Oct 2--Broad Avenue Art Walk

Cancer Stinks--The Art of Mary Lundberg

Please take a moment to consider the work of my friend Mary Lundberg.

Mary got her MFA from the University of Memphis and was a great friend to have while she was here. We used to walk our dogs together at Shelby Farms every weekend.

After she left Memphis, Mary's art got political:

Project fifty-two is a series Mary has been working on about pets euthanized at the animal shelter. While living in East TN, she began working with a local animal shelter and in doing so had her eyes opened to the large number of highly adoptable pets that were being put down. She decided to make work about the animals she met who died - to commemorate their lives and to make a statement about the situation. The project has been a difficult one and is far from being completed at this point. From the start of the project, she created a blog to document her progress it can be seen here .

Now Mary is using her training as an artist to deal with another even more difficult issue, her recent experience with breast cancer. Here's what she has to say about the experience:

So as I go through treatment for breast cancer I make art. I am currently working on several drawings and will be doing my first performance piece. I will update this page as things happen... I intend to show the body of work after I finish treatment. It is important to me to make work about my experience as I go through it and not just when I am well and reflect on my experience. I am working on the perspective I have on things now - there will be many years for me to look back and create art using a different perspective. Currently there are many things in the works as far as my art.... As I am struggling with the chemo treatments I am putting most of my other work on hold. I really do hate cancer.

If you'd like to take a moment to support Mary and her work, she has work available for purchase through etsy.com.

Etsy Treasury picks--Softer Silhouettes

I just curated a new silhouette treasury on etsy: http://www.etsy.com/treasury_list.php?room_id=84174

Sanitzed Figures

I've been hosting open figure drawing sessions with model Joshua at the University of Memphis for the past two weeks, and I'm doing it for the next two weeks too. I mostly look at figure drawing as a form of practice--I've never really made this type of drawing central to my work, but I think it's really challenging and it helps me practice some skills (like patience) that I don't practice when I'm kicking ideas around in my sketchbook.

I've decided to revisit some of my figure drawings with a few of my sketchbook tools to see what happens. Right now I'm using watercolor pigments and hand sanitizer and getting some really crazy results:

I like the idea of approaching figure drawing with sanitizing alcohol as a medium. Not only does the sanitizer do some crazy things with the way the color can be layered, but it has a metaphorical resonance.

Now, if I could learn to make music by coughing into my elbow . . .

Screech Owl Designs

This morning I got a short message from Cedar Lorca Nordbye pointing me to my new favorite artist in the whole wide universe. George Schmidt.

I could spend all day flipping through these images, and mostly because a little narcissistic part of me thinks they're all about my life. I've spent enough of my studio time making paintings of my grandparents' beach house to recognize the perfect specificity of Schmidts' palette. I could make a meal out of the way the salmon stripes butt up against those gorgeous dusty blues. I can taste the salt in those well-considered whites.

Of course once I looked at all of those gorgeous paintings, I wanted to jump in the car and drive south until I hit the Gulf. Since that's not happening today, I decided I would settle for learning more about Schmidt and his work. It turns out that there's more than one painter named George Schmidt--which is intriguing because it means it takes more than two seconds to sort through the search. I found the George I was looking for through a post on a blog called Little Paper Planes. It turns out that Schmidt, along with Mrs. Schmidt, MAKE POSTCARDS!!!!! Deltiology in action!

(swoon!)

I can have 12(!!!!!) postcards with these fabulous colors and beachhouse images for only 15 dollars!!!!! Or I could get an image of a kitchen full of pheasants! Or a bear and his teddy bear!!! All the images are funny and sweet and I think I'm going to swoon again! Oh my!

Oh what, you've already seen this work like a kojillion times on Dwell and Design Sponge? Why didn't you show it to me?! You were probably too busy swooning, I guess.

