Tag: lincoln perry

Categories
Arts

Where to buy local gifts for art-lovers

John Borden Evans’ “Dead Oak at Night” is part of Les Yeux du Monde’s holiday offerings. Courtesy of the artist

Because of its resonance, giving the gift of art may be one of the most personal gestures you can make. Perhaps a painting or photograph reminds you of someone, aligning with their style, spirit or personality. Or perhaps it is a functional piece of ceramic that they can use in their daily life. We scoped out two local galleries to highlight art you might consider giving this season. 

McGuffey’s Main Gallery has been converted into a holiday shop with handmade ornaments, cards and gift tags lending a splash of festive red and a dusting of white to complement the art displayed on tables and walls. The annual Holiday Show runs throughout December and includes the work of nearly all member artists.

Rebekah Wostrel is a ceramics artist and sculptor whose earthenware cups, bowls, trays and porcelain plates and pendants are part of the show. She has been making pottery since she was 4 years old, when she lived in Gloucester, Massachusetts, next door to a Finnish potter she describes as “a ceramic cowboy.” Wostrel likes to continuously try new things, and her work runs the gamut from sound sculpture collaborations with her composer husband, to enlarged porcelain pacifiers, handmade porcelain plates and earthenware bowls with hand-drawn rock walls. “Porcelain is very finicky,” she says. “Everything’s a dance. Red clay is more forgiving. I’d lived in Virginia long enough [that] I had to use the red clay,” she says, having moved to Charlottesville 11 years ago. The rock wall motif on the earthenware, she explains, is her Virginia and New England roots mixing.

Another McGuffey artist, Jeannine Barton Regan, paints with encaustics, a heated mixture of pigment, beeswax and tree sap. “It’s a beautiful, organic medium that goes back thousands of years,” she says, citing the Egyptians and Greeks. “The resiliency of the medium is phenomenal.” Regan began her career as a watercolor painter because she was drawn to its “ethereal transparency.” But when she began exploring encaustic painting seven years ago she thought, “Here’s the transparency I’ve been looking for.”

Because of the nature of the medium, which requires heat, it’s impossible to paint en plein air. She gathers inspiration from being outdoors and then, “In the studio I try to recreate the feeling that I had, not so much the visual,” she says. “And that guides most of my work.” But beeswax has a mind of its own. “If it goes in one direction, I let it go there.”

Preempting the concern about the beeswax changing over time she says, “The temperature for melting the wax is around 200 degrees. There’s very little chance of change in the painting.” And the wax itself is impervious to tearing, insects, mold or light damage, which sometimes affect traditional paintings.

At Les Yeux du Monde the featured artist this month is John Borden Evans. Other artists’ work, including small watercolors by Suzanne Chitwood and Lincoln Perry, will be displayed on Sunday, December 18, and span an accommodating price range.

Evans, who began as an abstract painter, has been painting the landscape and cattle surrounding his house since 1980. He still paints like an abstract painter, he says, in that he’s most interested in composition and texture, less so in subject matter. Sometimes he begins by painting words or letting his grandchildren create the underpainting. Or he begins by painting “imaginary skies.” Some of these skies consist of large, circular stars, while others are tiny blue circles, as in “Lollipop Smoke,” the sky that took him three weeks to paint.

In one called “Starry Sheep” you can still see the faint words that came before the sky. They spell out the names of his two children: Eliza and Patrick. He then painted over the words to create sheep, and then the sheep became clusters of stars. He has even painted over some of his abstract paintings from early in his career. He has no fear or ego about painting over past work. “It’s fun to paint over old paintings,” he says. He works on several pieces at a time but each one takes about a year, from start to finish. “Then if you count painting over a painting, that’s 30 years,” he says, laughing. He paints in acrylic to explore the possibilities of texture, layering and sanding down to differentiate between landscape features. “I usually don’t have an idea of what it will be until I get to the end,” he says.

Art for sale

Holiday City Market

100 Water St., downtown Charlottesville

Saturdays through December 17

The Gift Forest

209 Monticello Rd.

Daily through December 24

McGuffey Annual Holiday Show

201 Second St. NW

Daily through December 31 (closed on holidays)

Les Yeux du Monde

841 Wolf Trap Rd.

December 18, and by appointment

Categories
News

Teaching moment: Renaissance tradition v. Title IX

Critics say this panel of Lincoln Perry’s mural in Old Cabell Hall is inappropriate. Art historians say it’s part of a long classical tradition, and should be seen in the context of the whole work. Staff photo

While Charlottesville debates a petition to remove the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, a quieter controversy has been ongoing at UVA about a prominent work of art.

