Exhibition Review: Salt Lake City
Delight in Detritus: Sandy Brunvand at Art Access Gallery
by Shawn Rossiter
Last month, I attended the opening of Koichi Yamamoto’s exhibit at Saltgrass Printmakers. At one point, I was outside listening to the acoustic quartet that was playing in the printshop’s one-car parking lot. Sandy Brunvand, co-founder of Saltgrass, was standing to the side of the quartet (her husband Eric was on stand-up bass) swaying to the music and singing along. At the end of the number, she announced more wine was needed and started inside. Almost imperceptibly, though, she hesitated, stooped down, picked something up from the ground, examined it, seemed pleased, put it into her pocket, and recommenced her wine run.
I’m not sure what it was that Sandy picked up, but you may find it in one of her new paintings or multi-media works on display this month (opening June 16th) at Art Access Gallery. Brunvand’s show, along with an exhibit of woodcut prints by Blanche Wilson, will be the last at Art Access’s Pierpont location before they move to their new Artspace location on 5th West.
There is something appropriate about Brunvand’s work showing in the old gallery before it is tossed aside for newer, larger digs.* After all, her works incorporate a lot of things tossed aside. For some years now, Brunvand has been incorporating trail detritus into her work. During her daily hikes into Salt Lake’s foothills, she began collecting rusted bottle caps, small rods and plants that she found on the trail. “The bottle caps,” Brunvand says, “crushed, folded, and rusted look like beautiful miniature landscapes. My initial thought was that I would use the rusty metal as the subject of paintings and create observational landscape paintings from them.” So she began foraging for rust and soon her car was full of “fascinating junk.”
But instead of making paintings about the objects she collected, Brunvand began using the rusty metal itself as a material in her paintings. She embedded them in beeswax, which, she says, “has wonderful translucent, organic qualities of its own which I have been drawn to in my recent works.”
Brunvand starting looking at rust everywhere. On a trip to Washington D.C., she noticed that the rust there was different than what she found in the foothills of Salt Lake. “There were rusty bits of metal all over the National Mall, but they were subtly different . . .The Washington rust tended to be small twisted bits of wire, probably originally holding temporary fencing in place. But, the similarity of the rusted metal detritus and the quality of the shapes and forms was intriguing.”
Her Washington experience gave her a mission, and on a recent trip to Paris she began looking specifically for rusted detritus, and once again was delighted by the similarities and the differences. “In the square in front of Notre Dame I found my old friends the rusted bottle caps (also some champagne cages that held corks in place - how French!), but because of the crushed stone in the square, they were washed in gray tones rather than the red/brown dirt of the foothills.”
As one might expect, Brunvand’s paintings are very earthy. Generally created on a hard surface – birchwood panels – they involve a great deal of surface treatment – painting, scraping, sanding, layering – and, in the case of her “niche” paintings, the inclusion of her found objects. In the niche paintings, we see layers of pigment and texture crisscrossing the painting’s surface. In the center is a “niche” of beeswax containing a small piece of detritus. “By placing them in positions of honor in the niches of my paintings,” Brunvand says, “they become icons representing time, intrusion, nature, evolution, and place.” The works seem to be about observation. Brunvand has extracted an object from one ground and highlighted it within another ground. In the original ground the object is hidden, camouflaged, unremarkable. In the second ground, the object has become iconographic, but Brunvand’s delightful attention to the treatment of her fabricated grounds makes ground and object artistically separate but equal.
Metal objects and translucent materials have found their way into Brunvand’s other main body of work –her printmaking – and in the process have called into question the nature of the work she is doing. A couple of years ago, Brunvand first introduced a layer of translucent paper to her prints, an attempt to allow the viewer to see the information below a layer. “I was trying to create a history of line underneath the layer,” she says. Brunvand’s recent “prints” have included a lot of extraneous material – translucent layers of paper (Japanese mulberry paper or Bhutanese paper), staples, scraps of paper from relief prints, and beeswax – surrounding, laying on or hanging from the print itself. This working on and with a pulled print breaks with the orthodoxy of printmakers. “I often get caught up in the traditional ‘ethic’ of fine-art prints,” Brunvand says, “by which I mean that traditional printmaking involves pulling each print from direct contact with a matrix and not amending by hand afterwards. A fine-art print edition is traditionally supposed to strive for each print in the edition being as similar as possible. My new pieces go beyond that self-imposed boundary. They allow the prints, wood engravings and woodcuts, to continue beyond their first incarnation. It is a way to give the prints another voice, possibly a more inquisitive voice.”
The prints have taken the place of the small found objects in the niche paintings. They are the central focus, a dominant and consistent aria surrounded by shifting choruses of paper and materials. Each work, thus, becomes an original image while retaining the multiplicity of a print run. The print is like the niche objects in another way in that they are almost found or recycled objects. “In this series, I am using three woodcut images I created previously and three wood engravings that I made for Justin Diggle's U of U miniprint portfolios. It has been great utilizing these old matrices, almost like seeing old friends, giving them a new life.”
