CHRISTMAS REFLECTIONS

 

Christmas Reflections 

 

   Here I offer you for your contemplation my annual Christmas painting. It’s a very small picture of an immeasurably large truth. And if you read no other words in this year-ending ARTWACH post, I pray that you at least let these words from John 3:16 activate and inspire your Christmas spirit, indeed your life, now and forever forward:

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

   Still reading? Thank you! Let me help you unpack the ultimate Christmas gift with some additional reflections from C.S. Lewis.

 “In the Christian story, God descends to reascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity; down further still, if embryologists are right, to recapitulate in the womb ancient and pre-human phases of life; down to the very roots and seabed of the Nature.” - from Miracles

“The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.” —  from Mere Christianity

And finally this, also from Mere Christianity:

   “Did you ever think, when you were a child, what fun it would be if your toys could come to life? Well suppose you could really have brought them to life. Imagine turning a tin soldier into a real little man. It would involve turning the tin into flesh. And suppose the tin soldier did not like it. He is not interested in flesh: all he sees is that the tin is being spoilt. He thinks you are killing him. He will do everything he can to prevent you. He will not be made into a man if he can help it.”

“What you would have done about that tin soldier I do not know. But what God did about us was this. The Second Person in God, the Son, became human Himself: was born into the world as an actual man— a real man of a particular height, with hair of a particular colour, speaking a particular language, weighing so many stone. The Eternal Being, who knows everything and who created the whole universe, became not only a man but (before that) a baby, and before that a foetus inside a Woman’s body. If you want to get the hang of it, think how you would like to become a slug or a crab.”

“The result of this was that you now had one man who really was what all men were intended to be: one man in whom the created life, derived from His Mother, allowed itself to be completely and perfectly turned into the begotten life. The natural human creature in Him was taken up fully into the divine Son. Thus in one instance humanity had, so to speak, arrived: had passed into the life of Christ. And because the whole difficulty for us is that the natural life has to be, in a sense, ‘killed’, He chose an earthly career which involved the killing of His human desires at every turn—poverty, misunderstanding from His own family, betrayal by one of His intimate friends, being jeered at and manhandled by the Police, and execution by torture. And then, after being thus killed—killed every day in a sense—the human creature in Him, because it was united to the divine Son, came to life again. The Man in Christ rose again: not only the God. That is the whole point. For the first time we saw a real man. One tin soldier—real tin, just like the rest—had come fully and splendidly alive…”

MAY All OF US BE SPLENDIDLY ALIVE AND HAVE A BLESSED CHRISTMAS!

Oh How Her Gardens Grew!

 

Oh How Her Gardens Grew! 

Life Is A Balancing Act

American Grafitti

Everything But The Kitchen Sink

The Last Supper

The French Connection

See How My Garden Grows

By Tom Wachunas

 

“…Also inherent in this soup of paint, collage and accidents, is the subconscious mind lending to my creations the unknown factor. Tapping into the subconscious (which using my untrained hand facilitates) allows me to make work that relies on intuition, a mixture of art-historical and non-art resources in order to create funny, sometimes irreverent yet moving imagery.”

-Patricia Zinsmeister Parker

 

Obituary:    https://www.cantonrep.com/obituaries/pwoo1019397

 

   The news of Patricia Zinsmeister Parker’s recent passing continues to hit me hard. Her art has been a very frequent subject through nearly all the years that ARTWACH has existed. Yet overpowering, if not slowly assuaging my profound sadness at this juncture is my deepest gratitude for our friendship and the profound impact her art has made on our arts community in general.  

   Pat Parker was a flippant deconstructor, articulating the familiar side-by-side with the enigmatic. Her exquisitely refined unrefinement could invade our aesthetic comfort zones and rattle our predispositions for more conventional painting practices. She was a thoroughly compelling artist, and among the most prolific and important artists I have ever had the blessing and privilege to know. Equal parts dream weaver and reality shaper, she always painted in a delightful spirit of palpable muscularity.

   Insightful and inciteful, she made art that wagged a sassy finger in your face and rattled your sense of “finished” aesthetic decorum. She was a painter seriously engaged in mindful play, often not too unlike the proverbial kid who refuses to color inside the lines.

   Look long enough at a painting by Patricia Zinsmeister Parker and you might hear her right hand clapping and slapping while her left hand guffaws and giggles. One complemented and complimented the other.

