Tag: Fine Arts

Whether hanging on the walls of a Charlottesville hotspot or on display on the Downtown Mall, paintings by Kris Bowmaster are immediately recognizable. Not only does Bowmaster create pieces with distinguishable vibrancy and wistfulness, but he paints with a purpose that speaks.

Bowmaster’s upcoming show “Predator/Prey,” was inspired by photographs of animals attacking and consuming each other. He was especially moved by a particular photo of a lion on the back of a bison, triggering a sense of wonder at seeing two animals approaching what he calls “ultimate intimacy.” Indeed, as he put it, “how can you get closer to anything other than to ingest and digest it?”

Despite a lack of formal training, Bowmaster has been an avid devotee of many art forms including dancing, singing, and poetry for years. Dance often bleeds into his painting, both in form and process; in one specific methodology of his process he “approaches the canvas with paint on [his] fingers to perform [dance] gestures,” purely to implant the sensuousness and vehemence of dance into the strokes of pigment.

“Painting is violent,” Bowmaster said. “I’m constantly destroying what I’m doing and adding on to it.” The cathartic nature of his works reveals an aggravated and turbulent, but still formative inner dialogue.

When asked to elaborate on the thematic elements confronted in the ferocious depictions in “Predator/Prey,”  Bowmaster explained that it’s more an “exploration” rather than a thematic progression that necessitates a resolution, and that he is staying true to his convention of self-development with an audience. “It’s about people, not animals,” he said. He believes that one plays the role of both predator and prey upon reaching a depth of intimacy in a relationship, and that the roles are interchangeable and alternating.

Much of his artwork is his way of “figuring things out in front of people” and staying in touch with himself. “People should come before a painting and be able to feel that the artist went through something,” Bowmaster said. He dives head first into a visceral and primitive ideology and, in doing so, reorchestrates his perception of himself and his experience, promoting candidness and mindfulness in the midst of a separated and inhibited reality.

He explained that, in “Predator/Prey,” he aims to address the “precariousness of closeness,” and the idea that relationships are about surrender and “coming down the ladder” of power and autonomy to sink into coalescence and interrelationship. This theme will be further explored during dance performances with Charlotte James and Dylan Jacobs that will accompany the show opening on June 8.

Through his art, Bowmaster creates his own turn to be heard and delivers a message of great magnitude. “So few people get a turn to be heard in the world,” he said. ~Chelsea Blakely

Saturday 6/8  No cover, 5:30pm. “Predator/Prey,”  Performances begin at 7pm with Dylan Jacobs, Charlotte James, and Kris Bowmaster, followed by a poetry reading by Colotte Blount and a DJ Dance Party with DJ Bow and DJ Bristol  8:30pm. Milli Joe’s Coffee, 400 Preston Ave. 282-2659.

“The Civil War was a uniquely visual and literary war,” keynote speaker, Dr. Charles F. Bryan, explained Wednesday night at the Bradley T. Arms Detachment 1256 in Shadwell. The program, “Civil War Artist, Diarist, and Prisoner of War,” was sponsored by the Marine Corps League and featured the collection of Robert Knox Sneden, a Union soldier who produced nearly 1,000 watercolors and five volumes of diary entries during and after the war.

Bryan, President Emeritus of the Virginia Historical Society, spoke to a small but interested crowd, expounding on the life and work of the most prolific Civil War artist ever. Although the presentation, aided by PowerPoint images, was a fluid explanation of the man and the history surrounding him, there was little analysis of the artwork and the themes, both artistic and personal, running through the work.

An engineer from New York, Sneden helped map areas of Virginia and the old South that had never been drawn or configured before. In his spare time, he sketched battle scenes and landscapes, cities, like Charleston and Atlanta, and the army forts and stations he occupied. He also recorded everything that passed his eye or entered his weary mind, especially the details of daily soldier life, his prison sentences, and his observations of the brutal reality playing out around him.

“He seemed to be trying to put together a comprehensive history of the war,” Bryan said. Sneden returned to New York and continued to record his experiences after the war, contributing more than 30 images to the series “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War.” Struggling to keep a steady job and failing to get his diary published, Sneden retreated into alcohol and died in a soldier’s home in 1918.

