Tag: Lyn Warren

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Arts

Les Yeux du Monde steers away from traditional media

“The Livestock Marker Show” featuring recent work from Russ Warren (above), Kathy Kuhlmann and Gwyn Kohr (below) is on display at Les Yeux du Monde through July 15. Courtesy of the artists

On the second floor of Les Yeux du Monde, artist Russ Warren takes stock of his latest project. It’s a series of bulls drawn using livestock markers—paint sticks used to label cattle and farm animals. Gallery director Lyn Warren points out two piles of discarded chunks of the oil-based markers, fluorescent and accumulating on the floor. Several columns of Roman numerals drawn in permanent marker on a wooden desk count Russ’ progress—an “unsophisticated numbering device” that Russ borrowed from Emily Dickinson’s Collected Poems.

“It’s not organized,” says Russ. “I have no idea of knowing how many I’ve done. I’ll do more. I’ve easily surpassed the 100 mark.”

Painter Gwyn Kohr introduced Russ to livestock markers when she and multimedia artist Kathy Kuhlmann took lessons in his studio several years ago. Kohr lives on a farm with cattle, and when she learned the livestock markers could be used for art purposes, she bought all 16 colors. While there are more than three times that many colors in conventional kits of paint sticks used by artists, Russ and his students felt drawn to the livestock markers. Each marker costs about 75 cents (one-10th the price of the average oil paint stick from brands like Shiva or Winsor & Newton) and takes about two days to dry—allowing Kohr, Kuhlmann and Russ to experiment with the medium.

“The three of us have all utilized [the markers] in a very different way,” says Kohr. “The fact that they aren’t expensive gave me the creativity to play with them and not feel like I was taking a risk.”

Each artist’s unique exploration of the medium comes to light in “The Livestock Marker Show” at Les Yeux du Monde, on display through July 15. Despite the marker’s heavy quality and garish palette, every piece in the exhibition achieves a dream-like airy lightness and surrealistic, complex expression of color and texture—both paying homage to, and betraying, the humble origins of cattle paint sticks.

Kohr employs it “like a crayon on top” of her paintings, she says. After creating an acrylic underpainting, she builds linear, yet three-dimensional texture using modeling paste, then layers on the livestock marker. In Kohr’s “Les Fleurs” series, her additive process creates a wash of texture and color reminiscent of a well-loved pair of dark denim jeans. In “Infinite Rhythm,” one can easily envision this act of adding layer after layer in the painting’s mosaic of lines and circles—some such a vivid white that they appear to be made of mirrored glass at first glance. It’s a five-foot constellation and tapestry of circles and lines that come together to infuse the piece with movement and dimensionality.

Whereas Kohr’s process of using the livestock markers adds layers of paint and clay, Russ and Kuhlmann’s approaches incorporate more reductive processes. While Kuhlmann’s background is in textile clothing design and dyeing, she got excited about the process of photo transfers after taking a workshop that focused on the form.

“Photo transfer can be whatever you want it to be, from a picture that you took and put on a mug, to getting experimental with it,” Kuhlmann says.

With many of Kuhlmann’s photo transfers, she begins by painting an acrylic or watercolor wash on a substrate—anything from an aluminum panel to a clayboard. She then pastes a black-and-white or color photograph on that surface using a gel-based medium, lets it dry and tears away the remainder of the photograph’s original paper. On top of that, Kuhlmann gets color from the livestock markers on her fingers and rubs it onto the piece’s surface, then seals the work with layer upon layer of buffed cold wax.

“I enjoy the process and the ‘What happens if?’ quality,” she says. “It’s kind of like cooking. You want to put the love in there. With the layers and all the time I spend on it, I’m putting that part of me into it.”

Russ also infuses a part of himself into his series of livestock marker bulls. He grew up on a cattle farm outside Houston and raised his youngest daughter in the junior rodeo circuit, and feels like a “surrogate parent to steers.” For his most recent series of bulls, Russ looked to artists like Rufino Tamayo, Jean Dubuffet and Picasso for inspiration.

“I love the way the livestock markers work. It’s a give and take,” he says. “It’s angst and scraping on the surfaces of the paper. This is the perfect medium to respond to those artists. I chose that path.”

Though Russ says he likes each bull in his 120-plus series for different reasons, he points to “Bull LXVI” and “Bull LXXI” as two of his favorites due to their “childlike” quality.

“Of all the mediums I’ve worked with, the livestock markers are really fun,” Russ says. Kuhlmann, Kohr and Lyn Warren all use the same word to describe the medium—fun.

