MOTHER TREE

Fellow paper maker and friend Helen Hiebert's Mother Tree Project is now taking shape. Above is a photo of the 1/4" scale model of the plan...

OPEN TO CHANGE...

 Shown above: "Motherland" My mixed media paper quilt 

in homage to our 44th US President, Barack Hussein Obama

Embarking on a profound holiday season for many personal reasons... Got this e-mail today from The International Association of Hand Papermakers and Paper Artist (IAPMA) one of the organizations I belong to, and thought it was worth sharing....

“A Quiet Warrior of Her Art”

You Are Never TOO OLD...

Origin of Paper in China

...Traveled to Williamsburg in Brooklyn last night to the opening reception of "The Origins of Paper in China",  the second exhibit on the subject at the International Paper Museum. Organized by Elaine Koretsky with help from her daughter Donna Koretsky owner of Carriage House Papers which houses the museum, it is the place I buy most of my papermaking supplies.

Donna and her mother Elaine are two people amazing people. They have now spent more than thirty years teaching, documenting, leading study and field trips to remote villages to learn papermaking in the context of the communities that use the practice to sustain life. Over the years the two have amassed an enormous collection of Chinese handmade papers and unusual artifacts pertaining to how papermaking was invented in China and developed through the centuries, and still exists.

Elaine has assembled a lovely small catalog to accompany the exhibit which featured approximately 20 paper samples tipped in. A real keepsake, well worth the $30 purchase price... Carriage House is a great resource for additional books, dvds, samples, and supplies for papermaking.... Much too much to mention here. If you get a chance to view the exhibit, I promise you will not be disappointed. It is well worth the journey.

The Origin of Paper in China
December 13 through June 6, 2010
International Paper Museum

31 Grand Street (corner of Kent Ave)

Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY 11211

Museum hours on Thursdays, 2-6 p.m.

For additional info visit: Carriage House Papers: http://carriagehousepaper.com/ 
(address around the corner from the Museum at: 245 Kent Avenue)  USA • tel/fax: 718-599-PULP (7857) or 800-669-8781 • email:info@carriagehousepaper.com

FORTUNY

 

"There is no past or future in art" 

-- Pablo Piscasso

"How much 'time' has passed between a Cycladic fertility symbol, a fabric designed by Mariano Funtuny and a mirror by Anish Kapoor? While museums and exhibits increasingly direct their focus on particular periods, styles or artists, we are living in a global society, surrounded by timeless ideas and objects. Artempo aims to explore the universal, timeless language of art and examines the relationship between art, time and the power of display."1

...A friend gifted me a copy of the book "Mariano Fortuny" yesterday.  Serendipity... providence... destiny.... I think a bit of all that. I was intrigued by the father, the son, and the relationship of one's impact on the other... And like many of my internet "bunny trails," it lead me to ARTEMPO, an exhibit that ended two years ago, at the Palazzo Fortuny Museum....

Have a look: http://www.artempo.eu/menu_en/exhibition_en.html

Also found a few catalogues from the exhibit on Amazon.com.

Product Description

As Albert Einstein said, "The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science." This delightful, surprising and tactile exhibition catalogue examines the relationship between nature and the man-made world, reevaluating of our perceptions of reality, of how we read information, meaning and poetry in the physical world around us. Alongside an assortment of historical art objects from different periods and cultures, this volume features work by an assortment of international artists including Marina Abramovic, Antonin Artaud, Francis Bacon, Hans Bellmer, Michael Borremans, Louise Bourgeois, Andre Breton, Cai Guo-Qiang, Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Marlene Dumas, Fischli & Weiss, Lucio Fontana, Alberto Giacometti, Anish Kapoor, On Kawara, William Kentridge, Yves Klein, Man Ray, Piero Manzoni, Gordon Matta-Clark, Pablo Picasso, Robert Raushenberg, Medardo Rosso, Richard Serra, James Turrell, Andy Warhol and many more.2

1 From Artempo home page.

2 From Amazon.com product description of catalogue

Colors of the Night

“It often seems to me that the night is much more alive 
and richly colored than the day."

