. Pushed across the surface with a palette knife it adeptly conveys the texture and weight of the velvet.

“Young Girl in an Armchair,” c.1900 presents a striking portrait of a child wise beyond her years. With an appraiser’s eye, she sizes up the viewer. The delicately rendered face is captivating, but what I like are the broad expanses of pigment, the scumbled gray of the dress, the vertical brushstrokes that compose the fabric of the chair and the lively treatment of the floor. There’s also an audacious blotch of scarlet in the background, a sketch of something—a saint, perhaps—under a Victorian bell jar. The color choices in this painting are so unorthodox—about as far as you could get from Mary Cassatt—and the bold treatment of the paint is, dare I say, masculine.

In 1902 Charmy moved to Paris. Here she encountered Matisse and his circle of Fauves (A.K.A. “wild beasts”) with whom she would work closely. Their influence can first be seen in Charmy’s “Still Life,” and “Flowers and Fruits,” both of 1904. In the former, paint is applied with joyous abandon to produce a rich pastiche of color. “Flowers and Fruits” is an exuberantly splashy painting that combines a heavily painted foreground against a blurred, almost watery pattern signifying background wallpaper.

Then there are Charmy’s infinitely appealing landscapes of Corsica where she travelled with her Fauves cronies. “Piana Corsica—Stone Pine,” 1907-10 conveys that hard-edged quality of the sun when a storm has passed through or is coming. The clarity of the townscape contrasts with the blurred indistinct middle ground of sea where agitated brushstrokes suggests choppy water. “L’Estaque,” 1910, one of four Charmy paintings exhibited at the famous Armory Show of 1913, is a paradigm of a South of France landscape. It gives you everything you need, sparkling light, lush palette, and vista of ocean. With very little, Charmy describes the distinctive vegetation, tiled-roofed architecture, and topography. Stripped down to essentials, the quite abstract “Corsican Landscape,” c. 1910, provides an interesting stylistic contrast and demonstrates that Charmy was in synch with the latest art trends.

There follows a wonderful assortment of paintings of women, both clothed and nude. While I love the chic fashionistas Charmy depicts (especially “Self-Portrait with an Album,” 1907-12, featuring herself in a striking navy dress against a terra cotta background), the nudes, which run the gamut from erotic to matter-of-fact, are fascinating—done from a woman’s perspective, as opposed to with the “male gaze.”

Seemingly caught with her mouth open as if in midsentence, “Self Portrait in an Open Dressing Gown,” 1916-18 is a remarkable depiction of sangfroid. “Nude Holding her Breast,” 1920-25 uses a calligraphic treatment to render the expressive face and also, in an elegant flourish, to describe the pubic hair. “Portrait,” 1921, featuring a clothed model has striking color and a wonderfully austere composition. Here, Charmy allows the woman’s arm to dissolve into her dress and I realized that she doesn’t spend a lot of time on hands in any of her paintings. Maybe she didn’t like to draw them, but it doesn’t really matter because she’s very good at suggesting them.

What I admire about Charmy is her inspired palette, her superb compositional sense, and her dogged determination to succeed as a painter on equal terms with male artists. I concur with novelist, Roland Dorgelès’ assessment: “Émilie Charmy, it would appear, sees like a woman and paints like a man; from the one she takes grace and from the other strength, and this is what makes her such a strange and powerful painter who holds our attention.”

The Émilie Charmy exhibit runs at UVA’s The Fralin Museum of Art through February 2.

 

Cynthia Burke is a local artist who paints in a style similar to that of Alex Gross and Mark Ryden. Her studio at the McGuffey Art Center is filled with inspirational objects, and dozens of quirky paintings hang on the walls. We paid her a visit to find out more about her work and her artistic vision.

Tell me a little about yourself as an artist.

Well, obviously I paint birds and animals. I never expected that I would be painting them forever, but there just seems to be no end to the subject matter. When I first started out here at McGuffey, I was painting these floor coverings, huge floor cloths, a type of early American craft that I updated to be more modern. Those were done with acrylic on canvas. From there, I moved them to the wall where I worked on them like tapestries. They were all representational and had a medieval feel, much like the Unicorn Tapestries of the late 1400’s. I always put animals in them, and then I started leaving the people out. I realized that I enjoy painting animals much more than I do painting human beings.

From there my work developed into a portrait style, very much in the line of medieval portraits similar to that of Hans Holbein and Jan van Eyck. I swear that I am reincarnated from the 1500’s or the 1600’s because whenever I need to be inspired, that’s where I go. That being said, I have never done a pet portrait, and I have also never painted an animal in its natural habitat. Somehow I feel that to get away with painting animals you have to do something really different with them. But I have been doing these portrait-style paintings for a very long time, and I love doing them.