“I take them seriously but they’re humorous,” says Russ. “They’re not forbidding to the viewer. They’re not that boorish kind of seriousness.”

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Arts

Review: Les Yeux du Monde shows brilliance in black and white

Ivy Naté (work above) is among the artists featured in Les Yeux du Monde’s “Expressions in Black and White.” Courtesy artist

With “Expressions in Black and White” at Les Yeux du Monde, gallery director Lyn Warren brings together four artists whose work spans a range of media, from soft sculpture to monotypes, and offers juxtapositions of technique and style that are both visually interesting and thought-provoking.

“For this show, what really inspired me was the materials. I’ve been looking at new materials and how to use them to inform new processes,” says sculptor Nick Watson. “I’m trying to add some things in a more interesting way.”

Watson works from preliminary drawings and directly from the materials, which consist of a variety of metals, wood and acrylic. “The finished piece never comes out the way the sketches look in the beginning,” he says.

The recent UVA graduate is employed by Charlottesville’s Monolith Knives, which manufactures artisanal knives. “Working with the knives has instilled a finer attention to detail…helped me to slow down and not rush through things,” he says. “Knife-making has also expanded the range of materials I’m comfortable working with.”

It’s clear that Watson values craftsmanship. His “Ave” mounts to the wall so that some of the mounting hardware becomes the piece and the rest is hidden, and “Heavy Moon” features a zinc disk pierced by a copper chain that suspends a sideways pendulum. A kinetic element runs through much of the work. Some, like Watson’s mobiles, actually move, others suggest movement through the thrust of a shape.

It’s hard to resist Ivy Naté’s animals. Her inside-out IFFMs (Inanimate Furry Family Members) are made, “exactly how they sound like they’re made,” says Naté. She works exclusively with stuffed animals that have been thrown away, characterizing them as “unaccepted items that I have chosen to accept.”

Naté’s IFFMs are hapless, vulnerable creatures you want to cuddle, and thanks to their surprised bug eyes, somewhat creepy. You’re attracted and also a little repelled by them. This tension continues with mixed-media works that have been dipped in a plaster-like material rendering it into something brittle and hard. The outer shell adds a degree of gravitas to the work that’s no longer recognizable as a child’s toy. The forlorn little “Owl” with wings outstretched pulls at your heartstrings and the “Owl in Costume” is laugh-out-loud funny. Naté works with restraint, doing just enough to create artworks that are imbued with striking emotional resonance.

In a sense, David Wilson Hawkins also takes an inside-out approach using the subtractive, or dark field method, to make his black-and-white monotypes. Beginning with a plate entirely covered with ink, the ink is removed by degrees until the desired image is created, and then the plate is run through a press to produce a one-off print.

In Hawkins’ hands, the results are supremely satisfying. His romantic compositions, “Hurry Up Please, It’s Time” and “Ninety-Nine and One Half Days,” evoke an academic grandeur, but also possess a brutish dash thanks to a medium that tempers the beauty, and places them solidly in the here and now. “I like the way they come out looking like badass, beat-up Xerox copies of photographs of landscapes,” Hawkins says.

It’s clear he knows his way around a picture plane. You see this in the confidence of Hawkins’ line and form and how they relate and interact within the composition. The absence of color means the attention of both the artist and the viewer is trained on these elements. And like a great old film, you don’t miss the color, but appreciate the rich gradations of tone that he achieves and how he adeptly conveys the lushness of the landscape.

“I would definitely say my work is very process-oriented,” says Suzanne Tanner Chitwood. “As much as I can, I try and get out of the way of myself and let the work be a process. When I do, the work is stronger and far more genuine.”

That she “knows from” cattle is abundantly clear from her soulful representations of these gentle beasts. Chitwood grew up with Herefords on her family farm, and has had Black Angus on her property outside Charlottesville. She’s attracted to their powerful bodies, expressions and how they look against the landscape. Her nearly life-size charcoal drawings are insightful portrayals of individual animals that capture their essential cowiness. And in Chitwood’s hands they transcend representation to become something of real artistic import.

One way she achieves this is through the use of collage. Initially, putting a piece of paper over the drawing enabled her to try different options without changing the original drawing—the paper added dimensionality and fractured the image in a way she admired and so she began leaving it there.

It’s about fragmenting things, tearing them up and moving them around, adding and taking away. Chitwood embraces the unexpected, welcoming it into her work. It adds more than substance; for Chitwood, it is where the very essence of the piece resides. And on those occasions when she uses an unadulterated sheet of paper, she makes sure it’s messy because as Chitwood says, “Things are messy.”

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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.”