Toward a Fuller Cultural Profile?

 Toward a Fuller Cultural Profile?

By Tom Wachunas

 

    First, a little background. The following two paragraphs are from the ArtsInStark web site, www.artsinstark.com .

   “Artist Gail Folwell, nationally recognized and awarded for her sculptures of athletes in action, has been awarded the second commission in The ELEVEN, a $2.2 million public art project of ArtsinStark and the Pro Football Hall of Fame celebrating the greatest moments in professional football history.  Her work, depicting The NFL Draft, 1936, will reside in Canton, Ohio, the birthplace of the National Football League (September 17, 1920), and the home of the eventual 11 public art pieces to be completed in 2020 for the 100th anniversary of the NFL…”

    “…I was drawn to The NFL Draft, 1936 (moment) because it demonstrated the collaboration between the business and the art of football.” said Folwell.  “For this reason, I was compelled to conceptually portray the team owner in a suit as the center on the team, building the roster of players around him…”

   Additionally, here’s a link to the video of the artwork being delivered to Canton’s Cultural Center for the Arts  : 

http://www.cantonrep.com/section?template=videodetail&vid=4370774123001&vidtitle=Rep%20Video:%20Delivering%20the%20NFL%20Draft%20Sc

    Gail Folwell’s sculpture will be officially unveiled in Canton’s downtown Arts District on August 7, at the corner of 4^th Street and Cleveland Avenue. The photographs above are (in order from the top down) of Folwell in her Colorado studio, the five-figure array of the sculpture-in- progress (both photos from ArtsInStark web site), a close-up I took of an unwrapped portion temporarily parked in the Cultural Center’s Great Court, and the newly-built concrete platform awaiting final installation.

    Beyond its programmatic relevance to the whole idea behind The Eleven project, the sculpture is a remarkable work of art in its own right. Folwell has invested her figures with both a sense of impending explosive motion and a visceral, expressive physicality. Though cast in bronze, they seem to have been carved out of solid rock. This in itself evokes football’s apparently permanent place in the landscape of America’s (not to mention Canton’s) “popular” culture. Folwell’s chosen medium of bronze casting is one steeped in a classical tradition that we rightly associate with elevating or monumentalizing human achievements. For a time-honored precedent, consider the ancient Greeks and their veneration of athletic pursuits expressed in exquisite bronze and marble statuary.

   Currently, the collection of Arts District public sculptures is primarily a mobile menagerie of funky fauna. While some might argue that this pastiche of mostly recycled industrial metal parts is an “entertaining” expression of artful whimsicality, it nonetheless collectively pales in comparison to the compelling elegance of a work such as Gail Folwell’s. Hers, I think, sets a very high bar for ArtsInStark’s future installations of public artworks, football-oriented and beyond.

    And why should it be otherwise? If the intent is to invest in impressive public art to enhance Canton’s Arts District and its downtown surrounds as a “tourist destination,” why can’t that art declare not just Canton’s famous connection to the NFL, but also the full legacy of Canton culture? I’m taking a cue from Folwell’s own words about her piece as demonstrating “…the collaboration between the business and the art of football,” and imagining a series of representational public artworks that speak to a collaboration between the business and the art of…art. All the arts, actually.

   Think of it – a series of public works to complement and balance The ELEVEN with celebrations of the Muses whose promptings have been active in Canton since long before the establishment of the NFL. Fantasy or feasibility? Do we have at least the will to realize specific, permanent public monuments to Canton’s remarkable (and too often neglected?) legacy of music, singing, theatre, ballet, and the visual arts?

    The ball, ArtsInStark, is in your hands.

A Chromatic Constancy of Luminous Rhythms

A Chromatic Constancy of Luminous Rhythms

By Tom Wachunas

 

    “…The simplicity of the paintings and the intentional placement of each dot on the canvas felt like a meditation and a capturing of divine energy itself. I stood in front of their art with tears streaming down my face, the kinship so strong that I actually felt they were my paintings… My work is all about the energetic connection to spirit and depicts energy flowing through matter, energy flowing through color and various energies playing together…”

   - from artist statement by Barbara Harwell Francois

   EXHIBIT: From Down Under and Above - Aboriginal- inspired art by Barbara Harwell Francois, at Little Art Gallery, located in the North Canton Public Library, 185 North Main Street, North Canton -  THROUGH AUGUST 23, 2015 – 330.499.4712

   Some of the oldest images in the world are the cave and rock paintings made by prehistoric Australian Aboriginal artists, dated to between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago. The iconography of Aboriginal art points to an elaborate spiritual belief system articulated through ancient oral traditions that tell of the creation of the cosmos, death, and everything in between as it relates to communion with the land, forces of nature, and food gathering. Aboriginal artmaking continued into historical time, including the practice of making temporary images in the dirt (sand paintings) as part of the secretive and mysterious rituals of “dreamtime,” or “Ancestor Dreaming.” When the rituals were concluded, the symbolic images were rubbed out or left to the elements to reclaim them. In the early 1970s, contemporary Aboriginal artists developed a unique and more permanent visual language of abstract dot paintings on canvas that codified their traditional sacred symbols.