   Her paintings are specific events in time. Decisions: the point at which she stopped painting the picture. As such, arrivals. Prior to those arrivals there were always stories. History of the artist, indeed even histories of art. There be ghosts in a Parker painting. Some shout. Some whisper. Some sing and dance. Actions. Moods. Remnants. Echoes.

    Underneath what’s immediately apparent in a Parker picture, you might find a person or a place or a thing, a riddle or a rumble, shaky shapes or loose lines lurking inside colliding clouds and clusters of colors both muted and stunningly electric. A brush with memory. A life that’s anything but still. An attitude, an essence. A gripping adventure in unmitigated seeing.

   So look long enough. A Parker painting is often a confluence of the mundane and mysterious. A joining of the very recent and very distant past  to make wholly new, present moments.

   Look long enough. A Parker painting is an activation of her inexhaustible exuberance at mark-making. You might even hear the sound of scrubbing, scribbling, or rubbing. Erasing and emoting. Feeling the push-pull of pure possibility.

   Look long enough. Unencumbered by rendering any laborious illusory minutiae of prosaic details, hers was a larger, deeper reality: the poetry of the painting process. Of creation.

   THANK YOU, Pat, for planting in me an indefatigable longing, and loving, to wonder, to write, and to look… longer. THANK YOU for inspiring me with the constancy of your ever-evolving aesthetic. For your personhood. May you Rest in Peace.

Where's There?

 

Where’s there? 

Cherry Red Palette

The Other Side

Dream Crusher

Amber

Developing

Checkmate

Paperweight

By Tom Wachunas

 

“The theme of “Are You There?” revolves around the idea of self-discovery amidst the unknown and resisting external influences. The series features window-like viewpoints, overlapping layers, and explosions of color, each representing the myriad decisions we make in life. These layers symbolize the diverse aspects of human existence: physical, energy, emotional, and mental, capturing the essence of different periods in our lives in an abstract form.”  - Emily Orsich

EXHIBIT: ARE YOU THERE? – recent paintings by Emily Orsich / at Strauss Studios Gallery / 236 Walnut Avenue NE, downtown Canton, OH / Through closing reception on Friday Jan. 3, 2025, 6-9pm. /Viewing Hours: Mon-Fri 10am to 5pm, Sat. 12noon to 5pm/ 330-456-0300

Background:  https://john-strauss-furniture.myshopify.com/collections/emily-orsich?fbclid=IwY2xjawGgXZNleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHTJwWB3QH0LTp642gnL67cktN5__fRcQe-87wb7kokAs-OrtSt19u4PBLw_aem_4kN41ZlhczwkKboeghzGng

 

   Let’s away. To back then. To right now. To not yet. Or maybe to a place, a state of being, wherein present moments, past memories, and anticipated futures exist together all at once. Where tensions and harmonies, confusions and clarities, are recognized, processed in the mind, and expressed through the heart. Where we roll with the punches through all manner of experienced affirmations, denials, peace, turmoil, despair, hope, agony, joy, doubt, certainty, losing, searching, finding. In short, life.

  Emily Orsich paints that.

  Her exciting polychromatic compositions speak – indeed sing - to the vicissitudes of being alive. Her paintings are symbolic, metaphorical fusions, supple and intriguing, of organic and geometric configurations, intertwined and traversing both physical and ethereal realities. A blending of materiality and spirit.

   I appreciate this distinctive dialect of abstract painting as a form of poetry. Consider what Robert Frost once wrote: “Poetry is when an emotion found its thought and the thought has found words.”

   Now, let’s go somewhere a bit farther with that. Emily Orsich paints metapoetry. It’s when painting finds that ineffable, piquant place where words leave off.

   Have you been there?

#ROYGBIV RSVP#

 

#ROYGBIV RSVP# 

 

By Tom Wachunas

 

“In 2020 I started a series of mini paintings focused just on color, creating a little spectrum of paintings on my social media feed. I always loved the idea of doing a show with an entire wall of mini paintings, but it was just too ambitious to try to do myself. So last year I decided to invite 11 other artists to join me. Over the course of a year the 12 of us created 225 pieces…”    - Heather Bullach

 

EXHIBIT: SPECTRUM, at The Hub Art Factory, 336 6th St NW, downtown  Canton

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS: Heather Bullach, Sally Priscilla Lytle, Jake Mensinger, Todd Bergert, Steve Ehret, Dyanne Williams, Christopher Triner, Erika Katherine, Clare Murray Adams, Jo Westfall, Sharon Mazgaj, Emily Vigil

