Lots of stuff about the Sidewalk Arts Show 2012

Posted on April 13, 2012 by

Lots of stuff about the Sidewalk Arts Show 2012 Posted on April 4, 2012 by Gwenda This is just some information collected together in one place.

Possible changes to the Sidewalk Arts Show participation requirements. A single tent can be shared by two people by permission of the CEO of the Taubman Museum, David Mickenberg. If you choose to do this, find a partner to share with you. Each person should fill out the application form; and both people should submit their information together (in the same envelope/package). The cost should be as follows: $35.00 (per each person entry fee) $20.00 for tent rental (@$10.00 for each person) $200.00 for space for tent (@ $100 for each person) The total for each person will be $145.00 (Deadline extended until April 16th) ____________________________________________________________ Guest post and comments : from http://blogs.roanoke.com/dancasey/2012/03/guest-post-no-more-fences-for-the-sidewalk-art-show/ No more fences for the sidewalk art show? Photo courtesy of Ron Bill By Ron Bill I am an area artist who has been a participant in the sidewalk art show organized by the Taubman Museum supported by various sponsors. When I read over the 2012 prospectus for this year’s show I found that the museum is no longer providing fences for artist’s to display their art. For the last few years that has always been my preferred choice to display my art. The only option is to rent a 10 X 10 foot tent space for $200 (on top of the $35 non-refundable entry fee). Up until this year, artists had the option of renting a 4 or 8 foot fence section (8 foot cost $100, 4 foot was less). I called Aimee Hall, museum special events manager, to inquire about the change in policy concerning art display space. She explained that they lost their location to store the fences, the look of a tent only show is more professional and clean looking, that most shows offer only tents anyway and that, all and all, it will be a more enriching experience for the artists and spectators. All of this sounds well thought out but, as you well know, you can put a good spin on anything. I think the real reason is the museum just doesn’t want to fool with storing, putting up and taking down the display fences. Their decision to remove display fences from the show will eliminate an entire section of Roanoke area artists from this show. You have to sell at least $235 worth of art to break even (not including the expense of investing in a tent if you don’t have one). For a sizable segment of Roanoke’s artists, this year’s show will probably be a scratch when the joy of displaying their art to the public is weighed against the cost. I have seen the sidewalk art show slowly change over the years from a place where area artist of all levels of professionalism and talent could display their work to a much more polished financially driven art show. I will have to disagree with Aimee Hall in that many art shows don’t have fence display areas. Not at all true. The Lynchburg show is a good example, and probably a better show, more in tuned with the artists. Tents can be very confining and hot as the devil and if you have ever tried to move through the traffic between rows of tents you know that it’s difficult at best. If the cost and trouble of dealing with the fences is the motivating factor to do away with them, then shame on them. I doubt the cost is that much and volunteers do the setup labor. It should be about the art. They’re an art museum for Pete’s sake! Did I mention the museum will gladly sell any artist a tent if he needs one? Your thoughts? Posted at 08:00 by Dan Casey | Category: Guest post | 7 Comments 7 Comments » 1. Amazon has 10′ x 10′ pop up canopies with 4 zippered sides for $130. May be better deals as I only spent about 30 seconds on this. Comment by Ernie — March 9, 2012 @ 8:42 am 2. Good grief. Dan, enough with the entitled diva posts, please! Comment by tass — March 9, 2012 @ 8:46 am 3. Ron, What do you expect? The museum cannot be profitable based solely on membership and admittance fees, so they have to find other ways to generate any income they can find. Unfortunately for you local artists who wish to participate in the art show, you’re an easy target. Let them know you don’t approve….sit it out this year. If enough of you sit it out, they’ll have no choice but to reverse course. It’s hard to have an art show with no vendors and no vendors = no customers. Comment by RightWing — March 9, 2012 @ 8:53 am 4. Quit crying and deal with it or don’t go. Life’s not fair. It’s simple really. Comment by Uptheriver — March 9, 2012 @ 10:21 am 5. I’m still feeling sad for the peeps who didn’t like their new streetlights. Now this? Comment by Kristen — March 9, 2012 @ 10:55 am 6. Thanks for the kind words about the Lynchburg Art Festival. Please join us this coming September. Comment by George — March 9, 2012 @ 3:48 pm 7. This show has been a tradition since 1958. As artists, we do deal with it, we weather the storms, the wind, and the hot sun, what we shouldn’t have to endure is the treatment of the artists by the Taubman. Since they took over the prices, elitist attitudes, cliquishness, and pretentiousness has increased. The organization of the show has become more chaotic, with mistakes in spacing, incorrect charging of fees, etc. In my opinion, the quality has gone down as well. Sure, an artist can rent a tent, but what about those of us that do not have flats? You need those to hang on, you know? That was the appeal of the fences. Another consideration is that most artists do not have enough room in their vehicles for art, equipment, flats, and tents. Really…. The Roanoke Valley is home to a plethora of local artists, what a shame there is not a venue for them and them alone. Those in charge need to realize that they have this wealth of art and artists and need to appreciate and showcase them much more than they do; they need to include more than the ‘elite’ few. I have been here since the mid-1950′s and am well aware of the artists, the show, it’s history, and the passions behind it. It is disturbing to first find out the art is down by the railroad tracks with the noise and the stench of creosote, now this? I find this not acceptable. I have to say, Taubman folks need to rethink this. Perhaps one of the reasons is that membership is down and the museum is not a success is because of the ‘art’ etc. it offers. You have to know your audience; good writers know it, and successful artists know it, good managers know it. Look at your population and come up with a plan that does not make the museum look elitist and snobbish. Offer some programs that are more reasonable. What we really need is an art center, a place to include shows which include local artists, and the community at large on a regular basis. There is certainly room for improvement. Sad thing is, the artists of this valley are paying dearly for someone’s poor decision making. Lynchburg does have a wonderful show! They are good to the artists and also have much more organized community art happenings. It is a one day show, and in the fall. (Lynchburg, pat yourselves on the back!) Please pull it together, or else we all stand to loose. Comment by Doodles — March 26, 2012 @ 8:55 pm _________________________________________________________ Meeting at Taubman Museum on April 1 to discuss Sidewalk Art Show changes Have any thoughts on the changes to this year’s Sidewalk Art Show? Feel free to let me know in the comments. The Taubman Museum of Art has sent a letter inviting artists to attend a meeting 6 p.m. April 1 in its auditorium to discuss concerns about changes to the 2012 Sidewalk Art Show. When the museum released its call for applicants for the show, a Roanoke institution since 1958, a few artists immediately noticed a change in the prospectus. The museum used to offer rates ranging from $50 to $190 to rent space along a length of fence to hang artwork, but the upcoming show no longer offers that option. According to the prospectus, artists can pay $200 for a 10-by-10 foot space to put up a tent, or they can pay $275 for both the space and a tent purchased from the museum. That’s in addition to the standard $35 entry fee. Taubman Executive Director David Mickenberg clarified that the tents can be rented — they do not need to be purchased. A letter dated March 22 states tents can be rented for $20. Though complaints about the changes have been few, the museum still offered a mea culpa for not discussing them with the regional arts community ahead of time. “We failed to discuss these changes with you and integrate your feedback into our decision making. That will not happen again,” stated the letter. Mickenberg said the change was necessary because the museum has lost the use of the facility where it had been storing the chain link fence it used for the festival. Finding a new place to store it was too costly, Mickenberg said. Last year’s show featured 175 artists. Mickenberg said last week that he did not expect the change to drastically affect artist participation. About two-thirds of the artists who take part already use tents, and of those who used the fence, only two artists made use of the $50, one-panel option last year, he said. Having the entire show take place under tents will increase the quality of the experience and address concerns about sun and weather exposure, he said. The letter also addresses an attempt to change the judging process. The prospectus requested that artists submit four digital images for each judging category entered, with the idea that images would be judged off-site. The museum now plans for all the categories to be judged at the show. The letter stated, “we understand how upsetting this was to some of our artists … All awards will be judged just as in years past.” If you want to attend the April 1 meeting, the museum asks that you RSVP by March 30 by calling 204-4139 or emailing ahall@taubmanmuseum.org. The show takes place June 2 and 3. The deadline for artists to register is April 1. For more information, call 204-4131 or SAS@taubmanmuseum.org. 1 Comment » 1.I have considered exhibiting my art at this venue, but the entry fee has always been too high to support my cost in the long run. I do hope local art continues to be appreciated. Comment by Carolyn Nelson — March 26, 2012 @ 8:51 pm

