Liz James Artscene

HAMLET IN CLINTONVILLE

2011-05-24T13:32:00.006-04:00

DIRECTED (yes, elegantly and sparely) BY RICHARD ALBERT,
William Shakespeare's HAMLET, PRINCE OF DENMARK, will trod the boards at Columbus Civic Theatre, 3837 Indianola Avenue,on Thursdays, Fridays,Saturdays,thru June eleventh. BEN GORMAN is slightly short of stature-- but not of talent. His Hamlet is played with clarity, power, and appropriate understatement. Of course,the script is good too! Nobody "saws the air" Lighting and sets are minimal. The costumes are understated yet their hues suggest medieval gloom. Each player, even to the grave digger, speaks with authority.-- They know their places well. Again: the plays the thing, and it closes June eleventh

COOL FOR COLE, as in Cole Porter,should be delicious and intense.--Like the hyped up times Cole lived in! COLE runs from June 30 to July 23.
CALL 447- PLAY . Columbus Civic Theater resembles a water logged jewel box. It's at 3837 Indianola Avenue, and there is ample parking. Know your places well.

ART WITH AN ATTITUDE,: Don RICE,

2011-01-12T13:27:00.013-05:00

DON RICE,-- press man,bibliophile, art lover,author,and scholar,-- has made possible a highly attractive and informative exhibit. ART WITH AN ATTITUDE will show through January 18at First Unitarian Church. In "ATTITUDE" the printed covers of underground magazines from the Sixties have been neatly , professionally, hung or rather strung, on a wire which serves, adroitly, as kind of a poly sci clothesline! The colors (on the suspended covers} are gorgeous . They re bright, clear, unadulterated,
yet subtle. There is something "Asian" about the simplicity of the images. And,after all, the ancient Chinese have solid histories as designers and print makers --On the whole these newsheet covers are as American
as Ohio pumpkin pie-- drive the chevy to the levy. . . The subjects of Feminism, Peace, Antiwar Struggles,s, BoyCots,Sit Ins-whatever--the social messages are clear, yet abstracted, and the designs and hues are gorgeous. There are many names and titles. Go see, remember. I thought I saw Joe McCarthy last night. as live as you and me--Believe me, Senator, Betty Friedan was no Sarah Palin and
hey time is but a stream I go a wishing in and if it's oil it will float..
*Snowed in and lost in a mass media blizzard Ill live to write another day --Whatever your politics, you'll find Art with An Attitude, to be
an amalgam of artists and printmakers. Intelligent and beautiful The colors and shapes glow.
Don Rice is the author of ART WITH AN ATTITUDE: The Golden Age of the Underground Press, 1960a thru 1970s. His exhibit is vital; it has a strong constitution.

2011-01-12T13:14:00.000-05:00

SEEING RED

2010-11-16T13:49:00.009-05:00

She's here! The poet's best friend, Autumn! She's dancing on a real cool wind. She leaps, ripping open her notebook!--The pages fly! Her red skirt flutters. It flies, she flies! I want my words to fly, the way I want my fatigue and my anger and my vhronic illness to fly!-- Away!, away away! I want the poet Shelley to fly on the West Wind and help me out! But, he's dead, and so are the other Romantics . (Except me, of course. I wanted to write an article and call it Seeing Red.(!) I wanted to tell everyone to see RON ANDERSON'S wonderful show at KIACA. This masterful CCAD instructor has created marvelous large paintings of contemporary "ladies of the night" in gold and deep red . Yes, they are decorative, "Period," and illustrative, --Yet, they are evidence of Anderson's control over his media, and they are very, very good.
The old/new Masters hang out at KIACA Gallery, and one of them is the Maestro himself, TALLE BAMAZE, who hales from Togo Land and New York!. Can Bamaze paint? Can red leaves fly?
MORE AUTUMN MAGIC IS BLOWIN ON THE WIND:
Memories, red leaves, red dance skirts. . . RED LIGHT, RED LETTER. DANCES OF REDEMPTION This choreography by MARIAH LAYNE FRENCH smouldered at COLUMBUS DANCE THEATRE 592 East Main Street during August,2010. The subject was not roses, but prostitution and kidnapping, and the settings --which are universal, included Col
lumbus, Ohio, and police reports and news items.-- The choreography is convincing, yes, "engaged" and was beautifully danced. It (the choreography)concerns the CRIME of prostitution. It includes the spoken and printed word and appropriate sound effects.

NEW SCENE FOR THE ARTSCENE

2010-01-07T14:03:00.005-05:00

THURSDAY January 7, 2010!--A new year! Ive been sick, but I'm still writing: I intend to go on writing. . .

