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Art That Speaks: Digital images by David Sheskin

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 29, 2023 by laserjAugust 6, 2023

David Sheskin
Art That Speaks
Digital images

These images come from a large body of works which I refer to as Art That Speaks which involve the creative integration of art and text.

My Art That Speaks images, which must be read to be fully appreciated, are atypical in that unlike most art they challenge the viewer on both a visual and cerebral level. Although some of the works in the collection are mixed media (for example, using ceramic tiles), the images presented here were created digitally using computer software. My Art That Speaks images employ the format of a Scrabble board to provide a unique and/or humorous commentary on a broad spectrum of topical and fictional subjects ― the relevant commentary appearing in every odd-numbered line of text.

I view my Art That Speaks images as an anthology of parables or fables, intended to provoke in the reader reactions ranging from amusement to reflection (and perhaps even shock).

Art That Speaks: Digital images by David Sheskin - 1IF YOU THINK YOU MAY HAVE HEARD THE BIG BANG

Art That Speaks: Digital images by David Sheskin - 2

THIS IS A TEST


Art That Speaks: Digital images by David Sheskin - 3VOTER REGISTRATION

Art That Speaks: Digital images by David Sheskin - 4MOSES

Art That Speaks: Digital images by David Sheskin - 5ELEMENTS


David Sheskin is a writer and artist who has been published extensively over the years. Most recently his work has appeared in The Dalhousie Review, The Satirist, Chicago Quarterly Review, Tamarind and Shenandoah.  His most recent books are Art That Speaks, David Sheskin’s Cabinet of Curiosities and Outrageous Wedding Announcements.

Published on March 29, 2023 (Click for permalink.)

Of Comfort and Connection: Paintings by Lex Lucius

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 12, 2022 by laserjAugust 6, 2023

Lex Lucius
Of Comfort and Connection Paintings

I live in the Roaring Fork Valley just north of Aspen, Colorado, tucked into the Rocky Mountains. My life is full of family, painting, and horses. My clothes smell of the stable, and on far too many days, my boots, of the pasture.

Less than five minutes from my painting studio is the stable where my wife Aimée keeps her jumping horses and my daughter, her pony. When I drive over and watch them ride, which I do several times a week, I pass by a field of polo ponies. It is these ponies that have become my favorites to paint. I love their small, muscled bodies, and I see strength and determination in their movements. At the stable our warmbloods are huge, muscled, yet incredibly calm animals. Even in my paintings they have a sureness of movement and a stillness that speaks of this confidence.

I try to invoke the feelings I get from these animals, but just as importantly I also try to bring the stories and dreams we all carry within us when we think of horses and what horses mean to us all. I am focusing on art I want to see, art that makes me feel. It is my hope that these paintings bring out feelings of comfort and connection in the viewers also.
—Lex Lucius, December 2022

Of Comfort and Connection: Paintings by Lex Lucius - 1

Young Polo Pony

Of Comfort and Connection: Paintings by Lex Lucius - 2

Study of Pancho II

Of Comfort and Connection: Paintings by Lex Lucius - 3

Study of Pancho III

Of Comfort and Connection: Paintings by Lex Lucius - 4

Horse in Paddock

Of Comfort and Connection: Paintings by Lex Lucius - 5

Thoroughbread Standing I

Erased Horse


As a fine artist, Lex has exhibited in galleries throughout Northern California and New Mexico, as well as New York City, New Orleans, and Vancouver, BC. Lex’s work can be found in many private collections around the country. Lex is currently working in acrylic and ink on wood panel.

Lex Lucius holds a BFA in Printmaking from CCA and a MFA from UNM. His aesthetic sense stems from his years as a fine artist and sculptor, and enhances his mastery of metal fabrication.

Published on December 12, 2022 (Click for permalink.)

To What Survived: Sculpture by Mario Loprete

Cleaver Magazine Posted on June 25, 2022 by laserjAugust 6, 2023

Mario Loprete
TO WHAT SURVIVED: Sculpture

For my concrete sculptures, I use my personal clothing. Through my artistic process in which I use plaster, resin, and cement, I transform these articles of clothing into artworks to hang. The intended effect is that my DNA and my memory remain inside the ​concrete so that the person who looks at these sculptures is transformed into a type of postmodern archeologist, studying my works as urban artifacts.

I like to think that those who look at my sculptures, created in 2020, will be able to perceive the anguish, the vulnerability, and the fear that each of us may have felt in the face of a planetary problem that was covid 19. Under a layer of cement are my clothes with which I lived during this nefarious period — clothes that survived covid 19, very similar to what survived after the 2,000-year-old catastrophic eruption of Pompeii, and capable of recounting man’s inability to face the tragedy of broken lives and destroyed economies.

[ click any image to enlarge ]

To What Survived: Sculpture by Mario Loprete - 1 To What Survived: Sculpture by Mario Loprete - 2To What Survived: Sculpture by Mario Loprete - 3To What Survived: Sculpture by Mario Loprete - 4 To What Survived: Sculpture by Mario Loprete - 5 To What Survived: Sculpture by Mario Loprete - 6


Mario Loprete is a graduate of the Accademia of Belle Arti, Catanzaro, Italy. He writes, “Painting for me is my first love. An important, pure love. Creating a painting, starting from the spasmodic research of a concept with which I want to transmit my message — this is the foundation of painting for me. Sculpture is now my lover, an artistic betrayal to painting. It is a voluptuous and sensual lover that inspires different emotions which strike prohibited chords.”

Visit Mario on Instagram at @marioloprete

Published on June 25, 2022 (Click for permalink.)

LAYERING LIGHT: Paintings by Bette Ridgeway

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 25, 2022 by laserjAugust 6, 2023

Bette Ridgeway
LAYERING LIGHT: Paintings

Bette Ridgeway is best known for her large-scale, luminous poured canvases that push the boundaries of light, color, and design. Her youth spent in the beautiful Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York and her extensive global travel has informed her colorful palette. For the past two decades, the high desert light of Santa Fe, NM has fueled Ridgeway’s art practice.

Her three decades of mentorship by the acclaimed Abstract Expressionist Paul Jenkins set her on her lifetime journey of non-objective painting on large canvas. She explores the interrelation and change of color in various conditions and on a variety of surfaces. Her artistic foundations in line drawing, watercolor, graphic design, and oils gave way to acrylics, which she found to be more versatile for her layering technique. Ridgeway has spent the last thirty years developing her signature technique, called “layering light,” in which she uses many layers of thin, transparent acrylics on linen and canvas to produce a fluidity and viscosity similar to traditional watercolor. Delving further, Ridgeway expanded her work into 3D, joining paint and resin to aluminum and steel with sculptures of minimal towers.

Ridgeway depicts movement in her work, sometimes kinetic and full of emotion, sometimes bold and masterful, sometimes languid and tentative. She sees herself as the channel, the work coming through her, but it is not hers. It goes out into the world—it has a life of its own.

[click on any image to enlarge]

LAYERING LIGHT: Paintings by Bette Ridgeway - Title

Birth of the Blues

LAYERING LIGHT: Paintings by Bette Ridgeway - 2

Canyon Winds

LAYERING LIGHT: Paintings by Bette Ridgeway - 3

Chroma

LAYERING LIGHT: Paintings by Bette Ridgeway - 4

California Dreaming

LAYERING LIGHT: Paintings by Bette Ridgeway - 5

Calypso

LAYERING LIGHT: Paintings by Bette Ridgeway - 6

Coherence


For over four decades, Bette Ridgeway has exhibited globally with more than eighty prestigious venues, including the Palais Royale, Paris and Embassy of Madagascar. Her awards include Top 60 Contemporary Masters and Leonardo DaVinci Prize. Her work appears in the permanent collections of the Mayo Clinic and Federal Reserve Bank. Her work also appears in International Contemporary Masters and 100 Famous Contemporary Artists. Visit her website at ridgewaystudio.com

Published on March 25, 2022 (Click for permalink.)

YET SOMETHING DEEPLY FAMILIAR: The Photography of Natalie Christensen

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 20, 2021 by laserjAugust 6, 2023

YET SOMETHING DEEPLY FAMILIAR: The Photography of Natalie Christensen - Title

Natalie Christensen
YET SOMETHING DEEPLY FAMILIAR: Photographs

Photographer Natalie Christensen has an inimitable, and enchanting, focus on the exploration of the more banal peripheral landscapes that often go unnoticed by the casual observer. “I quickly became aware that these isolated moments in the suburban landscape were rich with metaphor. Closed and open doors, empty parking lots and forgotten swimming pools draw me to a scene; yet it was my reactions to these objects and spaces that elicited interpretation and projection.”

Christensen had worked as a psychotherapist for over twenty-five years and was particularly influenced by the theories of depth psychologist Carl Jung. This influence is evident in her photographs, as shadows and psychological metaphors are favored subjects.

“The symbols and spaces in my images are an invitation to explore a rich world that is concealed from consciousness, and an enticement to contemplate narratives that have no remarkable life yet tap into something deeply familiar to our experience; often disturbing, sometimes amusing…unquestionably present.”

In Santa Fe, where Christensen is based, her work is inspired by commonplace architecture and streetscapes. She realizes that the places she frequents for her images are probably not what people visualize when they think of Santa Fe, a major tourist destination with a carefully cultivated image. “I don’t have to go anywhere special to make my photography; instead I find my images around shopping centers, apartment complexes and office parks.” Choosing to shoot in locations that may be viewed as uninteresting or even visually off-putting, Christensen finds this challenging, to “see” something hidden in plain sight, noting “it is our nature to ignore what is unpleasant, but sometimes I get a glimpse of the sublime in these ordinary places. When I find it, it feels like I have discovered gold.”

Christensen is repeatedly drawn to the swimming pool as a metaphor for the unconscious. In American culture, pools symbolize the luxury of leisure. Yet she also sees a darker interpretation — evoking repressed desires, unexplained tension and looming disaster. “These photographs of a manufactured oasis suggest a binary connection between the world above and the world below, linking submersion in water with the workings of the subconscious.”

She dismantles all of these scenes to color fields, geometry and shadow. She shoots every day and is almost never without a camera. Enjoy some of her work below!

[click to enlarge any image]

YET SOMETHING DEEPLY FAMILIAR: The Photography of Natalie Christensen - 1

temptress

YET SOMETHING DEEPLY FAMILIAR: The Photography of Natalie Christensen - 2

surveillance

YET SOMETHING DEEPLY FAMILIAR: The Photography of Natalie Christensen - 3

fissures

gestalt at Monument Valley

YET SOMETHING DEEPLY FAMILIAR: The Photography of Natalie Christensen - 5

she had an idea

untitled – window with cloud

you can’t get there from here

are these chairs taken

lavender door


Naralie Christensen has exhibited in noted museums and galleries in the U.S. and internationally, was a UAE Embassy invitee for a UAE Architecture Delegation tour, has been invited as Artist-in-Residence to Chateau d’Orquevaux, France, and a photobook, 007 – Natalie Christensen, has recently been published by Setanta Books, London. She has guest lectured at the Royal College of Art and led photography workshops at The Royal Photographic Society, London, and Meow Wolf, Santa Fe.

Named one of the Los Angeles Center of Digital Art’s “Ten Photographers to Watch,” Christensen is the recipient of several prestigious photography awards, has work in permanent collections, and publications include The Guardian, Creative Boom, The British Journal of Photography, LandEscape Art Review, Art Reveal Magazine, Aesthetica Magazine, and Magazine 43. Christensen is represented by Catherine et Andre Hug Galerie, Paris; Turner Carroll Gallery, Santa Fe; Nordic Art Agency, Malmo; and Susan Spiritus Gallery, Newport Beach. Visit her website at nataliechristensenphoto.com

Published on December 20, 2021 (Click for permalink.)

Weird, Weird West by Chris Vaughan

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 23, 2021 by laserjAugust 6, 2023

Chris Vaughan
WEIRD, WEIRD WEST:
Collages

All of these works are part of an ongoing series of paper collages, collectively called Weird, Weird West.

The Weird West series of collages began with a ménage à trois that I found immediately menacing and whimsical: Cowboys, Seashore and Life Patterns and a King Penguin 1947 history of the greeting card called “Compliments of the Season.” The host book on cowboys was hungry for a more disparate diet: WW2 pilot manuals, Albers, Düsseldorf skylines and British executions. It was this menace and whimsy of out-of-season dolls in the desert, crustaceous-faced hangmen, Hyde Park pigeon feeders launching Spitfires over wagon trails, runaway girls remembering cities from an East German future and Folkstone’s seaside disturbing frozen Wyoming that kept me cutting and discovering new, skewed tales of the Weird West.

It’s important to me that materials are, as near as possible, found images, uninfluenced by my own tastes and aesthetic prejudices. That’s why I hunt books and magazines in places that generate randomness – bric-a-brac shops, charity book corners (constantly replenished with unimaginably eccentric juxtapositions: books on Japanese flower arrangement, English gardens, Marilyn Monroe, corn snakes, climbing in Kent, a soiled Grey’s Anatomy, postcards from Guernsey), off shelves of the unwanted, old-hat picture books put out to pasture in the dust. Ordinarily I’m a skeptic, but when collaging I’ve an unflappable faith in a strange combination of synchronicity and reincarnation. There are few things more satisfying to me than resurrecting images, concocting live pictures out of what’s been left for dead.

—Chris Vaughan, September 2021

Weird, Weird West by Chris Vaughan - Title

Oak Motel

Weird, Weird West by Chris Vaughan - 2

Floodplains

Weird, Weird West by Chris Vaughan - 3

A Hanging

Weird, Weird West by Chris Vaughan - 4

The Waterhole

Weird, Weird West by Chris Vaughan - 5

Ranchers

Weird, Weird West by Chris Vaughan - 6

Too Late


Chris Vaughan is a writer and artist from Whitstable, currently living a short jog from “The End of Europe” in the South District of Gibraltar. His work has previously appeared in Ambit, The Lifted Brow, Philosophy Now, Epiphany Magazine, The Rumpus, Bright Lights Film Journal, Bookslut, and The Warwick Review.

Published on September 23, 2021 (Click for permalink.)

FROM THE HEART OF OLD MAGAZINES by Sherry Shahan

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 23, 2021 by laserjAugust 6, 2023

Sherry Shahan
FROM THE HEART OF OLD MAGAZINES:
Collages

Feeling shipwrecked in 2020, I began ripping words from the heart of old magazines. My scissors were like me, rusty and dull. The glue, too thick. My collages resembled drawings found in a kindergarten classroom. I like that about them; it frees me from ideas of what art should be. Decades ago I approached photography much the same way. I rarely considered myself a professional even after my photos appeared in national magazines and newspapers. My collages seem to spill into two categories: those that pick at the scabs of humanity and those that reflect promise and possibility. Both styles express my purpose, passion, and personal truths.

—Sherry Shahan, September 2021

FROM THE HEART OF OLD MAGAZINES by Sherry Shahan - Title

Bizarre Dance

FROM THE HEART OF OLD MAGAZINES by Sherry Shahan - 2

Endurance

FROM THE HEART OF OLD MAGAZINES by Sherry Shahan - 3

Day Dream

FROM THE HEART OF OLD MAGAZINES by Sherry Shahan - 4

Waiting

FROM THE HEART OF OLD MAGAZINES by Sherry Shahan - 5

You Are Not Alone

Floating


Sherry Shahan has wandered the globe as a travel journalist, often watching the world and its people from behind: whether in the hub of London, a backstreet in Havana, or alone from a window in a squat hotel room in Paris; whether with a 35 mm camera or an iPhone. Over the past many months, she’s begun looking inward, living more fully inside her own skin. She is no longer too old or too slow. She moves at her own pace, eschewing imperfections and embracing her authentic female self. Her art and photography have appeared in Los Angeles Times, Gargoyle, december, Backpacker, Country Living, Lemon Sprouting, Open Minds and elsewhere. She earned an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and taught a creative writing course for UCLA for 10 years. www.SherryShahan.com

Published on September 23, 2021 (Click for permalink.)

Digital Paintings by Joe Lugara

Cleaver Magazine Posted on June 29, 2021 by laserjAugust 6, 2023

Joe Lugara
DIGITAL PAINTINGS

These works are from two distinct series of digital paintings, Framework and Dark Oddities. I enjoy the clash of the man-made and the organic, the grids contrasting with the shape-shifting blobs.

The Framework series asks one of those short questions that begs a long answer: Am I inside or outside? The pictures offer seemingly objective experiences that turn uncomfortably subjective on the viewer. Does being on the “inside” mean being trapped or incarcerated, or does it mean being in the know and accepted?

The drops and splotches in the Dark Oddities are likewise objectively/subjectively charged. Alluding to specimens on microscope slides, they suggest things observed—scrutinized—and then make a U-turn on the viewer. The question they pose to me is whether their seemingly bloody forms are healthy or diseased. I find that my response depends on the size of the blotch or drop, and especially its shape. The simple fact that they’re red is a clincher for my recoiling nearly every time. The experience always hits me as a form of bigotry.

All art is contrast—light/dark, high note/low note, wide/narrow—but objective/subjective is the contrast with which all art begins. The artist adopts a point of view and works from that angle. These two series were made independently but they share that objective/subjective polarity. They lure with curious shapes and then ask discomfiting questions.

My abstract digital paintings are made from either new blank Photoshop files or from poor quality photographs that I’ve taken that I call, unimaginatively, “source photos”. The subjects of the source photos are as irrelevant as their quality. In the process of “painting” them with the software, they become entirely different from what they were. It’s a painterly approach, not a photographic one.

I’ll occasionally leave a trace of the source photo, if it adds something special to the work, but my goal is to generate a new image. I want the pieces to be otherworldly, a bit out of the realm of photography.

Framework Series

Digital Paintings by Joe Lugara - Title Digital Paintings by Joe Lugara - 2 Digital Paintings by Joe Lugara - 3 Digital Paintings by Joe Lugara - 4 Digital Paintings by Joe Lugara - 5 Digital Paintings by Joe Lugara - 6Dark Oddities Series Digital Paintings by Joe Lugara - 7 Digital Paintings by Joe Lugara - 8


Joe Lugara took up painting and photography as a boy after his father discarded them as hobbies. His works depict odd forms and objects, inexplicable phenomena, and fantastic dreamscapes, taking as their basis horror and science fiction films produced from the 1930s through the late 1960s. He began creating digital paintings in the 2010s; they debuted in a 2018 solo exhibition at the Noyes Museum of Art in his home state of New Jersey.

Lugara’s work has been featured in several publications and has appeared in more than 40 exhibitions in museums and galleries in the New York metropolitan area, including the New Jersey State Museum and 80 Washington Square East Galleries at New York University. You can visit his website at joelugara.com

Raymond Rorke, Editor

Published on June 29, 2021 (Click for permalink.)

Sensitive Skin: Ceramics by Constance McBride

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 29, 2021 by laserjJuly 1, 2023

SENSITIVE SKIN:
Ceramics by Constance McBride

 

“Everyone wants to have an illusion of themselves, that they’re a bit attractive, but the older I get it seems more important to be absolutely honest and direct.” – Chantal Joffe

When I was a kid I discovered Seventeen Magazine and it really messed me up. I recently googled it and was shocked to see that it debuted in 1944. I always had the impression that it began in the ‘60s or ‘70s when I was a subscriber.   From Wikipedia: “It began as a publication geared toward inspiring teen girls to become model workers and citizens. Soon after its debut, Seventeen took a more fashion and romance oriented approach in presenting its material while promoting self-confidence in young women.” I have to disagree with this idea of promoting self-confidence in young women.

What I think it really did was cause many young women to angst about their faces and their bodies; something I did for a very long time. That and having a beautiful mother led me to focus on the topic of aging in a youth obsessed culture when I began my art practice.

I use clay (a medium historically excluded from the fine art world) to investigate the aging process, a notion rejected by many and specifically linked to failure as it relates to women. Through unidealized female faces and figures, I explore themes of identity and memory; referencing my own body to claim agency as the subject and owner of my work. I hand build my pieces with stoneware and paper clay. Colorants including under glazes, stains, oxides and graphite are applied to a figure’s surface to further magnify a countenance of grace and wisdom seen in senescent women.

I create my work through a lens of empowerment to address contemporary issues faced by women.

 

[click on any image to enlarge it]

Lonely Girl Room 315

Lonely Girl Room 315, detail

Lonely Girl Room 315, back view

Truth from Within

Truth from Within, front view

Between Two Worlds

Between Two Worlds, detail

Whisperers

Whisperers, back view

Time’s Relentless Melt

 

Works

  1. Lonely Girl Room 315
    2013
    Ceramic, Under Glaze, Iron Oxide, Pastel, Wire
    14″ x 10″ x 6″
    (photographer – Mike Healy)
  2. Lonely Girl Room 315-detail
  3. Lonely Girl Room 122-back view
    (photographer – Sean Deckert)
  4. Truth from Within
    2016
    Ceramic, Copper Carbonate, Wax, Wire
    20″ x 36″ x 14″
    (Photo courtesy of Phoenix Art Museum)
  5. Truth from Within – front view
    (Photographer – Amy Weaver)
  6. Between Two Worlds
    2020
    Ceramic, Copper Carbonate, Wax, Wire, Desert Debris
    21″ x 57″ x 9″ (figure)
    (Photographer – Joshua Steffy)
  7. Between Two Worlds 3
  8. Whisperers
    2015
    Ceramic, Graphite
    10″ x 13″ x 11″
    (Photographer- Chris Loomis)
  9. Whisperers – back view
  10. Time’s Relentless Melt
    2014
    Ceramic, Graphite
    8″ x 18″ x 7″
    (Photograper – Aaron

A native of Philadelphia, PA, Constance McBride’s work explores themes of identity and memory with an emphasis being placed on issues most experienced by women. When residing in the Southwest, observations of the desert made a transformative impact on her practice. Her work has been supported by grants from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, Phoenix Art Museum’s Contemporary Forum, Philadelphia Sculptors and the Arts Aid PHL program. Museum exhibitions include Phoenix Art Museum and Udinotti Museum of Figurative Art in AZ, Las Cruces Museum of Art in NM, San Angelo Museum of Art in TX, The State Museum of Pennsylvania and Biggs Museum of American Art in DE. Notable gallery exhibitions include Craft Forms at Wayne Art Center and The Clay Studio National in PA, America’s ClayFest International at Blue Line Arts in CA and Beyond the Brickyard at Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in MT. McBride’s work has received attention from Yahoo News, Visual Art Source, Philly Artblog, Philadelphia Stories, Schuylkill Valley Journal and the international platform Ceramics Now. Now living and working in Chester Springs, PA, she is actively involved with art communities in the Philadelphia metro area. McBride earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Arcadia University, Glenside, PA. See more of her work here.

Published on March 29, 2021 (Click for permalink.)

HEAVY BREATHING IN NIGHT: Paintings by Morgan Motes

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 18, 2020 by laserjAugust 7, 2023

Morgan Motes
HEAVY BREATHING IN NIGHT: Paintings 

Morgan Motes’ work is a visual representation of the feeling of being alone in nature. It is an expressionistic attempt to return to a sublime and nuanced world often left out of our technologically mediated lives. His method is conversational and meditative, letting paint speak for itself, leading to compositions that are as organic and living as they are fragmented and foreign. His paintings are abstract, without temporal beginning or ending, and present a moment in its full affective force. Landscapes are not landscapes, but heavy breathing in night.

[ click images to enlarge ]

HEAVY BREATHING IN NIGHT: Paintings by Morgan Motes - TitleRing Park / Acrylic on canvas / 2019 / 30×36

A few years ago, I spent a day hunting shark teeth in Gainesville, Florida’s Ring Park. It was very strange to un-bury shark teeth from a creek, miles away from any beach, from when Florida was underwater. The place felt ancient, I wanted to explore it with paint.

HEAVY BREATHING IN NIGHT: Paintings by Morgan Motes - 2Black Water Sound / Acrylic on canvas / 2019 / 28×30

I was standing in the woods at night hearing the world undress.

HEAVY BREATHING IN NIGHT: Paintings by Morgan Motes - 3Nocturne: Noontootla Creek / Acrylic on canvas / 2019 / 24×36

Noontootla Creek is a place I frequently camp at in north Georgia, I feel a kind of connection to it. My interest in this spot, in the way it makes me feel when I’m there, is what made me initially explore landscape painting.

HEAVY BREATHING IN NIGHT: Paintings by Morgan Motes - 4Black Water Feeling / Acrylic and oil on canvas / 2019 / 30×30

A kind of chest of ground, imagining a heartbeat beneath a pond. This is what it feels like to be calmly held by earth.

HEAVY BREATHING IN NIGHT: Paintings by Morgan Motes - 5Black Water / Acrylic on canvas / 2019 / 20×24

My initial study of water, thinking about the retention pond my apartment lives with.

HEAVY BREATHING IN NIGHT: Paintings by Morgan Motes - 6Black Water In Weather / Acrylic and oil on canvas / 2020 / 36×36

A process piece, painted over and over again until it was nearly fully black, and then carved and washed away with turpentine, until a composition revealed. Then touched up to feel more water-like.

Self-Portrait In the Retention Pond / Acrylic and oil on canvas / 2019 / 24×36

If I see myself in the retention pond, then I am the retention pond, at least for that moment. This piece is about the inseparation of us and what’s outside of us, like becoming nature, the world itself. Also, retention ponds are cool and are not loved enough.


Motes was born in 1997, in the small town Palatka, Florida. He previously attended Florida School of the Arts in 2018, and is working on his BA in painting, drawing and printmaking, with a minor in creative writing, at the University of North Florida. Motes has shown his work in numerous juried group shows and in multiple solo shows in small galleries throughout Florida. Motes’s paintings have appeared in The Talon Review, and The Fine Print Magazine’s “Prairie” collection. His poems have appeared in West Trade Review. Learn more on his blog www.morganmotes.com/blog

Published on December 18, 2020 (Click for permalink.)

REPARATIONS WINE LABEL Text by J’nai Gaither Illustrated by Phoebe Funderburg-Moore

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 29, 2020 by thwackAugust 8, 2023

Text by J’nai Gaither, Illustrated by Phoebe Funderburg-Moore
REPARATIONS WINE LABEL

Click on images for full-size.