Here's what their website has to say about the duo:

Jacqueline and George Schmidt, a husband and wife team, founded Screech Owl Design in 2008 in order to combine their interest in illustration, graphic design, and fine art. Their love of traditional craftsmanship is apparent in the rustic design of the cards, which Jacqueline draws by hand. Both Jacqueline and George have exhibited their artwork in galleries in New York City, Chicago, Michigan, Mexico, and in Amsterdam. They reside with their two cats Mister and Pinky near the East River in Brooklyn, New York.

Delta Exhibition call for entries

52^nd Annual Delta Exhibition

Don't forget to enter one the longest running, juried contemporary art exhibitions outside New York City, the Delta is open to all artists living in or born in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee or Texas. Founded in 1956, the Delta was created to showcase contemporary works by artists of the Mississippi Delta region. Today, the Annual Delta Exhibition has grown to encompass works in all media and reflects the region’s strong traditions of craftsmanship and observation, combined with innovative use of materials and an experimental approach to subject matter.

To download an entry form for the 52^nd Annual Delta Exhibition, click here.

The Deadline is November 2.

lauren coulson and jason miller: sure to be mindblowing

Clare

she's a rockstar

etsy treasuries

Curating etsy treasuries is addictively easy--once you get over the idea of having to catch the perfect moment for a spot on the list to open up, usually after midnight for me. The poster sketch tool allows me to curate the treasury before that after-bedtime window of opportunity opens up. Using the poster sketch tool, I have been piecing together selections of silhouette-based work all weekend. The poster sketch tool allows me to lay out the twelve items for the treasury and to add four alternate items that I can rotate into the treasury when other items sell. After being able to publish my first treasury at midnight last night, I started working on a second version of "soft silhouettes" to follow the "sharp silhouettes." Here's my layout so far:

Etsy Treasury picks--Silhouettes

Check out the etsy treasury I curated! It's my first stab at curating and I decided to start with silhouettes. http://www.etsy.com/treasury_list.php?room_id=82909

Epistle from Dwayne

Hello All,

Greelypalooza continues Friday night at the P and H. His work “Talkin” Round” will be featured and is reproduced in the great catalogue that is available.
The show will take place at the P and H Center for the Arts located:

P and H Cafe

1532 Madison Ave

Memphis, TN 38104

Opening Friday, September 18, 2009 8-10PM

We will also be raffling off another Greely Myatt piece as a fundraiser for Number: Inc., an independent arts journal. Each ticket costs $10.00 and there is no limit to the number of tickets you can purchase. The raffle will be at 9:00PM sharp so be sure to get there early to get your tickets. You will also have the chance to win work by Tad Lauritzen Wright, Dwayne Butcher, and others. We will also have other prizes available.

I hope to see everyone at the P and H Friday night to support Greely Myatt and Number: Inc.,

Best,

Dwayne Butcher

901.628.8438

Figure Drawing Open Session at the University of Memphis

Figure Drawing Open Sessions at the University of Memphis start this week in the basement of Jones Hall. I started a facebook group last year to share information about the sessions--like who the models are, where we're setting up, etc and I was googling around to find some great contemporary images to use on fliers when I came upon this nice little slideshow from 2003 published at Slate.com.

What has changed in figure drawing since 2003? Maybe that's a conversation we can have during our drawing session.

Unzipping "and exactly" Greely Myatt

Links:

Greely's Artmemphis.net profile

Fred Koeppel's take on Greelypalooza

Everyone who has ever made art in Memphis has a Greely story to tell. Before I moved here from Tuscaloosa, one of my favorite profs, Brian Bishop, told me about the great discussions that he's had with Greely. I thought it was nice that the two of them got along so well, but didn't realize at the time that almost everyone who sits down to talk about art with Myatt--in a museum, in his office, in his studio, or in the P&H--comes out with a new, unforgettable perspective on art as a verb.

I remember the first piece I saw of Greely's. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of that whirling wooden bird way up in the ceiling of the Brooks Museum rotunda the summer that I moved to Memphis, in 2005. The bird was part of a complicated installation that was being taken down, but I didn't know that--I just thought it was a funny and unexpected treat.