Snow. . . Ohio-Michigan-Indiana-snow. The white insinuates itself into everything. . . this cold coffee, the torn paper in the wastebasket. . . my white anklets. . . I won't freeze to death if I keep my hand moving on the keyboard. I can't actually see my breath but I pretend I do. . . I wonder if there is snow in Silver Spring Md., and if my sister Chris is writing about snow. I miss her too much. (Don't go there, Liz, you'll feel worse. . .)

The snow seeped into the TV last night while I stayed up late, watching RASPUTIN as played by LIONEL BARRYMORE. -- JOHN BARRYMORE, whom my mother recalled from her youth, played Prince Youssepof -- Well, he (Barrymore) certainly played the Russian guy who killed Rasputin -- and LIONEL BARRYMORE -- with a princely flourish, played "The Holy Devil," GREGORY RASPUTIN himself.

Black and white images oozed into the Ohio snow fields while I slept. . . My words caught on the naked berry bushes. . . My father owned too many books about the Russian Revolution, and I read them when I was far too young. -- I am a marked woman.

WINDBLOWN : Gusts of Autumn Art!

2009-10-21T12:15:00.007-04:00

GO GO GO! IT WILL BE FANTASTIC.

LEON APPLEBAUM will visit his major exhibition at HAWK GALLERIES, 162 East Main, on October 24, 11 to 5 pm and October 25, 1 to 4 pm. This artist's work is FIRST CLASS and NOW! He's been working glass over thirty years. His post card image suggests two big GLASS truck tires (or maybe inner tubes) conjoined by glass and floating in space! -- Way to go Tom, it's at your place I once saw TAGLIPIETRA himself working in glass!

PASTELLY & ROMANTIC, -- Vivid, child-spirited watercolors by ALICE CARPENTER will show at SHARON WEISS, 20 East Lincoln, at the November HOP and onward. Pre-images suggest "youthful, spritly, thought provoking."

BERNIECE KOFF WILL SHOW her fabulous, fabulous, flowers -- at least one! -- in PATTERNS IN PAINT at THE LYLE, 615 East Town, to November 18. -- LYLE is a delight, a gorgeous, eclectic, much needed space, an up-to-date new old home! And Koff continues to dare -- in colors and shapes! She has a splendid original way of using her compositional space!

STARRING ALICE SCHILLE: She was independent, often congenial, always keen and engaged -- a sometimes teacher to boot! AND SHE HAD STYLE! She painted independently and often alone and faraway. A world traveler in a tentative era for women. She was a gracious, determined woman who possessed an adventurous spirit and quiet technical ability. Yet, she returned yearly, well, almost yearly, to teach and to paint in Columbus. As curated by JAMES M KENY of KENY GALLERY (in German Village, Columbus, Ohio) the exhibit features Schille's work from 1902 to 1914. -- We all know what dislodged the European sojourns of U.S. artists from 1914 to 1917! During her career Schille painted -- as did her "ancestor," Mary Cassatt -- Dutch-clad toddlers; she captured desert scenes, painted dignified portraits, and solemn donkeys. Highly skilled at drawing, she could render horses, camels, and run-abouts. Her colors glowed; they did not blaze. She was often a woman alone painting outdoors, plein air. She understood flowers, gardens, and high fashion. What to wear for brunch, outdoors, with wicker chairs. She was always learning and practicing. You must see her work for yourselves in ALICE SCHILLE, THE EARLY YEARS, 1902-1914. THE SCHUMACHER is on the Fourth Floor Library at CAPITAL UNIVERSITY, College & Main in Columbus.

ALSO FROM KENY TO COLUMBUS: IN the Schumacher Show Case, works of the techno poetic MICHAEL McEWAN. McEWAN, as was SCHILLE, is a much admired teacher and a very substantial painter. -- I can't wait to see the new works. McEwan knows how to paint, and his students consider themselves lucky!

DOROTHY GILL BARNES in a fresh tradition of earliest Ohio -- combines with talents of BLAIR DAVIS and ADAM BRADLEY -- to offer a major sculpture presentation: GENERATIONS: MARKS IN TIME opens October 22, 6 to 8 pm, in the new PEGGY McCONNELL ART CENTER OF WORTHINGTON, 160 West Dublin Granville Road. Everything in Gill Barnes' work uses material from the Olentangy River Flood Plain. Way to go!

SEPTEMBER FIREWORKS! (IN ART!)

2009-09-18T10:06:00.005-04:00

ART ON FIRE! SEPTEMBER ART SPARKS from LIZ: A PANOPLY!
Written on September 18, 2009.

-- In case you're interested, and I know you are: AREO PROSE GROUP will meet on OCTOBER 15, 2:30 pm,at AREOPAGITCA BOOK STORE. (Third Thursday) -- LIZ, that's me, plans to discuss literature about Florence Harding and her husband, President Warren G. Harding of Marion, Ohio. -- YOU ARE INVITED. Our sessions always include time for conversation and the sharing of work. Rebecca Rutledge, AREO proprietor, kindly makes tea. coffee, and cookies, available.