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The Figure in Space

Posted on March 13, 2012 by

Taken From http://aestheticamagazine.blogspot.com/ – always worth a look.

Tuesday, 13 March 2012The Figure in Space | Alice Channer: Body In Space and Edward Thomasson: Inside | South London Gallery | London

Text by Travis Riley

Having been given the opportunity to exhibit at South London Gallery, Alice Channer took the bold step of creating an entirely new set of works to fill the impressive gallery space. The resulting exhibition, Out of Body, consists only of works made this year, and in many respects, appears to be as much a single installation as ten smaller constituent works.

Measuring the full ten metres from floor to sky-lit ceiling, Channer has hung three images of classical British Museum sculptures, printed on metre-wide strips of heavy, white fabric, entitled Cold Metal Body, Warm Metal Body, and Large Metal Body. The images are digitally stretched, and their proportions considerably distorted. In its overextended form the printed stone seems to pour from the ceiling, pooling on the floor where the fabric comes to rest. The scale of the works allows them to take on their own dizzying gravity as the spectator faces them. The statues depicted are all without head or limbs, essentially bodiless, however the implication of form beneath the remaining drapes of fabric is enough to give an immediately human impression. These banners of bodily space without form are emblematic of the other works on show.

Just as the banners fill the vast, vertical space in the gallery, the installation of pieces Reptiles and Amphibians, seems designed to fill the considerable floor-space. The titles are easy to locate in the works, which are mainly composed of smooth curves of polished stainless steel positioned to imply a reptilian gate. Amphibians comes complete with a ragged tail and lolling tongue, both made from aluminium cast Topshop leggings. The leggings are dotted about both of the works, cast in order to replicate the curves of the steel, but positioned in parallel, the materials are always spaced and never touching.

The walls of the gallery are filled with similar intent. Eyes, takes up the entirety of the left wall, and Lungs the majority of the right. The works consist of thin, looped aluminium frames covered by a thin layer of spandex. Each frame is hung separately, such that they can be horizontally spaced across the length of the room. Affixed by a flat spine, the frames curve outwards from the wall in an angular, imperfect semi-circular form. Each has a distinct shape, and viewed along the gallery wall there is a sense of sequence and accumulation; every form becomes superimposed into the next. In Eyes the sequence is sporadic, the distance between the frames and variation in form, frenetic. Conversely, Lungs has a rhythm. The impression of breathing, the heaving of a chest, is unavoidable. The spandex layer provides the skin, sometimes taught, sometimes bunched up by the motion of the frame. Between the two lungs is Arms. Two aluminium cast cuffs poking from the wall. These bring the exhibition full circle. The gauntlets are much less about their own physical frame, more about the space they contain, a space filled by an imagined human form.