The sketches (which were later turned into watercolors) are rudimentary and general depictions that display more of an architect’s sense of functionality than an artist’s sense of skill. His landscapes are full of rough lines mapping out space, as if surveying the scene, rather than capturing it and imprinting it with meaning. Yet it’s the overview of “View of Culpeper Court House,” with the lightly shaded horizon and primitively rendered buildings, that makes his work effective. His writing is cleanly descriptive, using words to sketch, and omnisciently observant or “clinical and unemotional,” as Bryan put it. His sober, unsentimental perspective lets us into a simultaneously personal and objectively historical landscape.

The collection, discovered in 1994 in a Connecticut bank vault, was brought to the attention of the Virginia Historical Society by an art dealer named Robert Hicklin. The breadth and the detail of the maps and watercolors was so unique that the VHS, headed by Dr. Bryan at the time, decided to buy them. The only problem was finding the money for a vast collection of Civil War art that was originally offered at $250,000.

The VHS bought 400 watercolors and maps for $100,000 in cash with the help of Floyd Gottwald, a generous and inspired patron. As it happened, Gottwald recognized his ancestral home in a painting of Leesburg, Virginia. The connection spurred Gottwald to insist that the VHS find out more about the man and his work.

Bryan’s search brought him to Snedens Landing, a hamlet in the lower Hudson Valley, 20 miles north of New York City. The initial inquiry came up empty, but he was referred to a great great-nephew of Sneden’s and learned that, stored somewhat haphazardly, were 500 more watercolors and a 5,000 page diary.

In 2000, Eye of the Storm: A Civil War Odyssey was published and edited by Bryan and Dr. Nelson D. Lankford. The illustrated memoir chronicles Sneden’s harrowing journey through specific campaigns, such as the Seven Days Battles and the second battle of Bull Run, as well as his time in Andersonville prison. A companion of mostly illustrations, Images from the Storm, was published a year later.

Sneden’s watercolors and writings can be accessed mainly through the books, but information about the collection is available on the Virginia Historical Society’s website (www.vahistorical.org), where exhibition schedules are listed.

Sneden’s work is also included in VHS’s exhibition “The Story of Virginia, An American Experience,” a wide ranging history of Virginia through its art.

No matter how you access Sneden’s work or feel about its value, experiencing one man’s complete perspective is as unique and important as the war he recorded. Thankfully, in an age where history is constantly turning to dust, organizations like the Virginia Historical Society and the Marine Corps League continue to preserve evidence of the Civil War’s personal toll and the artistic benefits we have reaped from the destruction. ~Justin Goldberg

If you’re in need of an instant mood-elevator, I suggest you head straight over to the McGuffey Art Center where dazzling light and vibrant color (and some pretty nifty painting) is on full display at a group show featuring the work of Karen Blair, Jessie Coles, Priscilla Long Whitlock, and Krista Townsend. Still lifes, landscape, animals, and urban scenes are all represented in this appealing show.

In her work, Coles describes a domestic life that is warm, rich and inviting. Just looking at her paintings, I know I’d like to spend time at her house. But above and beyond the pleasing vision her work presents, Coles’ paintings also have potency. “Energy and movement are the real subject of my work,” she says. She develops her paintings over repeated sessions, wherein scale may change, relationships alter, and “unexpected colors knock against each other creating an energy and excitement I never could have predicted.” These works are composites of repeated observations, not frozen moments in time. Coles’ rich impasto reminds me of Wayne Thiebaud and I’m not saying that just because of the cake. Seriously, you almost want to take a spoon and run it along the surface, scooping it up to eat. They’re that yummy.

I love Karen Blair’s riotous flower paintings that seem to explode with vernal energy. In “Poppies and Queen Anne’s Lace” she achieves an interesting, almost cut out effect, as if the flowers had been appliquéd on top of the turquoise background. There’s a more somber woodland creek and an autumnal scene of goldenrods that show Blair’s versatility. Don’t miss the exuberant “Poppies and Garden Hose” hanging around the corner in the McGuffey shop. I almost did. Big, colorful, showy, it’s a picture that captures the sensations of being in a garden buzzing with life: warm sun, moist earth, loamy smells. An admirer of Fairfield Porter, Blair seeks to balance abstraction and realism in the same way, “always asking how little information I can give and still convey the image.”