ART DANCES; DANCE WITH ART: And, be sure to dance around the art fires burning in the Columbus area! -- which includes Worthington, Upper Arlington, Grandview, and adjacent areas.

TO October 17 at SCHUMACHER GALLERY: LEE & GRANT. This exhibition features selections from the Civil War Collection of the Motts Military Museum, Groveport, Ohio, and was organized by the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond, Virginia. It shows at Capital University Fourth Floor Library, Monday--Saturday, 1 to 5 pm. Worthy of at least an hour.

THE OHIO CRAFT MUSEUM, 1665 West Fifth Avenue, presents CONVERSATIONS IN FABRIC as curated by Linda Fowler and Tracy Rieger. The post card image, by Susan She, should tweak everyone's curiosity!

FROM THE MARVELOUS KENY GALLERY TO SCHUMACHER: The One the only ALICE SCHILLE: THE EARLY YEARS 1902-1914. Without ALICE SCHILLE -- traveler, recorder of journeys, teacher, painter extraordinary, -- the art lights in Columbus would dim considerably. The reception for the Schumacher exhibition will be Friday November 13, 5 to 7:30 pm. The exhibit opens October 27 and runs to December 5. Aren't we lucky?

MICHAEL McEWAN's DIVERSE LANDSCAPES will show at the marvelous Keny Galleries through October 5, 2009. McEwan's art, glowing depictions of the Ohio countryside -- including Hoover Dam -- is, well, tranquil yet glowing. This artist understands: the manipulation of oil paint, the natural world, and light. He has "the gift to paint simple." -- So what else could be necessary? KENY GALLERY is at 300 East Beck Street in the German Village section of Columbus.

In the CONCOURSE GALLERY to October 23 work inspired by Italy. Everything at CONCOURSE -- which is located in the (UPPER ARLINGTON) Municipal Services Center 1600 Tremont -- is always first class. Whenever I'm able, I attend Concourse Openings which are fabulous and yummy and provide good music. -- A fabulous space with art that's always spanking new!

THE ART HOUSE IS ON FIRE! CHIHULY XIV opens October 2 at the beautiful HAWK GALLERY 153 East Main Street. Call 614-225-9595 to reserve a spot at the opening. CHIHULY is the Glass Master without compare, and he understand public art.

MAHAN, MAHAN: MAHAN Gallery is so cool it's hot in fact almost beyond NOW, it's THE NOW ART SPOT. FRESH MEAT will show there, 717 North High, until September 26. The title says it all, or provokes all. Again, 717 North High.

At 2731 Innes Road, WOODSCAPE ART STUDIO, JERRY TOLLIFSON's art is solid. In more ways than one. His sculptures have even been controversial! The exhibit is titled SYSTEMS OF PARADOX, and can be viewed 2 pm to 6 pm on September 20, 27, or October 4 and 11.

CURTIS GOLDSTEIN will show at the Ohio State University Faculty Club to October 23, and this guy is good. He can paint anything; his scapes can't be beat. We wish him luck and think he is an A#1 artist. In November and December at the Faculty Club: ELAINE FREEMAN, JUDITH HAZEN, ANASTASIA HOROWITZ, BECKY TAFT. Again, I'm familiar with the work of these artists and they are above first rate! The spirit of Anita Loos will hover.

UP AT RGBLIV, where art is always explosive and that's good, the 20th Anniversary juried Exhibition will be fabulous.

LUC TUYMANS OPENS AT THE WEX September 17. Members get in free, general public $5. It's a steal. Find out more at wexarts.org or call 614-292-3535.

The COLUMBUS CENTER FOR PAPER AND BOOK ARTS at EUROPEAN PAPERS will present 25 artists who will work on forms, as in dress dummy forms! October 3, 3 to 5:00 pm, meet the show artists at an Autumn Open House.

Last and far far from least, RICCARDO DAVENPORT, A 25 YEAR RETROSPECTIVE, shows at KIACA GALLERY to October 25 with an artist's talk on October 11, 3 to 4 pm. Be there. Talle Bamazi, artist and director at KIACA is a story in himself. As a painter he's powerful and as a raconteur, unbeatable.

-- I love looking at Art in THE RHODES STATE OFFICE TOWER LOBBY, and until September 30, you can see COLUMBUS: THE CROSSROADS OF OHIO, a don't-miss! I met some of the fabulous artists who are showing there, when I attended the Columbus Free Press Second Saturday Salon at Editor/Author Bob Fitrakis' historic 1900 mansion on East Broad. The house is an historic piece of art, and Fitrakis regaled me with tales which included that Eugene Debs adored the work of poet Whitcomb Riley.

