Tag: Fine Arts

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.

Frederick and Lucy S. Herman began collecting drawings as college students, and over the ensuing 50 years amassed a considerable collection of more than 250 works on paper that showcase the myriad techniques and approaches within the field. Produced between the years 1530 and 1945, these drawings run the gamut. There are religious and genre scenes, portraiture, landscape and social satire. Visual interest seems to be the common thread linking them. Executed in chalk, pen and ink, gouache, or charcoal, some are informal sketches, others studies for paintings, and still others are stand-alone works of art.
UVA’s Fralin Museum of Art features a selection of drawings from the Herman’s sizeable collection curated by McIntire Department of Art’s Lawrence O. Goedde. Most of the works were donated to the museum in 2006-07 for the instruction of the University’s students. Working with the drawings has enabled art history students not only to examine original artworks, but also to gain an understanding of the role drawing plays in the creative process. Here, the research done by graduate and undergraduate students has resulted in important new discoveries pertaining to the attributions and subject matter. The collection should also naturally serve as a vital teaching tool for studio art students; how better to learn techniques than by seeing them so consummately employed?
Beginning with the elegant “Study for St. Kunigunda,” c. 1528-1532, attributed to Hans Holbein the Younger or his workshop, which depicts the courtly saint regarding a jeweled cross. It’s a wonderful record of 16th century fashion, beautifully drawn and highly detailed right down to the many rings that grace St. Kunigunda’s fingers. Nearby is “Young Man from the Rear, Holding a Distaff and Spindle,” Anonymous c. 1510-1550, a drawing that has been pounced (pierced along its lines) so that it can be readily transferred. This technique was used to place the outline of an image on a surface that would later be painted and also in woodcuts. Given the subject matter—the man’s lost his pants and carries two items (spindle and distaff) that were signs of women’s work, as well as evidence of his emasculation, one could imagine that it would be made for the latter purpose with multiple versions of this cautionary tale disseminated. However, according to the wall piece, no such prints exist.
Moving from bathos to pathos we come to the figure study for “And the Sea Gave up the Dead Which Were in It,” 1882-1884, by Frederic Leighton. Though it is a study, the placement of the three figures has the gravitas of a finished work and the tortuous rendering of the shrouds’ drapery seems to provide a metaphor for the tortured state of the souls.
Luca Cambiaso’s “The Arrest of Christ,” 1570-1575, is astonishing. The figures have a severe, modern quality and their movement—literally blown off their feet by the force of the energy emanating from the Christ figure (depicted by radiating lines) is unexpected. Across the room, Cambiaso’s “Two Figures” is more conventional, but as a quick study has an appealing immediacy and fluidity.
The “View of the Piazza San Marco,“ early 19th century, by Giacomo Guardi was evidently made for the tourist trade. It’s a charming little Venetian Valentine, a precise rendering of the piazza’s architecture with perfect little dots of paint describing the people walking about the square. Above, delicate clouds drift against a cerulean sky, smoke floats up from a chimney and on a rooftop one can spot clothes drying on a line. Delightful, small references to quotidian existence in this iconic place.
Claude Hoin’s “Portrait of a Man,” 1770-1790, is not only beautifully rendered, but is an extraordinarily sympathetic portrayal of an individual. It’s a fitting work from the Age (albeit the tail-end) of Enlightenment.
“The Four Disgracers: Icarus, Phaeton, Tantalus, and Ixion,” Anonymous c. 18th century is a heroic depiction of the masculine form. Seen from below, the figures seem to tumble down through space at us.
An unusual nocturnal scene, “Pastoral Landscape with a Peasant and his Flock at Night,” c. 1760-1771, by Philip James de Loutherbourg, features white chalk used with deftness to create the effect of moonlight. It’s a stylish, evocative piece.
For those familiar with Francois Boucher’s saccharine paintings, his “Farmyard Scene,” 1733-1766, is refreshingly down to earth, drawn with confidence, simplicity, and dash.
Other works of note include Tiepolo’s “Head of a Youth,” Tomas Ender’s “Study of Trees with Three Figures in a Landscape,” c. 1815, Carl Friedrich Schulz’s “Faust in his Study,” 1822, Caspar Johann Nepomuk Scheuren’s “Hermit Reading in a Mountain Valley,” c. 1840-1850, and Nicolaes Pietersz Berchem’s “Winter Scene on a Frozen Canal,” c. 1647.
“Traces of the Hand” presents a rich and varied survey of drawing, adeptly making the case that drawings have the power to give you a more intimate understanding of an artist than any other art form. It’s as Goedde says in his accompanying text: “In contrast to paintings and sculptures… drawings record the movements of the artist’s hand, and through these traces of the artist’s touch, we can decipher hand, eye, and imagination coordinating in the intensity of the creative moment itself.”