Almost abstract, Whitlock’s paintings provide ample opportunity for her to show off her dynamic brushwork, which varies from expressive little daubs to dramatic slashes of pigment. “My interest is the challenge of interpreting landscape into painted marks, shapes, and color,” said Whitlock. A plein air painter, she spends time “standing in the field, marsh or woods.” Yet she isn’t dogmatic about recording exactly what she sees, choosing to use a highly keyed palette of pinks, greens, lavenders, and yellows, exaggerating the hues found in nature. Her paintings are certainly pretty, but they also have a heft to them thanks to her audacious application of paint. I particularly liked how Whitlock moves from light to shadow and foreground to distance using color in “Plank Road Field,” and also the lively brushwork in the areas of shadow. Two of her pieces on view, including this one, are triptychs. Breaking up the work into panels objectifies it, further removing it from the realm of traditional landscape painting. The effect is accentuated by Whitlock, who paints the edges of the canvas using a single bright color to provide a visual break between the individual panels. With the exception of Coles, whose works are framed, the other artists also paint the edges of the canvas, in effect, “framing” the work.

Krista Townsend’s paintings range from the very small (6″ x 6″) to the very large (75″ x 36″) and from farm animals to urban scenes. She employs a bold palette with splashes of orange and expanses of hyacinth. An intense, almost bluish light floods her work giving it a freshly scrubbed look as if it had just rained. The effect reminded me a bit of the work of Icelandic American painter, Louisa Matthiasdottir. There’s also a hint of Hopper in these empty streets. (To me, her “Chinatown” seemed like an animated, updated rift on Hopper’s “Early Sunday Morning.”) It’s interesting seeing views of Charlottesville and the surrounding countryside, well-recorded fodder of other local artists (Richard Crozier and Edward Thomas, specifically) treated in a completely different way. Townsend works professionally as a medical illustrator, an occupation that demands exacting verisimilitude, so it’s notable that she is able to let go of this in favor of expression. Her training still stands her in good stead in composing her works, and in a painting like the extraordinary prepossessing cat by the steps, amber eyes glinting in the sun. Townsend has perfectly captured feline essence in this charming painting.

All of these women paint from nature, but they’re after something more than just an accurate rendering of reality. It’s “more about the physicality and energy of the paint and less about landscape as ‘scenery’” is how Whitlock puts it. Certainly, they all know how to produce widely appealing work, but these artists also know “from” paint. You get the sense that they revel in their medium. There is joy there with the end result being works that lure you in with their charm and hold your interest with each singular approach.

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.

Pablo Picasso once said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”  Local artist Nym Pedersen understood Picasso’s quest and long ago joined the master on the road to imaginative artistic expression. Of course, Pedersen does not literally paint like a child, but he has maintained that direct, unadulterated quality that so many artists lose after years of technical training. No, his forms are not perfectly modeled and his compositions are not flawlessly articulated, but Pedersen’s oil paint goes directly from the tube to the canvas. This lack of meditation results in work of resounding self-expression.

Influenced by pre-World War I German Expressionism, Pedersen shows us the absurd, the amusing, and the more sordid aspects of modern life. He does not make overt commentary on currents events, but they unconsciously seep into his eclectic collages. Sometimes the face of Andy Warhol converges with that of Sir Winston Churchill, sometimes his faces develop fierce teeth and stares, and other times the viewer cannot tell what is human or animal.  In whatever form, an infectious emotive quality is ever-present.

Pedersen explains yet another influence, “Making paintings and sculpture is a great joy, and in our twisted times feels like a privilege too.  I keep in mind the approach of many great jazz musicians when applied to visual art: paint what you feel.  And keep it free,” he said.

Like the great jazz masters of the past, he transforms his own introspective journey into abstract works that are ethereal yet honest visual expressions. His art is original and universal, touching all who experience it, showing life at its most vulnerable, yet most powerful.  He depicts that time before we are told what is beautiful, correct, proper, vulgar-when the playing field is leveled and no one hides who they are.

Pedersen’s new show, “Now and Then” opens with a wine reception from 5:30-7:30pm at the WriterHouse Gallery Friday May 3rd as a part of Charlottesville’s First Friday.  The reception is free and open to the public.

One of America’s great art connoisseurs and patrons, Paul Mellon was quoted as saying that he and his wife “almost never buy a painting or drawing we would not want to live with or see constantly.” Having cut his teeth on father Andrew Mellon’s renowned art collection (which formed the nucleus of the National Gallery of Art), Paul Mellon was graced with an extraordinarily refined eye.

This is evident in “Corot to Cézanne French Drawings from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts” now on view at the Fralin.

To create the exhibit, Director Bruce Boucher selected 55 works (from 75) that would say something about Paul Mellon because “each collection is in some sense a portrait of the collector.”