Animals are very dignified, so the portrait medium feels right. There is something about staring into the eyes of an animal; if you stare into the eyes of a person in a portrait, you have such a clear feeling for who they are and what they are, but the longer you stare into the eyes of an animal, it feels as though you know less and less about it. You never know what’s going on in there. It’s fun to watch the viewers of my paintings staring into the eyes of the animals that I paint. They are immediately making up what is going on inside the head of that animal.

I had a show once where I painted nothing but chickens. The pieces were large ovals, and it was framed like a hall of ancestors. It was so much fun watching people look at the pieces because they were all going along the hall exclaiming, “Oh! This looks like my uncle, and this looks just like my aunt!”

Recently, I have started a new series that is going to have a lot more narrative in it. I’m trying to keep it open to the viewer so that they can create their own narrative.

Do you have any formal training?

Well, I was an art major and received my BA, but I can’t say that I really learned anything during that time. I’ve learned more through the process of painting every day.

What would you call your style?

I would call it fantastic realism. There is also an element of surrealism because it is very dream-like.

What is your medium?

I use oil paint and Liquin. If it is a smaller piece, it is always on board, and the larger pieces are on canvas. For me, that just works. Obviously, I also make all my own frames. I think framing is so important. And with these pieces, it just goes with the period to be a little overboard on the frames which is a lot of fun. For the bigger frames, I use a molding and there is gold leaf on the front and a subdued pattern on the sides.

What is your method of working?

That depends on what series it is. The ground is always a color, often pink or Prussian blue, which is a really wonderful base. But some pieces I put together piecemeal, whereas others I have done by completing the background first and then adding the figure later. A lot of that has to do with the subject matter as well. I paint very thinly in oil and I use Liquin which is a fast drying medium so I don’t have to wait. I can continue working the next day.

Why painting and not photography or another medium?

It doesn’t get more precious than paint. Hopefully, painting won’t die out entirely. It’s a little worrisome because photography seems to be very dominant right now. I just love painting. It’s a wonderful craft and it’s unfortunate because as people paint less and less, their knowledge of the craft also diminishes. It’s a craft, and I don’t want it to be lost.

Do you use photographic sources?

Yes. Usually, I use a whole bunch of photographs, many of which I have taken myself since I have traveled all over the world. I’ve been to Africa and the Galapagos Islands, South America, India, and a lot of places that offer a lot of beautiful nature scenes. China and Morocco have really influenced my work since I am very drawn to textiles and patterns.

How do you choose your subject matter?

Where does creativity come from? I’ve really been trying these days to not know ahead of time where a painting is going to end. I think you spend a lot of years trying to gain control of your medium, and one day you are controlling it too much. It can take a lot of the creativity out of the end product. It doesn’t leave the door open for surprise.

Recently, I never know where my work is going to go. I don’t do a drawing ahead of time and it’s more of a stream-of-consciousness process. It can take longer to complete a piece because one day you’ll finish up in the studio and you’ll say “Wow! That’s great. It’s been a really good day.’ And the next morning you come in and wonder “Argh! What was I thinking! That looks awful!”

How long does it normally take you to finish a piece?

I work in various sizes from very small to very large. I’m a fast painter and I can finish a small painting in two days, whereas the larger pieces can take me up to a month to complete.

How regular is your studio practice?

I’ve  always wanted to do art, and I spent quite a while trying to figure out how to make a living off of that, which is no small feat. I reshaped my lifestyle to get closer to the purest form of what I wanted to do. I started with a faux finish wall painting business. That was as close to being a painter as I could get. And it was very successful, so successful in fact that I realized I wasn’t doing my art. I didn’t have any time to.  Then for a while I was doing the floor cloths and tapestries while maintaining my business. But finally, I went cold turkey and started just painting. By that time, my work was starting to sell. I am a really hard worker, and I am here working every day. If you are going to be self-employed, you have to acknowledge that the buck stops here. Your only recourse, if you aren’t making it financially is to make more art! And get it out there! Plus, it’s what I love to do.

It would be very hard for me to do this from home. Because coming here is like going to the office. When you are at home, there is always something else you could be doing. But if you go somewhere else then you have to maintain regular hours because you are at work.

I also usually work in series towards a show. I have a show a year from now, so I try to work simultaneously on work to sell currently as well as work for my upcoming show.

Who do you consider to be your audience?

Being right here at the McGuffey is wonderful. I have been here for many years, and although people don’t come through here in droves all the time, First Fridays is a good time to meet new people. I also have work in a few galleries away from Charlottesville. Some of those venues I pursued and others found me. I also have a web presence.

