Exhibit: Artists as Educators (2009)

The Art Education grads have installed a beautiful group show in the Stella Elkins Tyler Gallery, located on the ground floor.

ARTISTS AS EDUCATORS
ANNUAL ART EXHIBITION

OPENING RECEPTION
September 17th, 7 p.m. 2009
Stella Elkins Tyler Galleries
September 17th to September 27th
Tyler School of Art
2001 N. 13th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19122

I am showing Gaza, a large oil on canvas completed in February 2009. I used a palette knife for this one, something new for me.

Mother and Child (2009)

Mother and Child (2009) charcoal on panel,  12 x 9 in

Hope with Cornel West and Wynton Marsalis

CW: ... are there any conditions under which you think your hope could be snuffed out?
WM: None!
CW: None whatsoever?
WM: As long as I'm alive. That's just in me as a person.
CW: Is it because of the freedom that you know as a human being and as an artist that reveals that no matter what the situation is, there's always some possibility it could be better?
WM: Yes. Plus I believe in God.
CW: But what does God mean to you, though, Brother?
WM: It's just ascendent consciousness ...

Work Cited:
West, Cornell (1997). Restoring Hope: Conversations on the Future of Black America. Boston: Beacon Press. p. 131.
 

Gaza (2009)

Gaza (2008) Oil on canvas, 42 x 30 inches

I am a city dweller. I often feel my environment is too gray. Too noisy.

I live on a busy street, cornered by businesses. Every morning, I wake to a dump truck emptying large garbage bins. As rush hour arrives, the din slowly builds. Engines rev, car alarms blare, and the streets groan beneath the weight of life. These are the sounds of the city. The sounds of the 21st century, a world overridden with people and machines.
Inside the house, the noise isn’t much less. The house is an old brick row home from the 1860s. People marvel at the details, but due to a lack of any insulation, the house is an echo chamber. Each footstep resounds through the halls. Each sniffle. Each cough. Each prance of eight large doggie paws. Doors slam. Electronics buzz. Voices waft through paper-thin walls. It never ends, this noisy urban existence.  To compensate, I escape in color.

Major Inspiration in my Life

photo of Blanche Rose Naclerio, my grandmother, with her sculpture

Color: Definition

Often, when asked to name a color, our descriptions are subjective and almost lyrical. For example, we will say, “sky blue” or “forest green".

But color is much more complex than that … for a more accurate description, we need to understand the three principle characteristics of color:

• hue – The quality that distinguishes one color family from another, as red from yellow or green from blue. Hue has only one dimension, color has three: hue, value and chroma.
• value – The lightness or darkness of the color. Lightness of a color depends on the percentage of light reflected from the colored surface (lightest is white- most light is reflected, darkest is pitch black- no light is reflected. Gray- some light is partially absorbed, and partly reflected). Often referred to as Tints (light colors, mixed with white), Shades (dark colors, mixed with black) and Tones (mixed with gray).
• chroma – The brightness or dullness of the hue. Chroma involves the intensity and purity level in a hue that can range from fully saturated to infinite levels of neutrality. Neutralized or grayish colors show weak (LOW) chroma. Intense colors show strong (HIGH) chroma.

For example, although the side of the paint container might say “Bar Harbor,” it would be better to say the paint is blue-green (hue), darkish (value), and moderately intense.

There are two common types of color: additive color and subtractive color.

Additive color refers to the mixing of colors of light. The three primaries in light are red, blue, and green. When all of the colors of the spectrum are combined, they add up to white light.

Subtractive color refers to the mixing of colors of pigment, such as paint or the ink in your computer's printer. This type of color is what is used in the art and design world. The three primaries commonly used by art students are red, yellow, and blue. The three primaries in your printer are magenta, yellow, and cyan.