When I mentioned to Greely that I had seen the piece, he sat down with me in the middle of the whirlwind of a crazy college day and took some time to show me some slides. I didn't take any of Greely's sculpture classes--and yet I learned that day that Greely is a person who is willing to take time out of an amazingly busy schedule to spend an hour or so flipping through images and talking about some of the projects he had recently completed and how they related to art history and to our shared experiences living in the South. For an artist I guess nothing is more valuable than time you could spend in the studio finding a way to make all of the crazy things that pop into your head. Greely is generous and not only finds a way to make things, but also to make other people feel like they're worth his time.

Greely's generosity gives him some amazing karmic superpowers. Not only does he laughingly claim to tell lies during every lecture and to have blatently stolen all of his best ideas, but through his work he's managed to take ownership of otherwise mundane aspects of visual culture. Lightbulbs and thought bubbles, zippers and quilts--any artist in Memphis who wants to appropriate one of these symbols finds out quickly that they must be wrestled out of Greely's unique vernacular--just as he is constantly wrestling with legends like Phillip Guston.

During the summer of 2006 I was working for a few weekends as an intern at David Lusk Gallery when Greely's show "Lapses to Kill" was up. That opening was one of top ten all time best nights of my life. I got to wear a special corsage (a tiny, orange, plastic citrus fruit) that matched a boutonniere on a sculpture of a man and woman who, instead of holding hands, were attached by the crowns of their heads. Even though I normally feel ridiculously shy and awkward at art openings, I loved each of the sculptures so much that I felt like a different person talking with strangers about mitotes and comic abstraction. Every detail of the artwork seemed perfectly considered, down to the drawing of a four-leaf-clover made by the electric cords that burst from the incandescent bulbs over our head. To top it off, at the end of the night, my name was attached to my first red dot in a real gallery.

.

It felt like a rite of passage. A month later I took home one of the speech bubbles from the show, one that combined the green grid of a cutting board with drips of paint that Greely later told me were remainders of one of Larry Edwards' work surfaces. I hung it in a place where you would see it as soon as I opened the front door. I wished for higher ceilings and better lighting and a more perfect wall.

The speech bubble prompted a discussion in my house, of course. Why exactly did we get it? What exactly does it mean? About ten months after that there were other discussions to be had as I sat under that speech bubble holding my newborn daughter. I rocked her to sleep in its shadow.

I never worked as a Greely disciple--there's not a lot a painter of little watercolors can do with little tiny paintbrushes to assist a man who physically alters the architecture of our city through the use of pieced steel quilts and whose sketches look brilliant as billboards. I did get to help him dust off a few sculptures at AMUM last week and take measurements of a few pieces, but really that's nothing compared to the contributions my heroes, friends, and colleagues have made to this extravaganza.

and exactly, an exhibition in ten venues, proves that there are hundreds of people all over Memphis--and all over the world, who want to celebrate the spectacle of Greelypalooza. For everyone who's worked tirelessly to coordinate these events, there are many more who are glad just to be one of those rescued and reused bulbs, dusted off and bundled up with the bright lights overhead.

Thanks for the palooza, Greely.

Vikings and Conquistadors

These are three of the drawings I've been working on that are inspired by the Tony Horwitz book A Voyage Long and Strange.

When Horwitz describes his writing he says "When I write about history I like to weave the past and present together." I feel exactly the same way about painting--you can see that in the way these Vikings and Conquistadors are interwoven with the semiotic style of contemporary protestors.

You can imagine how excited I was when I heard that Horwitz's book is being featured in a community reading program at the Gwinnett County Public Library, where one of my good friends, the Amazing Danny Hanbery (Hi Danny!), has been doing all of the things that heroic librarians do, which includes talking to people who make displays for the Gwinnett Reads program. I would very much like for these drawings (or paintings or watercolors or illustrations or whatever you prefer) to be included in the display. Danny and I sent a few quick messages to each other and now the idea is in the hands of the wonderful Sue Calbreath* (Hi Sue!).