-- Vincent Van Gogh,

September 8, 1888

Last year, I had the delicious opportunity, along with a small group from Montclair, New Jersey’s art community, to have a private showing at the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) exhibit on “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night.” We were lead through the exhibit by its curator Joachim Pissarro, who is an Adjunct Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, as well as, Bershad Professor of Art History and Director of the Hunter College Art Galleries. At first glance you may think this show is perhaps small and, as one viewer seems to think, suspicious in it’s intent. He writes:

…The central theme of the show is a bit contrived. It seems to be organized around a few comments Van Gogh made to his brother Theo (the exhibit includes multiple letters the artist wrote to his closest sibling) about effectively capturing the beauty of the night sky through artistic method. Beyond the two Starry Night works, the remaining pieces displayed are less on-point with regard to the general them … (Borrowed from the customer review section at Amazon.com on the page for the catalogue: “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night”)

Unfortunately that reviewer did not have the benefit of Joachim Pissarro’s skillful eye to guide him. If he had he would have seen that each work was specifically selected and hung to build into a most moving essay on the study of night by light.

Once we all gathered into the exhibit space Joachim explained his approach to hanging the show. Not necessarily in chronological order, the first gallery contains a survey of Van Gogh’s career from start to finish. Opening with sketches he made while still an itinerant preacher simply making visual notes from a café table of what he sees around him. From there the curatorial introduction sifts through years of Van Gogh’s work to show how his passion for capturing subdued light began indoors, and then is transformed as he moves outdoors to study. Emphasizing the effects of the setting sun on the horizon line and subject matter.

Joachim’s own passion for the element of discovery is apparent as we floated into the second gallery, where Van Gogh’s track from the Netherlands, where he was born, explodes into his later landscapes of France. There we saw canvases emboldened with colors that become alive in the imaginations of a yellow sky and a rainbow of brush strokes shooting out from subjects seated at a blazing fireplace … I was lost somewhere inside Van Gogh’s head absorbed in lavish texture created by generous mounds of paint.

The stage set we rounded the barrier into the third gallery to see the first "Starry Night Over the Rhone." On the opposite wall hangs "The Night Café" (both shown above). It is interesting, Joachim points out, that both paintings contain the same color palette applied in an opposite manor. Where bright lime green dominates The Night Café it is used sparingly to represent the only source of light in The Starry Night over the Rhone. We see in this gallery too "The Dance Hall in Arles." Again same radical palette of navy red and lime green. This time shades of lime illuminate the people themselves as they crowd the café.

Joachim talked about his research process for the exhibit, thinking it would take him about six months. What he found instead however, was a much broader subject matter that included art, poetry and literature. The idea of night itself evokes a certain sensuality and mystery – even danger that has drawn the attention of countless writers and artist for centuries. The curator said he found himself in a study that actually took two years to complete. Even then he admitted to us, he had not exhausted his resources. Van Gogh was a voracious reader, fluent in Dutch, German, English and French. “His vast literary knowledge fed his artistic imagination; many of these texts describe the spiritual and poetic character of the twilight and night hours that [he] sought to capture in his paintings.”(1) Some of those resources are also on display in a small room off the last gallery…

The forth gallery: By now we are all more sensitive to the elusive twilight Van Gogh sought to show us. Almost anxiously I waited to enter the final gallery. For years I have seen images of "The Starry Night." I confess secretly, it is not one of my favorite paintings. Now however armed with Joachim’s poignant visual essay I am certain I will see it with new eyes. I was not disappointed. It was magical. Lyrical movement of rotating brush strokes that danced across the canvas… For a little while I took flight with them fascinated by the vivid imagination that had created them. Joachim points out that no where in the South of France does a church exist with a tall steeple like the one in the painting, and for the first time I realize that Van Gogh has made us to see his impression of what the night feels like to him…


The entire exhibit can be viewed on line at MoMa’s website: http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/exhibitions.php?id=5634 (A side note: New York’s Modern Museum of Art was founded in 1929 as the first of its kind in the world. You can read more about that history at: http://www.moma.org/about_moma/history/index.html

Also, I found the following website, which claims to be a complete resource of Van Gogh’s art and writings: http://www.vggallery.com/

(1) Exert from the exhibit on-line Literary Reference page: http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2008/vangoghnight/flashsite/index.html

MY ART: Exploring Meaning

Tarin Fuller, former gallery owner, collector and friend. Is the daughter of Norman Lewis, who was an important twentieth century Abstract-Expressionist. She is also someone whose opinion I value. ...We gathered this past summer for my weekly papermaking open studios, when suddenly… the heavens opened and poured a heavy rain for more than an hour. Before we knew what happened water was pouring into my basement level studio from windows and the door… Naturally we stopped working, and several of us scrambled to clean up the mess.

