Second Movement. Più serioso. Mais pas beaucoup.
Brad Slaugh’s email stuck in the back of my brain, and as you saw from my few comments on the artists, I did actually make it to the show.
It was about 9:20 Gallery Stroll night. In galleries across Salt Lake, the cheese and grapes were gone, serious collectors had already retired for the evening, and the only people left in the galleries were young college students with no place better to go and gallery staff itching to turn out the lights, lock the doors and uncork a bottle or two of wine they had secreted away into some corner, far from the reaches of the freeloading “Gallery Stroll trash” who show up every month but never buy anything. I was bushed from standing up straight, smiling, and replying to the few who bothered to ask about my work at an opening at Utah Hands. I was on my way home, to the wife and kid in Sugarhouse, and, passing by Ninth and Ninth, I noticed the lights still on and some hanger-ons still hanging on at the Studio Nine, a hair salon moonlighting as an art gallery.
I ran upstairs to the show, smiled, shook a couple of hands, did my quick tour of the place and headed down the stairs and out the door. I had probably done the whole thing in less than two minutes, but, even so, I might have looked at the pieces only slightly less than everyone else who had been there that night. It’s just I hadn’t hung around to eat their food and chat up my friends. Or so I told myself.
Someone else, though, wasn’t buying it. Dashing out the door to my large, lumbering sky blue 1989 suburban, I heard a husky female voice behind me. “So, that’s how long it takes to write a review?”
I stopped in my tracks, pivoted and saw a darkened figure, puffing on a cigarette, step out of the shadows. For a second I thought I might be in some corny 50s film noir. “Well, no, I mean I’m gonna come back,” I began, but then dropped that line, figuring it wasn’t worth it. I could tell that my interlocutor had found a good supply of the secreted wine, so I picked up on the general tone of the conversation. “Well, yeah, you know all the shows are the same,” I said, tongue firmly in cheek. “I can crank the suckers out in a few minutes. Just have to change a few names and titles.” The shadow lurker, picking up on my theme, or simply opening her mind in a moment of
in vino veritas, "Oh yeah, I know, was it awful out there tonight or what? I went to a few places. Just group shows everywhere. I mean, what’s the point?” I concurred, but what are you going to do.
C’est la vie. Happens every November, like clockwork.
The final stragglers straggled out, made plans for the next non-gallery
tapas of the night (I’m not sure where but, there must be some place all the cool Gallery Stroll people go after Gallery Stroll, right? To compare notes and maybe sprinkle their conversation with a little French? If not, there should be) and I excused myself to go home.
So, two weeks later, when I walked into the GROUP show at
Saltgrass Printmakers, who do I see presiding over the whole thing but the same shadow-lurker of Gallery Stroll night (I’m not going to name names but in all fairness I should say it wasn’t Sandi Brunvand). My cheeks were making so much room for my widening grin that my tongue had little room to plant itself anywhere. I thought I might even stick it out, but from the expression on shadow-lurker’s face I could tell there was no need. The irony was not lost on her.
But, in the month of group shows, this, at least, was a group show that made sense. Printmakers are a group animal (gazelles? zebras? water buffalo? I’ll leave that up to someone else). They are not the solitary male lion painter wandering the savanna of his studio alone, laboring over one original to be sold to one collector, never to be seen again except by the occasional dinner companion. Printmakers come together. The very nature of their work means that more pieces are seen by more people and that interaction is especially important for them. Though some, like Bob Kleinschmidt, have their own fully equipped studios, the equipment necessary for printmaking requires that most of them work in groups, at universities or with a master printmaker.
Saltgrass serves this need, providing a place for professional artists, as well as learning amateurs, to develop their printmaking skills. And
Secondo Piatto (which, thankfully, was spelled correctly on the postcard), which is up through January, is their second annual fundraiser. Each participating printmaker in this GROUP show donates a certain number of prints, six of which are for sale as part of the fundraiser. Each artist takes home a batch of prints by their fellow printmakers.
It is a group effort and a group result. If anything else, printmaking is a conversation between these artists. Some painters keep their methods or mediums a secret, as if it were some guild knowledge that can’t be shared lest it be replicated; but, squeezing by press and design table at the opening, I hear the printmakers in attendance openly discussing method, tools and technique.
The works at
Secondo Piatto are smaller than those a couple of months ago when SLAP (now there’s another job for the Art Police – what does it mean to be the Salt Lake Associated Printmakers when some of your printers come from Provo and Logan?) showed at the Patrick Moore Gallery. More appropriate for the medium, it seems. Prints, after all, are small, portable, things. They are supposed to be viewed from up close; you want to see the texture of the paper and smell the ink. Glass does a lot to deflect this, and though an example of each of the prints submitted was framed for display, luckily unframed sheets were available for purchase.
