Tag: Russ Warren

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Inner realities: Les Yeux du Monde reconnects the imaginary worlds of Ed Haddaway and Russ Warren

Ed Haddaway's "An Even Larger and More Important Animal" draws influence from his time spent studying in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Photo courtesy Les Yeux du Monde

Winter gray getting you down? Les Yeux du Monde offers a potent dose of Southwestern heat in the form of paintings by Russ Warren and sculptures by Ed Haddaway that will banish those February blues.

The two artists, who are native Texans, met as students at the University of New Mexico in 1971, where they forged a friendship based on similar experiences and outlooks. Rejecting the abstraction then in vogue, they hankered instead for art that, as Warren puts it, showed the “touch of man.” Following graduation, Haddaway remained in Albuquerque. Warren moved east and the two lost touch. After a painting career that included teaching at Davidson College in North Carolina, Warren married Les Yeux du Monde director Lyn Warren, and settled in Charlottesville. Warren and Haddaway reconnected a couple of years ago, and realized that despite being separated by time and distance, they had been pursuing remarkably similar tracks all along.

“I chose ‘Surrealities’ as the title,” says Lyn Warren. “Because both Russ and Ed are interested in depicting imaginary worlds that evoke deeper truths. They value chance, humor, dream, and inner realities over external ones, and in similar fashion to the original surrealists of the 1920s, they favor the irrational over the solely rational, opting for a magical, dream-like, or humorous alternative.”

The surrealists were reacting to World War I and the instability and turmoil that followed. Finding their reality untenable, they rejected it, turning inward to their subconscious for inspiration. Warren and Haddaway came of age in a similarly chaotic time, at the height of the Vietnam War. Their work also rejects reality even as it retains a profound connection to its Southwestern surroundings.

Haddaway resists having his work labeled as “childlike.” It’s a tall order, given the bright colors, fanciful creatures, exuberant gumbo of shapes and underlying humor that permeates the work. But for Haddaway they are the creatures and objects that inhabit his imagination and visit his dreams. Thinking of them within the context of New Mexico, one can begin to see associations. In Native American mythology it wouldn’t be unusual for a man to be in conversation with a wolf as in “Meeting Mr. Wolf,” or for something like “An Even Larger and More Important Animal” to exist. The hand festooning the animal’s tail is both an ancient symbol and a humorous salute to the viewer.

In Haddaway’s larger works, the scale and color command attention, but he is able to sustain the interest in smaller works like “Click Clack Moon Metaphor” and “Wee House in the Forest.” A series of oxidized pieces, which seem made from organic matter, strike a subtler note. Haddaway’s monotypes are really appealing with their sophisticated palette and commanding, almost brutish gestures. The abbreviated images he produces are witty, edgily charming, and, yes, evoke Picasso.

Russ Warren, “Still Life with Curtains, 2018.” Image courtesy Les Yeux du Monde

You can tell that Warren revels in painting. The richness of the color, the texture, the energy, all convey a marked sensuality. Warren uses interactive acrylic paint to achieve a quality similar to the effect of oil, whisking the paint vigorously before he uses it. This creates bubbles that pop when applied, adding depth and texture to the work.

Warren’s recurring iconography has great personal meaning. There’s his dog Zeke, hit by a car shortly before his best friend was killed in a car crash that is both an homage to the adored pet and a stand-in for the friend. Guitars (Warren is a talented player) and other stringed instruments are represented, along with apples and half a watermelon.

Picasso and Cubism, in particular, are major influences. Warren is drawn to the fracturing of space that makes several views of an object visible at once, and the colorful flatness, simple shapes and use of dots that pervade his work are hallmarks of synthetic cubism. Take for instance “Still Life with Curtains,” a dynamic composition of abstract shapes with an arrangement of objects in front. The guitar, watermelon, and apples are all there, along with Zeke, curled up under the table. Here the dots not only add visual interest, they also veer into narrative, representing stars in the sky and watermelon seeds.

