Edgy Evocations

 

Edgy Evocations 

Crosscurrent_01

Text/Context_01

Text/Context_04

Beyond Interpretation_10

By Tom Wachunas 

“You can make anything by writing.”   - C.S. Lewis  

“Letters act as practical and useful signs, but also as pure and inner melody.”  - Wassily Kandinsky

“Handwriting is a spiritual designing, even though it appears by means of a material instrument.”  - Euclid

“Calligraphy is the most direct form of all artistic expression. Just as each movement of the dancer is absolute, so every gesture of the calligrapher is essential. It is not the meaning of the character but the writing–the movement of execution and the action itself–that is important.”  - Tseng Yu-ho Ecke

EXHIBIT: John Chang: In Ink—Transformation of Calligraphy, THROUGH AUGUST 11, 2021, in STUDIO M at The Massillon Museum  / 121 Lincoln Way East, downtown Massillon, Ohio / Phone: 330-833-4061 / The Massillon Museum is open Tuesday through Saturday 9:30am - 5:00pm,  Sunday 2:00pm - 5:00pm

https://www.massillonmuseum.org/539

From Merriam-Webster: Definition of calligraphy / 1a: artistic, stylized, or elegant handwriting or lettering / b: the art of producing such writing /

2: PENMANSHIP / 3: an ornamental line in drawing or painting

   Born and raised in Shanghai, China, John Chang is now based in Southern California. At one point in his statement for this solo exhibit, he writes: “…By invoking calligraphic forms, I am commenting on the distortion of language, but I am also reclaiming the energy of the written word. Tapping into my ancestral roots, I also use pigments for their symbolic power. For example, black and white are the colors of most ink painting but also represent yin and yang… I consider myself a 'spiritual escapist.’"

  Escape from what, and into what? Frankly I’m not exactly sure. Not able to interpret the elegantly drawn Chinese characters/words floating throughout his paintings like so many ghosts, I can only guess. I’m reminded that one of the paintings in the show is called, interestingly enough, Beyond Interpretation. This is not to say that the process of interpretation can’t be intriguing. Here, it most certainly is.

   For starters, remember that the traditional strictures of Chinese calligraphy require a mastery of brush (or pen) and ink. Chang’s arresting paintings are a departure from that ancient discipline. An escape? They regularly employ large, shiny textured shapes (or plains) rendered in the plastic patina of black acrylic paint. A nod to modern Western industrialism?

   There’s plenty of ambiguity here. Visual tensions. Weight and counterweight. Yin and yang. Positive and negative. Are those precisely-edged black shapes -  looking like so many puzzle pieces - macroscopic views of partially defined calligraphic letters? Or is that more what the white shapes are doing? Which is the positive shape, which is the negative ground? Indeed, both the black and white fields are transparent, revealing a variety of underlying as well as superimposed characters, marks, drips, scrapes, and textures. In some of the paintings, Chang has incorporated scraps of corrugated shipping boxes. The Amazon-delivered pleasures of American consumerism?

   A synthesis of text, context, subtext. Abstractions. Gestures. Actions of the hand to set the mind traveling. Metaphors for a meeting of cultures, a hybridization of identities.

   So as a viewer, maybe on one level you could commence your own inter-actions with these fascinating works by becoming a spiritual inquisitor. Think  of them as (I can just about hear your groaning now)… guesstures.

Meanings to an End

 

Meanings to an End 

Untitled  (1991)

Outbound (detail)

Outbound (detail)

Outbound (2021)

By Tom Wachunas 

“…Now, you’re either on the bus or off the bus…”  - Ken Kesey, quoted in the Tom Wolfe novel, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”

   Back on May 4, I received an email from curator Craig Joseph (remember Translations Art Gallery in downtown Canton?) with an invitation. Here’s most of the email content:

  “ Ladies and Gents... I am very likely going to be departing Canton this fall in pursuit of an MFA or some other new adventure, but before I go, I want to create with you one last time under the Translations banner.