On the first floor of the gallery is a second exhibition, which provides a remarkable, if coincidental, counterpoint to Alice Channer’s. Both are about the human body and space, but whilst Channer generates a general human image without body, Edward Thomasson’s exhibition, Inside, generates a vision of the person trapped inside the body and the body trapped in the world. His video (also titled Inside (2012)) consists of three cross-edited scenarios. An acupuncturist delivers a simple treatment, female prisoners receive art-therapy, and a woman and man sing a song called “Not Safe Inside”. The scenarios seem disjunct, yet somehow are effortlessly viewed as a whole. The video is narrated by one of the prisoners, who explains a difficulty in expressing feelings, and she, along with the music, provides an informal backing track to the overarching series of events. The web of reference in the video is so well spun, that even as we follow the camera inside the singer’s throat, the whole scenario remains plausible and indefinably rational. The final, self-reflexive narratorial statement, spoken as the prisoner stares toward the camera, mouth-unmoving, awakes you from the sequence, but leaves the debate about personal and private, physical and metaphysical space, ringing in your ears. “You’re inside my head, after all.”

In both exhibitions there is a focus on space. In Thomasson’s, space is constrictive. Physical space contains the prisoners, and emotional space is equally suppressed. In Channer’s, form (human or animal) is in the spaces within and between works. Her sculptural pieces are predominantly made up of flat surfaces. Space is found and trapped by folding, stretching, and shaping these surfaces around it. The negative space is not empty. The viewer is left to find the missing figurative element of each sculpture projected into it. On the reverse of each of the three banners is a small gesture that alludes to actual, undistorted human scale, such as a direct print of Channer’s arm and hand. The images are separated by less than a centimetre, yet cannot be viewed simultaneously. The sculptures are figurative; the figure is deliberately fragmented, but fully represented.

Alice Channer: Out of Body and Edward Thomasson: Inside, 02/08/2012 – 13/05/2012, South London Gallery, 65-67 Peckham Road, London, SE5 8UH. www.southlondongallery.org

Aesthetica in Print

If you only read Aesthetica online, you’re missing out. The February/March issue of Aesthetica is out now and offers a diverse range of features from an examination of the diversity and complexity of art produced during the tumultuous decade of the 1980s in Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, opening 11 February at MCA Chiacgo, a photographic presentation of the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s latest opening, Conversations: Photography from the Bank of America Collection. Plus, we recount the story of British design in relation to a comprehensive exhibition opening this spring at the V&A.

If you would like to buy this issue, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Better yet call +44 (0) 1904 629 137 or visit the website to subscribe to Aesthetica for a year and save 20% on the printed magazine.

Caption:
Installation view from Alice Channer: Out of Body at the South London Gallery, 2012.
Photo: Andy Keate.
Image courtesy the artist and the South London Gallery.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Dorothea Tanning – Surrealist

Posted on February 1, 2012 by

“Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” (1943) by Dorothea Tanning. (Tate)

 By Andrew Russeth

Dorothea Tanning, the painter, poet and ballet-set designer who was an integral member of the European Surrealists during and after World War II, died yesterday at the age of 101. According to her publisher, Graywolf Press, she passed away of natural causes while sleeping.

Ms. Tanning, active as an artist for some eight decades, is perhaps best known for the Surrealist paintings she produced in the 1940s and ’50s. Like Magritte, her work often took the form of realistic depictions of disturbing, surreal situations, as in 1943′s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, in which two apparently entranced young women are confronted by a giant yellow sunflower.

In another iconic work, Birthday (1942), a topless woman in a dress sprouted with dark roots of some sort opens a door that looks out down a hall way filled with a long series of identical doors. A winged beast crouches on the ground beneath her. The work provided the title of her first memoir.

Ms. Tanning was born in 1910, in Galesburg, Ill. (“where nothing happens but the wallpaper,” she once quipped), and by age seven she had decided to become an artist. She studied briefly at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago but abandoned her studies after a matter of weeks, moving to New York in 1935 at the age of 22.

Inspired by the Museum of Modern Art’s Alfred Barr-curated “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” exhibition, she set sail for Paris in 1939, hoping to meet the Surrealists, who had by that point all left the country in the hope of avoiding the war. Returning to New York, she designed imagery for department stores and married Homer Shannon, a relationship that lasted six months.

In 1941, Ms. Tanning joined the Julien Levy gallery, a stronghold of Surrealism at the time, and she fell in with the group, meeting artists like Breton and Tanguy, whose ghostly color palette and amorphous shapes were an influence on some of her work of the time. She also met artist Max Ernst, then married to dealer Peggy Guggenheim, and the two fell in love, moving to Arizona together in the mid 1940s. The pair married in a joint ceremony with Man Ray and Juliet Browne, and moved to France in the 1950s, where they worked until 1976, when Ernst died.

As her career progressed, Ms. Tanning was commissioned to make sets and costumes for the ballets of George Balanchine and other performances and public venues. The Drawing Center presented a retrospective of this body of work in 2010, marking the centennial of her birth.

Later in her career, Ms. Tanning’s work became increasingly abstract, and she experimented with other mediums, like sculpture, printmaking and weaving. By the 1980s, she became increasingly focused on her writing, publishing numerous poems and two memoirs.

Ms. Tanning had retrospectives at the Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, in 1974, the Malmö Konsthall in Sweden, in 1993 and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2000.