REPARATIONS WINE LABEL Text by J'nai Gaither Illustrated by Phoebe Funderburg-Moore - Title

REPARATIONS WINE LABEL Text by J'nai Gaither Illustrated by Phoebe Funderburg-Moore - 2

REPARATIONS WINE LABEL Text by J'nai Gaither Illustrated by Phoebe Funderburg-Moore - 3

Full Text of Label:

Blacks in Wine Matter
Reparations Red Wine
United Colors of America
Nappy Valley
2020
401mL              16.19% by volume
To be acknowledged and included in this White wine industry is all people of color have ever wanted. Though wine is as global as industries come, it has never been welcoming to people of color. Even in South Africa, on the Mother Continent, most wineries are owned by White South Africans, though there has been a push to put the economic opportunities of winemaking into the hands of Black people. After 401 years, time is up. Drink and protest responsibly. 
Reparations is made from Petite Sirah and Tannat, two thick-skinned black grapes that offer a hearty and savory liquid meal to the adventurous imbiber. With hints of espresso, blackberry and cocoa, Reparations gives back to the drinker what’s been stolen from them: the freedom to enjoy wine uninhibited. Aged in oak for only six months since we have already waited long enough.
Government Warning: (1) According to people of color, wine should be more accessible and less pretentious. It should not divide, and consumers and hiring managers should get used to seeing people of color in the wine space or risk losing a significant portion of the $1.2 trillion that is Black buying power. (2) Consumption of this alcoholic beverage may wake up the world to a bitter racism that has persisted in the industry for decades.
401mL                        Contains Anger & Indignation

J'nai Gaither author photoJ’nai Gaither is the hungriest of storytellers, always foraging for the next, excellent food and beverage story, or the most delicious of ad campaigns. When not consuming copious amounts of champagne and burgundy, she’s usually planning her next meal while listening to opera. Her work has appeared in Plate Magazine, New York Magazine’s Grub Street, Eater, Dining Out Chicago, Vinepair, From Napa With Love and other books and publications. You can see her work on Amy’s Kitchen website and packaging, as well as on current Sargento Cheese commercials. She has also been featured in the San Francisco Chronicle, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post.

Phoebe Funderburg-Moore artist headshotPhoebe Funderburg-Moore is a Philadelphia-based illustrator, screen printer, and graphic designer. Her work is focused around self-discovery, love of nature, and observational humor. Recently Phoebe has been teaching herself animation and digital illustration. To view more of her work, visit phoebefm.com and follow along on Instagram at @phoebemakesart.

Published on September 29, 2020 (Click for permalink.)

Terra in Flux: An Ekphrastic Collaboration by Mark Danowsky and John Singletary

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 29, 2020 by laserjAugust 8, 2023

Terra in Flux: An Ekphrastic Collaboration by Mark Danowsky and John Singletary - Title

Mark Danowsky and John Singletary
TERRA IN FLUX: An Ekphrastic Collaboration

The word ekphrasis comes from the Greek for the description of a work of art produced as a rhetorical exercise, often used in the adjectival form ekphrastic. It is a vivid, often dramatic, verbal description of a visual work of art, either real or imagined. In ancient times, it referred to a description of any thing, person, or experience. The word comes from the Greek ἐκ ek and φράσις phrásis, ‘out’ and ‘speak’ respectively, and the verb ἐκφράζειν ekphrázein, “to proclaim or call an inanimate object by name”.

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Terra in Flux

The bathroom mirror breaks my face
no, my face breaks the mirror

nose, a Picasso—

all comes down to energy

*

In Tai Chi, you create
an imaginary ball
then pass, smooth
smooth, smooth
sculptor at the wheel
passing it, passing it
back to yourself

*

fluid motion
blurs the line
we choose to walk against

*

You touch yourself touchingTerra in Flux: An Ekphrastic Collaboration by Mark Danowsky and John Singletary - 2
the face of love
closeness by another name
proximity one boon companion

Tell me when it is you feel
& I’ll go cold as fate
comet without gamble
trailing spectre-like
your unholy geist

*

The Rockefeller Center
zamboni operator down with flu
still can smooth & smooth

*

Faces of a masquerade
play at Janus
when lean Judas

*

free at least
sprawled
vagrant on the rocks

*

Mother of God
Sister of Heartbreak
Daughter of ChaosTerra in Flux: An Ekphrastic Collaboration by Mark Danowsky and John Singletary - 3

*

the beauty line
ties humanity to grace
by way of athleticism—
what it means to be perfect

*

ouroboros

the difference
between naked & nude—

*

dancing

a spectrum
that begins in innocence
& ends in BabylonTerra in Flux: An Ekphrastic Collaboration by Mark Danowsky and John Singletary - 4

*

There is nothing inherently wrong with Cypress trees.
Or apocryphal texts.

The believer tells you it’s a mistake not to believe.
The nonbeliever can’t tell you anything for sure.

I fall asleep & dream about a ball of light
passed from generation to generation.

I wake & stretch—

In Tai Chi, you take an open stance. Take an imaginary ball in your hands.
Circle the sphere. It can be crystal. You can call it an orb. You cannot drop this ball.

*

We know pareidolia—seeing
faces in things. We make
intentional masks
some just so we can walk around
being another, feeling safe.

*

Forget the self, sun
in Elizabethan world view
the great chain of being
we inhabit the middle
above all common earthly things
below the heavens, angels, divinity


Mark Danowsky is author of the poetry collection ​As Falls Trees ​(NightBallet Press, 2018). His poems have appeared in Gargoyle, Kestrel, North Dakota Quarterly, and elsewhere. He’s managing editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal​.

.

.

John Singletary Headshot. Photo credit: Stephen PerloffJohn Singletary is a photographer and multimedia artist based in Philadelphia, PA. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from The University of the Arts. His work has been collected by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Center for Fine Art Photography as well as other institutional and private collections. He has exhibited at the LG Tripp Gallery, The Pennsylvania State Museum, The James Oliver Gallery, Sol Mednick and The Delaware Contemporary Museum. He is also a contributing writer for The Photo Review Journal.​ Photo credit: Stephen Perloff.

Published on September 29, 2020 (Click for permalink.)

DUMP TRUMP, Illustrated T-Shirts by William Sulit

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 4, 2020 by thwackSeptember 28, 2023

William Sulit
DUMP TRUMP: Illustrated T-Shirts

"Dump Trump" four illustrations in 19c cartoonist style

Many artists have the ability to verbalize their thoughts with great clarity and eloquence—sadly, I’m not one of those. This must be a great source of frustration for my wife Beth, who is an extremely accomplished writer and well versed in the art of verbal communication. But she does not complain; she smiles and lets me babble aimlessly until I get distracted by a squirrel or something. Oh well. As I used to say to my mother when she was yelling at me for something I did (or didn’t do): That’s just the way God made me.

In any case, I should stop rambling and get to the point which is to write a few words about this image. I decided to make a series of drawings that chronicle the pure and unadulterated stupidity perpetrated by the current occupant of the White House. I really didn’t want to spend too much time staring at reference photos of Trump so I picked a character that visually had similar characteristics: bottom-heavy, awkward, graceless, has difficulty drinking water with one hand, etc. And so I landed on a duck, even though I am fully aware that even the dumbest of ducks is far more capable than Trump.  

And so I draw and then I print those drawings on t-shirts, and when I sell the t-shirts I donate 20% of the profits to The Lincoln Project, sort of like a bake sale. The material is endless so I plan to continue drawing, perhaps until the duck is finally wearing an orange suit.

—Bill Sulit, September 2020


William Sulit headshotWilliam Sulit is an award-winning illustrator, ceramicist, and designer. Born in El Salvador, he studied design at North Carolina State and received his Masters of Architecture degree from Yale University. He is the co-founder of Juncture Workshops and frequently collaborates with his wife, the writer Beth Kephart, on book projects.

Buy his illustrated t-shirts here.

Published on September 4, 2020 (Click for permalink.)

CONNECTED BREATH: Glass Wind Instruments for Intimacy and Vulnerability by Madeline Rile Smith

Cleaver Magazine Posted on June 29, 2020 by thwackAugust 8, 2023

three women blowing a shared glass trumpet

Madeline Rile Smith
CONNECTED BREATH: Glass Wind Instruments for Intimacy and Vulnerability

Growing up, I never imagined I would become a visual artist, let alone an artist working in hot glass. In high school, I was required to take an art class, so I signed up for a glass elective, with no idea what I was getting into. At first, I was terrified of burning my fingers, but after a few sessions, the hypnotic presence of melting glass in a flame lured me in. Hot glass is always moving; it has rhythm. The artist must respond with her own movements. You cannot control glass on your own terms; the glass will always be the one to set the terms of engagement. When you work with glass you must be humble and accept that you will fail over and over. A day’s work might shatter into a hundred pieces if you get cocky or overconfident. Glass demands a zen mind. When your piece is destroyed in an instant, you accept it and keep working.

Madeline Rile Smith making a glass trumpet on the torch.

Flameworking in my studio in the glass department at Rochester Institute of Technology

I’ve been playing violin and viola since I was a toddler. By the time I was in high school I was prepared to have a professional career in music but was sidetracked due to a serious chronic pain condition. When I began working with glass, I realized it was like playing an instrument: your body and hands work together to produce something delicate and ethereal—and often ephemeral. 

Like music, glassblowing is a collaborative art form.

Like music, glassblowing is a collaborative art form. In the hot shop, artists need a partner to breathe air into the blowpipe as they manipulate the 2300-degree blob of molten glass. The collaborative nature of glassmaking is similar to that of chamber music, where bodies are coordinated and orchestrated in space toward the group effort of a shared goal. My strongest memories from childhood involve practicing with my classical string quartet—with me on viola, two violinists, and a cellist. We spent untold hours in collaborative rehearsal, detailing the minutiae of musical expression in order to create a unified sound that would transcend the sum of each of our solo instruments. In an ideal ensemble, each member approaches the group with a sense of generosity, putting forth an effort that extends beyond each individual, toward the shared goal of collective expression. The tender and dynamic tension of music can be broken at any moment if one member of the group falters. The act relies on a delicate state of interdependence. The music is not complete when a member of the group is missing, and a single person cannot carry the experience alone, much like the communal act of creation in the glass studio. 

Madeline Rile smith plays glass duo instrument

A trumpet for two simultaneous players. When my partner finds his note, I attempt to push him off of it to create mine. Our breaths compete and combat inside the instrument to create a tone. The backpressure of another person blowing into the trumpet creates a significant challenge. Part shared effort, part battle of breaths. We both end up winded.

To me, the communal aspects of glass and chamber music require the kind of trust that is necessary for strong collaboration. Music and glass both rely on mutual understanding of subtle, non-verbal gestures—a moment’s eye contact or a punctuated breath can be used to synchronize coordinated movement or a pause. 

Madeline Rile Smith flameworking a glass instrument

Flameworking a glass instrument. I use a torch powered by a mix of propane and oxygen. The flame is about 3600 degrees Fahrenheit.

This spring, I began a series called “Instruments of Connection and Compromise,” a  collection of glass wind instruments that require multiple players. There is something squeamishly intimate about sharing a mouth-activated instrument with another person. You and your partner must stand shoulder to shoulder, simultaneously blowing into a hollow vessel to create a tone. As you exhale, you can feel the back pressure of your partner’s breath on yours, like your mouths are touching, but from a distance. Your breaths intermingle, creating a sound while simultaneously knocking one another off the note as soon as you establish it. Blowing into a glass trumpet makes the entire instrument buzz. When your partner buzzes into their mouthpiece, it causes your lips to tingle, as if you were kissing, by proxy, through a curving glass tube. 

Close-up of "Duel Duet"

“Duel Duet” in action.

There is a humorous absurdity that I love about the glass trumpets. I craft them through a meticulous flameworking process, using techniques similar to scientific glassblowing. The end result is a long winding trumpet, like a device from a Dr. Seuss story.

The charge of my work has changed, eliciting visceral reactions of repulsion, echoed by a longing for the connection we were once allowed. In the age of Covid-19, the act of breathing can no longer be taken for granted; a healthy unencumbered breath is revealed to be a gift. 

A glass instrument for three wind players

“Close Enough to Tickle,” 2020. A glass instrument for three wind players.

As the instruments are played, the performers’ bodies awkwardly huddle around one another. Spittle accumulates inside the trumpet body, while shrill honking noises are produced. To me, the ridiculousness of the performance creates friction against the precise technique required to create the glass trumpet.

A glass trumpet for two players

“Duel Duet,” 2020. A glass trumpet for two players.

These instruments were conceived and created only weeks before the Covid-19 pandemic spread to the United States. A week after this series was completed for my MFA show, my studio was padlocked by the university, all thesis shows were canceled, and the meaning of my work changed overnight. What began as a humorous and awkward gesture became terrifying. The thought of standing close to someone, let alone breathing into the same glass tube while swapping saliva, was horrifying. The charge of my work has changed, eliciting visceral reactions of repulsion, echoed by a longing for the connection we were once allowed. In the age of Covid-19, the act of breathing can no longer be taken for granted; a healthy unencumbered breath is revealed to be a gift. 

Duel Duet from madeline smith on Vimeo.


Madeline Rile Smith is an American artist working in glass. She earned an MFA in glass at Rochester Institute of Technology and a BFA in glass from Tyler School of Art. Madeline draws upon her musical background to create glass musical instruments that explore the physical connection between players. She utilizes hot glass as a performative medium to consider notions of intimacy and compromise. Madeline’s sculptural glasswork has been exhibited in venues throughout the US and featured in New Glass Review 41 and 35. She has instructed glassworking in schools and institutions throughout the East Coast, including UrbanGlass in Brooklyn, Salem Community College, and Rochester Institute of Technology. More at her website, MadHotGlass.com or follow her on Instagram @MadHotGlass.

Performance photos by Elizabeth Lamark. Gallery photos by Scott Semler. Special thanks to Ethan Townsend, Ying Chiun Lee, and Jensen McConnell for performing on these instruments with me.

Published on June 29, 2020 (Click for permalink.)

THE MYTH OF THE ARAN FISHERMAN: The Art of Jan Powell by Melanie Carden

Cleaver Magazine Posted on June 29, 2020 by laserjAugust 8, 2023

Melanie Carden
THE MYTH OF THE ARAN FISHERMAN: The Art of Jan Powell

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Knitting transcends time and is a dominant theme in Jan Powell’s life and work as an artist. Through her use and creative exploration of this craft, Jan has produced—over the past four decades—a tangible amalgam of heritage, feminism, and memory.

While working towards her master’s degree, another artist told Jan the legend of the Aran fishermen, whose intricately hand-woven sweaters have long been the topic of myth and symbolism. Though proven untrue over the years, the sweaters were long believed to help identify the Irish fishermen if they died at sea and washed ashore.

It was 2004. The tragic tsunami of Indonesia was still in the headlines, and the artist found herself in sincere sympathy for the families of those killed. The story of the Irish fishermen so profoundly resonated with Powell—whose mother and grandmother taught her to knit—she shifted her art to focus on the exploration of and use of knitting, so steeped in symbolism of identity, heritage, femininity, time, and memory.

THE MYTH OF THE ARAN FISHERMAN: The Art of Jan Powell by Melanie Carden - 1

Parallel Perceptions

What began as a conversation with the artist’s brothers, Parallel Perceptions is a monotype print created from deconstructed garments. While reminiscing, each sibling had such dissimilar memories of the same childhood story. It struck Jan as remarkable that though the basic structure of the memory was intact for each of them, the details—the fibers—had been uniquely distorted within each sibling’s mind over time.

THE MYTH OF THE ARAN FISHERMAN: The Art of Jan Powell by Melanie Carden - 2

Worn Out

Similarly, in Worn Out, Powell draws on her childhood. Just as her mom would unravel old sweaters to repurpose the yarn, Jan deconstructed children’s garments similar to the jumpers (sweaters) she and her brothers wore to create this piece. The symbolism of dismantling, through distortion, unraveling, and deconstruction, are as evident here as in her other works. Over time, our memories diminish, fade, and tatter—just like the sweaters.

THE MYTH OF THE ARAN FISHERMAN: The Art of Jan Powell by Melanie Carden - 3

The Fabric of Memory

Jan Powell’s artistic journey following the connective themes of fiber is also inspired by the work of the artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010). Bourgeois worked in a variety of media, including textiles, and believed that clothing is a metaphor for times past. Makers both, Jan’s mother and grandmother were avid knitters and dressmakers. The Fabric of Memory is a tribute to and celebration of this heritage. Inspired by Bourgeois’ metaphors and the feminine, lacy styles her grandmother wore, Powell built up layers of old, knitted garments to convey the passing of ages and the progression of time. Charcoal and graphite create intensity while the grey, monochromatic palette steeps the piece in the idea of faded diminishment.

Matriarchy reverberates through Powell’s textile work; the mother creates life, childhood memories—even, at times, the clothing. All of these strung together speak to one’s identity. Bourgeois once said, “You can retell your life and remember your life by the shape, weight, color and smell of those clothes in your closet. They are like weather, the ocean—changing all the time.”¹

THE MYTH OF THE ARAN FISHERMAN: The Art of Jan Powell by Melanie Carden - 4

Temporal Fossil #1

THE MYTH OF THE ARAN FISHERMAN: The Art of Jan Powell by Melanie Carden - 5

Temporal Fossil #2

It is in these ephemeral earthly elements that Powell draws inspiration for Temporal Fossils #1 and #2. These pieces—photographs of hand-knit shapes, frozen in ice—are designed to convey a sense of archeology and the fragility of the planet. Exhibited in HOT: Artists Respond to Global Warming at the Depot Square Gallery (Lexington, MA), the breadth of Powell’s storytelling is obvious. She has captured the ultimate power of matriarch, Mother Earth, as well as the juxtaposition of strength and fragility. Though not intended by the artist, a case can also be made that the effeminately cast Temporal Fossil #1 is a poignant snapshot of the complexities of the isolation of a woman’s infertility. The unattached string evokes a separation, a truncation in the ability to sustain life in the womb and here on earth as climate change erodes Mother Nature’s cycles.

Powell layers her temporal theme not just in the creation of this piece, but in its literal dissolve; the original has, of course, since melted. What appears cast in eternity is impermanent and fluid, like time itself.

Most recently, Jan’s work in Art on Science: 26 Etudes, is an installation in which a scientist is paired with and reacts to an artist’s work. The inspiration for her print Something Vanished was dementia, and it is a collaged monoprint involving photo transfer, intaglio, and hand-coloring.

Something Vanished

Both her mother and grandmother, honored in the piece, suffered from dementia. The artist’s love of these women and fear of the disease are represented in the piece. Powell’s piece was paired with David Kaplan, a biomedical professor whose work involves using silkworm cocoons to build neuroscience medical applications. Now sixty-nine years old, Powell says, “As I am getting older, I’m sort of thinking, ‘oh my God, when am I going to get dementia?’ I hadn’t realized it was going to be that emotional.”

Jan describes how emotion is a catalyst in the creation—but also the resolution—of a project. There is no failure in art she says, only the idea of resolution. She will ask herself, “Is it resolved?” Her philosophy of resolution has many components, and it changes with each work of art she produces. It may be texture, color, mastery of technique, or, of course, emotion. She has six unresolved versions of Something Vanished in her studio.

As in many of her works, Something Vanished offers layers of transparency, begging the question, what has been lost? Though the idea of hereditary dementia may be daunting to Powell, it is clear there is still so much left to be done—created—resolved. Just as the artist’s mother would unravel an old sweater to create a new one, Powell’s deconstructed textile tells the story of renewed purpose, even as threads fray and time plays trickster. The fibers may be worn thin from life’s elements, but Powell’s work lends proof that the myth of the Aran fishermen was, in fact, true. The weave of your sweater is your identity.

¹Morris, F. Herkenhoff. “P & Bernadec M. 2007 Louise Bourgeois: Tate Modern, London, 10 October 2007-20 January 2008.” London: Tate


Melanie Carden is a Boston-based writer and editor. Formerly a newspaper columnist, she writes about food sovereignty, cooking, culture, and social justice. She earned her BA in food and culture journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a passionate advocate for lifelong learning—the traditional, immersive, and online classrooms alike—and remains an active alumnus for the University Without Walls department of her alma mater. Visit her website at www.melaniecarden.com

Published on June 29, 2020 (Click for permalink.)

Umbrellas Could Have Brains: Paintings by Serge Lecomte

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 29, 2020 by laserjAugust 10, 2023

Serge Lecomte
UMBRELLAS COULD HAVE BRAINS: Paintings

The real world for me is a mix of images where two realities or more cross. Take two known objects and connect them in some other way. As a teen I saw the paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and was taken by the surreal world he envisioned. The world was never the same for me after that. Images were no longer meant to stagnate in their inert state. Rocks weren’t simply rocks. They could become loaves of bread. And fish could turn into young maidens. Leaves on a tree could turn into birds and vice versa. And umbrellas could have brains. After all, they have to open and close.

Words have always inspired images to me. I began my career as a poet and novelist. Then one day, I quit writing because I thought painting would be a better way of expressing ideas. But the words I paint become transformed into images that may not represent a definition for the words. It’s all about connections in my mind, although I hope I can connect with my viewer. 

I love loud colors and adore the Fauvists because of their use of bright and pure (unmixed) colors. Color, shape and space are very important for me.

I don’t see myself repeating what others have done. I don’t believe in smearing paint and calling it abstract art. That movement is gone. I paint because I am addicted to painting and enjoy the creative process, even in gardening or making jam. Ever had papaya preserves with walnuts? Pretty surreal. Enjoy.

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Umbrellas Could Have Brains: Paintings by Serge Lecomte - TitleBalancing Act
I recalled Charlie Chaplin in the movie The Circus where he was on a high wire while several monkeys are jumping on him. I imagined him flipping upside down. The picture stuck in my mind. And so, I painted a man walking upside down helped in the air by butterflies.

Umbrellas Could Have Brains: Paintings by Serge Lecomte - 2Barrier
This picture is the story of war about to begin. Barriers, walls, frontiers prevent people from  coming together.

Umbrellas Could Have Brains: Paintings by Serge Lecomte - 3Free as a Bird
Everything in this painting is free, except the man’s head in the cage. But I’m sure he thinks he’s as free as a bird in spite of the cage.

Umbrellas Could Have Brains: Paintings by Serge Lecomte - 4Gott mit uns (God is on our side)
It was originally inspired by a WWI belt buckle I saw when I met a German soldier in Philadelphia in 1960. The inscription “Gott mit uns” also appears on Nazi belt buckles. The words make no sense to me, but neither did the Crusades. And then there’s Mark Twain’s short story, “The War Prayer.”   My painting came into being from words.

Little Man
This painting was born from Alfonsina Storni’s poem, Hombre pequeñito.

Hombre pequeñito

Hombre pequeñito, hombre pequeñito,
Suelta a tu canario que quiere volar…
Yo soy el canario, hombre pequeñito,
déjame saltar.

Estuve en tu jaula, hombre pequeñito,
hombre pequeñito que jaula me das.
Digo pequeñito porque no me entiendes,
ni me entenderás.

Tampoco te entiendo, pero mientras tanto
ábreme la jaula que quiero escapar;
hombre pequeñito, te amé media hora,
no me pidas más.

Little little man, little little man,
set free your canary that wants to fly.
I am that canary, little little man,
leave me to fly.

I was in your cage, little little man,
little little man who gave me my cage.
I say “little little” because you don’t understand me,
nor will you understand.

Nor do I understand you, but meanwhile,
open for me the cage from which I want to escape.
Little little man, I loved you half an hour,
don’t ask me again.

It’s Raining Salmon
Having lived in Alaska for almost 40 years, salmon was on my table on a daily basis. The image recurs in my works in different fashions, sometimes as a head on a human body. Painting salmon in different poses is as if I were changing recipes. In Haruki Murakami’s novel Kafka on the Shore there is a downpour of fish.

Salt of the Earth
This picture was inspired by Toni Morisson’s The Beloved in which Sethe murders her child so that it would not know slavery. I embedded the face on the shore of the river.

The Waiting Room
The coffin is a waiting room, perhaps a place where the soul will one day awaken or not. In spite of death as a theme, there is also life in the tree fed by our decay. I remember Madame Bovary in which Lestiboudois, the cemetery caretaker, plants potatoes in the graveyard. Nothing like having fresh compost to nourish the spuds.

Zizi et Kiki au Café (Cute names for male and female sexual appendages in French)
First date over coffee isn’t about a cup of Java. Zizi obviously has the hots for Kiki, but her mouth is a Venus flytrap. I leave that one to your imagination.


Serge Lecomte was born in Belgium. He came to the States where he spent his teens in South Philly. Serge went to Wagner Jr. High and attended Olney and Roxborough High Schools. Serge then moved to Brooklyn. After graduating from Tilden High School he worked for New York Life Insurance Company, then joined the Medical Corps in the Air Force and was sent to Selma, AL, during the Civil Rights Movement. There he was a crew member on helicopter rescue. He earned a BA in Russian Studies from the University of Alabama and an MA and PhD from Vanderbilt University in Russian Literature with a minor in French Literature. Serge Lecomte worked as a Green Beret language instructor at Fort Bragg, NC, from 1975-78. In 1988 he earned a BA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in Spanish Literature and went on to work as a language teacher at the University of Alaska (1978-1997). Serge was the poetry editor for Paper Radio for several years. He worked as a house builder, pipe-fitter, orderly in a hospital, gardener, landscaper, driller for an assaying company, bartender in one of Fairbanks’ worst bars, and other jobs. Serge Lecomte resided on the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska for 15 years and recently moved to Bellingham, WA.

Published on March 29, 2020 (Click for permalink.)

A HISTORY OF ANYWAY: Intermedia, by Nance Van Winckel

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 29, 2019 by laserjAugust 10, 2023

Nance Van Winckel
A HISTORY OF ANYWAY: Intermedia

Sad lad of the far north, you with no means and no true lassie, with no way home and no home anyway, you voyage on.

And yes, as per usual, just when the key to all seems within reach, the dreaded forever descends.

[click images to enlarge]

A HISTORY OF ANYWAY: Intermedia, by Nance Van Winckel - TitleA HISTORY OF ANYWAY: Intermedia, by Nance Van Winckel - 2A HISTORY OF ANYWAY: Intermedia, by Nance Van Winckel - 3A HISTORY OF ANYWAY: Intermedia, by Nance Van Winckel - 4Found poetry on a page surrounded by a floral design, which reads: big white rooms ran to one edge. his bear dared not look He left afraid it danced. In the top right corner is an image of a bear laying on it back in chain and a cloaked figure standing over the bear.Found poetry on a stained book page. Title: THE KEY TO FOREVER LOST FOREVER. Text: her eyes begged but you your world, and dumb she went. Image of feminine figure looking into sun next to tall object with closed eye on it. Ornate art piece depicting animal-like royal figure wearing coat, accessories, and head gear. Stands against blue starry sky with black birds flying above and large colorful birds flying adjacent to the royal figure. Ghostly figure on top right. Text: To welcome what arrives to blacken the flowered fields.