To that end, I've poured over 10 years of files to pull together a list of most everyone who has ever exhibited in a Translations show before and I'm inviting you all to be part of one last hurrah…

The show is called THE LAST HURRAH and I'm inviting you to reflect artistically on some sort of ending, a last something, a finality. Might be the ending of a favorite book or movie, might be the ending of a relationship, might be a historical ending (the Titanic sinks or Marie Antoinette gets beheaded), might be getting your vaccine. It's entirely up to you what you choose…”

The exhibit is planned to open at the Main Branch of Stark Library on Friday evening, July 30, and run through August 28.

  I decided to make a piece about my troubled departure from New York City (after living there for fourteen years - ten of those in Brooklyn). The new piece is called “Outbound,” and it’s been 30 years in the making.

   It wouldn’t be accurate to say, however, that I’ve been actually working all that time on the painting itself. Better to say… it’s been working on me. The piece was originally a slap-dash acrylic self-portrait on a small scrap of unstretched canvas (11 ½” x 13”). It was the last painting I made in 1991, during my final days in Brooklyn -  homeless, jobless, divorced. In debt. And drunk. A few months after painting it, I left Brooklyn at night, a few days before Christmas, on a Greyhound bus – the last bus ride I’ve ever had - bound for my native Ohio, where I have remained ever since.

   I never thought of that untitled painting as a “last hurrah”  so much as a last, lurid harumph from a devastated New York dreamer. It seemed to me that nothing in it spoke enough about its generous measure of dark ugliness. In fact I always felt it prodding me through the years to do something more with it, not to make it somehow prettier, but rather to at least paint a hint or two of specific context or point of reference. The painting kept saying only, “You’re not finished with me yet.”

   And so for this exhibit, I finally got on board to finish the journey.

Myra Schuetter's Not-So-Still Lifes

                                                   Myra Schuetter’s Not-So-Still Lifes 

Listen

I Should Have Stopped with the Animals

Devil's in the Details

Break Out

Distortion vs. Transparency (detail)

Distortion vs. Transparency

By Tom Wachunas 

   Hopefully, we are seeing a time in our history when people are beginning to break out of their “molds” and are able to be the people they are and want to be…What helps one segment of our society helps all of us.  – Myra Schuetter  

EXHIBIT: We’ve Got Issues: Watercolors by Myra Schuetter / at the Canton Museum of Art (CMA), 1001 Market Avenue North, Canton / THROUGH JULY 3, 2021 / Facemasks required–

Visit www.cantonart.org/reservetickets     330.453.7666

Tuesday - Thursday: 10 am – 8 pm /Friday - Saturday: 10 am – 5 pm; Sunday: 1 – 5 pm / Regular Admission: Adults - $8, Seniors (60+) & Students (with ID) - $6 / Children (12 & under) and Museum Members – FREE / FREE ADMISSION on Thursdays

   Myra Schuetter is a native of Jasper, Indiana. For the past 40 years or so she’s been honing her considerable skills as a watercolorist working in a meticulously realistic style. Her complex and intricate compositions are executed with a commanding exactitude of details and exquisite color dynamics that are nothing short of astonishing.

   These very large watercolor paintings – you could rightly call them heroic in scale - are in one sense still lifes. They’re also allegories, populated by lots of toys and action figures. At first you might think that the paintings are children’s tales, or memories, or perhaps tailored to a child’s perspective.

   So on yet another level, the paintings are narratives. These elaborate visual stories are actually very grown-up commentaries and observations that often speak to the social and political sturm und drang of our troubled time and place. Schuetter effectively explains what inspired them in the placards posted with each painting.

   For her 2016 work, I Should Have Stopped with the Animals, the artist recalled an occasion of talking with her husband about the state of the world.  At one point in the conversation he had asked, "Do you think God ever said, 'Maybe I should have stopped with the animals’?" The various toy figures in the painting are engaged in a war, all transpiring on and around a large Bible, opened to the Book of Genesis (the story of creation and the end of Eden). Not to be irreverent, but the husband’s inspiring question does remind me a bit of Mark Twain’s glib suggestion to God that, “… the human being is another disappointment and… is no considerable improvement upon the monkey.”