The program kicks off on Tuesday September 29 with a panel discussion with a group of professors from Georgia Gwinnet College and there are several other events planned for Gwinnet readers. The grand finale is a reception with Horwitz on the 18th of October at the Red Clay Theater and Arts Center in Duluth, Georgia. Tickets are $10.00 in advance and $12.00 at the door.

*Sue probably would like to know that the drawings are on Arches watercolor paper mounted on sturdy mdf supports and are about 10 inches tall and 12 wide. The wood of the supports has neatly pre-drilled holes in the back which means that the drawings can hang easily on small nail or even a thumbtack, appearing to float off of the wall.

sketchbook bento

There was a great article in the NYTimes recently talking about the Bento trend of tiny packed lunches that are replacing brown bags in schoolrooms across the country. I've been using the idea of bento in my Foundations of Studio Art classes for a while now, but my food-free method was developed to foster a different set of healthy habits. The point of a Sketchbook Bento is to encourage people to try new things in their sketchbook every single day.

Many art students drag giant tackle boxes full of charcoal, pencils, and erasers all over campus every day--but I've found that you can pack more useful materials into a smaller space if you replace the tackle box with a tiny lunch box and are considerate and creative about what you pack. Students using Sketchbook Bentos filled with non-traditional materials are often more willing to share those materials and the results of their experiments with other members of their class.

SKETCHBOOK BENTO

What is a Bento?

While the Japanese term "bento" roughly translates to "box lunch" in English, this is not your average packed lunch. Designed to be easily portable, the goal with bento is to assemble a meal that is just as appealing to the eyes as it is to the taste buds. It's not uncommon for Japanese mothers to prepare an elaborate, playfully and creatively decorated boxed lunch to entice their children to eat all of their food when they're at school. These lunches may also contain cleverly repackaged leftovers.

What is a Sketchbook?

Designed to be easily portable, a sketchbook is a book or pad with plain pages used by an artist to collect observations, to explore an internal monologue, and to pursue inventive ideas. The goal of a sketchbooker is to assemble a collection of ideas that is just as appealing to the eyes as it is to the brain. Your sketchbook can track the progression of an idea over time and can stand as a testament to your brainstorming efforts.

What is a Sketchbook Bento?

Although it is quite uncommon for University of Memphis Fine Arts instructors to play the role of Japanese mother for their students, these Sketchbook Bento have been packed using the same philosophy that these housewives use to nurture their healthy sons and daughters. As an art educator, I have prepared elaborate and playful containers full of sketchbook supplies to entice Foundations students to use all of their sketchbook pages while they’re at school.

The Sketchbook Bento each contain a different set of supplies. Some of the supplies are traditional sketchbook fodder (paints and brushes, pencils, crayons, stencils and printmaking supplies). Some of the supplies are familiar to most arts and crafts aficionados, but are not often used in a sketchbook (swatches of fabric, needles and thread, sequins, ribbon, yarn). Some of the supplies are more familiar to engineers rather than artists (circuit boards, wire, watch and radio parts). Some materials may be more along the lines of what a naturalist would consider interesting (plant matter, soil and mineral samples). And finally, somewhere in each bento students will find pages torn from Art Forum, Art Papers, or other fine art periodicals.

Students are encouraged to use all of these materials in their sketchbook in some way or another over the course of the semester and to constantly restock their boxes over the course of the semester with the materials that are relevant to their current interests and ideas. At the end of the semester, students are expected to restock their Bentos for the next group of students and present the boxes along with their sketchbooks for their final sketchbook grade.

The following “eating utensils” will need to be provided by each student for each Bento: Scissors, Exacto Knives with fresh blades, adhesives such as tape or glue, and a camera to document “sketches” that are temporary or three-dimensional in nature.

inspiration

I was googling living history images for a series of drawings I'm working on about conquistadors and vikings, and somehow came across this remix of the movie Hook.

why?

