Up and Upcoming: To The North
Exhibition Listings in Northern Utah
OGDEN AREA
Universe City (2556 Washington Blvd, 801.458.8959) UP: Sidewalk Shadow Creatures: Lewis Crawford. Crawford creates the phantoms of extraordinary creatures in an ordinary world of concrete sidewalks. The artist uses the Van Dyke process, an early photographic printing process named due to the similarity of the print color to that of the brown oil paint named for Flemish painter Van Dyck. The process requires the use of a large format negative in the size of the desired print, a suitable substrate for coating and subsequent printing, and a UV light source, either sunlight or suitable bulbs. The negative is placed on the thoroughly dried coated substrate, and is then weighted with a piece of glass. Crawford uses this process to create the phantoms of extraordinary creatures in an ordinary world of concrete sidewalks.|0| The exhibit is a zoo of 12"x12" prints of these shadow creatures. Through May.
Eccles Community Art Center UP: Intermountain Society of Artists and Blanche Wilson Southwick. The Intermountain Society of Artists will exhibit their latest work in the Main Gallery and woodcut prints by Southwick|1| in the Carriage House Gallery. May 7-29.
Gallery 25 UP: Mac Stevenson will showcase his latest paintings. Through May.
VERNAL
Western Heritage Art Museum UP: Uintah School District students display a variety of arts: oils, watercolors, sketching, and more. May 5-18. UPCOMING: Wild and Woolly, annual Uintah Arts Council Juried Show, includes oil, water colors, pen/pencil/charcoal drawings/sketches, wood carvings, stone carvings, or metal casting. June 7th through Friday, July 2nd.
Opening reception Thursday, June 10, 6:30 - 8 pm.
PARK CITY
Kimball Art Center UP: Wasatch Back Student Art Show: Art in Action. Through May 28. UPCOMING: Don't Fence Me In: Contemporary Quilts. Quilts feature Western motifs for a wry look at the American West in fabric. Two quilting groups, the Piecemakers from northern Colorado and Denver-based Quilt Explorations, combine forces for this exhibit. June 5-July 25.
Julie Nester Gallery UP: Group exhibit featuring fresh figurative and abstract work by national artists: Chris Gwaltney, Tom Judd, John Dempcy, Jeff Fontaine, Daniel
Ochoa and others. Through May.
Gallery MAR UPCOMING: Bread and Blue, new works by Randall Lake Opens Friday, May 28th.
Lake's new work first caught the attention of gallery owner Maren Bargreen when she read his profile in the January 2010 edition of 15 Bytes. For this new “Blue” body of work, Lake’s ideas came to him in the middle of the night; he got “slammed with the idea and had to draw it out, right then and there in the kitchen” and then worked on the piece the next day, using his brush as a cudgel. The new work is focused on human misery, and inspired by Goya’s “Disasters of War.” For Lake, the work is intensely personal: “The imagery in these works, I saw this and I witnessed this.” This work is Randall Lake’s life. These paintings are coming honestly from this artist, without censure. Moving away from teacups, dinghies, florals, and portraits, Randall is now embarking on a new frontier. He is no longer fulfilled, faithfully painting the realistic way objects or landscapes look. Opens May 28th.
SPIRO ARTS UPCOMING: Open Studio Event, May 28th, 6 - 9 pm. A chance to see work by resident artists Karrie Hovey (California), Margaret LeJeune (Arkansas), and Jayoung Yoon-Visual (New York).
BOUNTIFUL
BDAC UPCOMING: Moving Space Sculpture Exhibit and Collaborations, features a wide variety of 3-D art from figurative to contemporary works.|2| The companion exhibit, Collaborations, will feature artists who work together in a collaborative manner. May 14-June 18.
BRIGHAM CITY
Brigham City Museum UP: Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity, a nationally traveling exhibition of cloth made by the Asante people of Ghana and the Ewe of Ghana and Togo. Through May 25.
LOGAN
Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art UP: Uses of the Real: What's New Now? displaying 31 new works donated by the Kathryn C. Wanlass Foundation and Marie Eccles Caine Foundation. Artists new to the museum include Manny Farber, Takako Yamaguchi, Don Suggs, Frances Celentano, Eric Orr, Michael McMillan, Michael Todd, William Wiley and M.A. Peers. Through April 2011. AND: Bobby Ross Draws, in the Study Center. The exhibit includes more than 100 graphite drawings rendered in the artist's meticulous narrative style. As part of the exhibition Ross will create a new drawing every two weeks. He will take suggestions from the public for the subject of his new works through a museum Blog. Through July 31.
