Tag: McGuffey Arts Center

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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

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Arts

ARTS Pick: Radio Jarocho

Son jarocho music is to the countryside state of Veracruz, Mexico, what fiddle music is to the Appalachian region. Zenen Zeferino and Julia del Palacio perform at McGuffey on Saturday. Publicity photo

Steeped in music tradition, son jarocho blends elements of African rhythms, Spanish poetry, melodies and native Mexican culture into a single genre, and members of New York City’s Radio Jarocho—master sonero Zenen Zeferino from Jáltipan, Veracruz and zapateado dancer Julia del Palacio from Mexico City—are in town to share their knowledge. They’ll give workshops on zapateado (rhythmic foot dance) and son jarocho rhythm and song technique before performing with Estela Knott and David Berzonsky of Charlottesville-based Mexilachian group Lua.

Saturday, December 10. Free, 3pm. McGuffey Art Center, 201 Second St. NW. luminariacville.org.

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Arts

Artist Rosamond Casey explores how technology has touched our lives

“Tabula Sacra” is part of Rosamond Casey’s exhibition, “Tablet and Cloud,” on display at McGuffey Art Center through October 30. She hosts a First Fridays reception on October 7 and an artist-led discussion on October 12. Courtesy the artist

The impetus for Rosamond Casey’s latest exhibition, “Tablet and Cloud: Pilgrims in Cyberspace,” was a sight that has become so familiar to us that we often overlook it: the tangle of wires beneath our desks. “The way I usually start is I get fixated on a thing, a material or a form so pervasive in our culture it needs to be unpacked,” says Casey, a local artist who has lived in Charlottesville for more than 30 years.

She began her first painting of the underbelly of workspaces two years ago. As society becomes more and more wireless, she recognized the presence of wires as a moment likely nearing its end and wanted to capture it. For her, the tangle of wires represents “a realm of our imagination, a corner of the mind we don’t want to look at.”

“I painted it with a reverence for what it was and what it might symbolize,” she says. She also thinks of it as analogous to social media. “There’s no map, no system, no sense of a neighborhood,” Casey says. “Just a tangle of chaos.”

From this initial idea she constructed a visual narrative that explores our relationship with technology and its impact on human interaction, conveyed through the expressive hands of her painted figures. In “Madonna and Child,” an infant subtly points one finger toward her mother who is preoccupied with her cell phone while a bear hovers over the child.

In “Tabula Sacra,” one hand threads a wire up through a hole in a table while another hand reaches down to receive it, the table bisecting the potential contact. Casey presents the idea of connection via the wires, while the hands that are close but never touching emphasize the withdrawal of human connection as we become more engaged with our devices. “I drew them with sadness,” Casey says. “There’s an aborted sense of touch.”

The title of the exhibition comes from this idea that we’re moving away from personal computers to a “tablet and cloud” culture as we rely more on virtual storage. The juxtaposition of the two terms intrigues Casey, who says, “‘Tablet’ casts back to something ancient while ‘cloud’ suggests a mysterious future.” Incidentally, the term “the cloud” originated because of graphic representations of it by computer scientists and engineers as they attempted to diagram it for patenting purposes. And while there are physical locations for cloud servers, we tend to think of the cloud as the nebulous thing its name suggests.

“We’re taking a pilgrimage through unseen territory, heretofore unknown,” Casey says. The style of her figures is inspired by art from the Middle Ages, in addition to futuristic influences, as she plays with a distortion of time. “These people are of the past or the future because we’re moving through the present so rapidly there is a less fixed idea of what ‘now’ is.”

The very mutability of this present moment spurred Casey to grapple with the visual changes technology has created in our society and to convey a sense of awe for them. “Phones, computers and our faces in the light of our own devices,” she says.

“It makes me think about something my father said: ‘We’re all chewing through this planet like an apple.’ I have this conviction that in spite of investing everything in this future, it will fail us in a dramatic way. It feels fragile to me,” she says. “The Butterfly Effect” is an example of this fragility as one person jumps from a boat, causing it to rock the three remaining individuals, one of whom drops a cell phone into the water.

The human figures are so haunting and compelling, it is a surprise to learn that in her 40 years as an artist she has never painted figurative work before, only abstract. In fact, she says, her current work is so different from anything she’s done that it will not be recognizable to those familiar with her previous work. “It surprised me just as much, how fascinated I was by faces, illuminated, attentive and yet vacant,” she says. The series not only represents a shift in genre for Casey, but medium as well. “This is the first time I’ve done oil painting in my life,” she says.

Even more surprising are her artistic origins. “What has been the ballast of my art life is calligraphy,” she says. “Every art project has some reference to the alphabet.” In “Tablet and Cloud,” the calligraphic mark can be seen in some of the lines and curves delineated by the seemingly random arrangements of wires. “All these years I’ve been breathing life into that line and seeing where it would take me.”