COME HEAR LIZ AND BE A SUPPORTIVE PRESENCE On October 15 at AREOPAGITICA, 3510 North High. I will include James Wright's fantastic poems about Marion, Ohio, the locust trees, and the Hardings, -- Florence and "Warn" -- with whom at one non-smoke-filled time, my father's aunts played croquet. My mother often told me, "When I was growing up my foks talked about THEM: I can remember, your Grandma and Grandpa would say the Hardings did this, the Hardings did that," meaning the Hardings represented the apex of style and fashion, and people imitated them. -- Among the present generation of my family, however, Republicans are few and far between! -- And President Grant is looking better and better!

JOHN DONNELLY AT MARCIA'S!

2009-08-26T13:33:00.006-04:00

WHIMSICAL RHYTHMS! -- JOHN DONNELLY, Professor of Art, a much exhibited artist, has long been fascinated the concepts of beauty,art, -- and beauty's stereotypes! His vibrant paintings will show at MARCIA EVANS Art Consultant and Gallery thru October.

Donelly likes, but does not over-use, tree greens and bright reds. His aesthetic taste ranges from The Venus of Willendorf -- to Tinker Bell in Peter Pan -- to Marilyn Monroe, "MM," and "JFK," John Fizgerald Kennedy! John has a deep respect for the great white whale, Moby Dick. -- In fact, Melville's book, especially Father Maple's sermon and the great white whale itself, have been major inspirations for this audacious, -- sometimes in your face -- artist!

Again, Donnelly's work manages to be "catchy," -- that's my description.
At the same time it falls between Pop and Conceptual boundaries -- minimal and fun! John can paint abstracts which are original, complex, and very attractive. He understands layering and over-and-under painting and mixed media -- all that good stuff! When Marcia Evans said she had web images available, I was quite pleased.

Donnelly teaches drawing and painting at Mount Vernon Nazarene University, and, not long ago, won the Frey Award. Among places other than galleries, he enjoys showing his work in upscale restaurants. At Rosendale's his Tinkerbell, as in Peter Pan, evokes much popular commentary.
Donnelly loves Italy and manages to study and paint there part of the time, and he is a successful portrait painter.

MARCIA EVANS is at 8 East Lincoln where everything is always elegant and cutting edge. Cool.

PS. There is an ARTIST'S RECEPTION on Saturday, September 5, from 4 to 7 pm at the gallery. -- See ya!

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BEAUTIFUL 'SCAPES at "SHARON'S!";

2009-08-07T13:56:00.007-04:00

BETWEEN TWO TREES is a serene, luminous, and unpretentious exhibit of medium-to-small landscapes, nearly all of them inspired by the Ohio countryside, nearly all of them painted in watercolor-with-oil. The exhibit can be seen at the lovely Sharon Weiss Gallery in the Short North District of Columbus, Ohio.

The artist, ELAINE FREEMAN, is the lyrical creator of these "canvasses" which glow, like small bonfires, campfire coals, in soft rich colors. --Freeman is an astute colorist, and an aware minimalist! Her shapes and her subtle power-hues exemplify the dictum: "LESS IS MORE." Her titles express her "eye" for the rural and the proximate. She lives near Hover Dam. Her titles reveal her "provenance" . . . NORTH OF BUCYRUS; BANDONED FARM; LAKESIDE SUNSET . . . MARSH DREAMS depicts "the end of a road in New Albany, between two subdivisions" . . . OXBOW VISTA, on pastel and Wallis paper, reveals -- with simplicity -- a road in Delaware County. Near-by hangs THE WOODS AT OXBOW . . . "The trees tell their story," Freeman writes, "standing there guarding the road from Alum Creek."

ROSES IN WINTER, a departure from the "scapes", is a successful abstract. The ugly brown roses, starkly "blossom-less", stand tall and proud in an invisible Ohio winter that makes us shudder. --This painting takes place in our imaginations. Freeman is versatile. She is one of the most killed portraitists around. --Yet, ROSES, an abstraction, reveals a "Cold" in which we recognize the raw and unadorned roses of abandoned ditches, fields, and gardens.

-- Go, see, buy. This artist is the master of understatement. If she has a weakness it may be her tendency to over-simplify. In general, I think not. FREEMAN's work is pleasing and engaging to say the least. Her exhibition list as well as her educational vitae are impressive. BETWEEN TWO TREES will show at "Sharon's" thru August 2009. In NOVEMBER Freeman will have paintings at The O.S.U. FACULTY CLUB.

The versatile and spectacular -- I said it and I'm glad -- VIKI BLINN will show at SHARON WEISS in SEPTEMBER. I'll be there with bells!