Nance Van Winckel is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Our Foreigner, winner of the Pacific Coast Poetry Series Prize (Beyond Baroque Press, 2017), Book of No Ledge (Pleiades Press Visual Poetry Series, 2016), and Pacific Walkers (U. of Washington Press, 2014). She’s also published five books of fiction, including Ever Yrs, a novel in the form of a scrapbook (Twisted Road Publications, 2014), and Boneland: Linked Stories (U. of Oklahoma Press, 2013). She teaches in the MFA programs at Eastern Washington University and Vermont College of Fine Arts. Read more at her website. 

Published on December 29, 2019 (Click for permalink.)

STILL AND YET: Photographs by Richard Kagan

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 16, 2019 by laserjAugust 10, 2023

STILL AND YET: Photographs by Richard Kagan - Title

Richard Kagan
STILL AND YET: Photographs

Born in Philadelphia, Richard Kagan is a photographer and former furniture maker whose artistic career took a curiously circuitous path. He began as a self-taught street photographer while a student at Temple University. However, after leaving college to practice Buddhism under a visiting Japanese Zen Master in New York, Kagan became impassioned with the silent eloquence of handmade objects and pawned his camera to buy woodworking tools.

Following several years of apprenticeships, Kagan opened his own furniture workshop and founded the Richard Kagan Gallery—the first nationally recognized gallery for contemporary furniture artists. He taught at the Philadelphia College of Art (University of the Arts) for 10 years and exhibited furniture in museums and art institutions throughout the U.S. A back injury put an unexpected end to his woodworking career and opened the possibility to return to photography, thus bringing him back to where he began.

Beginning photography again in 1988, with academic studies and assisting other photographers, Kagan went on to have solo photography exhibitions in the United States, Great Britain, and South America. He taught photography at Drexel University in the mid-1990s. An early grant from the Arts Council of Wales enabled an extended project in the U.K. and Europe, culminating in an exhibition at the Royal National Eisteddfod. That project solidified a love of landscape photography first begun in Italy some years before.

Not surprisingly Kagan brought to photography some of the same aesthetic concerns with which he made furniture—a quest for quiet, understated, and elegant forms. His main bodies of work include Land/Spirit/Sky, landscapes photographed primarily in Europe; Iron Portraits, a series of austere yet sensuous portraits of antique tools and objects; and Blurred Time: Sacred Places In Kyoto, nighttime photographs taken on the grounds of temples and shrines in Japan (and on exhibit at the Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral).

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Iron Portraits

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EXHAUST MUFFLER No. 1 (2008) | Floating in a black space, a fallen-off and run over, rusty automobile exhaust muffler. How ordinary and how humble in its sensuous skin of iron. And, like us, how vulnerable and how precious. I picked this up on the street as a 21-year-old living in New York’s East Village. Some 40 years later I photographed it.

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EXHAUST MUFFLER No. 2 (2008) | Another muffler which, after I photographed it, I realized was influenced by a single still life painting that I also discovered at 21, and which had a profound influence on everything I’ve ever done. (Dali, Basket of Bread, 1945 — the year I was born. Not to be confused with his earlier version.) So many of my photographs have been about making something so absolutely still and yet possessed of an internal icon-like energy. Stillness is a major link between the objects and the landscapes, I think.

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OIL CAN WITH LONG NECK (2004) | How could I not photograph this proud, elegant, oil can?

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RECUMBENT SHEARS (1992) | About 14 inches long, this rusty pair of shears, like all of the objects I photograph, are just things that are part of my life. They live on shelves or stands throughout my home and studio.

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DANCING PLIERS (2005) | For 20 years, prior to my career as a photographer, I worked with hand tools on a daily basis as a furniture maker. Working with wood was an expression of reverence and sensuality and I gave it up only as the result of a back injury. The silver lining in that dark cloud was that I got to pursue an earlier love, photography. Nonetheless, I am still inspired by the gentle grace and beauty of handheld tools.

SUGAR NIPPERS (2008) | Two centuries ago, sugar nippers were used by the wealthy, for table or kitchen use, to cut small pieces of sugar from conical shaped sugar loaves.

Land/Spirit/Sky

NEAR SIENA Tuscany, Italy (1990) | A clump of Italian cypress trees amidst a farmer’s land. This was the first of my landscape images. It spawned a decade of landscape photographs throughout Europe, the U.K., and Ireland.

CHAPEL OF THE MADONNA Tuscany, Italy (2001) | I knew I wanted to photograph this little family chapel with its two cypress trees, but it took a long afternoon of searching for the perfect point of view. In the actual (print) photograph, the chapel is bright white, while the rest of the image is a warm pink — a laborious technique of chemical split toning that affects the various tones of a black and white photo differently. In Photoshop it would only take two minutes.

RETURN TO GRANADA Andalusia, Spain (2000) | I like to photograph at night, though it has its own problems. During the 8-minute exposure that produced this photo, I covered the lens with a hat when cars were approaching. Somehow, I didn’t hear this car and thought the headlights had ruined the photo, but actually it’s what made it. Drawn to this image, but not happy with what I was getting, I worked on it in the darkroom for several days. Ultimately, I eliminated a house, tree, and other extraneous information.

PARQUE DE DOÑANA Andalusia, Spain (2000) | To make this photograph, I remember standing on a rental car roof with the 2 legs of the tripod astride my own and the 3rd tripod leg precariously perched on the top rail of a chain-link fence. A strong wind threatened to throw the camera, tripod and me over the fence. Stillness is a balm for the confusion of my life.

MONTURQUE Andalusia, Spain (2000) | What a joy when after days of fruitless searching, a horse, a building, and a hole in the clouds came together for the camera’s delight!

CAMPO DE SAN JUAN La Mancha, Spain (2000) | In Spain, I followed the route of Don Quixote along the path of Cervantes’ near-mythical hero.

The photographs in the Iron Portraits series were taken with a view camera — the old-style camera with a 4 x 5″ negative. The prints were made in a traditional wet darkroom in sizes ranging from 16 x 20″ to 36 x 46″.

The photographs in the Land/Spirit/Sky series were taken with Kodak 2475 Recording Film, a special purpose film with a very grainy, soft-focus quality that at times can resemble a drawing or mezzotint. They are 8 x 10″ and were also made in a darkroom.

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Richard Kagan

Photo by James Blocker.

A native of Philadelphia and a former furniture maker, Richard Kagan has been teaching, traveling, and photographing for over thirty years. When he is not in his darkroom hand crafting the fine nuances of black and white prints, or on the computer making color ones, he enjoys reading (Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous), meditating (on the mysteries of importing his AOL contacts into Gmail), and his cat (Takuhatsu). “I take relatively few photographs, compared to some photographers, but I spend a lot of time making work prints and thinking about each image on the contact sheet. I look for trends, I look for what’s happening that is consistently running through the contacts as well as for new directions. And from that I discover something about how I see.” Visit Richard Kagan’s website at richardkaganphoto.com for more photos and interviews.

Published on September 16, 2019 (Click for permalink.)

PASSAGES: An Installation in Progress by Cheryl Harper

Cleaver Magazine Posted on June 3, 2019 by laserjAugust 11, 2023

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Cheryl Harper
PASSAGES: An Installation in Progress

I am one of those artists who thinks my work has to say something. I have nothing against paintings that bring together a disparate room décor or just make one feel good, but that’s not what I want to do. If you happen to like my work for any of those reasons, that’s fine, but if you are intrigued and compelled to think about bigger issues, that is my goal.

Since 2006 I’ve been making small statues of politicians, particularly of women in the national spotlight, in addition to works that address issues like anti-Semitism, terrorism, and gun violence. But in the last few years, I’ve been thinking about how I came to where I am now, a Jewish woman who lost extended family in the Holocaust and who married a direct descendant of a Southern plantation family that owned other people. I am a descendant of the oppressed who married into a family who oppressed.

I used to think of this in terms of predator/prey imagery but I’ve become more immersed in the complex history of both families, especially through the lens of today’s rising intolerance. We now live at a time to witness the last generation of Holocaust survivors, the rise of white nationalists, and the progeny of many generations of African slaves who are struggling with the past — and we see how these histories intersect. For example, American Jews were helping achieve civil rights legislation for African Americans in the 1960s, after half of the world population of Jewry was enslaved and mass murdered in Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, many whites in America are descendants of those who escaped persecution in Europe during the years of the Atlantic slave trade.

• • •

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Passages dress in progress, 2017, at James Oliver Gallery, Philadelphia

My current project, Passages, is a proposed traveling installation to American colleges. I am hoping to create dialog about who was privileged, who was enslaved, and how to approach a better understanding of our generational histories in order for all to move forward.

The point of view is female. There are original family wedding dresses overlaid with other clothing and accessories owned by mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers.

There are hangings and floor objects related to their standard of living and aspirations. Hand-printed wallpaper brings together imagery culled from family photographs and objects that refer to immigration, plantation life, and slavery.

My mother was a daughter of immigrants from the Pale, an area that straddles Poland and Russia. Her parents were first cousins, often the case in Europe, who scrabbled for a living in tiny villages, ironically similar to the practice of cousin marriage in royal families who sought to keep their families blue-blooded. My new-to-America grandparents were considered a match even in their teens, perhaps earlier; it was not a matter of love. My zayde (Yiddish for grandfather) had the responsibility of bringing over siblings to America. He was a man of very modest means, a cantor of Jewish Orthodox tradition, moving his family of four daughters and a housewife with poor English skills to a small town in New York State.

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My European family in the 1930s

Here is a photograph of the other family members he was obligated to bring to America. The man in the oval, the father, was deceased. The two daughters died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. In this photograph, the girls hold proof they are educated as one holds a book and the other a scroll. Had my zayde and bubbe not emigrated, this likely would have been the fate of their four daughters, including my mother. I always had a sense of being hunted and unsafe, probably because of family stories that in childhood I overheard between adults. Post-war was a very confusing time for Jewish children in America. We knew everyone was sad but we didn’t know anything specific. It was only as teenagers when we read the Diary of Anne Frank that we began to understand what was lost. That was the beginning of our awakening.

• • •

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A slave auction advertisement placed by my husband’s ancestor

My husband’s family came to the Colonies in the late 17th century. Isaac Lesesne was Huguenot, one of the French Protestants who suffered severe persecution at the hands of the Catholic majority and who emigrated for religious freedom and opportunity. It didn’t take him long to establish a rice plantation, then an indigo plantation for dyestuff. He settled in the wetlands near Charleston, known as Daniel Island, eventually expanding to several plantations and a dry goods store in Charleston. Lesesne had many slaves, the majority of whom were likely from Sierra Leone and knew how to grow rice and indigo. We found evidence of his family ancestors, particularly the Laurens, who marketed slaves, and an early runaway slave advertisement by the Lesesnes in the main regional newspaper.

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A branch of my husband’s Southern family in the late 1920s

My husband and I researched objects that came down through his family through the centuries, studied the permanent exhibit of an archaeological excavation of the Daniel Island Lesesne plantation at the Charleston Museum, and visited the 18th century Lesesne family cemetery. We know who married whom and how the Lesesne branch of our family migrated to New Jersey through family fortune based on slave labor.

In this project, I am taking inspiration from Lesesne family objects dating back to the plantation, never sold, as the family was still wealthy during the Depression. In fact, this branch of the family was still collecting sterling silver service, Chinese snuff bottles, and semi-precious necklaces well into the 20th century.

• • •

Detail of an 1878 mizrah paper cutting, still in the extended family

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Family heirlooms, augmented, passed down from my husband’s family

My family had no trappings of wealth, only entering the middle class in the mid 20th century. Among the very few objects passed down in my mother’s family was a brass plate, brought over in 1913. My father’s family, one generation ahead in America, had a few more objects of value such as cut glass and a pair of English brass candlesticks dating back to the 19th century. By sheer chance, we discovered a wonderful paper cutting dating to 1878, made by my great-grandfather’s brother as a going-away gift. In fact, it turns out to be a very important example of an artistic tradition in Galicia, Poland. Called a mizrah (Hebrew for “east”), it was mounted in the Brooklyn family home in the direction of Jerusalem. I used elements from this image, still owned by a branch of my family, as a part of my installation’s wallpaper. The lions, gazelles, birds, and snakes all had spiritual meaning to the maker and the recipient.

Wallpaper patterns made for Passages using block prints, stencils, and woodcuts

I saw similarities between the photos in families, such as little girls wearing matching dresses. I also saw differences. In my family, the clothing was the product of my great-grandfather’s home sweatshop, probably sewn by him, his wife, and older daughters. In my husband’s family, the picture I used was of my mother-in-law and her sister, who lived in a charming mansion in Northern New Jersey; their dresses were certainly not homemade. I also looked to the industry of the plantation, where the product alternated between indigo, then rice, then back to indigo.

Studio study of ads for runaway slaves

In this installation, I plan to use Isaac Lesesne’s own words in an ad he placed for his runaway slaves, whom he considered lost property. As a culture, we need to acknowledge how black slaves were monetized, and the sorrow of Jewish slavery in recent history. If loss and misery can be shared and understood beyond our singular point of view, I think it will be helpful. The enslaved never leave this trauma behind completely.

I want to share these family histories through my art to create an experience and a vehicle for dialog. I envision a forest of dresses and collected objects and photos surrounded by wallpapers for an immersive experience. Beneath and above the dresses and perhaps in the floor spaces are collected objects that refer to the lopsided domesticity of the families, evidence that reflects privilege, hardship, ownership, and aspiration. Depending on the size of the space, the installation — as does history — can expand or contract.


artist cheryl harper in her studioCheryl Harper is an artist and independent curator in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area. She holds a BFA and an MFA in printmaking (Tyler School of Art and The University of Delaware) and an MA in art history (Temple University). Harper has received numerous awards and honors including a residency in 2018 at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Fleisher Challenge (2008) and first prize in sculpture in Pennsylvania Art of the State (2008). She has had two solo shows at the James Oliver Gallery in Philadelphia, was a juried artist in ArtShip Olympia (2016) and many other exhibitions. Her curatorial projects include the upcoming Seamless: Craft media and Performance (spring 2020) at Rutgers-Camden. Visit Cheryl’s website at www.cherylharper.com

Published on June 3, 2019 (Click for permalink.)

SEEING LEAVES OF GLASS, Glassworks, Essay, and Poetry by Paul J. Stankard

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 27, 2019 by laserjAugust 11, 2023
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Paperweights. (1980s) Photo: Douglas Schaible

Paul J. Stankard
SEEING LEAVES OF GLASS: Glass Art & Homage to Walt Whitman

HONEYBEES

In the hive
honeybees
breed
virgin queens.

Scented foragers
guided by sun
dance their language
about harvesting
to be done.

Dusted murmuring bodies
rubbing pink clover
wing repeated visits
lured by field’s odor.

Nectar
gathered in sun
made into honey,
Nature’s continuum.

—Paul Joseph Stankard, 2019

When I entered middle age, I hit a glass wall.

I felt that I was losing my creative mojo—the work was not evolving and I felt the need for more spontaneity. Feeling frustrated, I started to write poetry, seeing it as a medium to satisfy my creative need.

I was no stranger to poetry. As a child, I was a poor reader; I’m a dyslexic, a term that was barely known at that time. But my mother, who didn’t understand why I was such a poor reader, tutored me daily through my middle-school years. Books were a struggle for my tutoring sessions, but when Mom switched to poetry it was fun. She would read the poem first, and with my good memorization skills the words, rhythms and meter clicked with me, and I—for perhaps the first time—felt that I was comprehending written expression, an idea compressed into words.

Suddenly, the words were not my enemy. They were images of an expressed idea!

Three decades later, those boyhood lessons floated back into my creative consciousness as I was struggling to advance my artistic vision and interpret nature with new allusions.

So, feeling stymied with the glass, I decided to write a poem, which led to a series of poems paying homage to native plants.

BRAMBLE

Fertile decay nourishes
arched stems, green
growth; blossoms soften
thickets hooked thorns;
showy stamens satisfy
June insects; hairy
drupelets swell to juicy
blackberry.

The challenge of painting a word-picture paying homage to a flowering plant had an appeal to me. Interestingly enough, my verbal interpretation of the plant paralleled my interpretation of a crafted plant in glass—even though I had no idea at the time how to articulate this mode of expression in my art.

As an adult, I was self-taught. While enduring the stigma of being a poor student, I discovered I was not stupid, which motivated me to teach myself. Traditional education, including art school, would have just produced more frustration. I wanted to learn about art, so I began a journey of self-education by visiting museums and galleries. I wanted to acquire a broad education that would enable me to become more than a pair of hands; I wanted to become a well-rounded person in ways that would bring artistic maturity to my work, so I began listening to books on tape.

One of those tapes was Walt Whitman: A Life, by Justin Kaplan. I was introduced to an unusual person of heroic stature—someone who was largely self-taught. Whitman, I realized, to my delight, expressed nature in an intimate way that would come to influence my work.

After I read the line from “Spontaneous Me,” from Leaves of Grass…

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Honeybee Swarming a Floral Hive Cluster d. 8.0 ” (2010) Photo: Ron Farina

The hairy wild-bee that murmurs and hankers up and down…

…I went outside in the hot summer sun and captured a honeybee in a jelly jar—and was surprised to notice how hairy it actually was. That led me to experiment with the hairy allusion in glass. This made the bee a credible component that was a focal point of my floral interpretations.

But there was more to it than just reproducing the hairy aspect of the honeybee: the influence of Whitman, exemplified by his poetry, led me to interpret nature referentially. As a result, I began to learn from the process.

As I re-read my favorite Whitman poems, I noted in many instances he went beyond realism, along a journey leading to an almost spiritual realm. His words challenged me to attempt the same journey: to go beyond crafting realistic botanical models.

Like most, I didn’t connect with Whitman’s genius on the first read, and began to revisit the poems in ways that eventually allowed me to absorb the insightful intimacy of the words as they formed pictures in my mind.

The influence of Whitman’s words, coupled with my respect for his genius, led me to display excerpts of his poetry on the walls in my studio and exhibitions. Whitman was my guide through walks in the woods and Leaves of Grass became my textbook. I wanted to articulate the same depth of feeling on a visual level in glass as Walt did in words.

I was touched by the abstract idea of how Whitman portrayed a morning glory in “Song of Myself.” He elevates a simple flower to a spiritual level:

SEEING LEAVES OF GLASS, Glassworks, Essay, and Poetry by Paul J. Stankard - 3A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the meta- physics of books

My poem about blackberries, as well as my later glass interpretations, were complemented by Whitman’s unusual word choices, enhanced by the spiritual force relating to all living things. He expressed this in another line from “Song of Myself”:

…the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven

As a craftsperson who worked with his hands for four decades, I was heartened with Whitman’s intuitive insight into hand skills when I read this line from “Song of Myself”:

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Flowers and Fruit Bouquet with Swarming Honeybees d. 6″ (2014) Photo: Ron Farina

…the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery

Whitman’s poetry led me to pursue a convergence of writing, teaching, and glass art-making. I hadn’t been to art school and didn’t share the often-exotic influences referenced by my contemporaries. But Whitman infused me with confidence. His celebration of the ordinary as extraordinary gave me pride in my celebration of the familiar things into crafted glass components: blossoms, bees, roots and leaves encased in glass.

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Honeybee Swarm with Flowers and Fruit, d. 6″ (2012) Chicago Art Institute Rubloff Collection; Photo: Ron Farina

Clear glass rectangle with a mask inside it, topped with flowers, fruit, and one bee

Tea Rose Bouquet Botanical with Mask h. 5.5″ (2004) Photo: Douglas Schaible

During his time, Whitman thought that his poetry was under-appreciated and that his worth would only be understood by future generations. Similarly, this idea of spiritually connecting to the future, long after I die, motivated me to write this poem, which I offer as homage to Walt Whitman:

Clear glass sphere with bouquet of colorful flowers inside it

Walt Whitman’s Garden Bouquet d. 4″ (2018)

Receive this glass
it holds my memories
crafted blossoms
suspended in stillness
to be pollinated by your sight
anticipating your touch
through time.

Happy 200th Birthday, Walt Whitman.


Close-up of Paul J. StankardInternationally acclaimed artist and pioneer in the studio glass movement, Paul J. Stankard is considered a living master who translates nature in glass. His work is represented in over 80 museums around the world. Stankard is the recipient of numerous awards and honorary doctorate degrees. He most recently received the Masters of the Medium award from Smithsonian’s The James Renwick Alliance and the Lifetime Achievement award from the Glass Art Society. He is an Artist-in-Residence and Honorary Professor at Salem Community College. Stankard authored three books: an autobiography in 2007 titled No Green Berries or Leaves, an educational resource in 2014 titled Spark the Creative Flame, and most recently, Studio Craft as Career: A Guide to Achieving Excellence in Art-making. Visit Paul and his works at paulstankard.com

Published on March 27, 2019 (Click for permalink.)

INSPIRED TO SEE: Paintings by Giovanni Casadei

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 4, 2018 by laserjAugust 11, 2023
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The Music Pier and the Ferris Wheel. Oil on panel, 10.5 x 13″

Giovanni Casadei
INSPIRED TO SEE: Paintings

I was born and raised in Rome, Italy. Since the age of four I have been exposed to art, thanks to my Uncle Roberto, who religiously picked me up every Sunday morning to bring me to a museum to contemplate art. At the age of fourteen, I bought my first oil painting set with my savings, and I painted on my own for the next eight years. From 1978 to 1980, I studied at the Scuola Libera del Nudo (Free School for Drawing and Painting sponsored by the Academy of Fine Arts of Rome) under the instruction of the Armenian artist, Alfonso Avanessian. From 1980 to 1981, I was enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, then from 1981 to 1983, studied further under Alfonso Avanessian, during which I experimented with drawing, oil pastels, dry pastels, tempera, watercolor, acrylic, and oil paintings. It was a very productive, creative, and formative period for me.

On December 1, 1983, I arrived in Philadelphia. At the age of twenty-seven, I was beginning the biggest adventure of my life—to be an artist.

When I first arrived in Philadelphia, I worked as a house painter by day and as an artist by night. In 1988 I enrolled in a four-year certificate program at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where I studied under Seymour Remenick, who became my mentor and friend for the last ten years of his life. Seymour gave me the support to make my own mistakes and to learn from them. His love for art, painting, and people was contagious. This love is an integral part of my vision as an artist. Seymour reinforced my belief in following my heart and what I love in life.

Since 1997 I have been teaching painting at various art centers in the Philadelphia area. I enjoy teaching and sharing my knowledge and experiences from my studio and as an en plein air painter with my students. I have found teaching to be inspiring, challenging, and creative. My approach to painting is to communicate to the viewer my love for life and humankind. I strive to capture in the act of painting a moment that exists in me, inspired by the light and colors that nature offers us every moment.

I am and always was inspired by light.

I have been painting for forty-eight years and I still remember my fascination for the light in Caravaggio’s paintings when I was six years old, and when I was a young adult I would spend hours watching the changing light from the crest of the Gianicolo over the rooftops of Rome. I would say that light is the subject matter of my paintings, and I still carry the nostalgic experience of light from Rome now in my work.

I paint from life, going on location to paint landscapes and seascapes in the Alla Prima Technique (resolving them in one sitting), or staying in my studio to paint still lifes in the Multiple Sitting Technique. I always paint from direct observation, and this is because I want to have the experience of seeing more than reproducing an exact copy of nature.

I want to describe the experience of seeing that comes to me as the feelings and intuitions I get in the act of painting. I want to express, with a kind of shorthand application of paint, the unspoken aspects of Nature as it is revealed by the ever-changing light. Light transforms objects; light transcends concepts. Light creates space.

As light breaks down forms into masses of illumination and shadow, and as light drains or saturates colors into spaces of moving intensities, the experience of seeing is endlessly changing, infinitely fluid and changeable. I have been painting landscapes and still lifes for such a long time because I see the world with new eyes every time I paint.

Communicating this spontaneity and the immediacy of nature through my process of painting, I hope to inspire others to consider the beauty of everyday life. To be present in the moment is what makes our lives richer.

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INSPIRED TO SEE: Paintings by Giovanni Casadei - 2Ocean City, Big Clouds. Oil on panel, 12.5 x 13.5″

INSPIRED TO SEE: Paintings by Giovanni Casadei - 3Ocean City, 14th St. Fishing Pier. Oil on panel.

INSPIRED TO SEE: Paintings by Giovanni Casadei - 4Sunny and Windy Day at the Beach. Oil on panel, 8 x 12″

INSPIRED TO SEE: Paintings by Giovanni Casadei - 5The Music Pier and the Ferris Wheel. Oil on panel, 10.5 x 13″

INSPIRED TO SEE: Paintings by Giovanni Casadei - 6Approaching Sunset. Oil on panel, 9 x 14″

INSPIRED TO SEE: Paintings by Giovanni Casadei - 7Light and Dark. Oil on panel, 7.25 x 11.75″

Cloudy Day on the Delaware. Oil on panel, 12 x 12″

Strawberry Mansion Bridge. Oil on panel, 12 x 14″

The Columbia Bridge. Oil on panel, 12.5 x 14″


Headshot of Giovanni Casadei

Giovanni Casadei was born and raised in Rome, Italy where he studied at the Scuola Libera del Nudo and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, as well as under the instruction of the Armenian artist, Alfonso Avanessian. In December 1983 he arrived in Philadelphia, where he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts under his mentor Seymour Remenick. He has been showing and selling his work in Philadelphia and other major cities for the last twenty years. More at www.giocasadei.com.

Published on December 4, 2018 (Click for permalink.)

MINDSCAPES: Photographs by Denise Gallagher

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 5, 2018 by laserjAugust 11, 2023
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Everyman Gazes into the Future. Rovinj, Croatia 2017

Denise Gallagher
MINDSCAPES: Photographs

I consider myself a painter who photographs. I had given up on painting about ten years ago since I didn’t feel I could authentically express what was mine to express. Then, about eight years ago, I fell into photographing what I came to call my “magical landscapes.” These images came almost effortlessly and opened up worlds I never imagined. I credit this experience with giving me the courage to explore the real world. During the last five years, I have traveled around the world twice for extended periods of time. I tend to perceive now that most every landscape has the potential to be a magical landscape, given the right lighting and composition.