Visit the Pierpont Art Access Gallery this month one last time and you’ll be able to say goodbye to an old friend while witnessing the new life Sandy Brunvand is giving to her printmaking as well as the bits of metal we leave behind, whether on the trails of our own backyard or the front yards of capitols, foreign and domestic.
* I realize that "tossed aside" is too harsh a term. The Gallery is merely taking advantage of a larger space. But I know Art Access's Amanda Finlayson likes to write letters to the editor and I thought that might get her blood going. Plus it helped with a transition.
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Marilou Kundmueller . . . from page 1
Marilou’s educational background gave her ample knowledge of the power of rendering the literal to explain the metaphorical. In addition to a bachelor’s degree in nursing and some fine art training from the University of Utah foundation program and other workshops, Marilou also completed a Master’s degree in Medical Illustration at Johns Hopkins University. While her primary artistic focus is painting, she occasionally does illustrations of children’s medical conditions The illustrations are used in educational material that help explain complicated medical issues to medical professionals and patient families.
Currently, Marilou is winding down from a two-person show at Park Gallery in Carmel, California, after several months of focused painting. Although many artists thrive on painting down to the wire and shipping the majority of their paintings wet, Marilou finds that she enjoys the process much more if she doesn’t leave the work until the last minute.
However, she doesn’t believe that painting is something an artist can truly plan for until they are right in front of their easel. “Painting is a really immediate experience. You’re being your own teacher the whole time and focusing on making the right decision at the right moment,” she points out.
Marilou’s favorite part of the artistic process is when she begins a painting because it is free, whereas the end of the painting process is usually a lot more finite. Her ultimate objective is to keep that feeling of restriction out of her process altogether. “My goal as an artist is to keep that looseness throughout so that the end is as free as the beginning.”
To achieve that freedom, Marilou has learned that she works best in a private environment. Dogs and laundry are usually the only audience she has in her studio. She believes that an artist should have the chance to make mistakes while they work and be able to correct them on their own. She says some of the best advice she ever received was from art instructor Paul Davis, who said, “You need your own space where you can shut the door and lock it.”
Marilou finds this autonomy to be important, especially because she lives with and around many full-time artists. Between the artist-filled neighborhood in Helper and her husband, artist David Dornan, art dialogue and critique is in no short supply. She and David have kept their individualism and sanity as artists by having their own studios and keeping their personal lives separate from their paintings lives.
“David will always be a teacher and it’s not that we don’t talk about it, but we still do our own thing.”
Because David has been painting much longer than Marilou, she says his support and knowledge is very significant as she continues to grow as an artist. Conversely, while Dornan has become a household name in the Utah art world, Marilous has proven the adage that behind every successful man stands a supportive woman. In Marilou’s case, the “standing” in support bit is only figurative. She doesn’t have much extra time in her day to stand around. When she isn’t prepping for a show or doing illustration, she is working in her very large garden, cooking gourmet meals that the local artists line up for, racing with David in his and hers stock cars, aiding a resident artist who is living and working out of their Main Street building, or coordinating and preparing for the summer season of Helper Workshops.
Marilou has been organizing these workshops in some form for the last 12 years. Each summer, she and David, along with Davis and other celebrated art instructors, invite students to their Helper location for an intense and rapid learning experience. The students live and work together, often for a week to 10 days, and are able to experience full-time art in a supportive artist community. According to Marilou, the goal of the workshops is to provide a serious learning environment to challenge the student and help them realize their potential.
Although there is a cost to participate in the workshops, the classes are not exactly a cash cow. Marilou, David and Paul Davis continue to offer the summer experience mostly as their way of giving back to the art community. Their generosity has rippled through the art community, giving many up-and-coming artists the support system necessary to survive the early discouragements of pursuing art. As an added bonus, many of the artists relocate permanently to Helper, continuing to grow the social and art environment.
For Marilou, who has lived in Utah for about half her life, Helper is home. The calm pace and lack of distractions keep her painting and still leave her time to walk her dogs, race her car, and enjoy her life. Plus, with the cost of living in the small town, she can always afford the square footage for another dog to bask in the sunlight while she works away at her art.
During the summer of 2006 Helper Art Workshops is conducting two workshops:
--June 10-18 Figure drawing and painting with Paul Davis/Still life painting with David Dornan | tuition $565 includes models fees
--August 11-16 Landscape painting with Paul Davis/ Elements of painting with David Dornan | tuition $330.
Extended Studio Time: Artists can apply for living and studio space to work independently or with continued instruction during the summer. This offers the opportunity for one-on-one instruction, concentrated studio time, and the chance to interact with other artists. Please call for details.
More information at www.helperworkshops.com
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