Writing a preface for her second memoir, Between Lives: An Artist and Her World, in 2000, Ms. Tanning wrote of her life: “I like to think of it as a garden, planted in 1910 and, like any garden, always changing. There are expansions and dimishments as well as replacements, prunings, additions. One person’s gardens, one person’s life. So far.

http://www.galleristny.com/2012/02/dorothea-tanning-surrealist-painter-and-poet-dies-at-101/

Posted in Around the World, Fine Art | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

In Memoriam: Helen Frankenthaler

Posted on December 28, 2011 by

From – http://habituallychic.blogspot.com/

Helen Frankenthaler
December 12, 1928 – December 27,
2011
I was saddened to  learn of the death of abstract expressionist artist Helen Frankenthaler today at  the age of 83. She was born into a wealthy Upper East Side family and worked
steadily as an artist for more than 50 years.  She was influenced by art critic
Clement Greenberg, was married to another abstract painter Robert Motherwell,
and studied with Hans Hoffmann but was certainly her own entity.  She will be
greatly missed.
“There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs
happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules. That is what invention is
about.”
- Helen Frankenthaler
Posted in Art | Tagged | Leave a comment

A New Years Greeting From Marginal Arts Festival

Posted on December 27, 2011 by

www.marginalarts.com

Hello festival friends,

Last March’s festival is still so fresh in our minds, that it is hard to believe our next festival is less than eight weeks away!  Last year we reached new heights in the number and quality of our events.  Thanks to all of you who made it MAF a success!  The only complaint we received was that we had TOO MUCH going on and revelers couldn’t get to everything!  Well, we are not sorry about offering too much, but we do want everyone to get to all the programs that they want to see – SO – our next festival will look quite different.

Over the next eight weeks we would like to introduce you to some of the festivals “new faces” who will coordinate sections of the new festival format.  Just sign up for our blog, or just email us if you want to be “kept in the loop.”

Here’s the format in brief.  We will base each day of the festival in a different part of our city and region.  Starting Thursday, February 16, all festival activities will be based in and around Hollins University.  Friday will revolve around Waldron Stage in downtown Roanoke.  Saturday’s many events – including the Parade and Absurdist Carnival – will be based around the Community High/Taubman Museum of Art campus.  We may be making regional cultural history by including Salem as part of the festival on Sunday, February 19.  Monday we are going to launch a “Marginal Fringe” with a scattering of events around the region, and in another festival first we will be concluding festivities in Grandin Village for a big community party, and hopefully a ceremonial burning of King Khaos, to mark the end of marginal/extraordinary cultural activities and a return to normalcy.

We hope that this new format will make it possible for you to get to everything without cutting back on the number of events we can offer.  Check out each of the “day” links on the website to get a sense of the events that are being planned for each day.  We will be adding and changing these frequently as this sort of grass roots festival is fluid and organic (I know that sounds like it will smell bad, but think of it as a cultural tonic!)

Posted in A Day Out, Around the World, Art, Art Support Servies | Leave a comment

Monet Water Lily

Posted on December 14, 2011 by

Monet water lily paintings to make UK debut at Tate Liverpool

http://apps.facebook.com/theguardian/artanddesign/2011/dec/13/monet-water-lily-tate-liverpool

Note – We need a Tate Roanoke..

An exhibition of Monet, Turner and Twombly at Tate Liverpool will include two water lilies paintings never seen in the UK

Maev Kennedy · 13/12/2011 · guardian.co.uk

A detail from Monet's Water Lilies, on loan to Tate Liverpool from Fondation Beyeler. Photograph: Robert BayerA detail from Monet’s Water Lilies, on loan to Tate Liverpool from Fondation Beyeler. Photograph: Robert Bayer

Some of the most beautiful and beloved paintings of the early 20th century, Claude Monet’s shimmering Water Lilies, will come together in Liverpool next year – the first time two of the pictures have ever been seen in the UK and the largest assembly of the works in the UK in more than a decade.

Tate Liverpool is borrowing The Water-Lily Pond, begun in the last years of the first world war, from the Albertina in Vienna and the slightly earlier Water Lilies from the Fondation Beyeler in Basel. Neither has been exhibited in the UK before. They will hang with Water Lilies 1907, borrowed from the Göteborgs Konstmuseum in Sweden, Water Lilies 1916 from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and another from 1916 on long-term loan from the National Gallery.

Monet created the large pond in his garden at Giverny specially to plant it with the water lilies so he could paint them in all lights and seasons. Some have also seen the decline of his eyesight, and its improvement after surgery, in the paintings’ shifting perspectives and colours.

Most of Monet’s second great series of water lily paintings was created in the years when his only surviving son, Michel, was at the front in the first world war, so close that Monet could hear the guns from his studio.

The Monets will be seen alongside late works by JMW Turner and Cy Twombly, the American painter who died in July, in an exhibition opening in June. It will examine the response to mortality and grief, both personal and global, of three artistic giants spanning more than two centuries.

Jeremy Lewison, curator of the exhibition, said: “The water lily paintings mark the crowning moment of Monet’s career and are among the most recognised of his paintings. To have five major examples in an exhibition is incredibly rare. Painted against the backdrop of the first world war, they represent an oasis of calm while all hell was breaking loose around him. For Monet these paintings assuaged his sense of personal grief. Mourning and loss are key themes in this exhibition for all three artists.”

Tate Liverpool also announced that its new artistic director would be Francesco Manacorda, director of Artissima, the international contemporary art fair based in Turin. Manacorda, also a writer and critic, previously worked as a curator at the Barbican in London. He will take over in Liverpool in April, succeeding Christoph Grunenberg, who chaired the Turner prize jury in 2007 on the first occasion it was held outside London, and co-curated the record-breaking Gustav Klimt exhibition in 2008. He has returned to Germany as director of the Kunsthalle Bremen.

Manacorda said: “Tate Liverpool has an amazing history combining cutting-edge programming with great art historical scholarship. I am delighted to have the opportunity to contribute to the mission of such a leading international museum.”