Boucher wanted to present the exhibition as if it would appear in a private residence (painting the room a soft green to help convey this), and to separate it out from the rest of the museum. The show follows a kind of thematic pattern starting with the earliest works (Ingres, Delacroix), followed by landscapes comprising three different generations of artist beginning with Corot, then Pissarro (the “father of Impressionism”), then Cézanne, who called himself a pupil of Pissarro. There are also equine works (11 in all), figure studies, and interiors.

The Ingres pencil drawing of the gentle looking Monsieur Jacques Marquet de Montbreton Norvins who, surprisingly, given his countenance and funny little dog, served as the general director of police in the Papal States under Napoleon, exudes a warmth that transcends its astringent precision.

Jean Baptiste Corot, the leading painter of the Barbizon School (named for the town in France where the artists gathered to paint), was a prolific artist whose work, though rooted in a romantic realism, anticipates plein-air Impressionism. Here, he uses subtle gray cadences to render his elegant, petite “Landscape (Paysage animé).”

Of the three Cézannes in the show, “Large Pine Tree, Study” is the most interesting. A preliminary drawing of a famous painting now in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, it is a striking rendition of a tree reduced to its essentials.

Two van Goghs provide particular insight into his development as an artist. Seven years apart, the first, one of van Gogh’s earliest drawings, is a highly detailed, even busy work. It features a deep perspective, yet has a flat quality that suggests the influence of Japanese woodcuts. The second one demands attention with its dazzlingly expressive lines and dramatic pointillism. A supremely confident work, it’s clear with this one van Gogh has removed the safety net and is soaring through the air.

There are a number of surprises with works that bear no relation to what we think of as a particular artist’s oeuvre: an almost primitive Delacroix of a narcissus, an uncharacteristically saccharine Toulouse Lautrec, a pre-pointillist Seurat and three Bonnards which exhibit none of the Les nabis style so associated with him. The small Bonnard “Still Life,” a late work (1932-1933) of the artist’s materials, is the one I would grab from a burning building.

Picasso’s “Jester on Horseback” is a masterwork of restraint in terms of composition, line and palette, but Picasso’s little blue horse in “The Horse,” a scrap of a drawing pulls at my heartstrings: There’s something moving about the lone horse lifting its head into the wind which blows back its mane. In the background, a windmill crowns the barren landscape. Delacroix’s beautifully drawn old nag in “Study of a Horse” is broken down and yet somehow still noble.

One marvels at Degas’ ability to convey so much with so little in “Seated Jockey” and “Jockey Facing Left,” using just a line or two to evoke an entire animal: “the presence of the absence of the horse,” as Boucher describes it. It’s no secret that Mellon, deep into the racing world, was a keen admirer of horse flesh and I like to think that it was the accurate rendering of the Arab steed (the ancestor of the thoroughbreds in Mellon’s stables) in Carle Vernet’s “Marmeluke on Horseback with Bow and Arrow” that appealed to him. Boldini’s “Young Woman Driving a Carriage” captures a wonderful vignette of a stylish woman driving a carriage, possibly through the Bois de Boulogne. The slapdash quality of the rendering seems perfectly in sync with the spirited scene depicted. It also makes me laugh because the horse has gone through the same glamorizing treatment as Boldini’s chic society clients.

There’s an interesting pre-Cubist charcoal still life by Juan Gris and a perfect, tight little Matisse of a repurposed tobacco jar, Finally, three delightful Vuillards that showcase his singular use of light and pattern and as Boucher puts it, his “wonderful way of compressing space.” Boucher seems particularly taken with the Vuillards; as we stand before the one of a woman trying on a hat, he sighs and says wistfully “I wish we could keep some of these…”

“Corot to Cézanne” The Fralin Museum at UVA. Through June 2.

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.

A Stitch in Time

Springtime typically begets a seasonal bedspread switch, and this eighth-installment of the Charlottesville Area Quilters Guild (CAQG) biennial quilt show offers the best of warm, vibrant, and lively linen inspiration. Transforming the East Rivanna Fire Station into a  hub of artistic activity and enterprise, the event includes a silent auction, displays of guild and chapter challenges—as if completing a quilt piece by piece weren’t a challenge in itself—raffles, and special exhibits of the guild’s craftsmanship. Purchase a quilt and support the work of local artists as you dream beneath a coverlet carefully stitched with love.

Saturday 4/6 10am-5pm and Sunday 4/7 $5 suggested donation,  noon-5pm. East Rivanna Fire Station, 3501 Steamer Rd., Keswick. 293-6722.