When I travel, I love to simply wander, to experience a place with no agenda, simply to be available to receive the beauty of the moment. It is an open and receptive state and, in a way, capturing the image is just part of the process of relaxing and seeing 180 degrees. I’ve heard there are books on the zen of photography. I would say I fell into it naturally.

I’m from Philadelphia but I currently live in Fairfield, Iowa. When I return to Iowa after traveling, I create “Ritual Art Events” which I show at our local art gallery. At these evenings, I interweave short films I have created with my images, using transitions and movement (à la Ken Burns), spoken word, and soundscapes. One of my latest films combines the real with the imaginary magical landscapes. Having the imagery projected large, merging with other images and set to music, feels closest to what I consider my authentic voice.

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Magical Morning in Val D’Orcia. Tuscany, Italy 2016

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Walking In the Shire Near Bishop’s Castle. Shropshire, England 2017

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Fall Magic Near Lake Pukaki. Canterbury, New Zealand 2013

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Morning Comes Over Me. Glass House Mountains, Australia 2017

Solitary Woman. Lembongan, Bali 2017

Lightly Tethered in Lembongan. Lembongan, Bali 2017

Arabian Sunset. My Kitchen, Fairfield, Iowa 2015

Holding the Fallen Angel. My Kitchen, Fairfield, Iowa 2017

You Never Can Tell. My Kitchen, Fairfield, Iowa 2014


Denise Gallagher is a photographer/painter, occupational therapist, and world traveler, currently living in Fairfield, Iowa. She has exhibited her paintings and photography extensively in one-woman and group shows, and has produced ritual art events at ICON Contemporary Art Gallery in Fairfield and also, on a smaller scale, as she travels. She believes her therapy work and art work are intimately connected, one informing the other. Denise received a BS in Art Ed from Temple in 1979, including a year at Tyler Rome, and went on to receive an OT degree from Jefferson College of Allied Health in 1986. Denise has traveled around the world twice during the last five years, photographing daily. This past year she did volunteer work with Syrian refugees in Greece and taught Tai Chi in Bali. Visit her website at www.denise-healer-artist.com

Published on September 5, 2018 (Click for permalink.)

ACTIVE CONFLICT ZONES by Francesco Levato

Cleaver Magazine Posted on June 6, 2018 by thwackAugust 11, 2023
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Francesco Levato
ACTIVE CONFLICT ZONES

My visual and textual work tends to be palimpsestic; layered, erased, meaning bleeding between frames and lines. I am interested in what is left unseen or unsaid, hidden in the density of image and language. I am also interested in construction and deconstruction as methods of visual and textual composition. I build from found audio, video, objects, and texts; disassembling and recontextualizing them, often using appropriation to resist or subvert asymmetrical power structures.

Active Conflict Zones is one such project, a series of visual poems constructed with language appropriated from Executive Order 13780, Protecting The Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into The United States, and screen captures of digital video compression artifacts found between frames in Battle Beyond the Sun, an Americanized, English-dubbed, version of the 1959 Soviet science fiction film Nebo Zovyot.

I found hidden within the language of security in Executive Order 13780 the underpinnings of a xenophobic worldview that simultaneously aspires toward empire. In the text of the poems I sought to lay bare the underlying mechanics of power inherent such colonial impulses, and in the visuals I sought to subvert the legitimacy of claims to security from an administration compromised by foreign power. In attempting to hide the Soviet origins of the film Nebo Zovyot the American director of the retitled Battle Beyond the Sun replaced Soviet spacecraft with U.S. ones, obscured all text that appeared in Russian, and replaced the names of Soviet actors with those of English voiceover actors in the film’s credits; the screen-captured compression artifacts, the bleed through of data between the video’s keyframes and the P and B frames (usually hidden and containing only partial information from the surrounding frames), for me served as visual metaphor. —Francesco Levato, June 2018




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Francesco Levato is a poet, a literary translator, and a new media artist. Recent books include Arsenal/Sin Documentos (forthcoming 2018, Clash Books); Endless, Beautiful, Exact; Elegy for Dead Languages; War Rug, a book length documentary poem; Creaturing (as translator); and the chapbooks A Continuum of Force and jettison/collapse. He has collaborated and performed with various composers, including Philip Glass, and his cinépoetry has been exhibited in galleries and featured at film festivals in Berlin, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere. He founded the Chicago School of Poetics, holds an MFA in Poetry and a PhD in English Studies, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Literature & Writing Studies at California State University San Marcos.

Published on June 6, 2018 (Click for permalink.)

THE BROWNIES AT WORK by Nance Van Winckel

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 22, 2018 by thwackAugust 12, 2023

Nance Van Winckel
THE BROWNIES AT WORK

Welcome to Cleaver’s brand new genre, INTERMEDIA, where word and image intersect to create newly mediated spaces between the literal and the figurative—part word, part image, and deviantly part-way! And what better way to start off than with “Brownies,” those there-but-not-there creations that inhabit the virtual terrains and ordinary realms of our creative lives. —Ed.


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Nance Van Winckel is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Our Foreigner, winner of the Pacific Coast Poetry Series Prize (Beyond Baroque Press, 2017), Book of No Ledge (Pleiades Press Visual Poetry Series, 2016), and Pacific Walkers (U. of Washington Press, 2014). She’s also published five books of fiction, including Ever Yrs, a novel in the form of a scrapbook (Twisted Road Publications, 2014), and Boneland: Linked Stories (U. of Oklahoma Press, 2013). She teaches in the MFA programs at Eastern Washington University and Vermont College of Fine Arts. Read more at her website. 

Published on March 22, 2018 (Click for permalink.)

FRANCES by Maria Brandt

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 22, 2018 by thwackAugust 12, 2023

Face of a girl with eyes closed

Maria Brandt
FRANCES

Frances had skipped two periods before she realized what was going on. “I’m lucky,” she bragged to Sarah over milkshakes at the corner store. “I haven’t had my period in eight weeks, no tampons for me, I beat the system.” Sarah’s mouth dropped, and that’s when Frances became aware of the extent of her self-deceit. Now, she sits cross-legged on the floor in Jack’s bedroom shuffling a deck of cards while Jack moves laundry from the washer to the dryer in the basement, his parents in the city at a hospital benefit.

She remembers decorating the basement in her own home two years earlier for her sixteenth birthday party. Her mother had been in one of her moods, so her father had picked up Sarah and taken the two of them to CVS to buy twenty-seven feet of multi-colored streamers and a bag of medium-sized balloons. “I think we should make a giant stethoscope,” Frances said to Sarah while climbing an old step-ladder, “like the one my grandmother has.” “Why not a heart?” Sarah replied. She remembers thinking Sarah lacked ambition.

Still in Jack’s bedroom, Frances puts down the cards and lies on her back on the floor. Spreading her fingers so her palms press into the wood, she can hear Jack banging around the basement and wonders whether or not he uses fabric softener. She knows fabric softener contains toxic chemicals like ethanol and camphor that deteriorate a person’s neuropathways, and others that cause pancreatic cancer or fatal edema, and she berates herself for knowing this but not putting two and two together about her missing periods.

She thinks again about that night two years earlier, about trying to make that stethoscope, wrapping her fingers around the streamers, twisting them into lines and curves, then asking Sarah for her opinion. “It looks like a glazed doughnut,” Sarah said. Later, at the party, Jack gave Frances a present wrapped in old newspaper. She had invited him because he offered unusual anecdotes about medical breakthroughs in Mr. Elwise’s Biology class. “Did Elwise ever get back to you about that monkey neurogenesis study?” she asked when he handed her the present, the overhead lights making his nose look slightly larger than it was. “Nah, he’s useless,” Jack replied. After ripping open the newspaper and finding a used copy of Gray’s Anatomy like the one her grandmother had on the bookshelf in her living room, Frances felt her stomach flutter. That night, right before the ambulance came, she kissed Jack for the first time while Sarah cheered them on from the corner.

“Hey,” Jack says, laundry basket in his arms, Frances lying on his bedroom floor. “What are you thinking about?”

“Do you use fabric softener?”

“Of course not, fabric softener contains neurotoxins,” Jack replies. He watches while Frances sits cross-legged again and while she picks up the deck of cards. “You wanna play Strip Poker?” he asks.

“No, idiot.”

“Then what?” He sits next to her on the floor, his hand resting casually on her bare knee.

“I thought maybe we could tell fortunes,” Frances says. “Sarah taught me last week.”

“Sure, and then we can drive to the beach.”

Frances pushes his hand off her knee, but she misses him when he crosses the room to open a window. She finds the four Queens and turns them face-up on the floor. “Okay,” she says, “now you have to ask a question.”

“How bad will traffic be on the bridge?”

“It has to be a yes/no question.”

“Will traffic be bad on the bridge?”

She’s impressed that he doesn’t miss a beat, that he can rephrase his question so expertly. She wants to tell him this but instead asks him to concentrate and to choose a card from the deck, so he chooses the Three of Diamonds, and she places his card above the matching Queen of Diamonds. “Diamonds mean maybe,” she explains. “Traffic might be bad, might not.”

“That’s playing it kind of safe, don’t you think?”

“My turn,” Frances says. She squeezes her eyes tight until small tears begin to form, then chooses a card. It’s the Nine of Diamonds.

The night of her party, two years earlier, her father collapsed while making homemade popcorn over the stove. Frances heard the crash, then her mother’s screams. She rushed upstairs and saw her father lying stiff on the floor. She flung herself across his torso and felt her mother pulling her shoulders, trying to get her off him, but she knew blood wasn’t moving through his body, which meant no oxygen was getting to his heart, which meant his heart’s cells were dying rapidly and she didn’t know what kind of monkey tests had been done to shed light on the regeneration of a left ventricle.

She places the Nine of Diamonds above Jack’s Three of Diamonds and remembers thinking months after the funeral that her father would never have a conversation with Jack, would never know that Jack’s nose in fact was lovely, would never know that two days after the party, when she was sick with grief, Jack had quizzed her on the cellular make-up of bone marrow, would never know that she didn’t mind when Jack found out she used to think Gray’s Anatomy had been named after the television drama and not the other way around, would never know that Jack had figured out the streamers at her party were supposed to look like a stethoscope and not like a glazed doughnut or unambitious heart.

“No fair,” Jack says. “You need to ask your question out loud, that’s what I did.” His hand rests on her knee again.

“Okay.”

“Well? What did you ask?”

“Give me a minute,” Frances says and breathes more heavily than she would like. “Will you and I have a baby?”

Jack squeezes her knee and sort of lies on top of her. “I hope so, Frannie girl,” he whispers while shifting his weight, “I hope so.”

“No,” Frances says, “I meant will we have a baby now.”

“Now?”

“Like, now.”

“But—”

“Well, in seven months,” she says with finality.

Years ago, Frances’s parents took her and Sarah to the beach. They drove over the bridge, then parked the old station wagon in Field Three and carried chairs and a cooler up wooden stairs and over dunes to a spot near the lifeguard. Her parents spread a blanket over the sand and Frances watched while her mother touched the back of her father’s neck and whispered something in his ear. “What’s up?” Frances asked, but her mother took out a magazine and leaned into her chair. Later, Frances watched while her mother offered her father a sandwich. “Can I have one?” she asked, but her mother closed the cooler and looked to the waves. In the silence following her proclamation in Jack’s bedroom, Frances wonders if her mother wished that day that Frances would get sucked into those waves, or discreetly swallow enough neurotoxin to reduce her brain-energy metabolism, or do anything to disappear so her mother could make popcorn alone with her father every night before climbing into their great big bed.

“A baby in seven months,” Jack repeats. “Teeth are forming right now, an inner ear, even sex organs.” He pauses, then moves his hand to her belly. “May I?”

“You’re being awfully formal,” Frances says, but she lets his fingers make small circles on the skin under her t-shirt.

“What now?” Jack asks.

“What do you mean?”

His fingers linger on her belly and he slides closer so her head can rest against his shoulder. “My grandmother left me her ring,” he says. “Frannie girl, that ring is yours.”

Earlier that week, when Frances was doing her own laundry, her mother and grandmother were making grilled-cheese sandwiches upstairs in the kitchen. “I miss him,” she heard her mother say. “You need to take care of Frances,” her grandmother replied. “You always think of her, never of me,” her mother said. Frances opened a new box of fabric softener and thought about putting a sheet in with her mother’s underwear. Instead, she closed the box and hid it behind some old pipes.

“That ring is yours,” Jack repeats. She holds his hand and looks into his eyes, which remind her of her father’s eyes, brown like dirt overturned to dig a hole deep enough for a coffin. She remembers that shortly after she watched that coffin go into the ground, her grandmother pushed her stethoscope across the kitchen table. “It’s yours now,” she said to Frances, “I was alone, but I used this every day in my practice, it kept me company.” Frances remembers thinking her grandmother wasn’t alone, not really, because she had Frances’s mother, just like Frances’s mother wasn’t alone because she had Frances.

“Your eyes are like dirt,” she says to Jack, then regrets it, but he smiles.

“Freshly-turned dirt,” he says, “earthworms expanding and contracting their bodies to burrow and make things grow.”

Frances wonders how she got so lucky, how she found someone who understands her so well. “Yes,” she says.

“Yes to earthworms?”

“Yes to the ring.”

Later that afternoon Sarah braids her hair. “You really said yes?” Sarah asks while placing her hands firmly on Frances’ scalp. “What about college? What about med school? Why didn’t you use the cards, do more fortunes, don’t you think that would have been wise?”

“Sarah.”

“I’m serious. Diamonds mean maybe, Hearts mean yes, Spades mean no, Clubs mean probably, you just match your cards, they make the decision for you, it’s easy, you can’t go wrong.”

“I said yes.”

“Did you mean it?”

Frances looks down at her hands. “I don’t know,” she says. A year after her father died, she overhead her mother talking on the phone with her grandmother. “It’s hard for me, it’s hard for all women,” she heard her mother say. “Not you, you became a doctor, you beat the system, but—” Her mother stopped talking, and Frances wondered what system she might have meant, or what she might have realized that shut her up. Later that night, Frances decided to beat the system herself. She took off Jack’s jeans for the first time, let him take off her underwear, told him she loved him and that she wanted to experience penetrative sexual intercourse.

“I think I meant yes,” Frances continues while Sarah still braids her hair, “but I don’t know.”

“Why not?” Sarah asks.

“What if I’m like my grandma?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if I become a doctor and stop loving Jack, or care so much about being a doctor that I don’t pay attention to it? Or if I’m like my mom and love my husband but don’t ever really love it?”

Sarah’s eyes get all misty. “That’s a baby, Frannie,” she says, “not an it.”

“It’s a fetus, maybe even an embryo, but not a baby, and I can get an abortion.” Sarah pulls hard on Frances’s newly-braided hair and Frances welcomes the pain.

The next day, she sits at her grandmother’s kitchen table and looks out the window while her grandmother boils water. She watches a squirrel circle up a black locust and thinks about the locust’s trunk, wide and sturdy, almost threatening with its weight. By the time her grandmother brews two cups of chamomile, Frances is kneeling outside on the patio studying a pile of dirt. “Frannie,” her grandmother says, “what’s wrong?”

“It’s these earthworms,” Frances says through tears, the black locust looming over her head. “I think they’re copulating.”

“Frannie.”

“No, look, they’re lined up with their backs against each other, facing different directions, that means they’re copulating,” Frances continues. “Did you know earthworms are hermaphrodites? Did you know they have both male and female sex organs?”

“I know, Frannie.”

“And they make this thing called a slime tube, kind of like mucous, and they each ejaculate into the slime tube, sending sperm into the other earthworm’s sperm receptacle?”

“Frannie, what’s wrong?” Frannie leans back into her heels and starts making small noises. Her grandmother puts down the tea cups and kneels beside her, holding Frances’s damp face and rubbing her cool fingers into the back of Frances’s shoulder. “What is it?”

“Why did you have mom?”

“Is she at you again?”

“No, I want to know why you had her, you didn’t want her, you know you didn’t want her, that she would get in your way, but you had her anyway, why?”

Her grandmother pulls back and brushes some of Frances’s hair from her face. “Frannie, I did want your mother, I love your mother, what’s this all about?”

“Do you remember when I was younger and used to work with you?” Frances says. “You used to let me take your patients’ blood pressure, you taught me how to find their pulses and how to hold the stethoscope over their arteries, the same stethoscope you gave me after Dad died?”

“I remember.”

“I’d listen until I could hear the first pulse beat and then listen until I couldn’t hear anything at all, that’s how I read their systolic and their diastolic pressures, how I read the way their blood moved through their bodies, everything was so precise, everything was so clear.”

“I know.”

“That’s when I realized, even though I didn’t have the words,” Frances says, then looks again at the black locust, and at the maple just beyond, its branches fanning out from its trunk.

“Realized what?”

“That I wanted to be a doctor, like you.” Her grandmother rises and carries a steaming cup of chamomile to where Frances still sits huddled on the patio. “Why can’t we be like earthworms?” Frances says. “Why can’t we share slime tubes so everyone has eggs and everyone’s eggs get fertilized?”

That night, Frances and Sarah make popcorn over the stove. Sarah rambles on about the Ten of Clubs she drew after asking if some boy in their U.S. History class last year would break her heart, about how thin the card was, its paper face already bent with time, while Frances thinks about her father and his heart, cracked open like paper, like a broken kernel of corn. “It’s not fair,” Frances whispers.

“No kidding it’s not fair, why can’t boys step up? I don’t mean Jack, he’s one in a million, I mean normal boys, boys who don’t know how many bones are in their feet.”

While Frances melts butter for the popcorn, she wonders if her mother only had room to love her father, and if her grandmother only had room to love her work, and if traits like the capacity to love a child have a genetic component. She puts the popcorn bowl on the coffee table and goes into the bathroom to throw up.

In the morning, she notices the veins in her breasts and that she has gained two pounds. She takes out a deck of cards and pulls a Six of Spades which means abortion is no longer an option, which means she needs a new idea. Her grandmother’s car isn’t in the driveway when she arrives, so she sneaks around back. In the yard, she touches the black locust as if listening for that first pulse, that first marker of systolic pressure, but she keeps her eyes focused on the maple and its outstretched branches.

Getting to the first branch is easy. From there, she holds onto the trunk with one hand and feels for the next branch with the other, then pulls her body up again, then again, then again, until she’s sixteen-and-a-half feet from the ground, three times her body height. She makes sure soft grass is below before pressing her back into the trunk. Eyes closed, she pretends she’s an earthworm sending sperm into her mate’s receptacle, sending her uterus into her mate’s receptacle, sending her embryo, her fetus, her baby into her mate’s receptacle. She imagines the dirt and the slime and the release. Then, positioning her body so she doesn’t land on her neck or head, she jumps.

When Jack finds her, ten minutes after she texts him, she’s lying on her side in the grass, unable to move. “The cards didn’t work so I needed to figure out another way to beat the system,” she says, “and I might have killed our baby.” Jack moves to cradle her in his arms. “No,” she says, “lie next to me, but behind me, and face the other direction.”

“Like earthworms?” he asks. “When they copulate?”

Her back pressed against his back, she takes his hand and pulls it around to her slightly swelled belly while the locust, tall and forbidding, reaches for the sky.


Maria Brandt author photoMaria Brandt has published plays, fiction, and nonfiction in several literary magazines, including InDigest, Rock & Sling, Arts & Letters, Prime Number Magazine, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, VIDA, and upstreet. Most recently, her collection New York Plays was produced by Out of Pocket Productions and published by Heartland Plays, and her novella All the Words won the Grassic Short Novel Prize. Maria teaches Creative Writing at Monroe Community College in Rochester, NY and is a founding member of Straw Mat Writers. She lives just outside Highland Park with her son William.

Image credit:  Zulmaury Saavedra on Unsplash

Published on March 22, 2018 (Click for permalink.)

LIVING AS ART by Matthew Courtney

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 15, 2017 by laserjAugust 13, 2023

Anarctic Moon

Matthew Courtney
LIVING AS ART:
Ceramic Works

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To be in the presence of Matt Courtney’s ceramic art is to be embraced by a feeling at once familiar and unanticipated — a sensation that comes not only by directly looking, but also sensed, unsolicited, out of the corner of the eye. It’s a kind of well-being and heightened awareness that can happen while sitting outdoors, perhaps beside a percolating stream or a mile-wide river: small wonders, big sky. It’s all good.

Almost instinctively, Courtney’s ceramic pieces bring that palpable sensation indoors, where they acquire something domestic, grounded in a place that feels like home. That hits home.

Our connection with ceramic objects has always been like this. For millennia we humans have lived with objects made of clay. Fashioned with purpose and imagination, they have accumulated in our living spaces around needs of food and shelter, desire and memory. To live by the possibilities of clay is, really, to live by the possibilities of art: clay objects take the shape of our lives while shaping the course of our lives, and ultimately become the tangible signifiers of the art of living.

How fortunate, then, to encounter Courtney’s ceramic works at a place called the House Gallery — a gallery that’s actually the real-life home of Henry Bermudez and Michelle Marcuse. Located at 1816 Frankford Avenue, it’s in the heart of Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood, a stone’s throw from the Kensington High School for the Creative and Performing Arts.

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Inside the living room at House Gallery

Knock on the door, enter a tile-lined foyer, and step inside. You’re now in the wide-open living room of a typical Philly row house, with an antique fireplace and Grotrian-Steinweg grand piano at one end, and a renovated eat-in kitchen at the other. The morning sun pours through windows while a white cat (“Bobby”) spies from the top of the stairs (there are, in all, three cats living here, it turns out). Meanwhile, one of Courtney’s three-headed camels peers out the window; there’s construction going on down the block.

This is the House Gallery, a non-commercial gallery in a private residence where established Philadelphia artists have the opportunity to show their work as “house guests,” and where First Friday openings are just like house parties. It’s a work of love — and vision. Henry, who’s from Venezuela, and his wife Michelle, from South Africa, are both artists (Henry represented Venezuela in the 1986 Venice Biennale and met Michelle at his first solo show in Philadelphia). Seven years ago Henry and Michelle had the idea of re-imagining their living space, not just for themselves, but as a shared “open salon” for artists, an everyday, comfortable meeting place where neighbors and artists could rub shoulders. Today, original details of the house — the faux marble of the fireplace, carved chestnut staircase railings, and worn hardwood floors — blend in seamlessly with the scrubbed white walls and sleek modernist kitchen. It all feels “lived in,” just as Courtney’s work feels “lived with.” A perfect match.

house gallery matt courtney art

“Four Spires” at the House Gallery at 1816 Frankford Avenue

Stepping back, the House Gallery is also a refreshing assertion about how to experience art in our daily lives. It’s not an entirely new idea — think of the princely collectors centuries ago whose sumptuous palazzi became the museums and galleries of today — but it’s perhaps a more nobly aspirational one, presenting art and artists in a more intimate, immediately accessible way.

Accessibility is absolutely central to Courtney’s artworks. First off, they’re made of clay, a timeless, universal material with a long, built-in history of familiar human connections. Then, his objects are always immediately recognizable: game balls from various sports, human figures, animals, vessel forms. Additionally, he makes work at scales meant to inhabit living spaces as gracefully as gallery spaces. Ultimately, there’s an underlying human authenticity at work here: artworks sprouted from daily life, planted in real-life contexts, and holding their own among the overgrown artifices of the art market’s gallery scene.

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Minoan Octopus Urn With Skydivers

Courtney’s subjects are firmly rooted in real life, specifically his childhood, where he spent his time at home drawing, playing sports, and exploring the nearby woods. An important part of his art practice is about maintaining that innocence, a sense of wonder and play while making art, even after years of formal education, teaching, and residencies abroad. One technique is to use molds — industrial molds, molds he makes of everyday objects, molds he makes of his own pieces — to create multiple parts which are then assembled in seemingly random ways. The results: improvised replications and reconstructions of memory and instinct. Another technique involves creating large clay tubular cylinders, and allowing them to slump naturally while still wet; these can be assembled to become deformed rockets, statements about power and its contradictions (and a nod to his childhood hobby with model rockets). Another is to “raw fire” his pieces, a process that’s risky because moisture trapped inside the clay may not have time to burn off, resulting in mini explosions inside the kiln. Life happens, his pieces insist.

While many artists look to art for inspiration, Courtney is most informed by the lives of people he knows — friends, fellow teachers, or former college roommates, such as Susie Brandt, a fiber artist whose commitment to art is about investigating her family history and her mother’s dedication to the household. “Susie Brandt was my roommate for a year when I was at Philadelphia College of Art,” Courtney remembers. “She taught me about the importance of making art, that it was a serious thing, not a frivolous thing. The beginnings of my art making and thinking began with me trying to find a connection to my past that was at the foundation of the person I had become, similar to Susie’s connection to her mother’s skill at running a household.”

Early on, then, the domestic, lived-with vibe was there. It’s the human connection that matters, the conversation in the room.

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Camel Triptych

“Another big influence was Kirk Mangus,” Courtney continues. “Kirk was my graduate school professor at Kent State and was hugely influential. I had an odd relationship with Kirk. I really admired him as an artist and teacher but it seemed as though he was always disappointed in me. He was very hesitant to tell any of us that he thought we were making good stuff. It wasn’t until much later that I heard from Eva (his wife) that he thought we (Monica Zimmerman, Keaton Wynn, and I) were the best students to come through Kent. His main teaching method was to come into the graduate studios where he also had a studio and talk about things like poetry, Greek history, or Korean folk pottery.” (Kirk Mangus passed away in 2013; read Matt’s moving — and funny — tribute here.)

“Another person is John Parris. He’s a high school friend with whom I do collaborations. John came with me down to Georgia to do a residency at Keaton’s school. We are currently brainstorming ideas for a new collaboration. John works like Keaton: idea, then drawing, then art. I seem to just start with clay and then the ideas develop.”

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Six Pin

Courtney’s conscious decisions around intention, material, and process allow for the incidental and the accidental — the non-scripted, the unplanned — and this in turn allows for a sly, playful ambiguity in his works because they can never quite be taken literally. Layered and metaphoric, while emphatically real, they tease our curiosity, tacitly prompting multiple reactions and interpretations. In a medium in which “everything has been said and done before,” Courtney thinks of it as jazz improvisation, letting himself and others have their own spin. (His late father was a musician who played upright bass in the Philadelphia Orchestra.)

“The not knowing is part of what excites me about making my work,” says Courtney. “It’s also a source of anxiety. I get very very bored when I know what it’s about. But, not knowing puts me in a bind when people ask me about my work, because I’m not sure. Not knowing makes the work alive for me but I feel uneasy not being able to give a quick and clear answer when I’m asked.”