   When Barbara Harwell Francois saw an exhibit of Australian Aboriginal works at the Toledo Museum of Art in 2013, she tells us in her statement that she was inspired to paint for the first time, and “…felt an immediate kinship to the expression of their connection to the land and the spiritual realm…” Indeed, the intense sincerity and urgency of her statement leaves no doubt that the Aboriginal pieces she beheld had spoken to her with palpable resonance.

    A wonderful word, resonance. Webster defines it as “reinforcement and prolongation of a sound by reflection or vibration of other bodies.” I can’t tell you that all of this exhibit’s acrylic configurations on canvas are reflective of true Aboriginal iconography (though there are more than a few apparent similarities). But I don’t regard such knowledge as a prerequisite for embracing their spiritual sensibilities.

    There is an uncanny evocation of ethereal music and dance in these paintings - a communing with entities (or persons?) far removed from the incidentally ornate profusions of luminous patterns that comprise their look. Meticulously rendered rows of dots in a full spectrum of electrified colors (some of the paintings are monochromatic) seem to pulse and breathe, as if chanting a song of life under construction (molecularly and cosmically), or beating out the rhythmic momentum of sacred energy in an eternal cycle of congealing and dispersing. Call it a divine resonance.

   This ethereality is founded upon an exquisite materiality. Consider the somewhat architectural nature of the paintings’ pictorial structures, and their disciplined precision of execution. The myriad acrylic dots have a mechanical consistency about them, right down to the tiny crest of paint raised exactly in their centers, almost imperceptible from a few feet away. Maybe the applicator is a stamping device such as the eraser end of a pencil dipped in paint.

    While many of the paintings suggest fibrous weavings (one painting, Rag Rug 5, does in fact live up to its title), Francois infuses most of them with an effective illusion of depth. Her patterns aren’t merely flat ribbons of dots floating on dark grounds. Via a chiaroscuro effect achieved by the graduated transparency of color in the rows  of stamped dots (the paint wearing off the tip of the eraser with repeated pressing?), the bands take on a shadowed, wave-like dimensionality, curving into each other, or away from our gaze and into blackness.

   It might not be too much of a reach to think of that blackness as the infinite expanse of the cosmos and the dots as codified stars and planets. Or better yet, notes in a musical score. Perhaps in the spirit of Ancestor Dreaming, I’m reminded of the Greek philosopher and mathematician, Pythagoras, and his poetic speculations about sidereal harmonics. Imagine the physical universe as a single-stringed lyre, with one end of the string anchored in matter, the other in spirit. A grand harmony of gravitational forces plucks the string ceaselessly, producing the ineffable, beautiful Music of the Spheres.    

    PHOTOS, from top: Winter’s Rest; Vitality; We’re Rollin’; Patch Work; Life Force

Some Notable Quotables

Some Notable Quotables

    As I begin teaching the Summer III session of a course called “Art as a World Phenomenon” at Kent Stark, it occurs to me once again that even though I’m the “teacher,” I am in fact, first and foremost, a perpetual student of art. As such, over my lifetime, I’ve gathered a bountiful crop of ideas and attitudes about art and artists. As teacher, then, I’m simply an impassioned student who gets to literally give away the fruits of my labors to other students . Or at the very least, I see my role as tilling the soil of other minds and souls in order to sow the seeds of an authentic and lasting art appreciation (not to be confused with “liking” art).

    And so it is that I present the following list of quotes not just to my university students, but to all of you faithful readers who share my passion to any degree. These words are NOT to be taken as indisputable truths or ironclad definitions of art. And I don’t agree with all of them. Rather, let them plow up contextual possibilities for embracing the sheer vastness of what we call art. In any case, I hope there are plenty enough seeds here to lead to a nourishing harvest.    

    The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.  -Aristotle

    The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection. – Michelangelo

    Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.   -Leonardo da Vinci

    The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

    Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.  -Winston Churchill

    A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. -Oscar Wilde

   Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.  -Edgar Degas

   Art is a harmony parallel with nature.  -Paul Cezanne

   Great art picks up where nature ends.  -Marc Chagall

    Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.  -George Bernard Shaw

    To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist.  -Robert Schumann

    The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.  -Paul Gauguin

    Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.  -Thomas Merton

    I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.  -Georgia O'Keeffe

    You don't take a photograph, you make it.  -Ansel Adams

   I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. -Jackson Pollock

    Art is the only way to run away without leaving home. -Twyla Tharp

   If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.  -Anais Nin

    Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers - and never succeeding.  -Gian Carlo Menotti

   Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed.  -Khalil Gibran

  The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them. ― Anton Chekhov

  A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.  –Gertrude Stein

  What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. -John Updike

  Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.  –Ambrose Bierce

  Art is what you can get away with. ― Andy Warhol

    It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of self-deception.  -Robert Motherwell