   Distortion vs. Transparency is an especially intriguing work from 2012, prompted by Schuetter’s recollection of the terribly contentious public meetings in her city where her husband was once the chairman of the Utilities Services Board. The meetings were held to determine a feasible alternative to the city’s outmoded coal-fired power plant.  

   In technique alone, particularly in the way Schuetter renders a variety of colored glass vessels (a  ‘transparency” that tends to emphasize or exaggerate the words visible behind the vessels ) and the shadows they cast, the painting is a tour de force. It’s a three-tiered essay of sorts. The characters arranged in the top row represent a pompous, loud and angry faction spreading misinformation. The middle row presents more reasonable folks, sincerely seeking a viable solution, while the bottom row presents what the artist calls the trusting “silent majority.”

   In the border that frames the painting called Listen, that same word appears in 57 languages. Meanwhile the image shows a diverse crowd of confrontational characters holding protest signs. In her comments on the work, Schuetter has written, “…For all of our arguing, conflict and anger, no one is listening to the “other side,”…getting to know the other side and truly listening to them usually doesn’t happen…”  

  There are multiple voices present in this work - indeed throughout the entire exhibit - and none of them really ‘still’ (as in still life) after all. So look and read closely. But also listen. You might even hear your own

Pulpitudes

 

PULPITUDES 

Buried Alive For Four Months

The Devil Beast Of Tuz Golu

The Man Who Snuffed Out Hell

Jet-Sled Raid on Russia's Ice Cap Pleasure Stockade

The Shy Killer

By Tom Wachunas 

"I learned how to compose, how to tell a story. There's no way I could have done what I did later if I hadn't had all that men's adventure magazine work." -Mort Künstler 

EXHIBIT: Mort Künstler: “The Godfather” of Pulp Fiction Illustration / at the Canton Museum of Art (CMA), 1001 Market Avenue North, Canton, Ohio / organized by the Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY and toured by International Arts & Artists, Washington, DC / THROUGH JULY 3, 2021 / Facemasks required–

Visit www.cantonart.org/reservetickets    330.453.7666

Tuesday - Thursday: 10 am – 8 pm /Friday - Saturday: 10 am – 5 pm; Sunday: 1 – 5 pm / Regular Admission: Adults - $8, Seniors (60+) & Students (with ID) - $6 / Children (12 & under) and Museum Members – FREE / FREE ADMISSION on Thursdays

 BACKGROUND, excerpted from CMA MAGAZINE: “Mort Künstler is recognized as America’s premier painter and chronicler of authentic American history, especially noted for his incomparable renderings of Civil War events. The artist began his career, however, as an illustrator during the golden age of pulp fiction books and magazines… In a sense, he became “The Don” of illustrated pulp fiction, a title that alludes to that prodigious writer of pulp fiction, Mario Puzo, and his illustrious novel The Godfather. Puzo had a work ethic akin to Künstler’s, and the two collaborated on many assignments during their years working for Magazine Management Company, Inc. Künstler created the original visuals for Puzo’s Mafia saga, which influenced future depictions of Vito Corleone, including Marlon Brando’s iconic portrayal of The Don in the 1972 Oscar-winning film The Godfather…

   Mort Künstler: “The Godfather” of Pulp Fiction Illustrators features more than 80 original illustrations by Künstler that enlivened the covers and pages of American paperback books and magazines such as True, Argosy, Stag, For Men Only, Male, Adventure, and Saga, throughout the pulp heyday of the 1950s and ‘60s. Most of these illustrations are being exhibited publicly for the first time, and their subjects are wide-ranging and unabashedly action-packed: military conflicts, criminal heists, Cold War espionage, man against nature, and much more. Nobody captured hardboiled action better than Mort Künstler. His illustrations embody the very essence of the pulp era.”