HERES A FINAL CALL TO WITNESS A DELERIOUSLY DIVERSE, GLORIOUSLY UNIQUE GRIDLOCK OF 225 6”X6” MARVELOUS PAINTINGS BY 12 LOCAL ARTISTS FROM 7:30 P.M. TO 9:30 P.M. ON TUESDAY, NOV. 12 at THE HUB ART FACTORY. THANK YOU, HEATHER BULLOCK, FOR YOUR CONCEPT AND YOUR CURATING! STUNNING AND SPECTACULAR AND SUPERB AND SSSSSIZZLING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Fill in the blank: Once more, with _____

 

Fill in the blank: Once more, with ____ 

Drift in Harmony

 

Calm Like A Bomb

  

Whispers Underneath The Waves

Falling Into Midnight's Shadow

 

Snake Charmer

 

Tangled In The Sun's Last Breath

Flicker Of A Firefly's Lament

By Tom Wachunas

 

“I want to paint the feeling of a space. It might be an enclosed space, it might be a vast space. It might be an object.… Feeling is something more: It’s feeling your existence. Painting is a means of feeling ‘living.’”  - Joan Mitchell

 “I'm not interested in 'abstracting' or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more things in it - drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or idea.”  - Willem de Kooning

  “Art is an experience, not an object.” - Robert Motherwell

Artist background/ interview: https://artsinstark.com/interview/joe-ostrowske/

EXHIBIT: HIGH VELOCITY – Paintings by Joe Ostrowske /  through  January 10, 2025, at Cyrus Custom Framing and Art Gallery, 2645 Cleveland Avenue NW, Canton, Ohio / Gallery Hours are Mon.-Fri. 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sat. 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

   In an ArtsinStark “Self Portrait” interview (link posted above - from August of this year), painter Joe Ostrowske was asked to tell what inspired his creative process. He answered, “I find the blank canvas is what inspires my process. I never know where it is going to lead me, but I love the journey it takes me on with every new canvas.”

    So he’s about painting the journey rather than just replicating a pristine final destination. Ostrowske’s gestural abstractitudes aren’t so safe and predictable as that. They’re adventuresome explorations of colliding crossroads. They boldly depart from well-beaten trails to familiar comfortable places. Instead, they navigate more complex terrains   articulated with all the loose and visceral expressivity that acrylic paint can give him. His paintings are busy, sometimes explosive agglomerations of stratified marks and scattered, amorphous shapes that seemingly burst and dance to the rhythmic motions of sizzling bright colors. It’s as if he is sojourning in the dense and diverse landscapes of a consciousness not always his alone.

    Who else’s consciousness, then? As if,…what if. And here’s where I feel compelled to admit (and encourage) a sort of ‘magical thinking’ born from my own engagements with the process and methods of making a painting. Here’s an enigmatic, inexplicable, unreasonable, absurd proposition, but… What if paintings – ostensibly inanimate objects with lavishly decorated and marked-up surfaces – are themselves conscious entities capable of actually speaking to and being heard by the painter as they come into being? Granted, maybe only other painters will fully apprehend this idea, but give it a try anyway: The painting wants what the painting wants. It’s not just a static document of the painter’s past decisions, not just a silent witness, not merely an eye-popping wall adornment. It’s a continuing performance in the sense of performance being the motivation for, or execution of, an action, or the behavior of reacting to sensate stimuli, in real time.

   At that moment when you decide to look at that thing on the wall, the painter’s performance in real time has only paused, not ceased altogether. It has simply flipped the script as it looks back at you, now a fellow performer. The painting wants what the painting wants, which is to give you your turn too, in real time, to act, to get into it. Intuit. Let the painter’s performance lead or inspire you to make what you see continue to keep playing out on the stage of your perceptions - to write a message, feeling, or narrative on the blank canvas of your imagination.

   You might even experience looking as if playing a game of hide ‘n seek, or capture the flag. Better yet, let’s play tag. You’re it.