THE ART SCENE IN COLUMBUS IS JUMPIN' OFF THE MAP! AGAIN: BETWEEN TWO TREES shows at Sharon Weiss Gallery, 20 E. Lincoln, thru August 30. (614-291-5683). Freeman will exhibit at the OSU Faculty Club in November. . . "It was the purple iris I drew in kindergarten that piqued my early interest in art and that image remains a guiding star. . . Sun from my twelve years in California provides the light. Color, light, and shape are the major elements of my art . . . " -- Artist's statement by Elaine Freeman.

-- And aren't we lucky!

MULLEN at LINDSAY. LIZ AT COMFEST.

2009-06-25T22:10:00.004-04:00

HURRY, hurry, hurry! Better than coney islands and as hot as electronic rock at COMFEST, KARL MULLEN'S Outsider paintings will shimmy on the walls at Lindsay Gallery 986 North High, at least thru July 4 and maybe longer.

The soft spoken artist hails from Dublin -- not Dublin Ohio -- and is now a resident of Pittsburg where he has been honored by several major awards and grants. Luckily for us, his unusual paintings visit Lindsay Gallery once in a while, once in a green moon I am tempted to say.

For twenty years Mullen has shown in Canada, Ireland and the U.K, and his weird dreamlike paintings -- yes,they are representative -- and narrative -- often present crudely drawn personae. Like, like leprechauns and -- first graders' drawings! The guy knows literature and old books; sometimes his odd figures appear against pages of ancient tomes. He says his dreams are important to him -- I asked him -- and if you like, off beat skilled and original. KARL MULLEN is the guy! (he uses, or he has been known to employ, such weird "media" as lamp soot, walnut oil, street soot, sumi ink, you name it.) His musical band has just the right poom and oom, we hope he comes back soon. Go, see, buy!

P.S. I'll be reading with some terrific poets on Saturday night -- check the schedule -- at COMFEST, I think in the Arts Tent. Check the schedule. It's almost midnight and my eyes are giving out! -- Visit Lindsay Gallery and see Karl Mullens "Primitive", "Dream Like" art He's a quiet, one man COMFEST!!

JUNE 2009 BUSTS OUT WITH ART!

2009-06-04T11:12:00.022-04:00

FIRST DAY for the COLUMBUS ARTS FESTIVAL, this time near the one, the only Columbus Museum of Art!--I'm going down there tonight because Thursday is always a special night,and George Tooker will be there! (I hope we're brave enough to negotiate that Arts Festival traffic!)

MICHAEL BAUZA PhD.,will read his poetry at AREOPAGITICA BOOKS at 7:30pm on June 26 He'll read WORD MUSIC! (my title.) Bauza's newest work is based, or rather undergirded, by his attentive love for chamber music, -- even though much of his writing is not ABOUT chamber music! The writer holds a PhD in chemistry and works at Chemical Abstracts. This should be a sophisticated and unusual evening. There is always an open reading at AREO, 3510 N. High, and the imposing ghost of JOHN MILTON is usually hovering around the stacks, and the literary canine, Townsend, keeps watch on the readings and readers.

MORE THAN ARTSPARKS: TAMARA JAEGER's tall, unusual, and pleasingly wacky wood sculptures -- SELECTED ASSEMBLAGES -- will show at the impeccably lovely KENY GALLERY, 300 East Beck, thru JUNE 26. This show is a don't miss because it is substantial and quite unusual. -- Walking thru the exhibit this writer felt that she was wandering in a dream forest where she met characters from fantastical fairy tale books!! Many of the assemblages are taller than real people, and their flat wooden bodies have been painted in flat primary colors -- which are never dull, even when they don't shine!

JULIA McLEMORE's RECENT FLORAL PHOTOGRAMS are an absolute delight! These BIG flowers, and parts of flowers, are -- well, mind blowing, in that their design and color come straight from the natural world! McLemores artist's statement generously explains her process, but not the surprise that her works give to beholders. McLemore's work, with Jaeger's, will be on exhibit at KENY thru June 26. More information and images at www.kenygalleries.com

ERNEST LOCKRIDGE is a painters' painter. That is, he is agile at painting technique! -- Yet,the end results are not at all conventional. Color and imagination are the wellsprings of his work! Lockridge's CONVERGENCE shows at the CCPBA Gallery at European Papers, 539 East Town Street, until August 29.

The exhibit includes two large and striking images of Monarch butterflies who pause and fly with accuracy and elan! They're big! They're identifiable at a distance, and they remind us that we,as earthlings, stand at a "convergence" at which earth is in peril. (My interpretation.) Lockridge is a retired professor of literature; he taught at Yale and at the Ohio State University. The titles of his paintings reveal the liveliness and the variety of subjects of his paintings,some of which are rich with glimpses of a trip to Iceland.