“I’m most comfortable when I’m making art,” he confesses. “My studio’s in my basement, where I have four kilns. Plus, my side yard, where many of my pieces live outdoors.” One such piece, a massive series of chains, dominates an entire wall at the House Gallery. Each link is handmade, weighty and weathered, splotched here and there with a green mossy coating that naturally thrives on terra cotta that’s been left outside through summers and winters.

Small wonders, big sky. It’s all good.

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Ship Chain

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During this holiday season, you may find yourself sitting in front of a cozy fire, or wanting some company while sitting in front of a computer screen. If so, grab your headphones and settle into this lively, free-wheeling living-room conversation between artist Matt Courtney and DJ Ed Feldman on The Morning Feed show on G-Town Radio, where they share insights and commentary on everything from Chinese politics and Western aesthetics to Philly football and Czech beer. Enjoy!

MorningFeed with Matthew Courtney and Ed Feldman >>

morning feed with matt courtney


Matt CourtneyMatthew Courtney lives and works in Philadelphia as a sculptor and teacher. He received his BS at the University of the Arts and his MFA at Kent State University. A recipient of several fellowships and residencies, he currently teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of the Arts, and Drexel University. Courtney’s recent exhibitions in Philadelphia include New Work (House Gallery) and Divergences (Cerulean Gallery). In 2015 and 2017 he was selected as artist-in-residence at Lanzhou City University in Lanzhou, China, where his work was exhibited in Post Painted Pottery. View Courtney’s complete works at matthewcourtneyart.com/home.html


List of Works:
1.  Antarctic Moon, ceramic, 36 x 60 x 9″ (2014)
2. All World Camel, ceramic, 20 x 15 x 10″ (2015)
3. Four Spires, terracotta, each rocket approximately 60 x 20 x 20″ (2016)
4. Minoan Octopus Urn With Skydivers, ceramic, 24 x 8 x 8″ (2012-2017)
5. Camel Triptych, ceramic, 10 x 26 x 7″ (2017)
6. Six Pin, mixed media (clay, wood, glass), 12 x 26 x 8″ (2017)
7. Ship Chain, ceramic, 96 x 120 x 24″ (1994-2016)

Photography by John Carlano.

Published on December 15, 2017 (Click for permalink.)

WHAT WE SEE FEELS LIKE THE THING ITSELF by Micah Danges

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 15, 2017 by laserjAugust 12, 2023

Micah Danges
WHAT WE SEE FEELS LIKE THE THING ITSELF: Photographs

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My drive to take photographs is rooted in the unpredictability of such a seemingly predictable process. I use the precision of the camera in conjunction with the limitations of its mechanics to generate a series of inspiring problems that I can solve. I know that the assumptions that I make while shooting the photograph, about how life will translate onto film, will be proven wrong after it is developed and printed. This shift compels me to slow down, study the printed image and isolate key moments of transformation. From there, I consider the surface of the print and build a material relationship with the image that celebrates its singularity.

I want to continue to explore the photograph as a flexible medium that has the ability to be both image and object, and to find meaning in that dual understanding. My practice of joining other materials to the surface of photographs comes from an interest in deconstructing photography in a way that viewers can understand. I am not interested in stepping further away from certain elements of traditional photography. I am interested in exploring how both the strengths and shortcomings of the medium can be used to support the needs of each artwork I make.


Micah DangesMicah Danges (b. 1979) works and resides in Philadelphia. His work hovers between image and object, pushing the limit of what a photograph can be. He uses optical distortions that create abstract scenes from everyday items and places, in a distinctive merging of materials and process. For Danges, who prints on unconventional materials like silk, acrylic, and cotton, photography is a flexible and tactile medium. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Abington Arts Center, the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial, Cabrini College, and Vox Populi Gallery, and in group shows at The Michener Art Museum, Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, The Print Center, and Fleisher/Ollman Gallery. Micah Danges is a recipient of a 2012 Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, a 2013 Wind Challenge Grant from the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial and was named a 2015 Fellow by The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage.

More images and information may be found at Danges’ website: www.micahdanges.com


Works:

Installation View, Summer Show
Abington Art Center
2015

Key, 4-6
Pigment Print on Adhesive
14″ x 11″
2015

Installation View 5
After Now, Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery
Philadelphia, PA
2017

Untitled 12 (Maestri Series)
Acrylic, Resin, Magazine Pages, and Photographs
15″ x 12″ x 3/8″
2016

Untitled 13 (Maestri Series)
Acrylic, Resin, Magazine Pages, and Ink Jet Photographs
15″ x 12″ x 3/8″
2016

Two Legs
Ink, Museum Board, Newsprint, Book Page
15″ x 12″ x 3/8″
2016

Installation View 2
After Now, Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery
Philadelphia, PA
2017

Two Parts (Section 4, Section 8)
Acrylic, Ink Jet Photographs
Each piece is 15″ x 12″ x 3/8″
2016

Two Parts (Section 4, Section 5)
Acrylic, Ink Jet Photographs
Each piece is 15″ x 12″ x 3/8″
2016

Two Parts (Section 14, Section 9)
Acrylic, Ink Jet Photographs
Each piece is 15.5″ x 12.5″ x .75″
2016

Two Parts (Section 17, Section 10)
Acrylic, Ink Jet Photographs
Each piece is 15.5″ x 12.5″ x .75″
2016

Material information about specific work selections

Maestri series
In these works, sections of photographs and magazine pages are cut, collaged, and face mounted to a frame-like acrylic form. A larger intact image is then face mounted to a solid acrylic rectangle with the same exterior dimensions. These two layers are stacked, then merged when the visible area over the larger image is filled in with a translucent resin.

Two Legs
This piece is composed of a portion of a magazine page, fixed between pieces of newsprint and suspended in wax. The composition is set into an ink-tinted museum board panel.

Two Parts series
Photographs depicting fragments of plant materials suspended between two sections of highly reflective acrylic panels. A rectangle is excised from the center of the top panel and replaced with a different section of photograph from the same series.

 

Published on September 15, 2017 (Click for permalink.)

DEFT PERCEPTION by Hannah Thompsett

Cleaver Magazine Posted on June 7, 2017 by laserjAugust 12, 2023

DEFT PERCEPTION by Hannah Thompsett - Title

Hannah Thompsett
DEFT PERCEPTION:
Works of Porcelain and Paper, Plausibility and Pause

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Deft Perception: installation view

We all accumulate knowledge of our world through experience. Unconsciously, we learn to trust our perceptions as truth. But when this truth is challenged, our trust falters. We’re suddenly aware of the malleability and subjectivity of each of our constructed realities, our beliefs and expectations.

To explore and test the boundaries of that trust, I created Deft Perception: Allusions of Reality, a body of work in porcelain, paper, and photographs. When is something easily perceivable or believable? When do we need to take a second look to reassure or reevaluate our expectation of truth? To address these questions, I decided to slow down the process of visual perception by using constructed objects in spatially arranged situations. As an artist, I want us to consider the delicacy and individuality of our assumed truths and to become newly conscious of how the world of exterior phenomena informs and reassures — even as it contradicts and challenges — our perceived realities.

◊ ◊ ◊

I have been working in ceramics since my days as an undergrad. I began working with paper several years later and photography another year after that. Eventually I took up the process of folding paper forms, translating them into ceramic, and recording their arrangements with photography. I was interested in how information could be transferred through different materials and dimensions: from a flat drawing to a dimensional paper form to a ceramic object to a record. How does information change through these transformations and what roles do material and form play in translating and expressing that information? These questions and processes have all led to my thinking about perception (specifically visual perception) and are the impetus for my current practice.

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Sheets of paper or porcelain memories?

When we step into Deft Perception, one of the first things we may realize is that the sheets of “paper” leaning against the wall are actually made of thin sheets of colored porcelain. They began as folded or crumpled pieces of paper, which I directionally sprayed with various white, grey, and black liquid porcelains called “slips”. These shades of slips recorded the paper’s peaks, valleys, creases, and puckers as a tonal image. At this point, the porcelained paper was very wet and pliable, so I could smooth it out and, when dry, fire it in a kiln. This burned away the paper and yielded a thin, flat, rigid panel depicting the original paper’s topography. The resulting porcelain object was no longer paper, but a representation of paper, a memory of paper.

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Images or objects? Paper or porcelain?

What’s revealed in the slow, meticulous process of constructing these porcelain panels is a striking tension between two kinds of information: the representation of crinkled paper as an image and the materiality of the flat porcelain object. The panels allude to paper through their representation of paper’s surface, their rectangular format, and their thin, white edges. But though the panels reference paper, they are never mistaken for paper because the materiality of the porcelain is so prominent. And because I set the panels on the floor, leaned them against the wall, and stacked them against each other, their stiffness and physicality as objects is even more clearly emphasized. Moreover, because I used a different range of grey scales to create each of the panels, they’re distinguished even further as individual objects while being drawn farther away from the allusion to paper. It is this give and take, between image and object, that gives us pause and asks us to question what information is more important or truthful, if any, in forming our perceptions.

These kinds of tensions and contradictions exist in all representational images, often without our realizing it. Out of habit, and without consciously thinking about it, we recognize familiar situations in images and automatically transgress our own spatial and temporal reality to enter into their constructed realities. However, it is not possible to completely ignore our own real place in time and space, and so there is a paradox whenever we view pictorial representations: we simultaneously recognize, believe, and accept two separate situations or realities. Trompe l’oeil and illusion are attempts to eliminate this paradox through deception, but I enjoy the sense of this paradox, and I employ allusion instead of illusion where allusion is suggestive, but not deceptive.¹

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Which is real? Which is a photo? Are they all objects?

To further complicate things, the framed images hanging on the wall in Deft Perception are actually enlarged photographs of the ceramic panels. At first, they appear as crumpled paper or images of crumpled paper. However, they are actually images of the ceramic record of the original piece of paper. By translating perceived information again, this time though photography, another layer of material information is added. Displaying the photos closely with the ceramic panels, it’s easy to compare the two. We see their similarities as images, but also recognize the difference between the materiality of the panels and the photographs as objects.

On closer inspection, we see that the photographs are enlargements of the ceramic panels, emphasizing the texture of the sprayed slip particles. This dotted texture is reminiscent of pixelated information, an artifact of digital photography, but the “pixelation” here is actually an artifact of the ceramic process, not the photography process. This pixelation is often interrupted by flaws in the ceramic surface that happen during the firing, such as ruptures and cracks. Ultimately, the photographs simultaneously depict both paper and ceramic as subjects.

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Light and shadow: real or fake?

But how truthful are these photographs? Even as they record the flat surface of the panels, the light and shadow depicted are fake. Instead of actual light and shadow, the photographs capture a flatly lit representation of light and shadow. This information becomes evident because of the presence of the ceramic panels nearby. Comparing the photographs and the panels slows down the process of perception and allows time for the viewer to consider the many levels of information presented.

I am still a novice in photography, but as I utilize it, I enjoy what it contributes conceptually to the work through its process and history. At its dawning, photography was regarded as a mechanical reproduction of reality, capturing visual phenomenon with truthful, objective authority. It has since become clear, though, that this process is distinctly separate from actual visual perception for many reasons. Authorship, disengagement from time, staging, framing, and manipulation of process are a few examples of why this implied veracity cannot be assumed. However, as a medium, photography is primed to explore both the notion of truth and that of representation.²

A ceramic pyramid stands against repeated photos of ceramic pyramids. Which is more “believable”? “Objective”?

To interrogate those notions in Deft Perception, I installed two large ceramic pyramids and a field of smaller ceramic pyramids within the space as a break from allusion and representation. These physical solids, pure in form and mass, provide a visual and haptic experience bound to the present. They engage the entire space and emphasize the materiality of the other objects. The wallpaper, on the other hand, is a photographic representation of the pyramids from a separate viewpoint, digitally repeated to create an abstract pattern. The three-dimensional objects and their two-dimensional translation create a kind of easy fiction, or uneasy friction, an opportunity to compare the experience of perceiving both.

Our accumulation of knowledge through experience is constant; we continuously perceive our surroundings and build expectations and beliefs that inform our future encounters. Our mentally archived stores of knowledge are constantly in flux, distinctive to each individual. The process is automatic, and we are unaware of it until our trusted beliefs or expectations are challenged. My aim is to slow down the process of perception — visually and spatially — to draw attention to it, while gathering moments to consider, and consider again, our personal truths.

A field of ceramic pyramids, gathering moments of light.

—

¹Jonas F. Soltis, Seeing, Knowing, and Believing: a Study of the Language of Visual Perception (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company Inc, 1966), 137-138.

²Lyle Rexer, The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography. (New York: Aperature, 2009), 195.


Hannah Thompsett received her MFA in ceramics from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2016. She received her BFA in ceramics from The State University of New York at New Paltz in 2011. During her time between degrees, she was an artist-in-residence at the Flower City Arts Center. She is currently a Ceramic Art Technician at Alfred University and continues her studio practice in Alfred and Wellsville, NY.

To see more of her work, visit www.hannahthompsett.com and @hannahthompsettsculpture on Instagram.


List of Works:
1. Deft Perception: Allusions of Reality, digital prints, ceramic, wallpaper, 2016, installation view
2. Arrangement 3 (five panels), ceramic, 2016, 64” x 32” x 4”
3. Arrangement 7 (three panels), ceramic, 2016, 32” x 33” x 2”
4. Deft Perception: Allusions of Reality, digital prints, ceramic, 2016, installation view
5. Photograph 3, digital print and wooden frame, 2016, with frame: 28” x 42” x 2”
6. Detail of White Pyramid, ceramic, 2016, 24” x 24” x 36”
7. Field of Pyramids, ceramic and wood, 2016, 58” x 58” x 14”

Published on June 7, 2017 (Click for permalink.)

AMERICA UNSPOKEN: Paintings by Tina Blondell

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 22, 2017 by laserjAugust 13, 2023
AMERICA UNSPOKEN: Paintings by Tina Blondell - Title

“The Down Side of Up.” This painting explores my views concerning our national obsession with medicating citizens in an effort to subdue and dampen personalities. I believe this carries a steep cost in lost creative potential.


Tina Blondell
AMERICA UNSPOKEN: Paintings

It is perhaps because I spent the first eight years of my life being uprooted from one country to another that I developed a keen skill for observing human behavior. I struggled to learn new languages and to fit in, often with great difficulty. It was during these formative years that I developed a personal language freed from words — the language of drawing and painting. By the time I arrived in the U.S. at the age of seventeen, I had formed a sense of self that allowed me to perceive the world with the eyes of an outsider. I was fascinated not only with the diversity of American people, but also the world they had shaped around them. And although English is the lingua franca across this great country, variation in the spoken word fascinates me to this day.

There is no easy way to explain who Americans are. We are a complex accumulation of beings with unique and varied cultures, traditions, and genetic histories. Perhaps this is why I feel most comfortable expressing my thoughts concerning American identity visually. My models are friends, family, and neighbors—all people with whom I have a personal connection. I have tried to capture something of their stories in my imagery.

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“Urban American Gothic.” I got the idea for this piece while hanging out with the models around their backyard pool last summer. I was immediately reminded of Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.” This work is a tribute to all families, regardless of religion, ethnicity, or gender. The Human Rights logo on the cap is the only hint that this is a same-sex couple.


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This painting is entitled “I Walk the Line,” after Johnny Cash’s song of that title. It depicts a young father and daughter, with a nod to Caravaggio’s “Pilgrims Madonna.” With this work I address the blurring of gender roles in contemporary families and examine the archaic stereotypes of the past.


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“These Boots Are Made for Walking.” This work is in honor of all women who have survived difficult times in their lives with their dignity intact.


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“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” –Friedrich Nietzsche. This painting is named “A Boy Named Sue,” after Johnny Cash’s song of that title. It’s a personal piece about my son Sascha, and the effect his name had on him as a young child.


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“Chinese Take-Out” is a now retired roller girl with the Minnesota Atomic Bombshells. She is a first generation Hmong from Laos. I wanted to include a Hmong woman in this series to honor the contributions they have made to American culture and history.


“Mr. VanMadrone” is a local blacksmith working in his shop in Minneapolis. He apprenticed to learn the trade in northern Wisconsin. This painting honors the working class and all who use their hands to create things. I am always eager to embrace the challenge of working with light.


In this piece, I have painted Ms. Antimony Bishop as the fictional character Nubia, a comic book superheroine published by DC Comics. The original Nubia was created by Robert Kanigher and Don Heck, and debuted in Wonder Woman #204. She is a symbol of the inner strength and determination of women everywhere.


“Mr. DuBois” is a now retired commercial diver and underwater welder originally from Louisiana. His job required him to perform under the most challenging of circumstances, to be highly trained, certified, and to be in peak physical and mental condition. This painting honors those who work behind the scenes and accomplish things we never question and take for granted.


“Ms. Jessica” is a painting of a friend who is the drummer in a Minneapolis punk rock band. I tried to capture her bad-ass enthusiasm for her craft.


“The Fire Tamer” is about a friend who is skilled in the art of fire performance. She performs locally and nationally with the Infiammati Fire Circus. Although she is trained in a number of performance skills, I was most interested in the challenge of painting fire, and the way the light of the fire played on her face and body.


“Upper Mississippi Valley Sicilian.” This is simply a painting of an Italian-American friend here in Minneapolis. I have a soft spot for Italians, having grown up in Livorno, Italy, and I am interested in the challenges a Mediterranean temperament can create in a northern Nordic culture.


This painting, “A Convenient Myth,” explores my views on how women are portrayed in history. In the ancient world women filled many leadership roles, however a fundamental shift appears to have happened sometime prior to the advent of our Common Era. Many of the myths and legends concerning powerful women of the ancient past were modified or appended, with the objective of portraying them (and by extension – all women) in a less positive light. The ancient Greeks, Persians, and Romans may have started this process, but it was enthusiastically carried forward by the monotheistic descendants of the Sons of Abraham. The legends of Medea, Eve, Jezebel, and Joan of Arc are but a few examples of stories designed to undermine women’s influence in human society. This piece explores how women have been villainized in religion and history, but also reveals how our ancient inheritance survives to the present – albeit just beneath the surface.


Tina Blondell was born in Salzburg, Austria, to an American father and Austrian mother who encouraged her early interest in art. Crucial to her education as an artist was her firsthand encounters with art in Italy, where she lived until 1971, particularly the work of Caravaggio and of Artemisia Gentileschi. Other influences are Goya, Francis Bacon, and Alice Neel, whose paintings combine an emotional impact with a vision of the human condition. Blondell’s involvement with earlier art informed her technique and interest in narrative, as well as her referencing images from the history of art in decidedly contemporary work. In the mid 1990s, Blondell settled in Minneapolis, where she continues to live. Blondell has exhibited her work widely both nationally and internationally. Her work is in many private and public collections including the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Weisman Art Museum. More images and information may be found at her website: tinablondellstudio.wixsite.com/tinablondellstudio


Works:

The Down Side of Up, (2008-09) oil on panel, 60 x 19 inches
Urban American Gothic, (
2008) oil on panel, 49 x 38 inches
I Walk the Line,
(2008) oil on panel, 60 x 30 inches
These Boots Are Made for Walking,
(2007) oil on panel, 29 x 34 inches
A Boy Named Sue, (
2008) oil on panel, 49 x 30 inches
Chinese Take-Out,
(2012) oil on panel, 51 x 38 inches
Mr. VanMadrone,
(2009) oil on canvas, 60 x 39 inches
Antimony as Nubia,
(2011) oil on panel, 36 x 48 inches
Mr. DuBois,
(2013) oil on panel, 16 x 20 inches
Ms. Jessica,
(2010) oil on panel, 50 x 39 inches
The Fire Tamer,
(2011) oil on panel, 60 x 41 inches
Upper Mississippi Valley Sicilian,
(2009) oil on canvas, 66 x 22 inches
A Convenient Myth,
(2007) oil on panel, 36 x 24 inches

Published on March 22, 2017 (Click for permalink.)

WE ARE ALL MIGRATING TOGETHER by Shira Walinsky

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 28, 2016 by laserjAugust 13, 2023

Shira Walinsky
WE ARE ALL MIGRATING TOGETHER: Painted Bus Routes and Immigrant Roots, Mural Arts in Philadelphia

Introduction by Raymond Rorke

Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love and home of the famous LOVE statue by Robert Indiana, is taking love to new places.

If you happen to be in Philly, chances are you’ll catch sight of the 47 Bus. You can’t miss its bright blocks of color or its bold, emphatic message: WE ARE ALL MIGRATING TOGETHER.

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This “mural on wheels” is the brainchild of Shira Walinsky, mural artist, and filmmaker Laura Deutch. It runs daily from South Philadelphia’s Whitman Plaza, on through Center City, and all the way up to 5th and Godfrey in North Philadelphia, connecting several multilingual, multiethnic neighborhoods and commercial corridors. Riding the bus through this cross-sectional slice of the city you’ll inevitably hear a cross-cultural variety of languages spoken, while being wrapped in a welcoming collage that represents the patchwork of diverse people whose lives intersect every day. The back of the bus reads “We Are All Migrating Together”—words from the mouth of one of its drivers—and along the way you’ll see murals by and about refugee groups who have recently settled in Philadelphia—the Karen and Chin of Burma, the Bhutanese, the Nepalese.

The bus’s first stop, 8th and Snyder, is the site of Southeast by Southeast, a public arts space and social services community center originally founded as a six-month, pop-up storefront in 2011 by Shira Walinsky, artist Miriam Singer, and social worker Melissa Fogg under the Mural Arts Program with funding by the Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services.

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Karen Dancers

Five years later, Southeast by Southeast is still going strong, a space for immigrant and refugee families to learn from one another, gain access to important social services, and lend their voices to highly visible public art projects. There, with the help of many volunteers and artists within the refugee community, Southeast by Southeast hosts regular ESL classes, citizenship classes, and grandparents’ groups. Monthly workshops draw from refugee skills and talents and include Burmese food night, Bollywood vs. Breakdance events, weaving and sewing demos, and more.

And there’s more ahead. Along the 47 Bus route you’ll find that Shira has created a number of murals in collaboration with refugee groups to mark their collective stories of identity and migration.

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The 47 Bus Route and Mural Locations [click to enlarge]

MURALS ALONG THE WAY

Namaste (7th and Shunk) depicts a monastery in Bhutan. This mural was originally for the owners of Namaste Grocery.

El Chilito Loco (8th and Jackson) appears at the restaurant El Chilito Loco. Shira worked with the restaurant owner to create a mural using iconography from the Mayan number system and the Aztec calendar.

From the Mountains to the City (7th and Emily) tells the story of leaving home, being forced to flee, and moving into the city. Most of the Karen, Chin, Burmese, and Bhutanese refugee groups who have settled in South Philadelphia have come from very rural areas or refugee camps.

Farming Up the Mountain (8th and Emily) tells the story of farming in a rural area and here in South Philadelphia. Most of the recent immigrants in South Philadelphia were farmers in their home countries. This mural is next door to the Growing Home Gardens, a refugee garden project by the Nationalities Service Center. The colors come from Karen and Nepali textiles.

Storefront (7th and Dudley) is the site of the original Southeast by Southeast location. This mural is evocative of textiles by the Karen people of southern and southeastern Myanmar (Burma).

Language Lab (7th and Moore) celebrates the over thirty languages spoken in South Philadelphia. If you are waiting for the 47 Bus you can learn a word in another language!

* * *

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Poem About American Identity by Teenage Refugee

But all these projects and programs go beyond public perceptions of ethnic, immigrant minorities. There’s also the private joy and insight that comes from getting to know a refugee personally.

Shira writes:

There are many inspiring community members, but working with Ma Kay Saw has been really inspiring. Ma Kay Saw is a refugee from Burma. She grew up in Eastern Mountain Burma and is part of the Karen ethnic group. The Karen and other ethnic groups such as the Chin have been oppressed and engaged in civil war with the Burmese government for many years.

Ma Kay Saw had a 4th grade education, and worked helping her father farm in Burma. She also learned to weave. Each ethnic group in Burma has its own weaving traditions, and Karen weaving has beautiful, richly saturated colors.

Ma Kay Saw and her family fled from Burma, escaped through the jungle, and made it to a refugee camp in Thailand.

She arrived in the U.S. in 2011 with her husband and five children. She came with no English. She has been coming to the Southeast by Southeast community center since 2012 for ESL and women’s group activities. She has learned English and knows the 100 citizenship questions and is preparing to take the test.

Ma Kay Saw

Ma Kay Saw

A goal of the Southeast by Southeast community center has been to identify artists in the refugee community and find frameworks for their work. When I first saw Ma Kay weaving and making Karen clothing I was blown away by the complex patterns and rich color. I asked her if she would be able to do a weaving demo. At the time, a translator was needed to help present the demo, and she was somewhat hesitant, but in subsequent years she has led many demos and sales with confidence. Today, Ma Kay feels happy to connect people with Karen identity and traditions.

I am glad to be in a space where traditional and indigenous artists are given a framework and space for their work. I am inspired each time I see Ma Kay Saw and see her weaving—to see a resilience, an ability to learn, and to continue traditions from home.

* * *

Philadelphia, one of our nation’s forty sanctuary cities, has long been known as “a city of neighborhoods,” and South Philadelphia has long been a welcoming neighborhood for immigrants—the Irish of the 1840s, the Italians of the early 1900s, the Eastern European Jews of the 1920s, the Vietnamese and Cambodians of the 1970s, the Mexicans of the 1990s. Today, it’s the Burmese and Bhutanese who are arriving and settling in, and the annual Philadelphia New Year’s Day Mummers Parade, largely made up of South Philadelphians, is just around the corner.

We are all in this together, migrating together. Happy New Year.

—Raymond Rorke, December 2016

Postscript: It turns out that the Southeast by Southeast Brigade—Burmese, Sham, Chin, and Nepali dancers from the refugee community in South Philadelphia—got to strut their stuff in their very first Mummer’s Parade this year! Young members gave out Lao-style sukwon/mut khaen blessings, while elder women showed off their dancing skills.  “We were such a small group compared to the others we marched with, but everyone was very nice to us, and we heard from so many folks about the diversity, inclusivity, and culture we brought to the parade,” says Catzie Vilayphonh, a South Philly native who grew up watching the Mummers. “I think this may be the beginning of some great New Year traditions!” —RR

Dancers from the Southeast by Southeast Brigade in the Mummer’s Parade


Headshot of Shira WalinskyShira Walinsky lives and works in Philadelphia. As a painter, printmaker, muralist, and educator, she is focused on expanding the possibilities of partnerships between artists and communities. Shira received her MFA in painting from the University of Pennsylvania, and has completed eighteen murals in Philadelphia under the Mural Arts Program. In addition she created a series of seven lunch trucks focusing on identity, immigration, and work. She is currently co-teaching at the University of Pennsylvania with Jane Golden, Director of the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program. While pursuing interdisciplinary work both in teaching and her own work, Shira is interested in the cultures and subcultures of the city. How do personal stories fit into larger issues of the city? How has immigration continued to change the narratives and the face of the city? Shira’s work with people in local communities helps transform public spaces, and each project is a new hybrid with new sets of challenges for artists and communities to grow from. Visit www.shirawalinsky.net

Headshot of Raymond RorkeRaymond Rorke is an ardent fan of Cleaver Magazine. As a longtime writer and designer who has lived through the evolution of hand-set type into hand-coded webpages, he is fond of tinkering with words—and what goes into making them sing. Check out his ceramics portfolio here.