   Photography is a major force in explaining man to man. -Edward Steichen

    Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies. -Anish Kapoor

   Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”  ― C.S. Lewis

   Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.― Banksy

    PHOTO: The Sower, by Vincent Van Gogh

Alluring Waterborne Decisions

Alluring Waterborne Decisions

By Tom Wachunas

 

    EXHIBIT: Bits and Pieces, paintings by Nancy Michel, Nancy Stewart-Matin, Lynn Weinstein, Pam LaRocco, Judi Longacre, Gail Wetherell-Sack (mixed media assemblages), Peter Castillo, and Suni / in The Loft, upstairs at 2^ND APRIL GALERIE, 324 Cleveland Ave. NW, downtown Canton, THROUGH AUGUST 1   www.secondapril.org 

    I was tempted to title this entry “My Partial Summer’s Reading and Listening List.” Hopefully you’ll see what I mean as you read (and listen?) on.

   Recently a printmaking friend (Bill) reminded me (via a lengthy email) of the significance of scale in the work of the Danish-American sculptor Gutzon Borglum, whose legacy includes the colossal presidents’ heads on Mt. Rushmore. Without getting into the whole context of the email (note to Bill: you might consider authoring a blog), one of the take-aways has been a deeper consideration of any artwork’s scale in relation to its content and meaning.

    Tangential as it might seem, this consideration brings me to the notable popularity of watercolor painting as I’ve seen it manifest for many years in these parts. Canton a Watercolor Mecca? Possibly. In any case, what usually occurs to me when looking at even the best locally exhibited watercolors is their consistently small-to-modest scale: pristinely framed, consumer-friendly, and suitable for displaying in designer-savvy domestic interiors. But please don’t take this as a categorical disparagement of either the practice or the form.

   Monumental physical dimensions in a painted canvas, for example, can be useful in elevating the presumed importance of its underlying idea. The largeness of many Modernist and Postmodernist abstract paintings comes to mind here, and how they can still impress us with, and immerse us in a unique visual language that speaks of things we deem somehow “larger than life.”  

    That said, small-scale paintings (those we measure in inches, not feet) can be equally potent despite their size. I think those that are the most finely executed (and there are several remarkable watercolor examples in this exhibit) are intimate, experiential objects in same way that some books are. Books. Remember those? Hundreds of small sheets of printed paper bound together so you can hold them all at once in your hand? Both require the author/painter to arrange chosen compositional elements into an organized structure or theme of one kind or another. While many literary works are essentially evidence (symbolic journals?) of an author’s decisions on how best to evoke an immersive sensory experience in the reader, by extension you might think of some small paintings as writing with line, color, and shape with the same intentions and results.

    Judi Longacre’s sharply drawn and spectacular Lavalanche depicts an exotic forest invaded by a river of rainbow-colored lava. You can almost feel the heat, and sense the motion of the flow, signaled by its diagonal placement across the center of the picture plane amid the rhythmic swaying of vibrant green bamboo shafts. Hung next to this piece, both Lynn Weinstein’s liquid and playful Pigs and Pears, and Lemons and a Lime, display a similarly elegant, unifying balance of hot and cool hues.

    The richly toned background of Nancy Stewart-Matin’s Midnight in the Garden is dark yet neither brooding nor too eerie. Looming (and blooming) before us is a loosely rendered flowering tree. A mystical light gently illuminates its diaphanous form, as if glowing from within. Fluid passages of color seem to shimmer, aided by the wispy white lines that trace the contours of blossoms.

       The wrinkled-looking organic shapes that hover over the background in Nancy Michel’s Over the Edge are actually very low-relief painted cutouts, and are a bit more challenging to name. While the artist told me what the shapes were modelled after, I’m opting not to share it here, if only because I think there’s some magic in appreciating the ambiguity of the work. Suffice to say that the shapes (are they coming together or flying apart?) break the periphery of the picture plane and creep into the surrounding black matte. That blackness is in turn picked up by the serpentine line - a cut-out appliqué - placed atop the picture plane while simultaneously seeming to be behind it. It’s all an utterly intriguing playtime with figure-ground dynamics. 

   In “reading” these paintings we necessarily engage the terminology of applied principles in effective visual composition: unity, symmetry/asymmetry, balance, variety, texture, pattern, rhythm. To behold these principles (these decisions) in action, whether wholly or in part (and beyond any specificity of pictorial content), is to embrace the sheer pleasure of discovery – the essence of “an aesthetic experience.” And interestingly, this vocabulary that we apply to assessing the efficacy or beauty of a visual work is largely the same as when we assess a musical composition.   

   These painters are, then, accomplished orchestrators. As such, their paintings are beautiful music to my eyes.

    PHOTOS (from top): Lavalanche, by Judi Longacre; Pigs and Pears, and Lemons and a Lime, by Lynn Weinstein; Midnight in the Garden, by Nancy Stewart-Matin; Snacking After Swimming by Nancy Michel; Over the Edge by Nancy Michel