   Let’s start with considering three quotes. First this, from American photographer Aaron Siskind (1903-1991): “In any art, you don't know in advance what you want to say - it's revealed to you as you say it. That's the difference between art and illustration.”  Next, from American writer and comic book artist Brian Stelfreeze:  “I think there's art, and then there's illustration. Art comes from a deeper place.” And then this, from American painter Frank Stella: “…But, after all, the aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live.”

   Folks have been yakking about the supposed difference between “fine art” and “illustration” for centuries. In the quotes I cited here (and there are myriad others that I could have chosen as examples), there’s the snarky hint of illustration thought to be merely something. Something diminutive and inconsequential, something shallow, something weightless. As if to categorically declare, from the highbrow pulpits of aesthetic snobbery, that art is art and illustration is illustration and ne’er the twain shall meet. To that I say balderdash and baloney, fiddle-faddle and flapdoodle, humbug, hooey, hogwash and hokum. And lest I forget, piffle and poppycock and thank you very much Merriam-Webster.

    Illustration can signify many things to many people, depending upon taste and context. In the context of painting, for example, it seems to me that the practice of illustration has been too easily stigmatized as commercial entertainment. Perhaps the most laughable dismissal of illustration as art lies in the idea that illustrators lack originality because their imagery is nothing more than a translation of a written story. Tommyrot and twaddle. On that basis, why shouldn’t we write off countless representational painters through the entirety of art history - including all those beloved Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassical painters of old, for example - as mere hacks?

   Consider one more quote, from British illustrator Quentin Blake: “I suppose illustration tends to live in the streets, rather than in the hermetically sealed atmosphere of the museum, and consequently it has come to be taken less seriously.”

    Ironic, isn’t it? Here we are, in a museum, seriously filled with “mere” illustrations. Paintings. Most of them show a marvelous mastery of the gouache medium (opaque watercolor).  Mort Künstler’s compositions, drawn from stories, are exciting visual adventures rendered with stunning precision and a compelling flare for the theatrical. Come look. If you find them “entertaining,” more power to them, and to you. It’s an offer you shouldn’t refuse.  

Radiant Recall

 

Radiant Recall 

Merry go round

In the Garden

Sunshine Corner

Up on the Roof

All the Way to China

Mom's Prom

By Tom Wachunas 

“Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.” -Barbara Kingsolver

“One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.”  - Antonio Porchia

“A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.”  - Edward de Bono

“…The intention is not to fix or memorialize time, but instead excavate a specific memory, perpetuating movement and inviting participation. The work depicts the slippery efforts of the mind's eye to pause and preserve disintegrating memories..." – David King 

EXHIBIT: Time Travel – Paintings by David King, at Vital Arts Gallery /  324 Cleveland Ave NW, downtown Canton, Ohio / Through June 12, 2021 – ONLY A FEW DAYS REMAINING !!  Gallery hours are Wednesday 4:00 to 8:00 p.m., Thursday-Saturday, 6:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m.

   I often marvel at the magic of human memory. Our ability to remember the people, places and things we experienced in the past is a powerful and, make no mistake, mystical one.

   To recall and recollect feelings, states of mind, and even physical sensations, is a treasure. And yet it’s also a treasure confounding in its fragility and transience. Over time, even our fondest memories accumulate so abundantly into the mass that is our being that they can be crushed under their own weight, like gemstones pulverized and dispersed into glistening dust.

   So if a memory, especially an old one, can be said to be a magic show, it is nonetheless a fleeting encounter. Such memories might require a grand sleight of mind and heart to activate and preserve them. And interestingly enough, it is often the very potent work of a skilled painter – a prestidigitator in his or her own right - that can do the trick.   

  For this eye-popping exhibit of oil-and-acrylic works on canvas, Cleveland Heights artist David King was inspired by family movies and photos some 50 to 60 years old. While his imagery is narrative in a general sort of way, it isn’t a stylistically meticulous, literal realism at work here. Think of these loose, painterly remembrances more as a lateral poeticizing. Memory in motion. Yes, there’s something of a nostalgic spirit about them - a dreamlike if not surreal charm - but never one that gets too mired in gushy sentimentality.