Trolley Night: August 2009

Last Friday was the night of the firebreathing goldfish in Memphis, with great group exhibits (many featuring little swimming fellows) all over the map.

I managed to make it (in four inch heels--silly me) to several of the shows and took some photos of the night I'd like to share.

First I stopped by Hamlett Dobbins' exhibition space Material, where a show I had been eagerly anticipating was up and open. Your Epidermis is Showing featured several great sculptures and one HILARIOUS figure drawing/fishbowl combo that I will never forget:

After I left Material, I proceeded to drive in increasingly disoriented loops towards downtown Memphis until I finally found my way to Marshall Arts. You would think after the four-billionth time I've tried to make this gallery-leap I would remember to at least pack the GPS, but getting lost between galleries on Friday nights has become a way for me to get a few moments to reflect on what I've seen at one place before I hit another. Someday I'll have to post a drawing of my "lost between Broad and Marshall" map--the most complex drawing I hope to ever make.

It looks a lot like this projection piece by Jennifer Barnett Hensel.

At Marshall Arts there was a great all-girl group exhibit called HEX, curated by two super-talented ladies and featuring works by six more: Hensel, Clare Torina, Anna Kordsmeier, Adair Snow, Raleigh Rodger, and Whitney Schuylar Hubbard. The moment that I walked into Marshall Arts, I was lucky enough to be the only person taking in Hensel's gorgeous shadow-play called "Centered." I always love these projections by Hensel--the shadows cast by mylar and wire make loopy-doodles around the silhouettes of anyone who walks past, reminding me on some nights of viewing the world through champaign bubbles and on others of looking up into the moonlight, Ophelia-like from the bottom of a deep, cool pool. More than anything tonight, I reflected on that lost in-between time, traveling from one amazing space to another.

Coming up for air as I rounded the wall with the projections, I was met with a cooly chaotic arrangement of photos framed in glass punctuated by Kordsmeier's acrylic and plexiglass sculptures.

The photos by Snow, Hubbard, and Rodger had titles like "Unearthly" (Rodger), "Martian" (Snow) and "The Stranger" (Snow) and "Ophelia" (Hubbard). The titles accentuated the poetic distance that photographers used to transform ordinary places into fantasy worlds. Here's a pic of Raleigh next to a photo of a lady removing a goldfish from his bowl. Take from that what you will.

Amid all of these magical photographs, Clare Torina's* amazing paintings stood out. While her three ink drawings on velvet paper are relatively unassuming, the 72"x54" Conversion of St. Paul's Horse is an epic work that deserves deeper and more scholarly analysis than an "aw-shucks y'all" blog like this can handle. Indeed, this piece is so grand in scale and concept that an even bigger and more shockingly transcendent version is being installed in the Jones Hall Gallery at the University of Memphis Campus as we speak. It freaks me out that a seven foot tall painting of a god-struck horse is really just a study for Torina. Someone needs to get her a spare chapel in Vatican City and a cranky pope or two to yank her chain, forget grad school. I was so gobsmacked by this painting that I forgot to take a picture. (doh!)

I did remember to take a picture of the random fire-dancer in the drum circle on the trolley line when I finally left Marshall Arts and hit the arts district on South Main St. See:

The fire-dancing was pretty amazing, but I can honestly say that I spent more time staring at Clare's horse. A few stops past the drummers and fire I got to The Rozelle Artist's Guild's sketchbook show. I love sketchbooks. I was in this show. It was REALLY crowded.

I love sketchbook shows AND I was in this show AND it didn't cost me a dime. Thanks Rozelle Artist Guild. You Rock.

After all of that, would you believe that I rode the trolley to a bunch of other shows on South Main looking for a goldfish sale? I never found it, or the four artists who built a show around the idea. I did get really big blisters as a reward for choosing stupid girly heels with butterflies on them to tramp around town in, but other than those disappointments, I'd say it was a pretty great trolley night.