TITLES: Aphrodite; The River Goddess, Boann; Force of Nature; Penelope; Saffron Robe; Proteus Rising from the Sea. -- You can find more images and info at www.ernestlockridge.net. I believe Lockridge's reputation as an artist will grow as time passes. He is original and his work has substance.

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LISA HALL: POET WITH A PALETTE!

2009-04-10T11:14:00.006-04:00

What gorgeous surprises! On a recent Sunday when I needed an art infusion, I found not only a delicious art exhibit, but a gallery space which was new to me! CATERINA Ltd., 571 South Third Street in German Village, Columbus, Ohio, is a tall historical old German Village building. Inside it you'll find color-full-state-of-the-art-pottery and kitchen-ware, and many imported objects which are to die for. --Yet, on the third floor you'll find a bonafide and spacious art gallery! --Caterina Gallery, of course!

HIGH SPIRITED, an exhibit of LISA HALL's medium to large size oil paintings will show at CATERINA through May 15, and they are quite good, quite pleasing, and quite original in an understated kind of way.

In 2008 Lisa and her husband rode motorcycles through the Alps, and the artist stopped to capture the mountainous and pastoral countryside. --Yes, you'll find a small white church nestled in one green mountain valley, and you'll see gorgeous snows and meadows! --You'll find that Hall knows how to "blow you away" with warm (and cool) muted colors! --She's a genius at thickly applied brush strokes --she may use a palette knife, I forgot to ask! --And she understands texture.

Her yellow sun rays dance. The greens, blues, and lavenders she harvests from the natural world become gentle choreography. Some of her landscapes resemble weavings. --Look closely, look from far away!

On TOP OF THE WORLD, the painting which became Hall's post card image, is the closest the artist comes to pure abstraction in this exhibit which is, despite my reluctance to label, "an example of abstractionism with just enough hard edge." The artist has managed to be derivative without being passé. To conclude: when you see Hall's poetic mountain-scapes "you'll want to go there." --These are definitely paintings to live with.

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In the hall SUSAN ASTLEFORDS's glorious blossoms made me think of Shakespeare's sonnets -- his birthday is in April,-- and DAVID PHALEN's photographs are first rate. --Especially the warm and friendly bar scene in Wales. --I'm Welsh-American so I may be prejudiced, but Phalen is darn good. --I'm darn glad I discovered CATERINA!

POETRY AT THE RIFFE!

2009-03-27T09:15:00.004-04:00

DEAR READERS: March 27, 2009 I'm writing from a not so good space in illness, but I want you to know about an event at the Verne Riffe Center Gallery, 77 S. High St., on Sunday, March 29 at two p.m. --- Maybe I'll be there, maybe not.

MIMI CHENFELD, FRED ANDRLE, WIlLIAM FABRYCKI, (with me, Liz!) are THE UMBRELLA POETS OF COLUMBUS, and they will give a reading honoring poetry and the visual arts. DAVID FRANCIS SMITH and CRAIG MCVAY will be guest poets. The current RIFFE GALLERY exhibit is Visual Dialogues, which presents art from Germany and Ohio.

Here's my prosaic offering: (abstractions exist on their own merit, but I boldly let these tell short short prose poems to me!)

I.
MY FEELINGS ASSUME COLORS AND SHAPES
when I look at Green #5 by Jana Morgenstern!
Behold: Circles, tubes, abdominal curves, the intestines
of a gorgeous April.
I'm searching for spring! --- I'll love stepping barefoot!
Ah, they are so green, these curves and shapes of art.
As I stand here writing, I can taste spearmmint!

************

II.
BLACK #7 BY DETLEF SCHWEIGER
is my Dresden Ink Blot dress! --- It's so NOW!
Cut on the bias from a piece of charcoal!
Look, I'm a cold-hot-charcoal-piece-of-fabric
when I slip it on.
Years ago, my first art teacher, Miss Josephine Lee,
in Fostoria, Ohio, taught me about
dyeing Queen Ann's Lace, taught me
about Coco Chanel's little black dress.
Taught me how to use my imagination!
And so, today, I muse, "I'll write some
designer lines for Black # 7 by Detlef Schweiger.
I'll tape a map of Ohio to my left shoulder
and locate the Riffe Center in Columbus, Ohio!
--- And look, --- an orange dagger, a good luck patch!
And look, I can see haute couture against mottled snow!
Voila! I can feel stylish and chic
and do anything I want to, and go where I want to go
in my little BLACK #7 ULTRA DRESS!"

Here are some more of the abstractions in the Visual Dialogues exhibit. Click on each image to see a larger version.