Through May 26 “Traces of the Hand: Master Drawings from the Collection of Frederick and Lucy S. Herman”/The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia

One’s first impression of Anne Chesnut’s exhibition “Art.i.facts” at Les Yeux du Monde gallery (through April 7) is of rich colors, bold images, and dramatic compositions. On closer inspection, one sees interesting juxtapositions of images and it becomes clear something deeper is happening here than just fetching artwork. Information is being conveyed on a particularly cerebral plane.

Chesnut, who received her MFA from Yale has supported her artistic career through her work as a highly-esteemed graphic designer and her images have a polished quality that owes much to design. While drawing “remains at the core of what guides and informs my art,” she loves letters and numbers and switching back and forth between fonts, which confirms a lively cross-pollination between avocation and vocation.

Some of Chesnut’s prints are stand-alone works; she also produces series that range in number from three to 63. These vary from the elegiac “What Remains: Bolivar,” focusing on the destruction of Hurricane Ike to the Bolivar Peninsula in Texas, to the constellations (where her dogs, both living and dead, are immortalized), samplers, quilts and the “Summer Dressed” series. Within each print Chesnut combines disparate images taken from the wealth of drawings, photographs, and graphic elements she has produced over time. She uses animals and birds, constellations, seashells, flowers, and typography (with often autobiographical connotations) to create visually rich and enigmatic works that run the gamut from the microscopic to the astronomical.

“The sources of imagery and meaning for these prints are drawn from personal experience. My surroundings supply imagery, and my graphic work analyzing word and image, has introduced additional forms, symbols, and references.” She also draws on a rich science-based iconography featuring botany, ornithology, entomology, genetics, and astronomy and adds dashes of whimsy and political commentaries into the mix.

Using both familiar and exotic, even arcane images, Chesnut connects them much like a poet connects words, playing with the symbolic and visual links between them, achieving a kind of symmetry that expresses an awareness of simultaneous dimensions. The images and their interplay have an immediate visual appeal while referencing other more intangible concepts. Chesnut starts with something simple like a number, or letter, and runs with it. For example, the number four leads to heart chambers, blood groups, the four points of the compass and ink colors. A rose is a photograph of a rose picked from her garden, but also an amusing Chesnut-designed emoticon and a Gothic rose window. Like Chinese boxes, her works keep opening up to reveal more and more. Gallery director Lyn Warren said, “It’s very easy to enter Anne’s prints from different points. You can come at them from the standpoint of subject, concept, or visually. The more you look, the more you see.”

Chesnut uses both actual and faux stitching to divide up the surface. The hand-sewn approach has a practical side, enabling her to produce larger compositions, not possible given the limitations of printer size. But on a more symbolic level, she is stitching together not only the physical pieces, but also metaphorically she’s stitching the different concepts together. In some works she achieves a quilt-like effect and she has a whole series of “Samplers” (a modern version of “women’s work” according to Chesnut), which gives her ample opportunity to play with letters and numbers—key elements in traditional samplers.

The digital process allows Chesnut to merge traditional techniques with new artistic approaches. Working in the graphic design field Chesnut was conversant with emerging digital technology early on, and became interested in using it “to explore and exploit properties not previously available.” From the beginning, she saw digital printing as a means to make new discoveries rather than as an expediter of tasks. Once archival liquid inks and paper could be used in digital printing, Chesnut embraced the medium wholeheartedly.

It’s an equalizer of sorts giving the same visual weight, sense of texture and depth to, say a photograph as a drawing. Here, the end result is sleek and smooth. Chesnut says she’s interested in creating works “that push at the edges of what is possible with new media and seek to redefine old processes. Each individual print is a digitally manipulated composite that mixes traditional media, my drawings, prints, and photos, with images and symbols I have rendered digitally to make something entirely new from the images, patterns, colors, and textures.”

I must confess I was a little leery when I read “digital prints” while researching this show, but Chesnut won me over with her imaginative and innovative use of the medium. Her expertise with print technology enabled her to see its potential early on, and her strong artistic background means she uses it in a most creative manner, producing work that is visually satisfying and laden with significance. “It is my hope that the final images composed of many elements—whether old or new, detailed or abstract, anecdotal or scientific—will engage the viewer to find their own narrative or reaction to the shared images and experiences, whether true or fictitious.”