Captured in Cloth

 

Captured in Cloth 

Serenity

John

Watching U

Regrets

Still I Rise

Ophelia - Woman coming into her Confidence

Elements

By Tom Wachunas

 

…Just like moons and like suns, With the certainty of tides, Just like hopes springing high, Still I'll rise… from “Still I rise” by Maya Angelou

   “Art is a form of experience of the person, the place, the history of the people, and as black people, we are different. We hail from Africa to America, so the culture is mixed, from the African to the American. We can't drop that. It's reflected in the music, the dance, the poetry, and the art.”  - Faith Ringgold

 

EXHIBIT: Eyes To The Soul: The Fiber Art of Margene May / at Canton Museum of Art, through October 27, 2024 / 1001 Market Avenue N., Canton, Ohio /  330.453.7666 /

The Canton Museum of Art is open Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays from 10 a.m. – 8 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays 10 a.m. – 5 p.m., and Sundays 1-5 p.m. Admission is free on Thursdays and the first Friday of every month.

Background info:   https://www.cantonart.org/exhibits/eyes-soul-fiber-art-margene-may-august-27-2024-october-27-2024

 

   This captivating retrospective tribute to the work of Canton artist Margene May, who passed away unexpectedly in 2022, was curated by Lynda Tuttle Swintosky. Her downtown gallery, Lynda Tuttle’s Art Center, significantly contributed to the vital diversity of Canton’s burgeoning art scene with a large solo exhibit (31 pieces!) of May’s exquisite fiber portraits back in August of 2010.

   Margene May elevated the craft of fabric cut-and-paste to a riveting level of jewel-like intricacy. She composed portraits with pieces of cloth that often echoed traditional African-styled abstract designs, symbols and patterns. Moods, attitudes, postures. Her portraits exude a wondrous presence of palpable emotional expressivity and qualities of human character. They speak stories of vulnerability, strength, desire, anxiety, hope, doubt, confidence.

   Yes, stories. And also questions. As we watch, as we lock eyes and look at them, one of the pieces here called “Watching U” reminds me that they look at us too, perhaps asking what we feel, assume, or truly know about African Americans alive together with us in modern society.

   Margene May’s portraits are dynamic immersions, compelling contemplations and celebrations that still evoke beautiful connections to the ethos of African art and culture. One of the most powerful and poignant examples of that connectivity is especially present in her marvelous work called “Serenity.” A mother, her face aglow with intense, warm color, looks peacefully past our gaze, seemingly through us, into a time or place where her sleeping baby has yet to arrive. Mother’s hair seems windblown, electrified, alert. Her hand, resting on baby’s torso, is a cradling comfort. And a strong, ready shield.   

MuralFest Destinations - Part 2

 

MuralFest Destinations (Part 2 – more photos) 

by Timothy Smith

Timothy Smith

by Heidi Clifford and Ashley Palmer

by Kwesi Agyare

by Libby Doss with Canton Country Day School students

by Ashley Liptak (center figure by Stephen Ehret)

by Bethanie Steelman

Bethany Steelman

“Canton Mural Fest is a celebration of art, culture, and community in Downtown Canton as we transform blank walls into vibrant works of art that will captivate and inspire. We envision a collection of murals that together make an outdoor mural gallery designed to connect, reflect and celebrate our diverse communities through public art.” – Downtown Canton Partnership

 

https://www.downtowncanton.com/events/mural-fest/

 

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DAXtwT-OeyS/?utm_source=ig_embed&ig_rid=5b7334f9-cedd-43ed-a31a-0c7fbd835bc3

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS/ Mural location:

Dirk Rozich and Tracy Dawn Brewer (221 Cherry Ave. NW)

Rafael Valdivieso (221 Cherry Ave. NW)

Ian Burleson (221 Cherry Ave. NW)

Derin Fletcher (221 Cherry Ave. NW)

Bethannie Steelman (335 Second St. NW)

Arlin Graff (236 Walnut Ave. NE)

Ron Copeland (300 Walnut Ave. NW)

Ashley Liptak (405 3d St. NW)

Libby Doss with Canton Country Day students (404 3d St. NW)

Kwesi Agyare (331 Cherry Ave. NW)

Heidi Clifford and Ashley Palmer (321 Cherry Ave. NW)

Timothy Smith (320 Walnut Ave. NW)

Kat Francis (320 Walnut Ave. NW)

Lisa Quine (328 Walnut Ave. NW)

   Sponsored by ArtsinStark, the Downtown Canton Partnership and Visit Canton, Mural Fest celebrates public art and features 13 new murals in the Cherry and Walnut Avenue area of downtown Canton. This entire project is an altogether extraordinary urban transformation. A truly thrilling facelift, if you will, and a significant augmentation of Canton’s cultural depth.