 

 

Turner Monet Twombly: Later Paintings, Tate Liverpool, 22 June – 28 October 2012

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Cy Twombly by Claire Daigle

Posted on December 6, 2011 by

Claire Daigle on Cy Twombly

Claire Daigle is a writer, critic and assistant professor at the San Francisco Art Institute. She completed her PhD thesis, Reading Barthes ⁄ Writing Twombly, in 2004.

 Untitled VII from Bacchus Series 2005
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery © Cy Twombly
Oil on canvas

Coinciding with Cy Twombly’s 80th birthday, Tate Modern is staging the first retrospective of the American artist’s work for twenty years. Claire Daigle charts his time since the 1950s.

 

Twombly with unidentified work (1940s)
Courtesy Cy Twombly

In 1962 Cy Twombly (born 1928 in Lexington, Virginia) painted a work that illustrates many of the abiding engagements of his practice. Untitled is divided into two zones by a horizontal line about two thirds of the way up. Across the bottom edge of the canvas, Twombly has scribbled a textual fragment gleaned from the poet Sappho: “But their heart turned cold + they dropped their wings.” The phrase, suggesting a hovering between higher and lower realms, conjures up a distant classical realm, even as the grappling, awkward hand renders the words materially present. In the upper third of the canvas, the artist provides a code for viewing: a white circle swirled with pink is labelled “blood”; an aggressive red “x” reads “flesh”; a glutinous dollop of brown paint,“earth” or possibly “youth”; a delicate disc of wispy white paint, “clouds”; and a shiny coin-shaped form in graphite pencil,“mirror”. Beneath this code, Twombly has rendered, within a drawn frame, an array of possibilities for mark-making per se, as though to set them apart from the more direct references of words. The elements of the code come from three distinct experiential fields: the elemental (earth and clouds), the somatic (flesh and blood) and the subjective (mirror). And they can be mapped on to three corresponding traditional genres of oil painting, respectively: landscape, figure and self-portraiture. In Untitled we see Twombly’s invocation of myth and poetry, his wavering between high and low and his sustained dwelling on the threshold where writing becomes drawing or painting. Perhaps most importantly, we see in this painting how marks and words – in collaboration and counter-distinction – construct meaning differently. As John Berger has written, Twombly “visualises with living colours the silent space that exists between and around words”.

Although his work resonates strongly with generations of younger artists, ranging from Brice Marden to Richard Prince to Tacita Dean to Patti Smith, it has a general propensity to polarise its audience between perplexity and unbridled admiration. (Remember the incident last summer of a woman planting a lipstick kiss on a Twombly canvas on show in Lyon?) Additionally, the critical and historical reception has seemed to describe two Twomblys – one about form, the other about content. Some writers have concentrated on the materiality of the artist’s mark as aggressive, often illegible graffiti; others have followed the classical allusions to ferret out the references. Two elements might serve as metaphors for the predominant interpretations: the floating disc of white paint labelled “clouds” standing for the poetic and mythological aspects, and the scatological heap of brown paint designating “earth”. However, Twombly’s painterly palimpsests trace the progressions through which form and content, text and image are inextricably linked.

Cy Twombly
Min-Oe 1951
Courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Collection  © Cy Twombly. Photo: Geoffrey Clements
Paint on canvas
86.4 x 101 cm

Earth ⁄ Youth

Cy Twombly arrived in Manhattan in 1950 while the New York School painting of Pollock and de Kooning was in full swing. Upon Robert Rauschenberg’s encouragement, Twombly joined him for the 1951–1952 sessions at Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina –a liberal refuge, a site of free experimentation and exchange in a nation growing increasingly conservative during the Cold War. Among the influential teachers present at this time were Charles Olson, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and John Cage. Building on the freedom afforded by the previous generation, the younger artists emphasised libidinal energy integrated through experience. They focused attention on calligraphic gesture and word/image relationships resulting in work that was more syncretic, less spontaneously automatist. Works such as Twombly’s Min-Oe (1951) bear evidence of the poet Olson’s interests in the roots of writing in ancient cultures and condensed glyphic forms.

For eight months spanning 1952–1953 Twombly and Rauschenberg travelled through Europe and north Africa, joined for a while by the writer Paul Bowles. Upon returning to New York, Rauschenberg set up the Fulton Street studio that Twombly sometimes shared. Eleanor Ward invited the two artists to exhibit at her Stable Gallery. A series of Twombly’s works on light grounds dating to 1955 were given curious titles from a list collaboratively compiled by Twombly, Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns –Criticism, The Geeks, Academy. Here, pencil and crayon lines are inscribed into viscous light greyish brown paint. Among the anxious, discontinuous thickets, basic signs and letters begin to appear.

In 1957, having built a bridge of connections with Italian artists showing frequently at the Stable Gallery, Twombly left again for Italy, where he would remain for the most part, though making frequent trips, including many to the States. He established a studio in Rome overlooking the Colosseum and wrote a short statement for the Italian art journal L’Esperienza moderna, which was to remain the sole published reflection on his own work until 2000, when he was interviewed by David Sylvester. In the statement, Twombly describes his process: “Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate – it is the sensation of its own realisation.” Works from this era bear out the description. In Arcadia, for example, it is as though he taps into the nervous system, harnessing an alert state of tension, letting it come through in abrupt bursts at a level where it is generally inhibited by the body’s higher functions, registering its insistent throb in stuttering, jittery, whiplash lines. His move to Italy also afforded him ready access to the Mediterranean repository of classical ruin and reference. In works such as Olympia, words and names – “Roma”, “Amor” – emerge out of a network of marks.