Published on December 28, 2016 (Click for permalink.)

SPRING STREET: Works on Paper by Thom Sawyer

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 28, 2016 by laserjAugust 13, 2023

Thom Sawyer
SPRING STREET: Works on Paper

Unhappy small towns are all alike—claustrophobic, gossipy, dying.
—Timothy Egan

I have lived and worked in such a small town as this. Quiet, nondescript streets link manicured lawns and well-kept homes; neighbors guard their privacy as they intrude on the lives around them, paying close attention to the comings and goings of others, particularly those of relative newcomers. It is a strange mixture of the private and public, with odd boundaries that seem fluid—simultaneously hiding and displaying glimpses of interior narratives, opinions, rumors and expected codes of behavior.

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My town is a place that echoes David Lynch’s fictional Lumberton and “things that are hidden within a small town… and things that are hidden within people.” Some of those hidden things were revealed during the renovation of the house my wife and I live in—one of the neighborhood’s knock-off mid-century modern homes. Stripped bare, uncovered surfaces inside the structure tell fragments of distant family histories, many of which are highly private; others merely reflect the mundane public face of the neighborhood.

This series of paintings and drawings chronicles the process of fitting into—or not fitting into—a closed community, as well as the discoveries of long ago buried personal stories and events. The works are done on site, from life. As a result, the surrounding environments become integral to the process of making and thinking.

Often, unanticipated moments help shape formal and conceptual directions. Many of these decisions find a place in the final image, but just as many move from a central focus to a periphery status, which may or may not appear in a later image. In this and other ways, working from life is central to the images’ fluidity and flexibility around visual and conceptual possibilities.

Cliff's Japanese Maple and Sonja's Crabapple Tree

Cliff’s Japanese Maple and Sonja’s Crabapple Tree (2013)

Mark making is also a central focus of this body of work. Marks are used directly with little, if any, rendering or modeling. Uninflected, each mark carries as much information as possible, combining with other marks to construct a greater complexity of form, space and light.

Such a process requires a high degree of focus: shape, line, mass, color, gesture, and spatial relationships are all considered and combined simultaneously. A dichotomy exists between this process of close observation and the final images, which often appear to have a strong graphic quality, as if the images came together in a single pass, or through a paint-by-number template. The ability of the paintings to flip back and forth across the boundary or edge between a flat surface and the illusion of depth, as well as abstraction and figuration, echoes the often permeable boundary between the past and present as well as the private and the public.

Other elements in the work refer to these dichotomies simultaneously. Windows, although not included in every image, play an important role throughout most of the series. Clearly, they function both as pathways into and out of the private and public. Windows rarely appear unobstructed—they are usually coupled with an element that responds to or blocks the outward view. This response or blocking corresponds to a conscious sense of community and the decision to actively engage or resist exchanges and communication with the neighborhood.

2012-fpr-newtown-good-sm

For Newtown (2012)

Semi-opaque plastic drop cloths function in both roles. Originally, the thin plastic tarps were used to isolate parts of the renovation within the structure, but they soon began to play a greater role in an evolving narrative or context.

In the piece Color Test, Mailbox and Elmo’s Stairs (2013) the drop cloth alludes to the flowing curtain that appears at the start of Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet.

These thin sheets of plastic refer as well as to tragic private and public events: in For Newtown (2012), the drop cloth, while still evident in the upper right corner, has been pulled back to reveal a holiday tree hung upside down in a stairwell with a large window that looks out onto the neighborhood. This watercolor was completed at the time of the Newtown shootings and responds to that horror with a communal view (both from the inside and outside) using a well-known symbol frequently tied to the concept of peace. By setting this object on its head (and literally hanging it), many of its collective associations are subverted.


thom sawyer author photoThom Sawyer lives and works in New Mexico and Washington State. He received an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University. His work has been exhibited in solo and group venues including the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), The Contemporary Austin (Austin, Texas), the Creative Arts Workshop (New Haven, Connecticut), the Sierra Arts Foundation (Reno, Nevada), the Washington Street Art Center (Somerville, Massachusetts), C. Grimaldis Gallery (Baltimore, Maryland), ARC Gallery (Chicago, Illinois), the Indianapolis Art Center (Indianapolis, Indiana) and Rogue Community College (Grants Pass, Oregon). His most recent show, titled 36 Views of Baylor Canyon, took place at the Branigan Cultural Center in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Thom Sawyer began his series Spring Street in 2012. Between 2010 and 2012 in southern New Mexico, he completed 36 Views of Baylor Canyon, a series of color pencil drawings focused on the intersection, or collision, between a private, domestic world and a larger, more far reaching global view. Since 2003 Thom Sawyer has continued work on another series, Julia’s Garden, which examines aspects of love, language and the landscape.

More images and information may be found at his website: thomsawyer.net


Works:

Mildred and Helen, 2013, color pencil, 18 x 24 inches
Alice’s Closet,
2012, watercolor, 26 x 20 inches
New Mexico (Bed) (For Julia), 
2015, watercolor, 20 x 26 inches
Color Test, Mailbox and Elmo’s Stairs,
2013, watercolor, 20 x 26 inches
Dropcloth,
2014, color pencil, 18 x 24 inches
Elmo’s Rathole,
2013 and 2015, watercolor, 20 x 26 inches
Crazy Muriel’s,
watercolor, 20 x 26 inches
Vent,
2013, color pencil, 18 x 24 inches
Boomerang,
2015, watercolor, 26 x 20 inches
2 x 4 (For Uncle E.),
2013, color pencil, 24 x 18 inches
Intercom (For Aunt J.),
2013 and 2015, watercolor, 26 x 20 inches
Cliff’s Japanese Maple and Sonja’s Crabapple Tree, 
2013, color pencil, 24 x 18 inches
Pink Dresses, 2013, color pencil, 24 x 18 inches
For Newtown,
2012, watercolor, 26 x 20 inches

Published on December 28, 2016 (Click for permalink.)

A PILGRIM’S FUGUE: Fiber Works by Dennis Potter

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 21, 2016 by thwackAugust 13, 2023

Dennis Potter
A PILGRIM’S FUGUE: Fiber Works

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Dennis Potter is an artist whose work spans an interesting period of thirty-plus years. We sat down with him to talk about his journey as a contemporary artist now working in a traditional craft medium.

Let’s start at the beginning. Where are you from?

I grew up in the Deep South—in Huntsville, northern Alabama—and then lived in San Francisco after earning an MFA in painting at UC Berkeley in 1983.  Along the way, I’ve also lived and traveled in Asia, where for ten years I taught art and studied Asian art before returning to the Bay Area in 2012. And just this year I moved back to Huntsville.

So you’ve come full circle?

In more ways than one. It’s certainly been a journey. After thirty years of figurative painting and printmaking I realized I wanted something more, something different. I wanted a new context for making art, and for being an artist. Although I’ve shown my work extensively in San Francisco, Boston, and New York, and have pieces in several public collections, the gallery art world is very contentious and difficult, really frustrating. I was very unsatisfied. I’d been teaching art to support myself and had total freedom in my own work, but it was a trade-off situation. Long story short, I wanted to go beyond myself, get away from my background and training as a painter and printmaker. I had a strong foundation in modernism with expressionist qualities, and I had gotten pretty sick of making figures and narratives, even in abstract formats.

White, cream, and brown colored fabrics woven togetherWhat did you do to get outside of yourself and the art world you had been working in?

Ever since high school, I’ve been fascinated by Buddhism. At a certain point in my life, feelings of emptiness, groundlessness, and detachment began to influence my thinking—I blame the 90s, when I felt overwhelmed by the commercial art market. So I began to seriously study Buddhist art history, and I was surprised to encounter fresh new concepts, mainly about “art” as I knew it as a Westerner. For the Buddhist in Asia, art is not something peculiar in our lives, but integrated with our everyday existence. Asian art forms are highly traditional and familiar, marked by each maker’s particular approach. Individual expression is not the exalted purpose, but rather the development of an exalted form.

This is very much like how it is with the traditional Japanese raku teabowl, a form which began in the 16th century and is still being made, with contemporary variations, even by the same Raku family fifteen generations later.

Yes. Very much so. Objects and forms integrated with everyday life. The word “raku” comes from the place where it began — Juraku, near Kyoto. Juraku was the name for the special clay used to make the teabowls, and the word “raku” has been passed down through the generations as both a family name and a ceramic style. Just think of that: a place, a style, a family name, a patch of clay—one and the same!

White cat with black spots sitting on red fabrics, ribbon, and meshWhat was it like, this new path you took—of seeing art as something woven in with everyday life, of perhaps even seeing your life as a kind of work of art itself?

To me it meant a relief from the dead-end emptiness of self expression, from an insistence on the primacy of the individual ego and the singular self. It meant embracing new depths of being, and being part of a whole, the whole of human awareness. My purpose became one of achieving greater consciousness, and to share that with other sentient beings. For me, this is a finer and more lasting purpose than self expression, though it’s impossible to entirely separate the two sides of that false dichotomy! I am after all a Western man with an art education steeped in the self and its expression. A non-joiner, a dropout, yes—but with such a strong background in modernist process that I must use that practice, not deny it.

That must have been tricky, to throw out the bathwater, but not the baby. How did you go about continuing to make art that was “not art”?

I wanted to at least shift my purpose and practice. Since I was living in Taiwan and studying Asian art, I started by painting images of kimonos, of figures wearing kimonos; I took photos of models in kimonos, wearing geisha or kabuki makeup. These exercises soon seemed appropriated and hollow and I realized I needed to be making objects themselves, that I was no longer interested in the pictorial representations of things. At the same time, I wanted to create things that were abstractions, that is, non-objective. Does that make sense? I wanted to be creating things where the process and materials were more important and evident than their subjective “objectness” or narrative. I wanted, ultimately, to create something not representing something, but actually being something, as physically as possible.

My breakthrough came when I encountered the pilgrim’s robe (called henro hakui) while studying the Shikoku Island Pilgrimage in southern Japan. The Shikoku Pilgrimage (henro) is a very popular and traditional pilgrimage, and involves visiting the island’s eighty-eight temples. The hakui worn during these pilgrimages are simple, over-sized kimonos of handwoven cotton or hemp, and what I noticed right away was how beautifully worn and weathered they were. I saw the hakui as a kind of skin, expressing the pilgrimage experience, tattooed with wood-block printed stamps identifying each temple visited and inscribed with sutras by the temple monks in Sanskrit or Chinese. The hakui I saw were stained and faded because many pilgrims wear the same hakui for years on repeated pilgrimages. When a hakui bears all eighty-eight temple stamps, it is mounted and framed and proudly hung on your wall at home. Also, traditionally, if you die while on the trail, your hakui becomes your burial shroud.

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Pilgrimage garment variations, a progression in paper and fabric

All of this was a revelation for me: here was an object that was also a living canvas, whose ultimate meanings were fluid and lasting, real and abstract, everyday and otherworldly. I wanted to do something with these fascinating relationships, and I went to work, happily obsessed.

And so your own art pilgrimage began?

Haha–yes! Although initially, as I copied the hakui form and borrowed Chinese and Sanskrit characters, the work was not fulfilling. So I began using Western style imagery along with English text, transfers prints, collage. Then I began making the hakui in paper, which was better. The shift in material separated my objects from the original, and my hakui became something new. It wasn’t long before I began making the paper myself in order to construct more abstracted hakui and garments relating to the pilgrimage.

When looking at your body of work, we see, over and over, a kind of continuous construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction process going on. For example, in your weavings, it can begin as a way to make a solid piece of fabric, but then it loosens up to become a grid with tiny spaces, which then open up into holes, which then get reintegrated as drawn or torn circles on a solid fabric again. And sometimes the linear grids and weaves in your pieces can suggest a loom, itself a constructed object from which weavings originate, and once again we come full circle, from material to object to material.

Yes, this way of working is like making multiple pilgrimages, like circling an island eighty-eight times. It’s the same journey, over and over, but each time it’s new. In the beginning, I was searching for a universal form with historic, time-tested meaning that could stand on its own, as both Western abstraction and Eastern philosophy, and once I started to tap that vein, I found my way. First was the hakui or pilgrimage kimono, a worn, bruised but beautiful skin of actual pilgrim experience. Then I went deeper and found the mandala, a cosmic map of the universe, depicted in the form of circles within squares. The gridded, embedded squares embody secure belief, while the circles imply constancy of change. A mandala shows “the way,” how to detach from earthly experience to achieve enlightenment.

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Circles within squares within circles: embedded mandalas in paper and fabric

The very structure of a mandala seems to be embedded in your weavings and constructions, layerings of linear grids and circular holes.

That’s true. I find this approach endlessly fascinating and useable if you remove the absurd paranoia about cultural appropriation. Did you know that even ancient pagodas are mandalas, circles inside repeated squares, with a central pole—the “Tree of Life”—physically detached from the structure but holding it stable even in earthquakes? Pagodas are very early versions of today’s quake-proof buildings. Anyway, I later discovered the kesa, a Buddhist priest robe that developed in the Edo period as a way for temple goers to give costly gifts to monks who were forbidden to acquire wealth of any kind. In an oddly Japanese approach, they would work gorgeous fabrics into simple robes, pieced like quilts, and therefore considered without value. This lack of value, even in something gorgeously constructed, became another useful model for me. I had collected quilts for thirty years but never considered my fabric constructions as quilts until I made kesa and—voila, I saw I was making quilts, in another context. Later on, I began to dye my own found fabric scraps and turned to making thangka, devotional images, sometimes as paintings, sometimes as pieced fabric. Thangkas are usually hung on walls—a bit unusual for Asian art objects but probably the object most like Western art in form and use. Thangkas are seen as living gods, and always employ the mandala as a central structure.

Flat-lay photo of white, brown, and cream-colored crafting supplies including fabric and ribbonIt seems as though your work keeps getting “reborn”—or finding its way—by following these archetypal forms and structures.

I’m really trying to structure materials in an honest, rough, handmade process. I’m trying to get to a truthful, fundamental way of creating objects that can be universally read, visually, beyond their context. Along the way I find materials in nature—or even man-made, salvaged materials like orange plastic snow fencing or mattress webbing—and process them in a minimal, primitive way for my own use. The result is sometimes ancient in appearance, sometimes more Pop, almost. And while my work may have an Asian look, it’s no more Asian than modernist minimalism. If there’s a thought or a meditation there, I want it to arise out of the object itself, regardless of style or form.

It’s interesting how you put together materials that become everyday objects, and in turn you also use everyday objects that become your material.

This is the heart of the matter; how to make something that arrives at being purely itself, not a mere container for “something else.” It’s a paradoxical kind of emptiness, a journey or process of becoming wholly, singularly oneself and yet connected—materially, spiritually—to everything else. The simplest description of this kind of emptiness in Buddhist teachings is this passage:

This is because that is. A flower cannot exist by itself alone. To be can only mean to inter­-be. To be by oneself alone is impossible. Everything else is present in the flower; the only thing the flower is empty of is itself.

In other words, the thing is itself, nothing more or less. I always hope that the simple accretion of materials in a woven or sewn process suggests that’s all there is, in some evocative way that might lead to growing awareness.

And where are you now, on your “pilgrimage”?

I consider the most important part of my work is to bring together a philosophy of being with physical materials and processes. I also like that my work can be appreciated as a crossover from craft to art or art to craft.

While living in San Francisco all those years ago, I escaped the violence of growing up gay in Alabama and found freedom of identity. It was glorious—though dangerous and scary as AIDS entered the picture—and I loved it deeply. It is gone now, that San Francisco, and I’ve retired to a more affordable, easier life. Huntsville is an odd place, sophisticated if conservative, with high levels of education, art appreciation, and quirky genius mixed with the gritty reality of the South. A hybrid place, as I am a hybrid, reconstructed creature. As we all are.

These days, I don’t consider myself a fiber artist per se, though I value and love the explosion of fiber works which have become an important part of the art world’s mix of media in recent years. It’s an explosion, a freedom, but it can also be a liability, giving birth to a kind of pointless, commercialized diversity in the current art market.

Being a male who works in fiber—I don’t think about it. I’m not a joiner, never have been, I just search for good artists who get it, who understand what I do and what I am as they are searching. I’ve always done things women do, I’m a feminist, a kitchen artist, finding materials at home and in grocery stores, hardware stores, junk stores.

My recent paper and fabric constructions came after a ten-year hiatus from any showing at all, after a period of almost “making it” in the commercial and competitive gallery world of the 90s that turned me off. Now I’m making and showing again as I please—at local venues, in national juried shows, and within the big circle of my hometown of Huntsville, which, personally, is the most satisfying. Soon I will have a studio at Lowe Mill, a huge historic factory building that is now a major arts center. You might look it up. It’s wonderful.


Headshot of Dennis PotterDennis Potter has been a painter, printmaker, and fiber artist for more than forty years. He grew up in the deep South and has lived in the Bay Area since earning an MFA from the University of California at Berkeley in 1983. His work has been shown extensively in San Francisco, Boston, and New York. For the past ten years his work has been focused on a Buddhist conceptual model, and in 2016 Lowe Mill presented “Holes,” an extensive showing of his work. Lowe Mill is a historic mill building which has been redeveloped into artist studios, galleries, and performance venues, and is now the largest privately owned arts facility in the United States.

Works:
1. Measure. Painted and woven, sewn web straps, fabric, ribbon. 46 x 54″ (2016)
2. Indigo Weave. Dyed, woven and sewn straps, leather, paper, interfacing. 42 x 52″ (2016)
3. Enzo Thangka.  Painted and woven, sewn web straps, ribbon, fabric. 40 x 34″ (2016)
4. Indigo Thangka. Antique and vintage Japanese indigo Boro, pieced, sewn, layered, pierced. 40 x 34″ (2016)
5. Cha Wan Thangka. Pieced and sewn found fabrics, ribbon, screen, net. 40 x 36″ (2014)
6. Black Enzo. Painted and woven, sewn web straps, belts, ribbon, braid, fabric. 42 x 36″ (2016)
7. Inked Kimo. Inked and woven, sewn web straps, ribbon, fabric. 60 x 48″ (2016)
8. Black Mendicant Kimo. Woven, sewn web straps, belts, braid, fabric. 54 x 48″ (2016)
9. Oni Camo Hoody. Woven and sewn web straps, braid, ribbon, fabric. 74 x 50″ (2016)
10. Cold Mountain Hakui. Ink-painted sewn and woven paper strips. 74 x 38″ (2016)
11. Hole Thangka. Woven, sewn web straps, ribbon, lace, cord, fabrics, screen. 54 x 48″ (2016)

Published on September 21, 2016 (Click for permalink.)

COLOR OUT LOUD: Paintings by Chilean Artist Jacqueline Unanue

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 21, 2016 by thwackAugust 13, 2023

Jacqueline Unanue
COLOR OUT LOUD: Paintings

I was born into a family of artists, and for as long as I can remember I have been surrounded by music and painting. From an early age, my father encouraged me to carefully observe the rich palette of colors in the mountains of my native Chile, and, when we were at the beach, to make drawings in the sand. My mother encouraged me to listen to classical music.

When I studied graphic design as a university student, I was fortunate to have artist-teachers who were very talented and sensitive. Their lectures opened my eyes to a new kind of world, one that forever changed the way I looked at the environment. One of these teachers lectured on Wassily Kandinsky, an artist whose works were inspired by music and whose theories about art were shaped by his subjective experiences. The ideas in Kandinsky’s book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, defined art as something enigmatic and mystical, born from the inner necessity of the artist and claiming its own free-standing life, its own spiritual breath. These ideas deeply touched me and remained with me, dormant until recently. I am now painting canvases inspired by music—not simply by having it on the background, but as an element alive and breathing in my work.

In spite of living far away, I feel always connected to Chile, a place I refer to as “my ancient land.” Several years ago, the nostalgia for my homeland made me recall the work of two Czech composers, Antonín Dvořák and Bedřich Smetana, whose music conveys their own love for their country. Dvořák’s New World Symphony became the incentive for a new series of paintings I began, “From The New World,” and with Smetana’s My Fatherland as inspiration, I started “My Ancient Land” series.  The sense of belonging to a place is personal and universal, and this is the reason I could and can very much identify with these musical pieces.

COLOR OUT LOUD: Paintings by Chilean Artist Jacqueline Unanue - 1
From the New World II, inspired by composer Antonín Dvořák
COLOR OUT LOUD: Paintings by Chilean Artist Jacqueline Unanue - 2
My Ancient Land II, inspired by composer Bedřich Smetana

As my work evolved, I turned to Chilean classical music — six composers in particular: René Amengual (1911–1954), Eulogio Dávalos (b. 1945), Juan Orrego-Salas (b. 1917), Enrique Soro (1884-1954), Sylvia Soublette (b. 1923), and Jorge Urrutia (1905-1981). Some of these composers were stirred by the same Chilean landscapes and locales of my memory, others by the same experience of tapping into an inner “cosmos,” and one of them—Eulogio Dávalos—I was actually fortunate enough to meet in person. With this inspiration I continued painting for the series, “My Ancient Land,” which has been part of a traveling exhibit in the U.S., Chile, and Spain, curated by Gloria Garafulich-Grabois.

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Many of the paintings in “My Ancient Land” series were created on large-scale canvases mounted onto walls. My ritual is as follows: once the canvas is ready, I prepare sheets of watercolor paper and smaller canvases on easels, a palette of up to twenty or thirty colors in containers, a variety of paintbrushes, and, finally—but essentially—the piece of music. I begin by quietly listening to the music. Only when I start feeling the music within me do I begin to paint. Once immersed in music and painting it becomes very physical, and I find myself expressing both the movement of the music as well as my own emotions in free and spontaneous brushstrokes that are as gestural as they are musical.


Nothing is planned, it all happens—not from the mind or intellect, but from inner emotions and sensations. I stop often to observe what is happening on the canvas and then continue, painting in layers as the movements of the music accumulate. My brushstrokes express melodic patterns as I “write” my own pictorial composition. Without a rational purpose, this is how I “paint-and-write” the music, preferably using circles, ovals, and flexible lines in a kind of dance. From there I direct my arm and hand, and in turn my brush, to follow these shapes as if they were natural musical tempos and dance figures.

Through this kind of “writing”—if I were to name my creative process—I feel most free. First, to write and paint musical notes as an artist-musician, and then to interpret them as if I were a conductor. My baton is my brush. It interprets the voices of the composers, and the silences. The bass sounds are deep blues. A variety of yellows—ranging from a bright lemon to a yellow-orange—suggest a mystical air. White is the air itself, offering a transparent hint of layers below: the musical notes that repeat themselves in the colored sounds. The choice of colors does not stem from intellectual decisions, but rather from internal perceptions, wordless sensations. Kandinsky wrote: “the sound of colors is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would express bright yellow with bass notes or a dark lake with treble.” For me, the most powerful part of that observation is that all of us knows what he means, without being taught, without putting it into words. It is as if we all have an inner homeland in common, a place where we are most free to color out loud.


Jacqueline UnanueJacqueline Unanue is a Chilean born visual artist of Spanish ancestry who has resided in Philadelphia since 2000 with her husband Ricardo Guajardo, who is an artist and designer as well. She studied design at the Universidad de Chile de Valparaíso. While a student, she became interested in the rock art found in her native country, traveling extensively through Chile’s Atacama Desert. Jacqueline Unanue also traveled to the pre-historic Altamira caves in the Basque Country. Unanue has received numerous awards and grants—among them the Latin American Women in Art and Culture Tribute in 2015—and has widely exhibited her work in Chile, Spain, Finland, Ecuador, and Argentina, as well as in galleries in Washington DC, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York. Jacqueline Unanue’s work can also be found in many private collections in the Americas and Europe, and she is currently represented by the 3rd Street Gallery in Philadelphia. www.jacquelineunanue.com

Works:
1. From the New World II, | acrylic on canvas | 2013 | 60″ x 66″ (153 x 168 cm) | Inspired by composer Antonín Dvořák
2. My Ancient Land II | acrylic on canvas | 2013 |  30″ x 40″ (76 x 102 cm) | Inspired by composer Bedřich Smetana
3. My Ancient Land, Symphonic Prelude II | acrylic on canvas | 2014 | 63″ x 72″ (160  x 184 cm) | Inspired by Chilean composer René Amengual
4. My Ancient Land, Sextet III | 2014 | acrylic on canvas | 60″ x 70″ (163 x 178 cm) | Inspired by composer Juan Orrego-Salas
5. My Ancient Land, Cueca for Pablo Neruda I | 2014 | acrylic on canvas | 57″ x 73″ (145 x 185 cm) Inspired by composer Eulogio Dávalos
6. My Ancient Land, Fantastic Dance III | 2014 | acrylic on paper | 25″ x 31″ (63  x 79 cm) | Inspired by composer Enrique Soro
7. My Ancient Land, Roman Mass IV | 2014 | acrylic on canvas | 63″ x 72″ (160  x 183 cm) Inspired by composer Sylvia Soublette
8. My Ancient Land, Suggestions of Chile V | 2015 | acrylic on canvas | 30″ x 40″ (76 x 102 cm) | Inspired by composer Jorge Urrutia

Note: The above recordings are protected by copyright and are used with explicit permission from the publishers. These recordings are not for download or reproduction. All images copyright Jacqueline Unanue. 

Published on September 21, 2016 (Click for permalink.)

THE STIGMA OF BEAUTY, THE STAIN OF GLASS Glass Art by Judith Schaechter

Cleaver Magazine Posted on June 8, 2016 by thwackAugust 13, 2023

Judith Schaechter
THE STIGMA OF BEAUTY, THE STAIN OF GLASS: Glass Art

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I am fairly certain that many people experience my pieces kind of like this: Judith Schaechter is an artist who makes images in stained glass of anguished women set against highly decorative backgrounds. People often see my works all at once as a group — presented in a show or reproduced in an article — but to me, each piece is vastly different and each one arose over long periods of time. But yeah, I get it: anguished women and lush, decorative backgrounds.