   What makes the sense of spontaneity and freshness in these works all the more present is King’s intensely charged palette. There’s a not-in-Kansas-anymore quirkiness in the way his hot fluorescent colors irradiate the scenes with a dynamic energy, transforming so many thens into utterly new nows.

   I could be wrong, but I’m thinking that for David King, looking at all those old movie reels or photos must surely have been an incipient experience. A personal epiphany. So he celebrated it by wielding his paintbrush like a magic wand.

Diaphanous Realms

 

Diaphanous Realms 

Soft, early

the forever of stars

distant disturbances (detail)

distant disturbances

refracted shimmer

deep into

Rock Cloud and the Skywalkermothergoddess (detail)

Rock Cloud and the Skywalkermothegoddess

By Tom Wachunas 

EXHIBIT: Suspended Animations / work by Rebecca Cross, at STUDIO M in Massillon Museum / 121 Lincoln Way East, downtown Massillon, Ohio, THROUGH JUNE 16, 2021 / Tuesday through Saturday 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Sunday 2:00 to 5:00 / 330.833.4061

https://massillonmuseum.org/

LEARN MORE HERE:   https://massillonmuseum.org/538

   “…I was compelled to draw elements of these invented biomorphic figures because I was curious about drawing on dyed silk fabric with equally ethereal pastels. But I also sought in these pieces the immersion of slow work over time. Placing these drawings within dyed waterscapes brought together my concerns about environmental catastrophe with the vast Lake Erie horizon, which I regularly contemplate as I think.”  -Rebecca Cross

   This marvelous exhibit (of seven large wall pieces and one sculptural installation) is among the most enthralling unions of elegant craft and compelling concept I’ve seen in recent years.

   Rebecca Cross’s large colored wall pieces (4’ x 5’) – from her recent Horizons series - are chalk pastel drawings on dyed silk. Cross writes about their intriguing translucent surfaces in her statement for the show: “… what complicates the immediate apprehension of these drawings is a reflective feature of silk organza called moiré: the curvilinear effect on the surface of the finely woven silk created when the silk is sized through caliendering presses when processed into fabric.”

   These drawings have uncanny depth, at once real and illusory. Each one appears to be comprised of two individual planes with a only a tiny bit of physical space between them – the result of draping the large piece of silk over a rod attached to the gallery wall, like a translucent curtain.

    Aqueous and ethereal, Cross’s abstractions aren’t static objects to be viewed in any casual manner. They’re not pictures in the conventional sense so much as interactive, indeed spiritual experiences. Animated moments in time. To look at them is to see into them, to partner with them, as if engaging in a kind of slow dance. As you move, they move, buoyant and breathing in a pulsing response to your relative position in space. How far away are you standing, or how near? Look up, then down. Look to the left, then right. As you alter your perspective, you become increasingly absorbed in shimmering gossamer expanses of luminous, undulating color. Look closer still, and individual linear marks come into sharper focus: flecks and squiggles, specks that wriggle into organic shapes. Ghostlike traces. Remnants. Fossils. Memories of living things.

   A similar sense of immersion in the ephemeral is even more palpable in Cross’s stunning installation called Rock Cloud and the Skywalkermothergoddess. It’s a metaphorical moment of frozen flux. Here is a consideration of nature’s mutability in the form of contrasted modes of being – solids and air, hard and soft, substance and shadow, present and past. Gravity itself seems to have been inactivated. All those weighty white stones float in a suspended state of equanimity with their blue silk counterparts that look like bubbles or tiny clouds or maybe the shed skins of former stones. Call it all a mesmerizing Erie meditation.    