There is a balancing act that I have had to get used to between painting what I want to paint and painting what the market demands. It’s a very fortunate artist who doesn’t have to pay attention to that line. Even extremely successful artists have to give some thought to their audience and what they want. I try to provide a variety of sizes, shapes, media, and content. There is a lot going on and a lot of options.

What is your favorite Bodo’s bagel?

You know, I’m embarrassed to say my favorite bagel would probably be the plain one.

With anything on it?

Nope!

You can see more of Cynthia’s work on her website, Studio Burke, or in person at the McGuffey Art Center near the downtown mall.

~ Rose Guterbock and Aaron Miller

The dreamlike encaustic collages of Lindsey Oberg currently on display at Mudhouse on the Downtown Mall have a soft, ethereal quality. The medium is unusual, and something not seen very often. It is indicative of an artist who has experimented with and fully understood her medium of choice. Although collage can often become flat and heavy, these paintings create vast spaces and landscapes with a surreal, kitschy mystical vibe.

The images are collages with thick layers of encaustic wax and oil paint on the surface. A variety of photographs and objects, some old and full of history, are embedded in the surface of the images.

The painting aspect in each image is minimal and apparent primarily in the animal figures and the atmospheric washes. The painting is good, almost great. While there is a sense of care in the craft of the painting, the animals often look copied from nature photographs. This makes the animal seem out of place, more like collage than painting. This is evident in the larger work which contains an elephant with odd dark shadows indicative of bright sunlight. It’s not bad, it’s more eerie, and begs the question “Why paint at all rather than only collage?”

Several of the images are fantastically executed. In one, a black bear peers over a small ridge in the bottom left of the image, at a fort of sorts, which has been constructed there by the artist. Each element is made with simplicity in mind and the composition is seamless. In another, beneath the layers of wax, doodles and sketchy drawings of building emerge, which are amazing and perfect for their contrasted purposeful marks.

Oberg does a great job of being wild and low key at the same time. Furthermore, her work is beautiful. Although a few seem arbitrarily aesthetic, which is to say highlighting design rather than content, the show is predominantly fun and immersive. Each poetic label is intriguing to read and allows the viewer to wallow in the artwork’s allegorical implications.

It is worth noting that The Mudhouse often has interesting artworks on display. Some shows have been more successful than others but this display is certainly a success. It  is nice to see a local gallery like Le Yeux De Monde working in collaboration with a local business to bring good art to the people.~Aaron Miller and Rose Guterbock

Material based sculpture can be immensely captivating, transforming everyday and unexpected objects through scale, quantity, and precision of assembly into breathtaking constructions. The untitled work of Hong Seong Jang currently installed at the Second Street Gallery falls into this category. Like many found object works of art, however, it struggles with the contrast between low quality materials and their re-purposing as a sculptural medium.

There are two aspects to the installation. Dark images on the walls appear to be scratchboards, a matte black surface with a silvery image peeking though. A closer look reveals a matte black surface with tiny strips of frosty cello tape layered one on top of the other to reveal an image. The small pieces of tape are crisp edged and architectural, they seem almost computer generated, like a 1980’s imagining of future graphics. The image is that of dark forests and clouds which swim into focus through an unusual play of light. The forests are lit as though a bright light shines into the trees on an overcast pitch-dark night.

These works are transformative, which is to say the medium is revealed only upon close inspection. The image of fluffy clouds seems like the work of a procrastinating office worker passing hours in his cubicle. The images seem to capture a feeling of haunted longing, with cold office materials imagining the dark natural world far beyond. While the works are beautiful and interestingly crafted, the images overall seem more meditative for the artist than interesting for the viewer.

Turning away from the images on the wall, there is a large installation covering the floor. Laminate squares lay side by side, each with a design gaudier then the last. Some of the laminate squares rise up to form short walls, small obstructions, or obstacles. They seem to be climbing objects in a child’s playground or the slick short walls of a bath house.

The artist’s attempted transformation of the space fills the gallery with a bright play of colors. However the initial sense of wonder fades quickly as the piece suffers from a lack of scale. The artist statement refers to the floor of the Sistine chapel as inspiration for the piece. The laminate squares stop abruptly leaving a large portion of the wall bare, which heightens the cheap feeling of the laminate and leaves the room feeling incomplete. While the artist may have intentionally done this to contrast the illusion of his installation with the nature of his materials, it diminishes the effect of the altered environment and costs the viewer the unexpected experience of an exotic mosaic tiled floor.

There is something missing, whether it be the a larger sense of extravagance, a complete and purposeful over-taking of the gallery space, or an understanding on the artist’s part of how to carry a message through. The piece is curious and engrossing, but it somehow manages to miss the mark.

~ Rose Guterbock and Aaron Miller

When you ask Brooklyn-based artist and graphic novelist Laura Lee Gulledge about Charlottesville, her upbeat voice turns nostalgic. “Places like the IX building were full of my people. People who cared more about what you did than where you went to art school. People who helped me make art.”