I took one from
Ed Bateman home.
|2| Bateman’s pieces are meticulously crafted works using all digital means. His piece for this year’s fundraiser features a can of condensed milk, its label printed with the
Deseret alphabet – a pet fascination of the artist. Last year, I’m told, Bateman donated a Deseret spelled Campbell soup can image.
Stefanie Dykes’ prints often feature reworked elements of medieval and renaissance book design. In her piece for the show, “Should We Have a Passion for Watches,” she takes the marginalia of manuscript art and puts it center stage.
|3| This is not unlike what she and Sandy Brunvand are doing with Saltgrass, taking what is sometimes considered a marginal art form -- something serious artists only “dabble” in – and putting it center stage
Sandy Brunvand’s piece is done using traditional enough printing techniques, but she has collaged various printed sheets, in a very rough manner (if I were in Art Police mode I would check to make sure “staples” was included in the media description of her tag).
|4| The result is an interesting observation about the printing process of using multiple runs on one sheet, but here Brunvand separates the runs and prints one of her runs on waxed Japanese papers that are fairly translucent and sets it on top of the other. It is very similar to her painting, which often involves collage and found materials.
Many of the pieces in
Secondo Piatto have a light, playful feel, though in some the play may be irreverent, as in Beth Collier-Fogdall's “Pius Bovis,”
|5| or satirical, as in Sam Wilson’s piece, “A t-shirt design, what a relief,.” The styles range from the warbly, expressionistic figure in Veera Kasicharervat’s “Mystery Woman,”
|6| to the photographic collage elements of Justin Diggle.
|7|
If you’ve got some extra cash this month my personal suggestion would be to donate it to Artists of Utah so we can hire our first Art Cop so he can start hitting the streets and revoking people’s Artistic Licenses and enforcing the
Plein Air Act; but if you’d like to take something home for your money and still give to a good cause, you might head down to the Saltgrass watering hole and see if there isn’t something you like. And be sure to stop in at Studio Nine and appreciatively gaze upside down at a Slaugh, McClure or Erickson original as your hair is being shampooed. Take it home with you and you can see it right side up.
A Coda: Now, at the end of my meandering, after having unjustly abused some fine artists and fine artwork and having liberally sprinkled my text with my own pretentious foreign language references, I sit back and await the flurry of letters to the editor pointing out my own typos and misrepresentations (because I'm sure there are some -- probably in English, no less). But, in the Babelling spirit of this article, and to aid in the elevation of your dinner conversation, let me offer a glossary and pronunciation guide before closing.
Salon des Refusés : Salon of the "refused" or "rejected"; an exhibition held in 1863 by decree of Napoleon III for the artists who had been rejected by the jury of the official Salon.
salon style : refers to the manner of hanging paintings common in the 19th-century French Salon -- floor to ceiling, one on top of the other.
coda (KOE- dah): an Italian word meaning " tail," as in what Brad Slaugh stuck between his legs after the postcard debacle. In musical terms it is the closing passage of a movement.
tapas (TAH'-pahs): my most arcane reference, you won't need this word unless you find yourself checking out the night life in certain parts of the Veneto region in Italy.
Fare le tapas means to go from one locale to the next, a reference to the Spanish culinary experience of
tapas.
giclée (zhee - CLAY): an inkjet technology used to produce a very detailed reproduction. Be careful about being too snooty when using this term because in French it means spraying or squirting and is used by that baguette loving people to refer to aspects of the sexual act.
Amedeo Modgliani : 20th-century Italian artist. This has nothing to do with the article but is a pet peeve of mine. I have found myself snickering again and again whenever I hear people mention how much they love “Moe-dig-lee-ahni” with a loud, guttural hiccup in the middle there, when that "gli" sound should actually glide in the back of your mouth – like tagliatelli. I've laughed to myself more than once thinking, “Sure you love him. You can’t even pronounce his name right." But then, when I found that everyone was gleefully gurgling the middle of the name, I began to say, hey maybe they’re laughing at me? If you want to make sure you are dropping the names of some of your favorite art references correctly, I found
this pronunciation guide online (though I won't vouch for its correctness).
And here’s my last bit of gratuitous linguistic showmanship. It seems everyone these days is having a special, private opening on the Thursday night before Gallery Stroll. To be really oh so cool and refined we should start calling this type of reception a
vernissage – literally "a varnishing" – that’s what they do in France. Just ask Brad Slaugh. He would know. Speaking of Brad, here was his final email in our exchange:
BS:
For the record, after seeing the movie, John Erickson doesn't remind me much of Arthur "Killer" Kane, and it's difficult to imagine him with lipstick. You should see this film if you haven't yet. It was a trip.