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Essay
Craft and Commentary
What we as artists say, and how we say it
by John Hughes
Normally I focus my remarks on the painting process, but today I would like to take a moment and wax poetic on the subject of painting in a more general sense. I am mainly directing this commentary to young aspiring artists who are trying to find themselves artistically. That journey can be a long one and involves discovering both how to paint and why we paint.
In many institutions today it seems concept has so eclipsed craft that the visual arts are more about commentary than aesthetics. For me, the role of commentary is commentary; and commentary can be about art; but I’m not generally thrilled about art as commentary. My question really comes down to, what are we artists trying to say with our work, and is the message more important than the execution? Some artists feel the need to use their creative output to make a statement that causes other people to think; this approach sometimes makes me wonder if there is a shortage of newspapers.
By now you are probably thinking that commentary in art rubs me the wrong way. Not necessarily. For instance, I am reminded of the story of an alleged meeting between Picasso and Goebbels at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris, where Picasso’s famous mural on the bombing of Guernica was hanging. Legend has it that Goebbels walked up to the artist and asked if he was responsible for the painting. Picasso replied, “No, you are”! I don't know if the anecdote is true, but I would like to have been a fly on the wall that day if it was.
Some years ago, while a student at a California college, I had the experience of observing (ala "fly on the wall") an interesting exchange between a fellow student and our painting professor, a renowned artist in the local area. The student mentioned that he had recently seen one of the professor’s large paintings on display in a public building. While there, the student noticed a couple of older women who were shocked by the painting, which depicted a much distorted representation of a human form, dressed in a flamboyant costume. Hearing of the women's reaction, our professor swooned in joyous ecstasy while exclaiming, “That’s the reason I paint”! I really had to wonder if that was reason enough! Compared to Picasso, what was his message anyway? Futhermore, what did his remark say about his love of art, the excitement of a well placed brush stroke, the satisfaction of mastering the craft of painting, the sheer joy of expressing an emotion? Was his reason for painting really just about its shock value?
To be quite honest, when I viewed his paintings I wasn’t struck so much by the content of his expression as by the lack of paint quality and handling of the medium. The whole thing became clear to me one day when he said that I was doing well, but that I had to hasten the rate of my development as an artist. I couldn’t help but wonder how that concept worked! He said that I needed to speed up the process, because there was no time for learning, in the traditional way. I figured at that point he was referring to content over craft.
I don’t want to give the impression that this artist had nothing to offer as a teacher; he did, and I really liked the man on a personal level. Unlike some professors I’ve heard of, he gave me the space to paint what I was interested in, and was generally supportive of my goals as an artist; I truly thank him for that. Nevertheless, after that I resolved to seek out an art education anywhere I could piece it together, and piece it together I did! The Scottsdale Artist’s School and numerous other workshop venues, copious trips to museums and art galleries, along with mountains of books, tapes and associations with many good artists, has made up the bulk of my experience in gathering knowledge of painting thought and practice since then. I would never say that I was self taught, because as the saying goes, I would have had a poor instructor! Self directed study is a more accurate description of what I went through, and am still going through to gain knowledge. I’ve learned that knowledge is not the sole property of institutionalized learning. That is not to say that you can’t get some good training in schools, but so much of what has been taught for many decades has been more concerned with content than craft. If that’s what you are experiencing in school, you might think about rounding out your education with some study on the side.
I know now that my art is an expression of what I love, what I feel, and who I am, coupled with a hard-won foundation in the craft of painting. I’ve learned that there are no artistic short cuts, just lots of hard, but rewarding, work. Learning to paint well is a lifetime pursuit, just like learning to play an instrument, or any other discipline that requires mastery. Self expression may be the goal, but self discipline is the vehicle.
Social commentary in art is fine -- if you have something important to say -- but it’s not why I paint. I could have chosen that, but I chose to convey feeling and emotion instead; perhaps that’s my commentary. It’s beauty that inspires me and has inspired many other artists both living and dead whom I admire -- the beauty of how light affects various forms in the visual world, the beauty of expressing an emotional reaction to visual realities through the manipulation of paint.
Having said this, I realize there are others whose painting goals are different than mine, and that is perfectly ok with me, we can’t all be after the same thing. We are all free to make our own choices. One can depict tragedy, hopelessness, satire, disrespect or any number of human failings in their art; I figure we get enough of that on the evening news. For me painting will always be about an emotional reaction to form and the painting process itself. The great thing about Picasso and other artists of his generation was that they learned their craft first, and then went on to do what they wanted with it. Since those days, many aspiring artists have thought to bypass the craft, thinking that they could substitute raw emotion or commentary for quality. In music that would be the same as an untrained musician banging on the keyboard of a grand piano. Whatever you decide your art will be about, I would encourage you to avoid the soapbox for a while and take the time to learn the fundamentals. There will always be time for commentary.
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