Stewart Hall exhibition

I am delighted to have two pieces selected for the Art Rental Collection 2013 at Stewart Hall.


The Stewart Hall Art Gallery, at 176 Bord du Lac in Pointe Claire, is a beautiful exhibition space, with gallery lighting and raw brick walls. When your work is hung there it looks like... well... art.



More than one hundred works from Montreal artists have been chosen for the annual show, which runs from October 27 - November 25.

The vernissage is this Sunday, October 28, at 2 p.m.

Fibre Content show, Burlington ON

Delighted to have two of my pieces juried into Fibre Content, an important show coming up at the end of the month in Burlington, Ontario. The details are available on the poster below. I hope that you will visit the show if you're in the area. The venue is large and brightly-lit, and the organization of the show has been impeccable. Expect to see 128 examples of fibre art by 65 Canadian artists. 

Rooftop Terrasse 24" x 12" (sold)

53rd Street 24" x 18"

 

Hudson Artists Fall Show, Oct 19 - 21

Our local artists' group is over 60 years old, and numbers eighty members. More than thirty of us will be showing our work at the Hudson Community Centre this weekend, mostly paintings of all kinds but also some mixed media and fibre. Please see the poster below for details. I hope to see you there!

And...

...Michele Meredith and I will be holding a joint show of our work in fibre, collage and mixed media in the lobby of the Hudson Community Centre throughout the month of November.

The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield

I read this book twice during my holiday. A slim little volume at 165 pages, but meaty and inspirational.

The author is an accomplished writer of historical fiction, and has also written other books about creativity. To quote Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City, "I've never read a self-help book that wasn't fatuous, obvious and unhelpful. Until The War of Art. It's amazingly cogent and smart on the psychology of creation. If I ever teach a writing course this would be one of the first books I'd assign, along with the letters of Flannery O'Connor."

In Book One, Pressfield writes about Resistance in all its forms, that force that gets between you and your accomplishment, whether it's starting an exercise program, a new business or charity, or finishing your paintings, poems or screenplays. Resistance can manifest itself as procrastination, addiction and recovery. It can show its power in ongoing family drama, allowing oneself to be victimized, and psychosomatic illness.

I was briefly a fan of The Artists's Way, by Julia Cameron. Then I decided that rather than journaling daily about my struggles with creativity, it would be better to just get in there and spend that time making my art. "Just do it." This is very much the theme of Book Two. By comparing the amateur to the pro,  Pressfield makes his points about the importance of showing up and doing the work every day. The author speaks from long personal experience that having a professional attitude is a prerequisite to achieving one's goals.

Book Three is a thorough discussion of Inspiration, and all the good things that follow from doing the work. An excellent book that would be helpful to the aspiring artist, the entrepreneur wannabe, and anyone with a dream.

Inspired by Hopper

On a guided walking tour of Montmartre, I couldn't help but take these Hopper-inspired photos. Perhaps they'll find their way into my work.

Preview: Edward Hopper

Balcon, Albert Marquet, 1904

Yesterday we saw an exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg. It featured a collection of paintings acquired by the Cercle d'Art Moderne. Basically, this was a group of wealthy businessmen centred around Le Havre, France, who bought and promoted modern art in the early years of the 20th century.

Many of their first acquisitions were Impressionist, but as artists moved beyond Impressionism, so did the collections. Even someone like Renoir, an icon of Impressionism, tired of this style in his later years, and reintroduced concerns of "form" in his work, using light, shadow and contour to model his subjects.

Le Haut-de-Forme, Vallotton, 1887

I was struck by two paintings, because they seemed to foreshadow the vision of Edward Hopper. The first, "Balcon, avenue de Versailles" by Albert Marquet, was painted in 1904. The second, "Le Haut-de-forme" or "La Visite", is by Félix Vallotton, dated 1887.


Hopper lived in Paris for two or three years between 1906 and 1910, where he studied art and was no doubt influenced by French painters of the time.

Early Sunday Morning, Edward Hopper, 1930

Sun in an Empty Room, Edward Hopper, 1963

There is a major show on Hopper opening today at the Grand Palais, and when I visit the show tomorrow, I hope to learn more about his early influences.

Fibre Art at Amsterdam's Central Library

This large, colourful piece of fibre art greeted us on the fifth floor of the Openbare Bibliotheek Amsterdam, Europe's largest public library. It was made of...

...socks. That is, sections cut from never-worn socks, then folded and inserted under flaps of commercial felt. I wasn't able to find any information about the artist or the piece, but it was visually effective, and probably functional too, in that it no doubt absorbs unwanted sound in the library's "quiet" area nearby.

On arrival to the Library, visitors are welcomed by a woven woolen wallhanging that covers an entire wall by the entrance. 

As you can see in the detail shot at right, the horizontal bands are made of highly-textured yarns. I find it interesting to see the warmth and textural qualities of fibre used to enliven large, modern public spaces that might otherwise be cold and forbidding.

Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum

Visited the Modern Art Museum in Amsterdam today, and saw this piece of fibre art. It was made in 1932 by Dutch artist Herman Scholten, and was acquired by the Museum in the early 1970's.