THE STIGMA OF BEAUTY, THE STAIN OF GLASS Glass Art by Judith SchaechterI started working in glass when I was a painting student at the Rhode Island School of Design. I took a stained glass elective course and was hooked. Looking back, I think that had a lot to do with time and tedium. I was in the habit of painting fast and furiously, with a lot of anxiety about the blank canvas. It was easy enough to cover that up, but I would later gesso over the parts that weren’t working and found that ultimately I was looking again at a blank canvas. With glass, on the other hand, it takes a long time to bring about a transformation. It can take days to make the glass do anything, and I found that during that time I would achieve what psychologists call “transference.” In other words, I’d grow deeply attached to the work.

Glass is a magical medium. I am using that word specifically because it alludes to the sort of Vegas-y glitz that has led some people to disrespect it as a medium and to distrust it as a serious contender for art making. Glass is one of the few materials that looks good before you touch it, and that’s dangerous because anything you do to it risks ruining it, as opposed, say, to clay, upon which anything is a vast improvement. But glass can be far more than merely superficial.

THE STIGMA OF BEAUTY, THE STAIN OF GLASS Glass Art by Judith Schaechter - 2Abbot Suger (the 12th century monk who designed the Basilica of Saint-Denis) cited the spiritual promise of stained glass when he said: “stained glass is enlightenment embodied.” And how true that can feel when inside a cathedral (even if you are not religious!) But the flip side is that stained glass is particularly guilty of disillusionment; it promises so very much that when it falls short, it is extra disappointing. Stained glass suffered as a medium when demand for it decreased during the Protestant Reformation, and it suffered further as art became more and more separate from the Church. When I started working in glass, my first thought was that no one had done anything new with it in centuries, with the exception of Tiffany (whom I happen to dislike). I liked the challenge of working with a risky material and I particularly liked its neglected history.

As it turned out, the distorted, anguished figures and decorative backgrounds that looked like a pantomime of teenaged angst when I did them in oil paint, looked a lot more authentic in stained glass. Perhaps they needed real illumination to make them seem as though they were burning inside.

And so, glass it was.

◊

Today I’m often asked, “Why do you do those things you do?” Understandably, that’s what people want to know from artists, and if we could make sense of that in words, we’d be very lucky indeed, because part of the reality is that if we could say it, we wouldn’t need to make it.

It helps to narrow it down some to two questions: why does it look the way it does, and how do you choose a subject.

I doodle a lot and I would go so far as to say I don’t have “ideas” per se. In order to launch a project, I need to literally draw it out of me. Inspiration is something that resides in me like a swamp monster in murky depths. I don’t see things in my head first and then draw them. I draw in order to see them. And so I doodle — and I see flowers, animals, female faces. Why? I honestly have no idea, and can only give a tautological response: because they interest me.

Anchoress, 35″ x 25″, 2015I can, however, say a few words about the significance of realism in my work. First off, perceptual realism (“realistic” realism) is not of interest to me. My flowers and faces don’t exist in nature. I have an urge to distort and reinvent — one reality is plenty in my life! — and I am attracted to other art forms of distorted realism, such as Gothic art, much Asian art, and some modern art, such as Expressionism.

As for the female faces, I think sometimes I am engaged in doll play, in that they can take on any role in a sort of proxy of selfhood. They are not self-portraits. In fact, one of my main concerns is that I want my pieces to be eternal and universal so that anyone can empathize with them. It bothers me, though, that casual observers see them as depressing. I am fascinated with the nuances of human expression and try very hard to create faces that express several emotions at once, preferably conflicting ones. So they are never just in agony, but agony tinged with ecstasy; grief offset by hope; rage tempered by serenity.

Now, about those backgrounds: they take a long time to make, longer than the figures. There is this thing in the two-dimensional arts known as the “figure-ground dilemma” — the question of what to do in the background after you’ve made a figure. Distinguishing this second dimension from the first lies at the crux of what makes us human: the ability to recognize and utilize symbolic abstractions. This is critical because one cannot help but empathize with the figure, and so its location becomes a reflection of where you are. As it was once explained to me, art is a “You Are Here” map. I hesitate to say anything mystical, or deeply philosophical (since I feel both foolish and unqualified to do so) but here goes. One of the ways art is significant beyond mere entertainment is that it contextualizes our existence in the cosmic sense. One sees an image, and one is able to echolocate off it. It’s not communication so much as telepathy.

Acedia, 44″ x 27″, 2013My backgrounds perhaps act as a foil for the ambivalent figure. Or maybe they’re projections of their possible psychological state, a hallucination, a dream, or even a visual representation of their speech if they could talk. However you want to see it, I consider my backgrounds to be an extension of the figure.

Some artists are content to paint a blank area around a figure. Most are content to depict a realistic space around a figure. But I have always found it to be more challenging and rewarding to place the figure in an undetermined, abstract space.

I believe that beauty is a Good Thing, and my works usually involve plenty of bright colors, contrasts, and patterns — abstract signifiers of beauty. But since questions around beauty have been a bugaboo in art for most of the 20th century, beauty can also be a confusing thing. Is it good for us like spinach or is it good like candy? Is it morally good, or sensually good? Mind-good or body-good? In the end, I think asking this question misses the point that beauty can be both — or, as the Abbot of Saint-Denis put it, “enlightenment embodied.”


Headshot of Judith SchaechterJudith Schaechter has lived and worked in Philadelphia since graduating in 1983 with a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design Glass Program. She has exhibited widely, including New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, The Hague, and Vaxjo, Sweden. She is the recipient of many grants, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Crafts , The Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, The Joan Mitchell Award, two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts awards, The Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and a Leeway Foundation grant. More at www.judithschaechter.com and judithschaechterglass.blogspot.com. Visit her work at Claire Oliver Gallery in New York.


Works:
1. Cold Genius, 35″ x 43″, 2009
2. Three-Tiered Cosmos, 30″ x 40″, 2015
3. Feral Child, 25″ x 42″, 2012
4. Horse Accident, 33″ x 45″, 2015
5. Our Ladies, 22″ x 25″, 2012
6. Waiting Room, 22″ x 32″, 2014
7. Lockdown, 21″ x 31″, 2010
8. The Sin Eater, 25″ x 46″, 2009
9. The Battle of Carnival and Lent, 56″ x 56″, 2011
10. Odalisque, 24″ x 33″, 2015
11. Harpy, 37″ x 33″, 2013
12. An Invocation, 26″ x 34″, 2009
13. The Birth of Eve, 57″ x 31″, 2013
14. New Ghost, 32″ x 19″, 2014
15. Anchoress, 35″ x 25″, 2015
16. Acedia, 44″ x 27″, 2013

Published on June 8, 2016 (Click for permalink.)

A PRESENCE IN WOOD Wood Sculpture by Miriam Carpenter

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 16, 2016 by thwackAugust 15, 2023

Miriam Carpenter
A PRESENCE IN WOOD: Wood Sculpture

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Throughout my life I have sought the companionship of trees, and have developed an ever deepening reverence for them. Trees are intelligent, resilient, majestic, and adaptable. When a tree has reached the end of its life, the shadow of what once was presents another gift in the form of a satiny, warm, sensual material. ever-deepening

Each piece of wood has its own story—reflections of moments specific to place and time within the architecture of a species. Each tree has its own experience and characteristics uniquely formed by its geographical location, the effects of the seasons, wind, rain, and what grew beside it. The history of each year is physically recorded in each ring slowly reacting to external and internal stresses after it has died and been cut into lumber. Reading this story in the grain is just as exciting to me as transforming it into an artifact. The more time I spend with each piece of wood, the deeper my understanding grows. Respecting its capacity and understanding its potential, I can be more thoughtful in how I bring the piece to completion.

Everything that I create is an experiment. Whether the approach is multi-axis split turning, bending, or carving by hand, it is always an exploration of the material’s unique potential.

My current passion is fueled by an evolving series of delicately carved wooden feathers. Species with the most porous early wood, tight growth rings, and strong medullary rays provide the type of structure I have found to be most resilient. The dense medullary rays project radially through the rings, offering an ability to shape incredibly thin undulating forms that expose the delicate pores, while the tight rings offer a dramatic visual texture through varying densities.

My process is of making—of staying present in the moment, of focus and flexibility—and is an ongoing lesson in non-attachment. As I work, I allow myself to pour out love with such intensity that what I create becomes embodied with a life that is viscerally connected to me. I do not believe that handmade artifacts are simply objects or things; I believe they are imbued with heart and soul. Our energy passes through us and into what we are making. Bliss, anxieties—these things are reflected in what we produce. We exchange matter. When we create a baby, far along in its gestation, its DNA floods the mother’s body. When a baby is born, some of its DNA remains in the mother’s body forever. There is a constant exchange in whatever we create, and being mindful and deliberate about how we do what we do is of utmost importance to how we share our gifts and our lives with everyone and everything around us.

Living creatively shifts the way I move through the world and expands my perceptions. The inclination to create art sets us apart from other living things on this earth. It is an active universal language that creates ties, discovers compatibility, and allows us to realize connections. While creating ties, my hope is to evoke something in others that might broaden understanding and help perpetuate a passion to learn, nurture, respect, and explore.


Miriam Carpenter author photo

Miriam Carpenter is an artist, researcher, and designer based in New Hope, Pennsylvania. After graduating from RISD in 2006, she designed furniture alongside Mira Nakashima for seven years. In 2014, she was awarded the Windgate ITE Residency sponsored by the Center for Art in Wood together with four wood artists from Japan, Canada, West Ghana, and the United States. The year following, she lived, worked, and studied with furniture makers, sculptors, scholars, and environmental stewards in Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand. She is currently working as an independent artist while enjoying teaching across the country.

Author photo credit: Amber Johnston

The sculptures:

Bliss, 2014, Turned and carved bleached Ash. Finished with whitewash and 4″ liming wax. 4″ x 9″
Concentra, 2008, Turned and carved Mahogany. 4″ x 13″
Feather 11,903, 2012, Hand-carved White Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. 4.5″ x 2″ x .875″
Feather 11,902, 2012, Hand-carved Silky Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. .5″ x 1.5″ x 4″
Feather 11,901, 2012, Hand-carved White Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. 4.5″ x 1.75″ x .875″
Feather 11,900, 2012, Hand-carved White Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. 4″ x 1.875″ x 1.25″
Feather 11,899, 2013, Hand-carved White Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. 1″ x 1.25″ x 3″
Feather 11,898, 2013, Hand-carved White Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. Holly box. .75″ x 1.25″ x 3″
Feather 11,892, 2014, Hand-carved White Oak endgrain. Steam-bent Wenge spine. Pyrographed and dyed. 1.75″ x 2″ x 2.5″
Feather 11,889, 2015, Hand-carved White Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. .625″ x 2″ x 3.75″
Feather 11,888, 2015, Hand-carved White Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. .75″ x1.5″ x 4″
Feather 11,887, 2015, Hand-carved White Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. 1.25″ x 2.375″ x 4.25″
Feather 11,886, 2013, Hand-carved Wenge. Finished with wax. 7.5″ x 2″ x 3.75″
Feather 11,883, 2016, Hand-carved White Oak. Burnished with graphite powder. 4.5″ x 2.25″ x 1.25″
Sisters, 2014, Multi-axis split-turned and carved Basswood frame, finished with India Ink and burnished with beeswax. Mirror glass backed with Dacron and wool. 25.5″ x 18″ x 1.75

Published on March 16, 2016 (Click for permalink.)

WHY DRAW TREES by Laurel Hooker

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 10, 2015 by thwackAugust 15, 2023

Laurel Hooker
WHY DRAW TREES?

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Before I went to art school, before I decided to become a painter, before my work and classes carried me far away into the world of fine art, all I really wanted to do was draw. I drew the way a lot of teenagers do–carefully, self-consciously, and often. I drew unaware of the complications of critical analysis, ego, sophisticated processes, and expensive materials that would soon converge in the realm of my higher education.

When I was a student at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, drawing nice pictures soon became the farthest thing from my mind. In that four-year whirlwind of studio classes, I roved quite far from simple drawing. I studied glassblowing, ceramics, on-loom weaving, and figure modeling. As a painting major, I took drawing classes, but they were secondary to my painting classes. After graduation, I went home to my parents’ house in east Tennessee, where I listened to the drone of cicadas in the evenings and slept until noon. For the first time in four years, my life slowed to a walking pace. I made a couple of paintings; I carried a small watercolor kit with me as a way of keeping in habit. And I was doing something I hadn’t done in a long time: I was looking. Looking at things that I didn’t get to look at during the years I was living in North Philadelphia: Trees. Grass. Flowers. Mountains. Rivers. The ground at my feet, even.

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“Katsura Tree,” pen and ink, 9”x12”, 2015 – Click to enlarge.

Had I ever really looked at the ground? Had I tried to separate pebble from milkweed with only my eyes? Or looked into the matrix of blades and buds, clustered and sprouting, snaking in ribbons, spurting from muscular stalks? What about the trees? Had I ever examined every leaf? Had I watched the entire narrative curl of a single branch into its stems?

One of my drawing professors in college once told us, in a dramatic moment of frustration, that she hated student drawings of trees. “Please, please, no more trees!” she sighed, rolling her eyes. I was perplexed. No trees? Should we just omit them? Draw only buildings? The ground?

And yet, I understood her point. Trees are hard to see. And even harder to see well. I could suddenly imagine legions of students mass-producing the same childhood version of the classic crayon-book tree, a generic shorthand of cylindrical trunks and cartoon foliage. It made more sense for us students to invest our senses in the moment, in the perceived spaces around us, without getting caught up in trees we’d learned by heart.

 “White Pine,” pen and ink, 6”x9”, 2015

“White Pine,” pen and ink, 6”x9”, 2015  – Click to enlarge

But I’m not a student anymore. Last August, I moved back to Philadelphia and, being without a painting studio, I picked up my drawing pen and dipped it in ink. I wanted to draw something from life. I wanted to draw something in front of me, something present. I looked out across the front porch and saw a small arched ash tree. This was what I wanted to draw.

Trees and plants have been my subjects ever since. With pen-and-ink I can capture gesture, immediacy, and fluidity with precision. India ink, which can be diluted with water, allows the full tonal range of graphite, but without the option to erase. I find that this restriction stimulates my attentiveness. While I do draw trees and plants out of admiration for their singularity and form, I consider my tree drawings exercises in bearing witness, not pretty pictures. In art, plants are often relegated to background status; wrongly so, in my opinion. Drawing them intimately helps me appreciate the savage power and poetry of vegetal life.

When you begin drawing a tree or a garden, you become locked into its convolutions, and an endless, groping attempt to understand the living network of light and shadow. It’s a task I will never completely master—and that’s what I like about it.

The Drawings:
“Sedgwick Street Garden,” gouache and ink, 9”x12”, 2015
“Carpenter Lane Garden,” pen and ink, 9”x12”, 2015
“Porch on Pelham Road,” pen and ink, 6”x9”, 2015
“Little Ash Tree,” pen and ink, 6”x9”, 2015
“Katsura Tree,” pen and ink, 9”x12”, 2015
“White Pine,” pen and ink, 6”x9”, 2015


Laurel-HookerLaurel Hooker is an artist living and working in Philadelphia. She received her BFA in painting from Tyler School of Art at Temple University. Brought up exploring the mountain wilderness outside of Knoxville, Tennessee, the natural world remains a central source of inspiration for her work. Her additional enthusiasms include all things musical, ethical, and edible. Further images of Laurel Hooker’s work can be found at www.laurelhooker.com

Published on December 10, 2015 (Click for permalink.)

WORKS ON LOVE by Michelle Doll

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 10, 2015 by thwackAugust 15, 2023

WORKS ON LOVE by Michelle Doll - Title

Mother Child (KA2), 2014 Oil on Canvas 60 x 60″

Michelle Doll
WORKS ON LOVE

My paintings are about felt moments, both the visible ones as well as the ones that we aren’t able to see. For years, I used to create work about feelings of disconnect and loss. When I’d leave the studio, those feelings and the difficult emotions surrounding them would become amplified. But today, both my life and my work are focused on love and connection, what I see as the root of intimacy.

Such moments exist as I go through my day. I find myself constantly witnessing how people connect. Living and working in New York is a source of inspiration, as I can absorb these intimate interactions openly, on the streets. I’m attracted to the physical and metaphysical energy that’s going on between individuals — the touch between a couple, the closeness between a mother and child. By capturing these private moments, my paintings seek to bring together the mind, body, and soul through the physical substance of paint.

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Couple (JT5), 2014 Oil on Canvas 60 x 60″

I naturally express myself through touch, and the very tactile quality of paint allows me to express myself. Each brushstroke is a way of recording the dialogue between bodies and minds during moments of closeness. For me, the greatest quality of oil paint is that it allows me to explore these expressions of intimacy. The nature of the body and the often elusive nature of love is no longer hidden from view. It is given texture: sometimes rough, often sensual, at times gentle, but always present. The touch of paint to the canvas is also a presence that I can share with viewers of my work.

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Couple (AJ6), 2015 Oil on Board 30 x 20″

There is an inherent vulnerability I experience while revealing the relationships between people, and the painting process allows my own emotions to come through. I allow myself to feel the beauty and weight of my sitters, and whether I feel bonds of love or fear and loss, I pass it along through my work.

This said, it is all very transitory. When I start a painting, I ask, how does this feel and what is the importance of the moment? I usually focus on certain areas in the painting while allowing other areas to “fall away,” not fully rendered. In that way the painting when complete feels similar to the way intimate moments have been experienced. It becomes essentially a stand-in for multiple sensations that would otherwise be lost to time.

Couple (JT1), 2013 Oil on Canvas 40 x 28″

These transient, hidden flashes of physical human contact hold meaning in the creases, crevices, overlaps, folds and weight of connecting bodies. Each stroke of the brush is, for me, a way of grasping and holding this.

The paintings:
Mother Child (KA2), 2014, oil on canvas, 60 x 60″
Couple (JT5), 2014, oil on canvas, 60 x 60″
Couple (AJ6), 2015, oil on board, 30 x 20″
Couple (JT1), 2013, oil on canvas, 40 x 28″


Michelle-DollMichelle Doll’s paintings capture quiet, intimate moments hinged on personal connections between her subjects, as well as their interactions with the world around them. Doll’s recent works are imbued with femininity and introspection, and explore the themes of love, desire and connection. She earned her B.F.A. from Kent State University and M.F.A. from New York Academy of Art where she graduated cum laude on both. Her work has been exhibited and featured worldwide at galleries in New York, St. Barth’s, San Francisco, Chicago, Basel, London, and Olso. She is represented by Lyons Wier Gallery in New York City and Galleri Ramfjord in Oslo, Norway. Michelle Doll currently lives and works in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published on December 10, 2015 (Click for permalink.)

THE DOGS OF SAN JUAN AND THE FISH OF PHILADELPHIA by Paula Rivera

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 16, 2015 by thwackAugust 16, 2023

THE DOGS OF SAN JUAN AND THE FISH OF PHILADELPHIA by Paula Rivera - Title

From the series “Si me caigo de cabeza,” 10″ x 10″, India ink, gouache, and watercolor on paper, 2015

Paula Rivera
THE DOGS OF SAN JUAN AND THE FISH OF PHILADELPHIA: Works on Paper and Beyond

I started drawing when I was a baby. My first subject was an elephant, done in orange Crayola marker. My parents have the drawing to this day. I’ve always had a strong feeling for drawing animals; like many children, I believed I understood animals, and I’m still fascinated with animals.

I went to Philadelphia’s High School for Creative and Performing Arts (CAPA), a magnet school for art students. I was convinced that an arts school environment would be best for me, even though I suspected that you cannot teach a person how to create art. The art environment was good for me in many ways, but the Western conceptions of teaching art messed with my head and feelings.

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“San Juan to Philadelphia,” a story of fire to water, about 24″ x 30″, India ink, gouache, and watercolor on paper, 2015

After CAPA I attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts to study drawing and painting. Sure enough, by the third year I was completely sick of it. So I left, planning to work for a year and save enough money to move to California to study animation. But even after a year of working, my California dream was still too expensive—and I didn’t want to go into debt for student loans. Before I knew it I was auditioning for acceptance at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas to study animation. I was leaving my adopted home, Philadelphia, to return to my birthplace, San Juan, Puerto Rico.

My original goal in character animation was to learn to create figures that made anatomical sense, to create “live” figures instead of “cartoon” figures (bodies “made of bones” as opposed to bodies “made of rubber”). You can see what I mean by this if you look at work by the Studio Ghibli, or compare the Disney approach to animation versus Looney Tunes or Cartoon Network.

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​Untitled, India ink on paper, 8.5″ x 9″, 2015

But as time went on, my work became less figure oriented, and more emotionally centered. Instead of trying to create the “correct” moving figure, I began making work in which the sun was the center, surrounded by life. Sometimes, I draw two or three suns. They are providers of life and nourishment. Sometimes they are crying, sometimes they are angry, but they are always full and bright.

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Untitled, Chapter 1 from a book in progress, India ink on paper, 8.5″ x 11″, 2015

As my time in San Juan drew to a close, I found myself drawing a lot of dogs under this bright sun of Puerto Rico. I was inspired while walking my own dog, Miro, through the barrio Santurce, where we lived. Together, we saw amazing things, taking in all the sights: buildings, cars, plants and fruits, other people and other dogs. I had adopted Miro in February. He was the first dog who was my own, as opposed to my family’s dog, and I see him as a new chapter in my life as an independent dog mom. Miro has brought much joy and new experience.

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Untitled, paint on longboard, about 40″ x 10″, 2014

Now that I’ve returned to Philadelphia, my “Dogs of San Juan” series has evolved into a new series: Fish—a new emotional state. The idea of fish came to me instinctively. San Juan is fire; Philadelphia is water. It’s not something I can explain logically, because the images I create come directly from feeling, but in my new emotional state while living again in Philadelphia, I feel like a fish in water.


Paula-RiveraElephant-drawing-250pxPaula Rivera was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her family moved to Philadelphia when she was two and a half years old, and ever since she’s lived her life as an artist. Her usual media is ink and paper. She has studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico. She lives for sun, big sky, and water. She aspires to create a few animated films, start a small art school, and build her own art studio in the desert. Currently Paula Rivera lives with her new family — her beloved and loving boyfriend and her dogs.

All works © Paula Rivera. Click any image for a higher resolution.

Works Discussed:
1. Untitled, from the series Si me caigo de cabeza, 10″ x 10″, India ink, gouache, and watercolor on paper, 2015
2. “San Juan to Philadelphia,” 24″ x 30″, India ink, gouache, and watercolor on paper, 2015
3. ​Untitled, India ink on paper, 8.5″ x 9″, 2015
4. Untitled, Chapter 1 from a book in progress, India ink on paper, 8.5″ x 11″, 2015.
5. Untitled, paint on longboard, about 40″ x 10″, 2014
6.  “Elephant,” Crayola marker on paper, 8.5″ x 11″, 1994

Published on September 16, 2015 (Click for permalink.)

ART AND HEALING by Donna Levinstone

Cleaver Magazine Posted on September 16, 2015 by thwackAugust 16, 2023

Donna Levinstone
ART AND HEALING: Pastel Landscapes

Art enhances the healing process. My work is meditative and has been used in hospital settings and other situations where healing is called for. My mother and a few of my friends, in the last stage of their lives, have used my work as a source of calm and focus during their bed-ridden illnesses. As a cancer survivor, I, too, have found that artwork provides calm in my life. My pastel landscapes have often been referred to as “landscapes of the soul.”

The use of wide skies in my work promotes a sense of well-being. I have memories, as a  young child, of riding in our convertible and gazing up at the sky for hours. According to Jack Borden, founder of For Spacious Skies, people who have sky awareness in their lives often have an added sense of optimism. They look at their lives, like the skies, with an endless sense of possibilities.

My drawing “Daybreak” was acquired by Sarah Campbell, curator for Memorial Sloane Kettering Hospital:

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Daybreak, pastel, 24″ x 36″, Collection of Memorial Sloane-Kettering, 2013.

“Marshland” was commissioned for the University of Connecticut Health Center. Both drawings provide a sense of calm and light. Patients are able to feel safe, inspired and comforted while looking at these works. There is a direct link to content of the images and the brain’s reaction to stress and anxiety. Merely looking at art makes the hospital environment less stressful.

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Marshland, pastel, 44″x 60″, Collection of University of Connecticut Health Center, 2014.

Spiritual healers often use color and chakras in their practice. For example, green is the color of nature, creating balance and harmony, and linked to the heart. Blue is cooling, positive energy and connected to the throat. My pastel “Changing Skies” also speaks to the beauty of nature and changing skies.

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Changing Skies, pastel, 10″ x 14″, Collection of Wendy Schrijver, 2014.

I have also found comfort in the darkness. When my father was dying, I would stay at a hotel by the ocean and study night skies and the moon for hours. In those moments, there was an instant connection to God and healing.

I recently completed a series called “Nocturnes,” a grid of pastel drawings:

Nocturne Grid, Pastel 18" x 18", Collection of the Artist, 2015. Click for higher resolution image.

Nocturne Grid, pastel, 18″ x 18″, Collection of the Artist, 2015.

My work provides a sense of calm in the midst of fear and exhaustion. My pastel landscapes have an added advantage of allowing patients to dream and travel away into their memories. A lot of my work has this reflective light. “Eternal Waters,” a black and white pastel, is another example:

Eternal Waters, B/W Pastel, 18" x 28", Collection of Tom McCarthy, 2013. Click for higher resolution image.

Eternal Waters, b/w pastel, 18″ x 28″, Collection of Tom McCarthy, 2013.


Donna-LevinstoneDonna Levinstone’s pastel drawings have been included in many private and corporate collections, including Pfizer, Citibank, Time Inc, Nabisco, IBM, and Verizon. Her pastel drawings are part of the collection of the Library of Congress, the New-York Historical Society, the Museum of the City of New York, and the US Department of State. A black-and-white pastel drawing from her 9/11 Series will be part of the new 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York. Her work appears on several book covers and has been published in The New York Times and Drawn in New York: Six Centuries of Drawing and Watercolor, among others. As an arts educator, Levinstone has also received various grants to teach art to the elderly and to cancer patients. Her teaching work also includes working with various school aged children. She is also a member of the Cloud Appreciation Society. More at www.donnalevinstone.com.