GLORIES: VIVIAN PITMAN AT LINDSAY

2009-03-05T11:40:00.014-05:00

Wearing elegant, yet simple, Africa-print dresses and matching head wraps, Vivian Pitman and her mother, the artist Barbara Thomas, welcomed guests to their Lindsay Gallery Opening on Friday, February 27. It was a gala evening. Guests and glasses sparkled. Vivian's unique and bright paintings almost jumped off the wall, and so did the more sedate renderings of her mother. All of the small, puppet-like dolls seemed to breathe, even though they are cartoon-ish and stout and dance without strings!

When I asked Pitman what her dolls were made of, she replied, "clay. And anything I need to use and find to use."

Pitman is a self taught artist. She seems to dance, like a break dancer, between colors, words, and "schools" of art. Her liveliness surpasses the terms "primitive" or "authentic." She is unafraid to use bright reds, greens, yellows, purples. She knows how to create textures and surfaces, and she will not reveal her secret: how she uses sand in her creations.

Her composition -- sometimes elementary, sometimes random -- is always effective. Expressive. As in Expressionist! In THE DEATH OF LINCOLN, Pitman, at her most elementary, has depicted the martyred President as resting, his corpse strangely tube-shaped, on bright grass surrounded by a color guard in bright yellow shirts! The crudely painted soldiers are firing a salute, "as they would for a President," Pitman said. An encirclement of creatures that resemble merry go round horses -- or reindeer -- surrounds the scene. And everything dances together. --As I recall, this is a scene in which a grotesque blood red Bird of Death is veering.-- A Pitman may be child-like, but it is rarely, or ever, "cute."

Vivian employs words; most of her paintings include titles or phrases. You'll find an ALPHABET OF SLAVERY: "A is for African, torn from his home. B is the bloodhound to catch all that roam. C is the cotton plant. . ."

One of the small stout three-D puppet-like dolls represents "Eta Moten, singer, actress, hailed as a pioneer for black actresses."--I had to look her up!-- Pitman "saw Moten once in a movie." And many remarkable personages will be seen at this Lindsay show. You will learn much. For example, Virgina Hamilton, who wrote books for young people, is represented.

The slogan,"Only Love Can Drive Out Hate" is visible. So is a heart wrenching Klan Whipping, and a Lynching, and the admonition "KKK. Leave the negro alone!" (in which blood drips from the white man's club!) Gazing at these grotesque depictions we are reminded of the ferocity of anarchist posters that blossomed before and between World War I and II. They said it like it was.

Pitman celebrates history and narrative in a unique way, and she is, indeed, worthy of the title, Griot. History bearer and tale teller. Lincoln, Martin Luther King, yes, and nearly life-sized President Barak Obama, are much in evidence. In one painting the wonderful young President, in profile, wearing a classy green sweater -- I just know it's cashmere -- looks admiringly at a recognizable, if stout, Martin Luther King. They are both happy because Barak Obama has fulfilled The Dream. A wide Stars and Stripes provides a background for the two gifted leaders. In one painting Obama-as-Hero seems to have morphed into Spider Man!

OOOPS! One of Pitman's most outre subjects, unique but not offensive, depicts women sitting at a long table, similar to that in the legendary Last Supper. However,Pitman's "supper" presents, not traditional disciples of Jesus, but women who are squirting breast milk at each other! Pitman said this painting was inspired by Women Who Earn Money by Selling Their Own Milk!

IN OUR TELEPHONE INTERVIEW Pitman revealed that she works part time, is a Christian who loves her church, and that her art career started when she began making ladies hats and selling them. Her mother, Barbara Thomas, a strong yet more conventional artist, has always encouraged Vivian.

About her own art Pitman said, "it's kind of a gift, like a talent for throwing a baseball. You're born with it, but you have to practice. I'm still learning."

She added, "I'm patient and strong, and I can work hard." Pitman likes to listen to jazz and all kinds of music. She is not immune to the power of dreams. And she is wonderfully proud of her sister, the novelist GWANDINE THURMAN who recently published ETHIOPIAN PRINCESS. (see www.kingdomnovels.com.)

Pitman is "engaged" or engagee as the French used to say about socially concerned artists. She was definitely not born with a gold paint brush in her hand. In fact, Duff Lindsay, gallery owner and curator, first discovered Pitman through a contact at The Mid-Ohio Food Bank.

The current exhibition reveals a wide sweep of concerns and subjects, which, like the proverbial maiden in a fairy tale, Vivian Pitman has woven into a mythical assemblage of paintings, dolls, and sculptures.

Click on each image to see a larger version. Then click on the back arrow to return to this blog.

Lindsay Gallery is located at 986 North High in Columbus, Ohio. 614-291-1973. VIVIAN PITMAN will run thru March 21. See photos of the Pitman reception.