Creative community is the crux of Gulledge’s sophomore work, a young adult graphic novel set in Charlottesville. In Will & Whit, which Gulledge wrote and illustrated, a teenage girl must face her fear of the dark —and a family tragedy—when a hurricane knocks out power and threatens to ruin the carnival her friends have been building.

Gulledge, who lived in Charlottesville from 2002-07, based her fictional storm on Hurricane Isabelle, and the novel references several institutions that locals will recognize. The longtime artist and teacher chose details, like a flier for Moto Saloon, consciously. “In Will & Whit, I wanted to model a creative community for young people,” said Gulledge. She drew the grassroots Charlottesville that helped shape her own artistic path as “my little love letter to the creative scene.”

In her debut graphic novel Page by Paige, Gulledge explored the way creativity helps students understand themselves. Nominated for both the Eisner and Harvey awards and one of YALSA’s Top Ten Books for Teens in 2012, Page by Paige reflects Gulledge’s own experience as a teen.

“When I was younger, I could draw out my stuff even if I couldn’t say it. I could use pictures, not words,” she explained. “Now we work out our issues on paper so we can share them with other people.”

Gulledge describes herself as an instrumentalist artist, someone who makes art to convey an idea or teach a concept. “Education and art are the same thing,” she said. “I approach new stories, like the picture book I’m currently working on, as ‘what do I want to teach these little kids?’ Their brains are like sponges.”

Long before she wrote her first graphic novel, Gulledge earned her master’s in art education from James Madison University. She moved to Charlottesville to teach, working in the Louisa County school system for a few years. But the public school “felt really wrong,” Gulledge said. “We need creative people, but the outlets to teaching creativity [in schools] are getting squished and squashed.”

Once you acknowledge the complexities of the creative process, Gulledge said, standardized education looks one-size-fits-all, and you see “a disconnect between how we learn and how we teach.”

Conflicted by her chosen career, she left the school and took a job in the furniture store The Artful Lodger. Flexible hours allowed Gulledge to start making art for herself. “You can’t teach someone else to be an artist if you aren’t an artist,” she said, “so I started experimenting. I lived in this renovated motel room near the railroad tracks, and I painted murals. My first art show ever was held at Fellini’s, and I was, what, 26?”

It was a happy time, and Gulledge immersed herself in Charlottesville’s collaborative art-making scene. But as local venues like Traxx, Starr Hill (music hall), and the IX building disappeared, Gulledge and her friends began to look elsewhere. “People told me I should go to New York to make connections and discover my niche,” she said. “Even my boss—she liked working with me and knew I was good at my job, but she told me ‘this is my dream, not yours. You should figure out your dream instead of playing it safe.’”

In 2006, C-VILLE Weekly’s readers voted Laura Lee Gulledge Best Artist. A few months later, she packed her bags and “took 2007 as my science experiment year.” She spent a few months with the Junior Art Club in Ghana, West Africa, as a volunteer art teacher in elementary after school programs, and then she moved to New York.

“As an artist you need help—a docent, a cheap living situation, a spokesperson, something—you just can’t do it on your own,” Gulledge said, and when the redhead became an au pair, she discovered it to be true. “The children’s mother was one of Leonard Bernstein’s daughters, and we were on the same wavelength about so many things. That young people need to express themselves, that creativity belongs in education.”

Her new mentor gave her a gift that would change her life: her first graphic novel. “For years, I’d only worked in sketchbooks,” Gulledge said. “I had spent years trying to figure out where my oh-so-personal-metaphorical drawings fit in, from self-publishing zines to gallery shows,” and graphic novels were the piece of the puzzle she didn’t know she’d been missing. Like the heroine of Will & Whit, Gulledge discovered that “once I stopped trying to control my life, everything got easier. Like trying to swim upstream versus just floating.”

Not that life as a working artist is easy. She’s worked as a scenic artist for department store Christmas windows, an interactive event producer, and a body painter for burlesque dancers. She also does publicity tours for her novels. “It’s a long game, the comic industry. You have to keep plugging away and going to shows and conventions,” she said. “But it’s also much more soul-satisfying.”

These days Gulledge practices education-
in-process through therapeutic illustration and collaborative art projects. “When people use their hands, they just open up. We need to use our hands. It unplugs all this other stuff.”

In her work, Gulledge reminds us that art is not self-indulgent, not trite. “As kids, we all naturally make stuff. Until age 7 we sing and tell stories. It’s how we’re wired, it makes us happy. In fourth grade we put ourselves in a context and start censoring ourselves, but you’re the only person who is qualified to write that book. It’s one little volume in one small corner of the huge library of human experience, but only you can do it.”