Cy Twombly
Poems to the Sea 1959
Collection Dia Art Foundation, New York © Cy Twombly. Photo: Douglas M Parker
Oil, crayon, pastel and coloured pencil on paper
One of 24 sheets, each approximately 31 x 31cm

In 1959 Twombly executed some of the most spare works of his career, among them the 24 drawings that comprise Poems to the Sea, done on the coast of Italy at Sperlonga. What order of poems, punctuated with numerals and question marks, are these? The sea is reduced to horizon line and word, scribblings and veils of paint against the stark white of paper. A persistent compulsion is invoked in the viewer, the desire to read what is there, but not fully manifest in the artist’s scrawled script. Two words in these drawings emerge into legibility, “time”and “Sappho”, as if washed up on the beach alongside sudden, subtle gem-flashes of colour – blue, orange-yellow, pink – gleaming all the more because of their discretion. In these pages, meaning is endlessly frustrated and pursued. It settles only in the distance, figured perhaps by the horizon lines that move across the top of each of the drawings – in fact, simply grey or blue lines made with a straight edge, but suggesting seascapes at the vanishing point. The flat planes of sea and page have been collapsed. Writing comes in waves, rolling funnels of cursive script, crossed out, erased, enfoamed in satiny greyish-white paint. The signs are given as nascent forms, as gestural indications of “the hand’s becoming”, as Roland Barthes so aptly phrased it.

Cy Twombly
Ferragosto V 1961
Private Collection. Courtesy Thomas Ammann Fine Art, Zürich © Cy Twombly
Oil paint, wax crayon, lead pencil on canvas
164.5 x 200 cm

Flesh and Blood

In the autumn of 1960 Twombly had his first solo show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. Moving into the 1960s, thick and florid colour comes into his work, along with multiple classical references. During the prolific summer of 1961, he reached a fever pitch, a colouristic crescendo in the Ferragosto paintings. A thickly encrusted palette of brown, pink and red takes on a viscerality paired in the work with a body parcelled into pictograms: pendulous breasts, erupting penises, scatological posteriors. From 1961 to 1963 mythological motifs appear with increasing insistence: Leda and the Swan, Venus, Apollo, Achilles. This line of investigation culminated in 1963 with a series of works called Nine Discourses on Commodus, an obscure portrait of the megalomaniacal Roman emperor conceived while Twombly was reading the French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet and looking at the paintings of Francis Bacon. These works were shown at Castelli in 1964, to a New York art world which had by then turned to Pop and Minimalism. Following this exhibition, Twombly’s American enthusiasm ebbed for a number of years. The situation was quite different in Europe, where his work remained a critical success. Nevertheless, the Commodus exhibition represents a crucial moment of rupture in the artist’s career, for, as he commented, it made him “the happiest painter around for a couple of years: no one gave a damn what I did”.

Approaching the end of the 1960s, Twombly employed a monochrome grey ground. In 1966 white writing in looped repetitive script appears on blackboard-like surfaces. The works, which continue into the early 1970s, resemble rudimentary handwriting tests, registering the muscular rhythms of the arm relaxing and tensing, and seem to eschew outside reference; but Leonardo da Vinci’sDeluge drawings and the Italian Futurists’ spatio-temporal explorations echo through them.

Cy Twombly
Apollo and the Artist 1975
Image courtesy Works on Paper, Rome © Cy Twombly
Oil paint, wax crayon, pencil and collage on paper
142 x 128 cm

Clouds

Beginning in 1975 and continuing into the present, Twombly has been working towards increasingly integrated combinations of text and image; of lines – both written and drawn – and colour. The repeated returns to the rich resources of classical mythology have remained the complications of his work. He employs myth as yet another form in conjunction with painting, drawing and writing. He sometimes suggests myth’s first seminal stirring, letting only hermetic fragments come to the surface as names from the past: Hero and Leander, Orpheus, Bacchus. At other times he offers a full-blown line or verse burdened with all of its cultural and poetic associations like a tree overripe with fruit. Roberto Calasso has written of the Greek myths: “All the powers of the cult of gods have migrated into a single, immobile and solitary act: that of reading.” Twombly’s caveat, however, would be that the gods’ powers lie not in a single act, but in the mobilisation of the space between reading and seeing.

We see this in works such as Venus and Apollo (both 1975). In Venus the name of the goddess is written out in a palimpsest of red lines with a blossom drawn in crimson oil stick beneath. She is attended by a pencil-drawn list of her various names (Nadyomene, Aphrodite, Nymphaea…) and of her associations (myrtle, poppy, apple, sparrow…). “Venus” is written out so as to emphasise the openness of the “V”, “N” and “U”. In the pendant drawing,“Apollo” is delineated in dark blue with a triangle, the Greek delta, serving as the first initial and doubling as a directional pointer upward. Like the delta, the two letters “o” of the name are closed forms, as against the five open letters of Venus. Apollo, too, is accompanied by a list of his many names and attributes (laurel, palm, tree, hawk, grasshopper…). In these drawings, no direct definition is provided (no goddess of love or god of measure), but rather a network of allusions given both word and form.

The Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a retrospective exhibition in 1979 intended to rectify Twombly’s relative absence on the American scene. Roland Barthes, upon the artist’s suggestion, wrote the catalogue essay, “The Wisdom of Art”. In his tendency to promote a proliferating, reference-laden and intricate web of text, Barthes met his match with Twombly, whose work he described as “inimitable”: “It is in a smear that we find the truth of redness; it is in a wobbly line that we find the truth of a pencil.” The exhibition made only a small splash, critiqued by some for being “too European”. Twombly was still in Rome and very much outside the dominant narratives of contemporary American art of the time.