One day after Rolling Stone came out with its now discredited “A Rape on Campus” on November 19, 2014, the Cavalier Daily wrote about artist Lincoln Perry’s acclaimed mural in Old Cabell Hall, “The Student’s Progress,” which depicts fictitious student Shannon’s journey through the university.

“Props to the University for knowing how to take a joke,” said the Cavalier Daily about one wall on the left staircase depicting partying students.

Subsequent coverage of the mural was not so amused.

Less than a week later, UVA music professor Bonnie Gordon took aim at the mural in a piece she wrote for Slate titled, “The UVA gang rape allegations are awful, horrifying and not shocking at all.”

Wrote Gordon, “The mural depicts, among other scenes of daily life at the University of Virginia, a male faculty member standing on a porch and tossing a mostly naked student her bra as his beleaguered wife comes up the stairs.”

That panel is in an alcove also on the stairs, and Gordon says undergrads who pass it are bothered and she’s seen parents shaking their heads at the painting. Nor is she a fan of the scene of the male student duct-taped to a column at the Rotunda in which a presumably drunk girl is being dragged off.

“I don’t want that mural in a teaching space or in a student space,” says Gordon. Nor is it the UVA experience she wants her children to experience, she says.

A committee was formed to examine the mural in January 2015, and it submitted more than one recommendation to the university administration, according to UVA spokesperson Anthony de Bruyn. A decision has not been made, he says.

The mural was commissioned in 1996, funded by a prominent group of donors. Perry worked on the piece for 16 years, and the final panels were unveiled in 2012, including the ones Gordon finds objectionable. “It would be different to me if it were in an art museum,” she says.

“Museums are teaching facilities,” says Richard Guy Wilson, who is chair of the university’s public art committee and a mural benefactor. Old Cabell Hall is a “preeminent art building” and Perry’s mural plays off the copy of Raphael’s “The School of Athens” there, he says.

“We will become the laughing stock of the country” if the mural is removed, he says.

Perry is “arguably the best mural painter in the country,” says Paul Barolsky, who teaches Italian Renaissance art and literature at UVA. “He’s a superb draftsman and storyteller and he painted an allegory of UVA.” The idea of removing the panel, says Barolsky, is “preposterous” and sets “a dangerous precedent.”

He asked his students to look at the mural. “They just shrugged their shoulders,” he says. “It’s not obvious. One thought it was streaking.”

He says, “If you start to cover up paintings that offend one person or another, where do you draw the line? Should I not teach Italian masters because of nude figures?”

Perry’s mural is a contemporary reinterpretation of the classical theme of the virtues and vices, which comes from a long tradition dating back to Plato and Aristotle and which may make some people uncomfortable, explains Lyn Warren, who owns Les Yeux du Monde gallery and who sells Perry’s works.

The artist is not trying just to paint some salacious scene, she says, and he balances good and evil, conflict and harmony. “That’s why it stays interesting,” she says. The mural is full of references to philosophy, literature and art, recreated in the context of Jefferson’s university, she says.

“It’s a masterpiece,” says Warren. “After Monticello and the Lawn, it’s one of the most important art works in this area. It’s one of the university’s greatest treasures.”

History professor John Mason is a fan of the mural and particularly likes the way it “mashes through the gentility that is UVA.” He likes the bacchanalia scene because “UVA can be uptight. It’s a feast for the eyes.” And he likes the satire in the work.

However, like Gordon, he finds the panel with the “professor and young woman clearly interrupted in hanky-panky” inappropriate. Where once, in what he calls “the ‘Mad Men’ era,” a university professor may have considered attractive female students a “perk,” he says, now there’s no faster way for a faculty member to lose his job.

“We shouldn’t smirk at it any more,” he says. “If it came today, no one would allow that panel. Times change, sometimes very quickly.”

Mason says he doesn’t have an answer about what should be done. “I’m not saying it should be painted over,” he says. “Do you offer the painter a chance to redo it? Do you make it a teaching moment?”

That’s a debate that remains ongoing. And while Perry declined to comment for this article, in a 2005 interview conducted by his wife, Ann Beattie, he said, “I was glad if people brought their own interpretations to my work.”