All works © Donna Levinstone. Click any image for a higher resolution.

Works Discussed:
1. Nocturne Grid, pastel, 18″ x 18″, collection of the artist, 2015
2. Eternal Waters, b/w pastel, 18″ x 28″, collection of Tom McCarthy, 2013
3. Marshland, pastel, 44″ x 60″, University of Connecticut Health Center, 2014
4. Daybreak, pastel, 24″ x 36″, collection of Memorial Sloane-Kettering, 2013
5. Changing Skies, pastel, 10″ x 14″, collection of Wendy Schrijver, 2014

Published on September 16, 2015 (Click for permalink.)

NOW IN ELSEWHERE, A Now for MENAM by Orkan Telhan

Cleaver Magazine Posted on June 10, 2015 by thwackAugust 17, 2023

Orkan Telhan
NOW IN ELSEWHERE

A Now for MENAM: A Calendar That Curates Time

The Middle East. North Africa. The Mediterranean. Asia Minor and the Levant. These refer to inexact geographies. It is hard to tell where each begins and ends. As names, they may take on different meanings when they refer to people, languages, belief systems, and politics, all of which constantly negotiate their identities with respect to one another. As places, they may bring together a series of disjointed lands unified as an imaginary cultural construct, yet whose presence lives everywhere, whose lands have produced many diasporas around the globe. Today, someone from Little Syria, New York, uses the same recipe for hummus that a grandmother uses in Syria. And it tastes different; taste belongs neither here nor there, and changes every moment.

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Installation view from CULTURUNNERS RV, Armory Show 2015, New York. Click for higher resolution image.

It is often an oriental gaze that renders these uneasy, tenuous connections. This is a gaze that comes both from the desire to belong to a place and the fear of its possibility. Thus the Middle East, North Africa, or the Mediterranean always exist as mediated elsewheres where only others can belong. Or where we belong as others.

Making sense of all of this today is an art. Is opinion really in the eyes of the beholder? What is there to look at when our interpretation will always be skewed by what is selectively mediated for us? Where or whom do we belong if opinions are already others’?

“A Now for MENAM” is an artwork that responds to these questions. It reflects on our habits of looking and making meaning out of what is thrown at us by media. It proposes a different kind of interface—perhaps a less complacent window or mirror—that tries to present the other in its fluidity; with enough room for fact and fiction.

The artwork is designed as a real-time calendar that brings together different moments from history to curate a “now”—a minute-long media excerpt collected from online sources that broadcast content from or about the Middle East, North Africa, and the Mediterranean (MENAM). Its algorithm queries different sites and brings together texts, videos, facts and historical trivia that are related to contemporary issues based on the current month. For instance, in March 2015, we see news about the upcoming anniversary of the Armenian genocide, the current death toll of immigrants crossing the Mediterranean, and watch an excerpt from Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour—the only film by the French writer who now rests in a Spanish cemetery, in Laresh, Morocco.

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Almanach du Levant (The Levant Almanac)

By design, the calendar’s format references two predecessors: Almanach du Levant (The Levant Almanac) and the Saatli Maarif Takvimi (Educational Calendar with Time).

Almanach was published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the Ottomans to address the needs of the minorities living in the Levant region, which we today identify as the area that spans Cyprus, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt. It featured the current dates in Turkish, Greek, French, Bulgarian, Armenian, and Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) with respect to the specifics of the timekeeping practices used in these geographies.

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Saatli Maarif Takvimi (Educational Calendar with Time)

Saatli Maarif Takvimi also dates back to the early 1900s but is still in use today in Turkey. It features both the Gregorian and the Hijri calendar, which is mainly used to indicate the daily prayer times for Muslims based on moon cycles. In addition to timekeeping, the educational calendar also includes daily items such as weather predictions, recipes, suggested names for newborns, jokes and trivia about past events that happened on that day. It works like a serial publication written by an anonymous author who tells you what you need to know for the day.

As a mobile application, “A Now for MENAM” runs in real time yet pays homage to these printed formats, both in form and content. The layout is broken down into sections that organize the information in quadrants. Every minute we see content based on a new topic related to one of the countries in the region—immigrants in Libya, austerity measures in Greece, the banning of Berber names for Moroccan babies. A video feature on the topic appears on the upper right corner of the page, matched with a looping gif animation, which counters both its speed and message with humor or satire. On the lower left, we see a visualization of facts or real-time information, such as stock exchange tickers or real-time widgets reporting on currencies and markets of MENAM, while on the lower right there is a Twitter feed where everyone can contribute to the current topic with a selection of hash tags.

A Now for MENAM, detail. Click for higher resolution image.

“A Now for MENAM” curates a running critique on issues related to current times. The four-quadrant format presents multiple perspectives on the same topic by showing adversarial opinions in the same frame, with information collected from different outlets such as personal blogs, mainstream media, and scientific journals. In the age of social media, this calendar does not presume to feature the “right” point of view; rather, it tells a story from the perspective of different tellers. As with any narrative, the result is always subjective and incomplete. Every minute-long “now” is a possibility negotiated between an algorithmic selection and a series of curatorial decisions programmed by the artist.

The calendar can be accessed anywhere in the world, 24/7. However, it is primarily designed to be a travel companion—a temporal navigator—that will find its place next to the GPS in our cars. Currently commissioned by the CULTURUNNERS Project and the Armory Show 2015, the calendar will travel across the United States and visit different cities inside an RV. During the calendar’s trip, its algorithm will detect the current location of the RV and pull its content accordingly, from sites and sources created by those who identify with MENAM in the visited places.

Like all narratives, the cultural constructs we call the Middle East, North Africa, and the Mediterranean will always unfold in fragmented ways. The “Now” calendar, as a work of art comprising a series of curated moments, will never render a clear coherent image of the land or the other but rather help us reimagine a different MENAM every time we look at it.

For an example page of the calendar, visit here: orkantelhan.info/now_for_menam_single. For more information about the project, visit culturunners.com/projects/a-now-for-menam.


Orkan TelhanOrkan Telhan is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and researcher whose investigations focus on the design of interrogative objects, interfaces, and media, engaging with critical issues in social, cultural, and environmental responsibility. Telhan is Assistant Professor of Fine Arts–Emerging Design Practices at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design. He was part of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Laboratory and the Mobile Experience Lab at the MIT Design Laboratory. Telhan’s individual and collaborative work has been exhibited in venues including the 13th Istanbul Biennial, 1st Istanbul Design Biennial, Ars Electronica, ISEA, LABoral, Archilab, Architectural Association, the Architectural League of New York, MIT Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York.

Image credits: Educational Calendar with Time, Page from July 4, 1958: gittigidiyor.com; Almanach du Levant, T. Pavlidis on theopavlidis.com.

Published on June 10, 2015 (Click for permalink.)

Excerpts from BOOK OF NO LEDGE by Nance Van Winckel

Cleaver Magazine Posted on June 10, 2015 by thwackAugust 17, 2023

Excerpts from BOOK OF NO LEDGE
by Nance Van Winckel

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The Book of No Ledge

As usual, it starts with love. I had my heart set on the door-to-door encyclopedia salesboy. Maybe eighteen or nineteen, he said he was working his way through college. He winked a turquoise eye at me and asked if I was the “lady of the house.”

Well, I wasn’t. I was thirteen-going-on-seventeen and vaguely trying to flirt. My mother came out on the porch to see who I was talking to, and NO, she said, we don’t need any books. She smiled, though, and wished him luck in school.

I followed him down the walk and told him to come back tomorrow after I’d had a chance to work on my mother. Sure, he shrugged, why not.

I could really use those encyclopedias for my school projects, I told my mother later. And so could Sally (my sister). My dad was suddenly behind it. His family had been a bit more bookish than my mother’s.

When the cute guy returned the next day, he was all business. I watched as he showed my parents the full set. The pages were silky. Thirteen volumes and an Index. As I passed Volume N (with the information about how the nose worked!) back to him, he caught my eye and gave me an appreciative nod. My tween-size heart felt too large for my chest.

Of course once the check was written the boy evaporated back into summer’s humid mist, never to be seen again. But I could walk by and caress the books and in so doing call him again into my mind, which I did for years. For years I dipped into those encyclopedias. The knowledge of the world was inside. I perused. I skimmed.

Much to everyone’s surprise, most of all mine, I did indeed use them. With friendly and helpful manners and the smoothest, most confident voice of The World, an all-knowing authority, almost godlike, stepped forth from the text. Dinosaurs. The sad and short lives of the poets I was just beginning to read. The ALL I needed to know about the states to which my family would move in the coming years: Illinois, Wisconsin, Washington, and the states in which we’d previously lived: Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, New York, Connecticut.

Every page offered a surprise! Every page featured Mr. Explainer giving me the lowdown with a winking turquoise eye, a nod, or sometimes a shrug because I was getting older and the books had begun to have a bit of a musty smell and he was beginning to feel unsure I still loved him as I had, especially when I turned into a much older woman and had these nice sharp scissors and even X-Acto blades, and Oh, you’re not sure that the white man helped the tribal people as well as I’ve so carefully outlined? No, dear, the solar flares aren’t scary. Please don’t fret. And please point that glue stick elsewhere. Surely you won’t chop away that whole paragraph about the wonderful westward expansion and put some little poem in its place. A poem is not a fact, dear. Wait! We’ve been together for almost half a century! How could you! You know I loved you first. You know I loved you best!

—Nance Van Winckel, June 2015


Nance Van WinckelNance Van Winckel’s newest books are Ever Yrs., a novel in the form of a scrapbook, and Pacific Walkers, her sixth collection of poems. Book of No Ledge is forthcoming in 2016 from Pleiades Press. The recipient of two NEA Poetry Fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner, she has new poems in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Field, Poetry Northwest, and Gettysburg Review. She is on the M.F.A. faculty of Vermont College of Fine Arts. More of her visual photo-collage work may be viewed at: photoemsbynancevanwinckel.zenfolio.com.

Published on June 10, 2015 (Click for permalink.)

Hidden in Plain Sight by Tara Stella

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 18, 2015 by thwackAugust 18, 2023

Tara Stella, Introduction by Raymond Rorke
HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT: Instagram Photography

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A century ago, in 1916, American photographer Paul Strand would attach a false lens on the side of his camera so that he could photograph candid portraits of unsuspecting subjects. Later, in the 1930s, French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson painted his small Leica with dull black paint so that he could unobtrusively capture “the decisive moment.” Before the decade was out, Walker Evans was hiding his camera under his coat, the lens peeking through a buttonhole, to photograph riders on the New York City Subway just as they were.

Today, in this time-honored tradition of street photography, New York photographer Tara Stella takes Instagrams. Her subjects, too, are candid moments, but her camera is a cellphone, hidden in plain sight. And while Evans didn’t publish his collection of subway photos until 1966, Tara’s photos are shared instantly online with a worldwide public.

Hidden in Plain Sight by Tara Stella - 1Tara is one of over 300 million active users of Instagram, the popular mobile app that enables cellphone users to grab an image and share it on social media. Since its debut in 2010, over 30 billion photos have been generated by users, ranging from the National Geographic Society to Kim Kardashian. Its distinctive features: a square format; hashtagging and geotagging; and digital darkroom filters for special effects, such as Toasting to age the image or Slumbering for a retro, dreamy look. On an average day Instagram users post 70 million photos and click the “Like” button 2.5 billion times.

Hidden in Plain Sight by Tara Stella - 2But while today’s brand of hi-speed mass photography can compress the distance between photographers, subjects, and viewers into a preemptive blur, these snapshots can also create a curious kind of slowing down, a friendly interruption that taps us on the shoulder and draws us closer. In Tara’s images we see not so much a flash-frozen instant as we do an instant prolonged. There is patience in her gaze, a sense that she pauses, however briefly, to spend time with her subject, finding composure in the moment, coaxing complicity. Hers is an eye that looks, clicks, and connects us with a mind that sees.

Hidden in Plain Sight by Tara Stella - 3When one of Tara’s daily Instagrams appears on my Facebook feed, I invariably pause in my scrolling to take in the subject and to make sense of the random details collecting around the margins — so many flat pixels, each one democratically lodged next to its neighbor, swept up like trash off the street or stray fragments of ad copy on subway signs. And since each of her tagged photos is connected to sprawling networks of similarly tagged photos posted by fellow Instagrammers, the photo I am looking at becomes a singular data point whose truth and realness register not because it’s arrestingly odd, or insistently memorable, or significantly about “the other,” but precisely because it’s part of a larger collaborative narrative that’s accumulating with countless other authenticities, bit by participatory bit, byte by accessible byte.

focusedThese days, when everyone is distractedly looking down at their cellphones, I am often struck by how people reveal themselves, and how naturally and unguardedly they hold themselves in public. When using the phone, they—we—slip easily in and out of solitudes, gracefully solo and intact. And so there’s a kind of satisfying symmetry in the realization that Tara’s photos are themselves so unselfconscious, natural, and unfiltered—ordinary in gesture, matter-of fact—and that they can give another cellphone user pause.

revealedWe live in a time when it is practically unthinkable to be alone, equipped with devices that ensure that we are not alone or even perceived as loners. Yet Tara’s photos of ordinary non-loners, their public selves caught up in the collective gaze of social media, have a poignancy in their declaration of privacy that speaks to the human condition in ways perhaps more urgently present than earlier pioneers of street photography. And whether she’s geotagged in New York, Bangkok, or Sydney, Tara’s serial extensions of everyday moments allow us to see ourselves enlarged in them, hashtag nofilter, hashtag followme, hashtag reallife.

The result: glints of humanity, hidden in plain sight.

—Raymond Rorke, March 2015


Tara StellaTara Stella is a street photographer living and working in New York City. She grew up in Los Angeles and received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied both photography and ceramics. Today Tara Stella spends most of her time roaming the streets of New York, capturing moments she believes to be beautiful and unique. View more of her online photography, as well as her Instagrams.

Raymond-RorkeRaymond Rorke is a ceramic artist whose professional background includes designing museum exhibitions as well as designing and writing for online communications. With the University of Pennsylvania as his alma mater, he has become, over the years, a Philadelphian who has been lucky enough to teach ceramics, be featured on a Mural Arts mural, and co-edit The Painted Bride Quarterly (with Karen!). Raymond’s ceramic work is exhibited locally and nationally, and is part of this year’s NCECA Biennial, an international juried ceramics exhibition. He also recently co-curated “Pervasive Clay,” an exhibition of contemporary ceramic artists at the University of Pennsylvania.

Published on March 18, 2015 (Click for permalink.)

STARING AT THE SEA by Julianna Foster

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 11, 2014 by thwackAugust 18, 2023

Julianna Foster
STARING AT THE SEA: Digital Photography

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Several years ago I came across a story about a nor’easter that hit a small coastal town.

The morning after the storm, residents of the town reported having seen something they had never experienced before or since—fleeting visions, every one. Strange sightings out at sea, like clouds of smoke rising from the horizon, orbs of light, and unrecognizable objects floating on the water. Yet, as soon as they appeared, they were gone.

But was it ever really there? Or was it simply an illusion? How do you explain the fact that several people reported having seen such different, albeit similar phenomena? I couldn’t get the story out of my head. It stayed with me for days, weeks. My curiosity was piqued.

In the report, one resident tried to explain the peculiarities of what she had seen:

It was early morning, somewhere about 6:30 AM. The brunt of the storm had mostly passed overnight and the weather had calmed. But it was still raining and rather foggy. “You must know, I don’t believe everything I see. And I don’t have problems with my vision—or my mind. I saw what I saw. I can’t explain it, and I don’t need to. Mother Nature works in mysterious ways, and I don’t pretend to know, let alone understand, why things happen the way they do.”

As I read her account, I imagined myself walking on the shore, like her, staring at the sea. There was no separation between the sea and sky; it was all one tone of grey. Then, suddenly, the sea began to swell, and I saw what she saw. This was the moment when the visions formed, constructed and invented—or were they?

My work usually begins in this way, drawn from an existing narrative, story, or text that, for whatever reason, I can’t let go of. The series, Swell, started with that story of the aftermath of a nor’easter, which transformed into a retelling of events as I interpreted them to be. Swell consists of digitally manipulated images—a combination of photographs that I have taken and found. Those that I shot directly are of natural landscapes and architecture as well as hand-made, model-scale, built environments (again, of both architecture and landscape) that are lit, photographed, and digitally manipulated. Through this series, my intention is not to illustrate in a literal sense or to dictate and record the witness version of the experience, but instead to take liberties with a narrative account of an event and reconstruct the outcome, of sorts.

The Images:
1. Swell series, Three Figures I, inkjet print, 46 x 34″, 2014
2. Swell series, Three Figures II, inkjet print, 46 x 34″ 2014
3. Swell series, Iceberg II, inkjet print, 30 x 20″, 2014
4. Swell series, Dark Cloud, inkjet print, 34 x 26″, 2013
5. Swell series, Seascape, inkjet print, 34 x 26″, 2013
6. Swell series, Room I, backlit film, lightbox, 46 x 36”, 2012
7. Swell series, Fireworks, inkjet print, 30 x 20″, 2014
8. Swell series, Moon, newsprint, 30 x 20″, 2014
9. Swell series, Orbs II, backlit film, lightbox, 46 x 34″, 2013


Julianna-FosterJulianna Foster lives in Philadelphia and teaches at The University of the Arts in the Photography Program and MFA Book Arts and Printmaking Department, where she received her MFA in 2006. Foster was an artist member of Vox Populi Gallery in Philadelphia from 2006-2013, where she had four solo exhibitions—In a Vale, From Morning On, Kirkwood, Swell—and a three-person exhibit titled Relic. In addition to her individual ventures, she has collaborated over the years with various artists on projects that include artist multiples, artist books, and series of photographs and videos. Foster was a 2014 Artist in Residence at the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center. Julianna Foster has participated in international group exhibitions in England, Romania, Spain, and, most recently, Korea and Bulgaria, and her work is featured in private collections across the country.

Published on December 11, 2014 (Click for permalink.)

OF PINHOLES & PEEPSHOWS by R.C. Barajas

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 11, 2014 by thwackAugust 18, 2023

R.C. Barajas
OF PINHOLES & PEEPSHOWS: Pinhole Photography

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You can’t return to the days of Polaroids. Not really.

There are modern approximations—crafty mimicry that recalls the once ubiquitous family camera. I like the app Hipstamatic, a high-end photographic fast food that can reproduce the bygone look of analogue photography with the convenience of a cell phone. Then there are the dogged geniuses of The Impossible Project who recently reinvented the defunct self-developing film. But if you grew up during the days of the first Polaroid cameras, those instant snaps became forever entwined with your childhood. Here’s one of me with our cat, and our mother’s handwriting. Typical in our family, the photo was about the cat, not the child:

Lucy-Can't-Wait
Our parents were unsentimental, and discarded the old camera when something smaller and lighter came along. But during the 1960s, theirs was the J66 Polaroid Land Camera, gargantuan by modern standards, with a 14mm f/19 lens (according to the manuals one can still find online). It was a complicated machine compared to the later iconic Polaroid cameras that spit out one photo at a time. The film came on a roll, and the user had not only to move the film through the pressure rollers to start the process, but also had to wrench the protective paper out of the camera to initiate developing. After counting to ten, you opened the camera back, peeled out the photo, and immediately preserved it with careful, even swipes of the peculiarly aromatic fixer tube that came with each roll of film. It was a ritual I reverently watched my mother perform countless times, in slack-jawed admiration. The photographic options of the J66 were streamlined to near point-and-shoot levels, the assumption being that users didn’t know their way around a camera, and didn’t care to. “Learn to hold the camera steady by pressing it against your face,” the manual suggested helpfully.

On my lap now is a family album dated 1961-1965, containing 3 x 4 inch deckled-edged pictures taken with that Polaroid camera. The instant gratification the camera provided meant that it was used often, recording seemingly mundane moments that would otherwise have been forgotten. I see not only the faces and stuff of our childhoods, but a shocking revelation that the house was once tastefully, even sparsely furnished, showing clean lines long since obscured behind lean-to bookshelves, walls over-populated with pictures, and thickets of knickknacks. Even the oak floors were visible—before the ’70s buried them in wall-to-wall. Many things haven’t budged in all this time. When the everyday is photographed and archived—and then fifty years pass—the frozen scenes acquire a gravitas they lacked at the moment.

The time is nearing, after almost sixty years, when the house will no longer be ours. I find myself compelled to photograph and archive this place that retains so much history, so many pieces of our lives in the very walls and wood. My three siblings and I ran amok here, grew up, moved out and in many times. Our parents grew old here. Grandma died in the cottage behind the house, and Dad in the living room. Our mother is old, so old she wanders in her mind and forgets that her husband died over a year ago. She fears that he won’t fit next to her in the narrow hospital bed that replaced the sagging king-sized one in their room at the top of the stairs. How do I memorialize this house, these people? It is a place where change had happened reluctantly or not at all, and now irrevocable change is looming. For now, at least, some change is held at bay: drink time is still four o’clock, and so it will be until none of us come here anymore.

And so I have taken to photographing in a manner antithetical to the lickety-split days of modern documentation. I am using pinhole cameras that I make myself. The basics of a pinhole camera are simple: There is a container (a box, or can, or other such empty enclosed space). There is a tiny hole to let in light, and something to cover it when you wish to prevent light from entering. Finally, there is the photo-sensitive surface—paper or film—placed inside the container. The Polaroid J66 took snapshots in a fraction of a second. The exposures I make must, by nature of the pinhole’s technology, sometimes take as long as forty-eight hours. Because I am looking back over extended, stretched time, it seems fitting that snapshots should give way to the long, stretched exposures afforded by a pinhole. Time, as we experience it, is fickle. I am slowing things down, and breathing in and out thousands of times as one simple latent image evolves.

I set my cameras around the house, beginning each exposure by peeling off the black tape from the pinhole. A camera watches, unmoving, spying for as long as I allow it. It sees the light and dark and begins to gather the two, pulling them in, creating tonal ranges, drawing the lines and curves of the vista within its angle of view. People can go about their business, might even stop and stare, but they pass too quickly to register. Not even a ghost of them remains—unless it is my mother, who sits in her chair for hours on end these days. Only the still and the illuminated will be laid down on the emulsion.

I do not tidy the clutter of the house or clean off the dust. Beyond clearing a space for the camera, I leave things be. The results show the inherent distortions and sometimes unpredictable occurrences of pinhole photography, a scene strewn with blinding highlights and murky shadows as the sun comes and goes and returns again outside the windows, and the lights of the inside are turned on and off in their normal course. The images are like a day’s worth of security camera footage, condensed into a single frame.

I’ll do this until I can’t anymore: choose a spot, and with a giddy sense of reverence, reveal the pinhole and walk away to go about my business. “Go ahead,” I murmur. “Do your thing.”

The Images:
1. Entryway, silver gelatin print from 5 x 7″ paper negative, 2014
2. Coat Closet, silver gelatin print from 5 x 7″ paper negative, 2014
3. Living Room, silver gelatin print from 5 x 7″ paper negative, 2014
4. Living Room Piano, silver gelatin print from 5 x 7″ paper negative, 2014
5. From the Top of the Stairs, silver gelatin print from 5 x 7″ paper negative, 2014
6. Austen’s Room, silver gelatin print from 5 x 7″ paper negative, 2014
7. Mom’s Side of the Bed, silver gelatin print from 5 x 7″ paper negative, 2014
8. Dad’s Side of the Bed, silver gelatin print from 5 x 7″ paper negative, 2014


R.C.Barajas_PhotoR.C. Barajas was born in Stanford, California. She attended college, skipping from UC Berkeley to College of Marin to San Francisco State like a stone across a pond. She eventually garnered a degree in art. For ten years, she worked as a goldsmith. While living in Colombia in the early ’90s, she began writing nonfiction and short stories, and has published in magazines and newspapers on a variety of topics. The uneasy intersection of art and writing is what excites her most. Russell currently lives in Arlington, Virginia, with her husband, three sons, and two or three dogs. Her short story “You Were Going to Tell Me” appears in Cleaver’s Issue No. 2.

Published on December 11, 2014 (Click for permalink.)

INSIDE REX by Mimi Oritsky

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 11, 2014 by thwackAugust 18, 2023

Mimi Oritsky
INSIDE REX: Oil on Linen

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I was born in a small town sixty miles northwest of Philadelphia, called Reading. It was an industrial city on the Schuylkill River, full of brown-brick factories and heavy gambling with lots of strip joints. It usually appeared dark with silvery smoke in the air.

Fine art and culture were not nearly as popular there as building automobiles, shooting squirrels, and drinking Old Reading Beer. However, the town was surrounded by mountains and farmlands, and this landscape was filled with cornfields, milk cows, and small herds of sheep. It all appeared to me much lighter and more colorful.

Twenty years later the town’s industry stopped, and my personal gaze turned to the river, which had sustained generations of factory workers, in the hope of illustrating their livelihoods.

My mother, Marcia Sarna, went to school in Philadelphia and went on to become an illustrator for Harper’s Bazaar until the end of WWII. My early exposure to art and design was in the home, and also inside the studio of my mother’s sculptor friend. Here we spent time rubbing 100-year-old gravestones with charcoal. This was my first experience with the creative process. As a four-and-a-half-year-old, I was taken by my father on an airplane to his job in New York City. After turning green and throwing up, I was in awe of being above the land—looking down on Berks County, Manayunk, Newark, and eventually the Statue of Liberty. At six I experienced New York City at ground level; everything I saw there remains with me to this day.

My working process involves the quality of airspace and how it can be translated into paint. While drawing the elements from above, I am aware of how we lose eye-level perspective and normal angles. These losses force me to explore space, scale, and time. In moving away from the aerial sense of perspective, but remaining above the view, I watch the air as it is contained within its predefined spatial parameters. When I am moving fast, as on a moving train, the elements seem to have a sense of urgency, a desire to catch up, within the vast stillness of the airspace.

The Inside Rex series of rock and tree debris is inspired by a random and scattered landscape along Rex Avenue, near my neighborhood in Philadelphia. In this sense, I come to terms with my environment to create a space organized by light and a surface marked by the rhythm of moving air.

 

The Images:
#1: Inside Rex #1, 2014, oil on linen, 14 x 14″
#2: Inside Rex #2, 2014, oil on linen, 14 x 14″
#3: Inside Rex #3, 2014, oil on linen, 14 x 14″
#4: Inside Rex #4, 2014, oil on linen, 14 x 14″
#5: Inside Rex #5, 2014, oil on linen, 14 x 14″
#6: Inside Rex #6, 2014, oil on linen, 14 x 14″