The Green series, Untitled [A Painting in Nine Parts], is a sustained investigation of colour set in relation to Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry and Monet’s art. Clearly gesturing toward landscape painting, this work seems to be the most mimetic of Twombly’s oeuvre, yet it is also the most rawly material – suggesting the two primary paths taken in the decades to follow. The green Untitled was executed in the spring of 1988 in Rome, the wood panels covered in quick-drying acrylic (for speed was of the essence in these shots of propulsive vernal energy). Part 1 functions like a title page: two lines from Rilke’s Moving Forward pencilled in Twombly’s cursive hand (“… and in the ponds broken off from the sky, my feeling sinks as if standing on fishes”)flutter down the plane of white. “Fishes”, written in shimmery silver-grey oil stick near the bottom of the panel, spans from edge to edge, even moving on to the white frame. Words read as though seen through rippling water. Rhythmic spurts of graphic attention create a visual analogue to the assonance of the words. The hesitations around the letter “s” swish like fish. In the other panels, words seem to be losing the battle with a superabundance of verdure. Groping finger streaks of deep emerald green have the look of sea grasses shimmying in shallow water. Monet’s Water Lilies enter the frame of reference. The effect of spatial disorientation and the congested surfaces of these pond-panels suggest something of metaphorical drowning. The myth of Narcissus, in which identity is swallowed up by mirror reflection, lurks somewhere beneath these works.

Mirror

In 1994 the Cy Twombly Gallery in Houston, Texas – designed by Renzo Piano from Twombly’s original conception – opened as a joint project between the Dia and Menil Foundations to house an extensive permanent collection of the painter’s work. That same year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted a Twombly retrospective curated by Kirk Varnedoe. It met with success and marked a dramatic shift in his American reception. This was due largely to the curator’s mission of reinstating the artist’s grand themes into an individual poetics. Varnedoe essentially reads Twombly’s work as sublimation: “[Twombly] used the new art he created precisely to reforge, in a wholly different poetics of light and sexuality that was specific to his experience, the link between the heritage of the human past and the life of a personal psyche.”

Concurrent with the MoMA retrospective, Twombly exhibited his Untitled (Say Goodbye Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) (1994) at the Gagosian Gallery in New York. The monumental piece measuring four by sixteen metres, a meditation on ageing and homecoming, offers an extraordinary array of types of mark, range of chromatic dynamics from the faintest stain of pale grey to outbursts of overripe wines and vibrant yellow-oranges, and a large body of associative references (to name only a few: Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Keats, Catullus, Archilochus, Turner). The painting is intended to be read from right to left, like a Chinese scroll, marking the direction of Twombly’s return over the Atlantic as it does the movement of soul boats crossing the Nile, the primary pictorial theme. The varied marks also weave a complex web of connections to myth, poetry, history, memory, conventions of painting and earlier moments in Twombly’s career.

Untitled was undertaken over a period of nearly 22 years, from 1972 to 1994. Just before it was about to be installed in the Cy Twombly Gallery in Houston, Twombly called Paul Winkler, then director of the Menil Collection; he had found a disused factory with enough wall space to hang the work in Lexington. The painting was rolled up and two Menil couriers were dispatched in an ice storm to deliver the work so that Twombly could rework it, yet again, before it was permanently hung. The anxiety around finishing this painting belies the artist’s thought expressed to Winkler, that it would be his last. It was not. He has been extremely prolific since 1994. The Bacchus series from 2005, for example, with its rush of roseate pigment and whorls of gestural energy, shows an extra-ordinary exuberance. In Simon Schama’s words: “The good ship Twombly sails on.”

Cy Twombly with Untitled (Bolsena) 1969
Courtesy Cy Twombly

Signature

Beginning around the time of the move to Rome in 1957, Twombly’s signature became an increasingly integral element of his compositions, though often sullied, sometimes barely legible, sometimes scribbled over. The signature would seem an appropriate way to conclude a meditation on Twombly. His work is characterised by a shuttling among styles and by a certain detachment that do not enable easy extraction of a singular signature style. So what if we were to take some liberties with the proper name, “Twombly”? To pronounce its two syllables, the tongue performs an awkward wobble, the vocalised equivalent of a Twombly scrawl. The name holds within it the formidable parentheses that frame a life, “womb” and “tomb”, the possibilities of proliferation and foreclosure. What of the “-ly”? As the suffix characterising the adverb, it could be read metaphorically alongside a verb unfurling in action (as in Action Painting), as a term turning back to modify the verb, to comment upon it.

Poster for Cy Twombly’s exhibition ‘Three notes from Salalah’ at Gagosian Gallery, Rome (2008)
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery © Cy Twombly

Certainly, the fortuities of a name are being pushed too far here, but what does Twombly do but offer up words in all of their resonance: literal, metaphoric, corporeal, material? His citations often have the vanitas effect of graffiti: “Cy was here”. Lingering at the threshold between word and image, Twombly renders visible those things– experience, emotion, the body’s share – that lie beyond the reach of verbal articulation.

‘Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons’, supported by the Cy Twombly Exhibition Supporters Group,Tate International Council, the American Patrons of Tate and the Horace W Goldsmith Foundation, and curated by Nicholas Serota with Nicholas Cullinan, Tate Modern, 19 June – 14 September 2008. Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, edited by Nicholas Serota with contributions by Nicholas Cullinan,Tacita Dean and Richard Shiff, is published by Tate Publishing.

Claire Daigle is a writer, critic and assistant professor at the San Francisco Art Institute. She completed her PhD thesis, Reading Barthes ⁄ Writing Twombly, in 2004

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Gloria Coker

Posted on October 28, 2011 by

 

http://www.gloriacokerfineart.com/

Gloria Coker was an illustrator for the Newport News, Virginia Daily Press (a Chicago Tribune newspaper) newsroom for twelve years before pursuing her career as a professional fine artist. Her work there included illustrating newsroom and feature stories as well as courtroom art, which appeared in the newspaper and on TV.