The Garage, newly renovated over the past few months, thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign, will re-open with a month-long show of paintings, drawings, prints, and cut-outs by Jordan Grace Owens.
The show is titled “People in Poses”—simple and accurate enough, but more complex than it seems. Owens’ works depict figures floating against blank or solid color backgrounds, but the poses are all relatively still, non-dramatic ones. They’re flat, but there’s also a subtle tension. Though the figures are cute and cheerful, their postures imply apprehension, shyness, or anxiety. They are self-consciously holding still, rather than comfortably at rest.
“A lot of my characters are caught in the middle of these weird gestures,” Owens said. “They’re looking off at something beyond the composition, or they’re extending a hand towards who knows what, or their legs are folded up in an uncomfortable sitting position.”
The paintings resemble old photographs, particularly 19th century ones in which the subjects would often have to sit intently for the duration of a lengthy exposure. The visual style is different— flattened, simplified, and brightened—and although the figures seem more modern, that feeling of posing is still quite present.
“I love old photographs,” Owens said, “partly for nostalgia and partly for aesthetics—the weirdly forced poses and the flattened shadows from years of degradation. Most of my full-color paintings do refer to specific vintage photos, but the line drawings are almost entirely made up characters.”
Her drawing hand brings to mind several cartoonists, including Lili Carré and the comics published by the now-defunct French collection L’association (such as David B. and Marjane Satrapi). Owens shares with those artists a simple, thin line and a fluid expressivity. “I’m definitely influenced by the visual language of comic artists,” Owens said. “I haven’t ventured into narrative work yet, but that’s something I’d like to get into.”
Her clean and simplified figures also owe a lot to folk art traditions, as well as artists influenced by those styles. She cites a teenage exposure to the work of Margaret Kilgallen as “the moment that something clicked…I started embracing my tendencies towards flatness over push and pull and individual moments over full compositions. I think her influence on my work is pretty obvious. I’m a fan of folk art, too, for the flatness, lines, patterns, solid color, and lettering, but really I’m a fan of so many art forms that have a practical, decorative, or story-telling purpose.”
Owens’ sensibilities make her at home on both sides of the increasingly vague barrier between high art and low, between gallery and boutique. It’s cute enough to sell in one context, yet credible enough to withstand scrutiny in another.
“I don’t make much of a distinction in my own work between art and craft, but I do promote my work on both sides of that line,” Owens said. “I might hang a drawing in a gallery one day, and the next day print it on a tote bag to sell at a craft show for 15 bucks. Coming from a graphic design background as well, I became pretty comfortable with the idea of art as product. And I think the line continues to blur as artists, more and more, promote their work themselves and carve out a DIY career via Etsy, Society 6, and so many other venues.”
The Garage will host a reception for “People in Poses” from 5 to 7pm on Friday, April 5.

Rock around
Fans of freeform radio are advised to mark their calendars and buy some blank tapes (or bookmark some URLs) in preparation for the upcoming WTJU Rock Marathon, which runs from April 8–14.
Four times a year, each of WTJU’s departments takes control of the airwaves for a seven-day, round-the-clock celebration and fundraiser, and this spring is the rock department’s turn. The marathon will feature live on-air performances by local favorites Invisible Hand, Corsair, Left & Right and Dwight Howard Johnson, as well as a remote broadcast at the Tom Tom Founders Festival.
The rest of the schedule is stuffed with carefully curated tributes to genres as diverse as ’90s techno, surf psych, and country soul, with shows devoted to beloved indie labels like Merge, Jagjaguwar, Flying Nun, and Sacred Bones, and the return of marathon mainstay themes like Brian Eno, Riot Grrl, and Funky Virginia. DJ Baconfat will spend two hours playing every song and band namechecked in LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge,” and there are shows themed around the much-sampled “Amen” drum break, and the history of noise music.
This author will be hosting a show dedicated to “Songs About Cars” (to follow up on previous years’ “Songs About Girls” and “Songs About Boys”), as well as a tribute to the recently disbanded group Emeralds. Rounding out the schedule are shows dedicated to songs from the years 1963, 1973, 1983, 1993, and 2003, each hosted by a handful of the station’s DJs.
The full schedule is available online at wtju.net, and the marathon will kick off early with a dance party at the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar on Friday, April 5.

Do you have a song request for the WTJU Rock Marathon? Tell us about it below.