Through April 7/“Art.i.facts”/Les Yeux du Monde

Allyson Mellberg and Jeremy Taylor are not only two of the best contemporary artists in Charlottesville—or anywhere else, for that matter—they’re also two of the sweetest and most thoughtful people you could meet. Their work draws from nature, cartooning, modern art, and the contemporary craft movement, and their carefully composed drawings, paintings, prints, and soft-sculptures depict a conflict between the natural world and the man-made. “Hareball,” is their most recent collaborative show.

Mellberg’s easily recognizable work is usually centered around drawings of androgynous, tomboy-ish girls; in “Hareball” they can be seen drowning in their own hair, with small mammals clinging to their faces, or vomiting mouthfuls of earthworms. Posed like portraits, they seem both blasé and somehow coy, despite their gross afflictions.

Taylor’s work is less stylistically consistent, occasionally incorporating geometrical patterns or a more cartoonish line, but much of his work draws from, and subverts, the history of natural illustration. In Taylor’s paintings and prints, deer, rabbits, and seabirds are involved in a range of violent or disturbing scenarios. A deer anxiously paws at its antlers with a hind leg, trying to dislodge clumps of honey. A pelican opens its beak to reveal a rotting human face. A realistically drawn deer is decapitated, and has a cartoon cloud emerging from its’ neck-stump.

Their larger subject is the natural world and the violence done to it by humans, but they avoid the bombastic tone of political or propagandistic imagery, opting for a more subtle and poetic approach. The overall tone is dismay, or resigned disappointment, rather than terror or distress.

There’s a deadpan humor that comes from the juxtaposition, which is subtle but effective. And although occasionally a shopper looking for a cute animal-printed tote bag will turn away in revulsion after taking a closer look, there’s much more to their art than a facile or juvenile mash-up of cute animals and violent imagery. Their delicate sensibilities give equal weight to the handsome and the gruesome, with significant overlap.

“It’s not just irony,” Taylor said. “ Both of us try to be sincere, and sensitive. I’m not sitting there thinking, ‘Deer are cute, deer are hip right now, so I’m going to draw deer,’ but it’s also not just a one-liner, like ‘zombie-apocalypse deer.’ It’s more nuanced.”

“In Jeremy’s work, all of his animals are really dignified,” Mellberg said. “Their eyes are really human. You identify with them beyond just seeing them as animals. The reason Jeremy uses the animals that he’s using isn’t because they’re cute, it’s because those animals are prey.”

“There are a couple of pieces where nature is retaliating,” Taylor said. “There are animals eating people, animals having revenge. I’m interested in putting yourself in the position of nature. In some ways there’s a lot of humor in that—like, you’d never see a deer with a human’s leg hanging out of it’s mouth in reality. That one’s actually kind of a reference to Robert Gober, with the legs coming out of the walls—I think Robert Gober’s work is funny. It’s also peculiar. There’s a lot of different emotions in there.”

Working closely over the past decade, Mellberg and Taylor have developed personalized, intertwining, ever-evolving networks of iconography. They share and exchange motifs, including strange growths, dark clouds, thick sludge, coral, and fungus. Their styles inform each other’s work, and it can take even their most dedicated followers a while to learn to distinguish between their individual pieces.

“We met in ’02 in grad school at UNC in Chapel Hill,” Mellberg said, “and we started making work together halfway through our first year.”

“We got married pretty soon after that,” Taylor said, “so we had to make our wedding invitations together, and everything from that point forward has been collaborative. We both have our own solo exhibitions—she’s had a really stellar solo career, showing at places like Galerie LJ in Paris, and Cinder’s in New York.”

“Our two-person shows are my favorite shows,” Mellberg said. “I know his work, I love it, and to able to walk around in it, through it, with my work is really cool. And we get to do bigger projects by working together.”

Self-conscious about the paradox of using synthetic materials to depict the natural world, and wary of the health hazards and environmental effects of paints, emulsions, and solvents, they began making their own inks and dyes. “We started growing pigments in our garden. We’re learning how to process them,” Taylor said. “It takes time to iron out the details, to learn how to get the consistency right.”

“When we first started making art, we knew the materials were unhealthy, but we weren’t really aware of any alternatives,” Mellberg said. “That’s why we’re writing a book about sustainable and non-toxic art materials—not just for our own work, but we’re educators too.” Both are art instructors at James Madison University, and Taylor also teaches at Piedmont Virginia Community College.

Mellberg and Taylor’s homemade art supplies are available via their online Etsy shop, and their show “Hareball” is on display at The Honeycomb through the end of March.

Do you source art supplies from nature?  Post your answer 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.