“The Ready Jester” reveals Warren’s eye for composition and color. The masks are Mexican, not African, with Day of the Dead connotations, and the turquoise, yellow, and orange evoke a southern border aesthetic. Horses and cows, a cat, and perhaps Zeke, are jumbled together to form a semblance of “Guernica” without the horror. On the left side, the background is a solid, smooth opaque, on the right, Warren introduces red and allows the brushstrokes to show.

A welcome seasonal respite full of joyful, eye-popping work, “Surrealities” also comes with a delightful backstory that speaks to the endurance of friendship and the power of personal convictions.

“Surrealities: The Art of Ed Haddaway and Russ Warren” is on view at Les Yeux du Monde through March 10. 

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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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Artists gather their animals for Chroma exhibition

The “Manger Scene” exhibition at Chroma Projects offers a comforting art break through December 24. Courtesy the artist

There is something about the scene of animals gathered in a manger to greet a newborn that offers a bit of relief to the anxieties of our human world. “Animals are so pure of heart,” says Chroma Projects director Deborah McLeod. “They have no political agenda. And in the manger scenes, the clusters of animals are neutral. They’re gathering around innocence.”

The image of this tranquil setting compelled her to invite a number of artists who work with animals as their subject matter to show their work at Chroma Projects’ downtown location this month. The exhibition consists of paintings and sculptural installations by Virginia Van Horn, Russ Warren, Aggie Zed, Pam Black and Lester Van Winkle. Three of these artists in particular share a fascination with horses that has informed their lives and their work for years.

Virginia Van Horn’s large-scale horse sculpture, “If Wishes Were Horses,” rests on bales of hay and a metal bed and immediately draws the eye upon entering. Van Horn, an artist based in Norfolk, writes in an e-mail: “My fascination with horses dates back to my childhood as a champion rider and it continues to be the central image in my work.” Her two other pieces in the exhibition consist of wire sculptural interpretations of the equine form, including one with two heads, each nestled in a black box that resembles a stable. “The juxtaposition of animals with man-made artifacts,” she writes, “emphasizes their shared traits with humanity, as if we all live in a shared fairy tale.”

Warren, from Charlottesville, raised horses for 30 years and is well-acquainted with their form and personality. He was most recently inspired by an exhibition of Picasso’s sculptures at the Museum of Modern Art. When he returned, he began sculpting the horse and crane that appear in “Manger Scene.”

His works consist of wood covered in chicken wire, which he then overlays and shapes with plaster. He often combines found objects with his sculptures that also reflect his agricultural environment, such as the pitchfork that represents the horse’s tail. His color selections, says Warren, “are influenced a lot by Mexican muralists, specifically Tamayo and Picasso’s Cubist phase.” At the foot of his two sculptures, reclining on a makeshift manger, is a two-dimensional dog named “Un chien” (French for “The dog”), whose material base is cement Warren made from his farm’s gravel dust.

Zed’s anthropomorphic figures are what she calls “intimate-scaled,” and are sculpted by hand. Her origins as a sculptor began with a small act of rebellion in college. After being criticized for painting horses, she built a chess set by hand in order to have an excuse to make horses (in the form of the knight pieces). Little did she know she would stumble on the livelihood that would allow her to paint.

As she branched into sculpting, Zed worked with ceramic at first. But soon the problem of chipped ears and broken legs presented itself when she began shipping. Her solution? To integrate metal components into her work. She calls these fantastical pieces “scrap floats,” as she imagines them “as parade floats at a time in the future when technology has gone off the limb and we’re left with various parts we don’t use anymore.”

One such piece is a mechanical rabbit with wings. Another is a horse with metal ears and wheels for hooves. “Almost all my work,” she says, “rather than meaning something, is a visual exploration. I get it to a point where it doesn’t look mechanically awkward and it has an emotive quality.”

While the manger scene tells the story of animals gathering around a newborn human, Chroma offers the opportunity for humans to gather around these representations of animals and consider their interior lives, their sentience or what we might even call their humanity.