In the end, after everyone else had gone and things were quiet, Tarin and I sat in my upstairs sitting room where “Fan Dance” (my other blog's masthead) hangs, to talk about my work as an artist. In the midst of some very insightful suggestions, she challenged me to explain the WHY? of my work: Why vintage/antique lace, why the fascination with embroidery hand work, what is my connection to the Victorian era, to slavery, to history…? And WHY, pray tell, does everything hinge on PAPER!?

The paper part is easy... It belongs to my soul. From a child I have collected it. Admired it. Bought commerical products just to own a special piece of it. ...In my mid twenties, I moved into an appartment where a child's paper quilt had been left. Sixteen squares of all white paper with simple shapes cut into the center of each one, and white paper behind to give depth. All taped together with a paper cut fringe on the bottom it was hanging on the wall when I moved in. Was it left for ME? Or just a forgotten treasure? Which ever the case I kept that light airy quilt on my walls through several homes and two states until it literally disinergrated. It was only natural that I should eventually discover papermaking. In 2000 it became my spiritual solice as I struggled in a new life as a married woman.

Thinking about the rest of her questions for a few days… My short answer is I am fascinated by things made by hand, their perfection, imperfection, or no attempt at perfection, I am comforted by that approachability. Designs that carry with them a sense of fun movement and celebration… Made well because that’ how things WERE done.

Even when I draw or paint I seem to swirl. I’m told my work sings… and that I also sing when I talk. Others say I write in poetic prose… So it is the movement then of handwork that attracts me. Intricate. Delicate. Lively. Created over many quiet reflective moments. There is a spiritual component to the celebration. I find this all uplifting. It breathes hope. Yes for me antique lace and vintage handwork does all that… Like Victorian Era exactness and detailed sensibilities, it speaks of constancy, a place where human dignity seems to linger less and less as society becomes more complex. ...Then there is history. My fascination with the need to know, to tell, to gather objects and stories from lives, or whole communities, is also my need to embrace appreciate understand what has been, because it provides some root for what is, and perhaps, for what is to come… And, since slavery is near the root of me – though certainly NOT the root – just close enough to the base to need shoring up. I dive there often for myself, for my ancestors, until the day that I know is coming, finally arrives. The day, when I make piece with the past, that I may lunge fully into the now, copiously into the celebrations of the PRESENT, the place where God lives in me…

This, I think, is what my mixed media art is about... for now at least.

PERSONA

...For weeks awhile back, work was manifesting itself in the context of updating/transferring my family tree from one software to another with my mother, and reminiscing... absorbing, celebrating, understanding. Remembering old losses and coming to terms with those that still feel fresh and recent. Accepting relationships that are NOT going to CHANGE. Making new friendships with family members I have yet to meet. All in the process of realizing, some of who "WE" are, and who I am in the mix of all the B_’s, and W_’s, W_’s, V_’s and C_’s.

Gathering names and images of people connected to you is almost scary. At some point it feels unending. Every turn produces another set of names, another set of faces. Getting around to the newly formed takes a back seat to finding the roots of… where we came from. I see faces jumping generations. Eyes, skin, hair, all surfacing like fragments in pools of water, rearranging themselves with a certain fluidity that’s hard to pin down, but there all the same… No denying. Personas must come forward too. No ways to say just how. Still the idea has given me pause and made me look deeper at myself and my actions. Have I been disillusioned all these years…?

I have always thought the internal face was “the” pure one… At the conscious level we all have many facades. Ones for home, for school or work, friends, and special-occasions, even spouses and significant others… At this point however, I am starting to think the inner masks are even more diverse and complex.

The above image is by Richard Avedon (American Photographer, 1923–2004). It is of the great contralto Marian Anderson. I love this image, particularly in relationship to the idea of the inner personas and external survival. Eyes closed, drawing on the depth of who she knew herself to be… What must it have taken for Marian to stand on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that Easter Sunday in April 1939 after the being rejected by The Daughters of the American Revolution…?

PERSONA. Popular etymology derives it from the Latin word "per" meaning "through" and "sonare" meaning "to sound," or, something in the vein of "that through which the actor speaks", i.e. a mask. …In communications, the term is given to describe the versions of self that all individuals possess. Behaviors selected according to the desired impression an individual wishes to create when interacting with other people, according to the social environment. In particular the persona presented before others will ultimately differ from that an individual presents when he/she happens to be alone.

Given my recent observations of myself I am convinced that different internal personas are also presented to the self for somewhat the same reasons…. This idea intrigues me. So I have decided to explore it in a series of mixed media art… I am interested to see where it will lead…

STICKLEY MUSEUM