A Healing Return to the Stage

 

A Healing Return to the Stage from the Canton Symphony Orchestra 

By Tom Wachunas 

“Wisps of cloud and mist, are lit from above, breeze in the foliage and wind in the reeds, and all is scattered.”  - from first part of Faust, the lyric poem by Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, and the inspiration for the third movement of Felix Mendelssohn’s Octet for Strings 

     Reasons to be cheerful: They’re back! The May 23 concert by the Canton Symphony Orchestra (CSO) marked the first time in more than a year that the ensemble has performed live at Umstaddt Performing Arts Hall. This occasion was certainly an important step on the road back to cultural “normalcy” as we recover from the dreadful pandemic shutdown.

   For a May 21 article by Ed Balint in The Repository (Canton’s daily newspaper), CSO president and CEO Michelle Charles said of the concert, “That's what we do, that's what we love and that's why we exist, to perform music live. You do take for granted how readily available (classical music) is until it's not. So I think it's going to be very emotional."  Noting that the concert was especially significant to Gerhardt Zimmermann, CSO music director and conductor since 1980, she added, "It's been so long, and Canton has held a special place in his heart for many, many years. I think it's going to be more emotional for him than anyone." The emotional factor becomes even more resonant when considering Zimmermann’s own battle with coronavirus which led to weeks of hospitalization and rehabilitation in 2020. He’s still not at optimal strength, and consequently conducted the program while seated on a raised platform.

   This short concert (with no intermission) was an altogether unique sensory experience, and not a CSO business-as-usual affair. Zimmermann chose just two works to be on the program: Felix Mendelssohn’s Octet for Strings, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Symphony No. 29. Covid protocols were in place. Umstattdt Hall, a 1,400- seat venue, felt eerily empty as the audience was limited to a total of 300 attendees, most seated in socially distanced manner, and all required to wear masks, as were the musicians spaced widely across the stage.

   From the very start of Mendelssohn’s grand Octet, the palpable esprit de corps between Maestro Zimmermann and the ensemble (four violins, two violas, two cellos) was a pleasure to behold - inspired and inspiring. At once fiery and flamboyant, delicate and precise, the vigorous sound emanating from this small group during the first movement (and for that matter the entire work) was a warm embrace of the inventive composer’s youthful panache, and his instructions that the work “…be played by all the instruments in a symphonic orchestral style. Pianos and fortes must be strictly observed…”  Mendelssohn’s Octet is a masterpiece calling for virtuosity from all the players to varying degrees, but none more so than from the first violin. Here, the vibrant playing by Emily Cornelius was exquisite. Her arpeggios often soared to ravishing heights above the intricate syncopations and lovely harmonies being crisply articulated beneath.

   Pausing after the long first movement, Zimmermann turned briefly to the audience and with a broad smile said, “How sweet it is.” Then it was on to the gentle textures and beautiful phrasing of the lyrical Andante movement, followed by the bewitching Scherzo, seemingly transporting us to a magical forest wherein nocturnal spirits scurry about. And finally, the robust fourth movement Presto. Here was a dazzling, ebullient romp, truly symphonic in scope, first announced by the cellos, then quickly rippling through the whole ensemble at a furious tempo with an explosive, infectious energy.

   That same spirit of infectious energy was present in a rousing performance of what is widely considered to be Mozart’s first symphonic masterpiece, his Symphony No. 29. Though originally scored for a smaller-scaled orchestra (here there were 29 instruments including strings, a pair of oboes and a pair of French horns), the CSO dispatched all of Mozart’s vigor and lyricism, his melodic grace and frolicsome wit, with impressive clarity and robust sonority, all of it bringing a very grateful audience to its feet.     

   In his brilliant virtual pre-concert lecture, Professor MJ Albacete noted that both works on this program were written when the composers were astonishingly young -  Mendelssohn was 17 years old, Mozart was 18 - and were of major importance in their respective aesthetic evolutions. Further, he offered this moving personal observation about what he called a subliminal connection between the works and their symbolic meaning for our current time and circumstances: “Both begin in joy, descend into a period of serenity – you might even say melancholy – but revive with hope and expectation and conclude with a sense of triumph and rejoicing, returning to the way things were not so very long ago. Great music can also be a remedy for the spirit and the soul. So may it be for all of us in the days and weeks to follow.”

   How sweet it is indeed.