Work Cited: Color Basics by Stephen Pentak and Richard Roth

Art with Liza Lou

Liza Lou is one of my favorite artists. She was born in 1969 in NYC, but currently works in Durban, South Africa, overseeing a group of local beaders in the creation of largescale beaded works.  When asked if art is a kind of comfort blanket, Liza Lou responded,

Yes, definitely. I think it gives a tremendous sense of purpose. It’s a way of seeing the world; it’s a way of reinventing the world. It gives a sense of power over matter, over what it is, over what it is you’re looking at. It’s really exciting to be able to decide you want to see things in a certain way and so you go ahead and do that. And it really doesn’t require any money, just time and a lot of effort. That was something I latched onto early on. Even as a kid, being able to tap into the control that you have that no matter what’s going on around you, you can go into your room and make, or draw what you want to see even when, in the world around you, there’s nothing that you want to see. Even when everything’s so dark and so ugly, you can go into your room and make something. And on that page you have total control.

When Liza Lou was an art student at the San Francisco Art Institute, one professor whom she would later nickname ‘The Frogman’ chastised her for attaching glass beads to her abstract paintings. Liza recalls, “I was really, really hated for what I was doing…People would actually say, ‘I’m sorry, but that is not allowed’.” Instead of conforming, Liza dropped out and got a studio in Los Angeles. She worked as a waitress and began work on her first major artwork, Kitchen (1991-95). The piece is a life-size replica of a suburban kitchen, but it sparkles, because every surface has been covered with millions of hand-glued glass beads. Liza said she wanted to transform an ordinary kitchen, a place typically associated with domestic toil, “into something as dazzling as Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice.”

Art with Jeanette Winterson

What art does is coax us away from the mechanical and towards the miraculous. The so-called uselessness of art is a clue to its transforming power. Art is not part of the machine. Art asks us to think differently, see differently, hear differently, and ultimately to act differently, which is why art has moral force. Ruskin was right, though for the wrong reasons, when he talked about art as a moral force. Art is not about good behavior, when did you last see a miracle behave well? Art makes us better people because it asks for our full humanity, and humanity is, or should be, the polar opposite of the merely mechanical. We are not a part of the machine either, but we have forgotten that.

Sailing the Acheron (2008)

Sailing the Acheron (2008) oil, spraypaint, and rope on canvas. 36 x 27 in

Roped (1999), oil and rope on canvas. 36 x 27 in

Last year, before full time grad school started, I found one week to paint. The prior year had been a busy one, forcing me to neglect the art studio. I needed a canvas, so I scoured the basement. I uncovered a bunch of older work, covered in plaster, dust, and dirt. They didn’t look too good. I thought of resurrecting them, giving them makeovers, injecting life into their yellow and crusty corners. I do not throw art away. I will carelessly destroy it by having too much of it and relegating it to a damp unsavory home, but I would never throw it away. I found Roped (1999).

When I originally made the stretcher, I pulled the canvas too tight. After applying gesso, the frame warped. Instead of fighting it, I decided to accentuate the unnatural bend in the frame. I ripped holes in the canvas and weaved rope thru the holes, wrapping it around the injured wood, binding it up. Now it looked as if I meant to warp the wood. The painting is now entitled Sailing the Acheron (August 2008). While the original is an atmospheric, minimalist use of spray paint and oil stains, the recent incarnation is quite the opposite. It is a celebration of color and texture.

Italian (1994)

Italian (1994) oil on canvas, 30 x 22 inches

This painting, Italian, is one of my first serious attempts in oil.Now I will tell its story.
I entered Syracuse University as an undeclared major, under the auspice that I would study Biology.  After one year, I transferred into the art school.  There were a few girls in my wing at Shaw Hall that were making excellent art (thanks Jen Briggs and Ann!) and I burned with the desire to do the same.  I began as an Illustration major.  I considered Graphic Design.  However, after a class with Jerome Witkin, I saw somewhere I wanted to be, the 4th floor painting studios in the Shaffer Art Building.
I was 20 years old and foolishly decided I wanted to be a painter. 
The summer before my junior year, the year that I declared painting as my major, I sat in my grandparents' attic, determined to make a really good painting.  In it, I exaggerated the veins in my neck, making myself appear much older.  I used to joke, "That is what I will look like when I am 40."  Now, almost 40, and still painting, it is nice to look at this work and contemplate how it all began.