Seeing this today made me think of a remark made at the recent executive meeting of one of my groups. It was noted with some satisfaction that the group, composed almost entirely of painters,  has recently accepted for membership artists who work in "craft-like media": fibre and ceramics. Picasso worked with both!



And here is another piece that I liked very much, "Charlene", by Robert Rauschenberg, 1954. This is one of his "Combines", both painting and sculpture, and certainly collage. He incorporated many found items into the piece: fibre, newspaper, plastic, wood, mirror, metal, an electric light, and a letter from his mother.

I'd like to think that my group would have considered Rauschenberg for membership, should he have applied.

The Missing Link

It's been staring at me from my bulletin board all this time.

What is it that will allow me to make a connection between the deliberate style of work I have used to create my Cityscapes series, and the more intuitive play with colour and shape that I also enjoy?

I think I can see the answer in this uncredited photo, torn from a travel magazine some months ago. It's a photo of Tenerife, which I was lucky enough to visit this spring. Like so many cliffside towns in the Mediterranean area, it's architectural and organic at the same time. Grids, interlocking shapes, square-in-a-square: all my favourite elements.

At left is a small piece I made a year ago, titled "Square / Unsquare". It is mounted on a small canvas, so it stands away from the wall when hung, and casts a shadow. I would love to make more pieces like this, perhaps larger and in various colour palettes. It's a very different way of working.

I'd like to think that the two approaches would complement each other, and that I could shift from one style to the other and back again.

I knew there was a connection beween Square / Unsquare and my Cityscapes, and I think I'm on my way to figuring it out.

SAQA

I've just been honoured with Professional Artist Member status, and so my work will now be seen on the SAQA website, and included in the annual portfolio publication. I am delighted!

I've been a member of SAQA for about 6 years. They're an international organization with over 3000 members, not only artists but collectors and curators as well. SAQA offers a wide range of benefits, including regional meetings, annual conferences, mentoring, exhibition opportunities, a quarterly journal, and a wiki-style resource of technical and professional information.

The SAQA conference in Santa Fe this April will be my first. I am thrilled to have been accepted as one of five participants in a "voice coaching" session with Leni Weiner, whose work I admire very much. Santa Fe is one of America's top centres for visual arts, with nearly 300 galleries, ten museums, and art fairs almost every weekend.

Right now, we are staging the third and final week of our on-line benefit auction. If you'd like to see the kind of work produced by SAQA members, please have a look at some of the 12" x 12" squares donated to the auction. It is expected that bids will total close to $60,000.

53rd Street West

53rd Street West, 24" x 18"

A few months ago I made a piece titled "53rd Street", based on a photo taken from a window at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It has been accepted into Fibre Content, a juried show in Burlington Ontario, October 27 - 28.

Because I need to have work available for the upcoming Hudson Studio Tour and the Hudson Artists Fall show, I decided to make a second piece from this photo. The image is flipped, conforming to the actual scene, and I experimented with bolder hues.

I think a brighter palette is the inevitable result of having done so much hand-dyeing over the summer. There is something happy and fun about these popsicle colours.

Worked or over-worked?

Emperor's Coat, by El-Anatsui

So much of the appeal of fibre art seems to depend on process. Artists speak of an almost spiritual experience of "working the cloth", "the meditation of knitting", and "the mantra of hand-stitching". We talk about "the hand" of the cloth. Think of embroidery, tapestry, weaving, traditional quilting, all highly labour-intensive.

How often are fibre artists asked, "How long did it take you to make that?" How often do we hear the exclamation, "You must have so much patience"? These comments make me wonder if my work says anything to the viewer other than, "This must have taken a long time to make."

Shown here is a wall-hanging by Ghanian sculptor El-Anatsui, made of discarded metal bottle caps, stitched together with wire by the 16 - 20 hired workers in his atelier. Viewers are amazed by the beauty he has achieved by intensively working everyday materials, and his work is often compared to tapestry. (His work speaks on another level: the role of alcohol in the colonization of Africa, and the detritus left in the wake of imperialism.)

On the other hand is the pursuit of "freshness" in the medium of painting. Painters are cautioned against over-working, of "giving too much". To counter the impulse to fuss, to clutter, they are urged to remember that "Details do not a painting make". I subscribe to a weekly newsletter from painter Robert Genn, who recently warned his readers that "Small additives often lessen the big picture." He reminds us of the words of Robert Browning, "Less is more."

Glow of Expectancy, by Elizabeth Barton

Is there a place in fibre art for work that relies on strong composition and sophisticated use of colour for its impact, rather than on intensive stitching? I'm thinking of the work of Elizabeth Barton. Do you know of others? I haven't seen Barton's work in person, and I don't  know how densely stitched it is. But it does have a forceful, fresh quality. She juxtaposes those flat, coloured shapes much as painters do.

To what extent is intensive manipulation of the material essential to the appeal of fibre art? Is it impossible to "overwork" art made of cloth? Would some of those heavily-worked, intricately-designed Japanese quilts benefit from a whiff of freshness?

And getting back to the colonization theme, is it possible that one of the functions of needlework in the past was to pacify women who were denied other outlets for creativity and autonomy?