Her loose and vivid acrylics and oils capture her feelings about people of all ages as they engage in their passions and everyday activities. She displays her personal art including musicians and dancers in galleries in Virginia, North  Carolina , California and Montreal Canada. Her collectors are worldwide. She has taught classes in watercolor at local colleges and art centers and well as lecturing on her art. Her awards are numerous. She was nominated for an ALLI award (Hampton Roads Cultural Alliance) in 2008.

She has exhibited her series on conductor JoAnn Falletta and the Virginia Symphony and jazz series featuring Arturo Sandoval at Chrysler Hall in Norfolk and also at the Ella Fitzgerald Concert series at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. Her work has also been featured at the Buffalo Philharmonic. An article about her work has appeared in American Artist Watercolor edition and was selected three years for the Hampton Bay Days poster. In 2001 her work was chosen for the Norfolk Harborfest poster and the brochure cover for the 2001 season of the Virginia Symphony and for the 2002 Buffalo Philharmonic series. Two large acrylics hang in the Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters in Norfolk and a painting of the launching of the sub Newport News is in the Harbor Bank collection. Sony selected a jazz painting for the CD cover “Modern Jazz Classics” and her art was featured on a CD cover for JoAnn Falletta . In 2004, she received First prize at the October Studio 107 Norfolk, Virginia Splash of Color Show. Her painting of JoAnn Falletta was feactured on the WNYC (NEW YORK) website on June 4, 2004. Gloria shows her delightful art locally at  Chasen’s Gallery in Richmond, Tyler White Gallery, Greensboro, NC and Beach Gallery, Virginia Beach, Virginia. She is also represented by Gibson Gallery in Carmel Ca, Shayne Gallery in Montreal, Canada, 2010 Gallery in Kansas City Mo. She recently has shown at Terra Wine Bar in Williamsburg, Va

Ms. Coker’s art is in many collections including Byrd and Baldwin Restaurant inNorfolk,  Ernie Els, JoAnn Falletta, Tom Clancy, Marcel deSaulniers, Fuzzie Zoeller, and the Daily Press.

Although her academic background includes a BA in psychology and a Masters in Counseling and Guidance from William and Mary, Gloria now devotes full time to her art. She has two grown children and lives in Newport News with her husband

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Christopher Carroll

Posted on October 10, 2011 by
My work, though disparate in media – encompassing video, sculpture, painting and installation – is tightly focused in my chosen subject: one’s relationship to the environment. My most recent work echoes my struggle to engage with the natural environment that I encounter as a result of urban life. My work is, ultimately, absurd, depressing, frustrating and potentially beautiful. Despite the reoccurring themes of defeat found throughout my practice I believe that my work is not that of a cynic but instead that of a Romantic; its central operation is to make the insignificant appear monumental, the empty full, and the shallow deep. It is a task that the early romantic philosopher, Novalis, defined as an act of ‘qualitative potentialzing’. Although the use of this operation in my work does not solve the great conflicts it may bring to light, I do believe that its application, emerging as an urgent reminder and a call for personal investigation, has the potential to change the consciousness of a community through its emotive imagery and ability to passively navigate implication and consequence.
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Charles Goolsby

Posted on September 15, 2011 by

   

  

http://zeeman.ehc.edu/art/

My paintings and prints are representational images resulting from an exploration of my environment and subjects that have personal meaning for me as an artist. This approach has provided me with a number of challenges. One is the focus on something specific. The second challenge is that of the specific issues of representation such as creating tension between objects in an orchestrated and ambiguous two-dimensional space. The third challenge is that of creating a visually expressive work utilizing the formalist elements and principles of art that are at the root of all visual form.

Out of my experiences, I have developed a greater awareness of my environment and the transitions of change that take place in it. In the landscape, the changing of light and shadow is very quick. Color subtleties and relationships cannot be manufactured in the studio. I have reinforced my belief that art is clearly based on one’s personal response to the world and not simply a product manufactured independently of one’s world. My process involves going out on location and making drawings, oil studies and photographs. This is the research aspect of my work. In my non-landscape based work, sketches and photographs are also used to develop ideas. Back in the studio, I use these source materials to develop my final compositions into the paintings. The final painting process involves completing a strong under-painting in black and white, laying in a ground tone, and building the paint layers while retaining as much spontaneity as possible.

The selections I make are chosen because of an affinity I have to the shapes and forms that interest me. There is little doubt in my mind that I am having this affinity because of personal experiences that I go through and that these intuitive selections are allowing me to express these ideas. The themes that dominate my work are speed, confrontation, crossing borders, transitions, compression, isolation, reflection, fear, and collision

In turning to representation, I have attempted to retain the strengths of my earlier abstract works. This includes a free gestural and liberal handling of the paint. The physicality and richness of oil paint are two inherent qualities that the medium offers and I wish to exploit them to their fullest extent. A formalist concern that naturally seems to run through my work is the contrast of the geometric and the organic. This concern, while at first is seemingly simplistic, is the basic construct that creates the elements of opposition in my work. Whether it is a gestural brush mark colliding with a tree, or a dappled reflected light contrasted against aggressively sweeping concrete, it is a basic organic-geometric opposition. I have continued to deal with issues of space and the dynamics it has to offer in terms of illusionary depth within the picture plane. I also continue to search for a personal, convincing, and surprising color that is effective in delivering an emotional punch. Mystery, monumentality, and ambiguity continue to be ongoing elements in my work.

Posted in A Day Out, Art, Featured Artist, Fine Art | Tagged | Leave a comment