MARCIA EVANS ON LINCOLN

2008-09-11T13:29:00.003-04:00

When I dropped in at Marcia Evans Art Consulting Gallery, 8 East Lincoln, to see the current exhibit, I blinked with pleasure at the large abstracts glowing on the walls. These acrylic paintings by BJR, BRIAN REAUME, are vivacious yet sedate, and their color intensity is warm, not hot! --- Here are beautiful, if not provocative, contemporary paintings.

The artist employs, if loosely, a range-of-colors-and-geometric aesthetic which is "Now" yet "Classic." BJR is a self taught emerging artist with a Masters in literature, and the titles of his paintings describe a mood, an inner journey:

My idea begins with a story. . .
Brand New Wish. . .
This space was designed around me. . .
I was just going to. . .

BJR is quite a facile painter; he knows about hues and layers. He knows how to make colors and shapes dance! His no nonsense abstracts reveal a lively spirit, and his work is decorative in the best sense of the word. His large paintings are perfect for various offices and corporate sites and for many gracious living spaces.

DAWSON KELLOGG, Professor of Art at CCAD, is the glass half of this show, GLASS & CANVAS. Kellogg's tall vessels, at least the ones at "Marcia's," average around 18 inches tall and have a classic urn-like shape. Of translucent glass, they usually emphasize one radiant color, one clear glass tone, so to speak, which has been augmented by compatible hues, chromatic blurrs and shapes, within. Deep blue, for example, enhanced by various blue and purple swirls within. Kellogg, like Reaume, is a Now-yet-Classic master.

The opening reception for Glass & Canvas included live jazz and hors d'euvres, and was quite well attended. THE EXHIBIT CLOSES SEPTEMBER 30.

Next up at Marcia Evans will likely be a SALON show with works which may or may not include paintings by one of Marcia Evans' most sought after painters, JOHN DONNELLY, Professor of Art at Mount Vernon Nazarene University. Donnelly's zany and flowing interpetations of everyone and everything --- from Marilyn Monroe to Mona Lisa to a rooster crossing the road --- I think I saw that --- present the hallmarks of a strong and practiced painter!

LINDA WESNER's* colored pencil renderings of rural Ohio have won top national awards. In an inimitable understated (Wesnerian) way, they're breathtaking!

Donnelly and Wesner are but two of the many fine artists who have been exhibited by Marcia Evans. Marcia Evans moved from Granville to her current site, 8 East Lincoln almost two years ago. She has been working successfully as an art consultant for twenty years. She has a diamond cutter's eye for choosing art and art objects from the Mid West and nationwide. She and her gallery can be summed up in a few words. --- New York sophistication with an (Ohion's) - hard-cider-zing!

CAROL PHILLIPS WITT lives in Granville, Ohio, and her smallish, sun-toned, nature-informed "plates and vessels of pressed clay" are to die for.

MARCIA EVANS is open 11-5 Tuesday-Saturday and by appointment. 614-298-8847.

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*note: Linda Wesner's colored pencil renderings will be on exhibit at Ohio Wesleyan's Richard M Ross Art Museum in Delaware, Ohio, thru September 21st.

IMPRESSIONIST WOMEN,-- THEY'RE HOT!

2008-08-27T11:25:00.005-04:00

Midwestern Visions of Impressionism will show at the Ohio Arts Council's Riffe Gallery at 77 South High in downtown Columbus until October 12. You will find my article about this wonderful exhibit in the current (September) issue of The Short North Gazette. The exhibit stars several pretty women, so look for them. (Unfortunately I've lost my exhibition list so I'm flying by the seat of my flowery wash- and-wear skirt!)

Believe me, Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman was not lovelier than the slender youngish woman in Morning Sun, as painted by Pauline Palmer. ( I think around 1920, perhaps earlier. No matter.) The time is morning; the scene is a sea side hotel room with a high ceiling. Near a huge window the pretty woman sits at a make-shift vanity table likely arranged by the artist herself. Perhaps the slender young woman in gauzy and layered "morning" attire IS the artist herself! A wood frame stand-up mirror is her mirror and she's making herself up, the way the painter is making this painting up! The window is tall and wide and beyond it is the bay, the sky, and the LIGHT fills everything. --- It's the light, guys, how you paint light! --- Yes, the pretty woman is, quote, "illustrative,"--- She's a magazine cover for all time. --- You want to call room service and order a French press (coffee) and chat with her.

Mary Holland Bacher, 1891, by Otto Bacher (1856--1909) (Click image for a larger view.)

In 1891 Otto Bacher painted Mary Holland Bacher his wife, an artist. Her long, full tennis- whites dress, possibly a blouse and skirt,with its big dippy lace collar, was likely made to order by a dress maker. There were visiting dress makers; they would stay at your house while they sewed clothes for you, and you didn't have to be especially rich. --- The white chapeau --- sooo 1890s --- is topped by a big white rose! Mary sits --- notice I use the present tense --- leaning forward in a straight backed wicker chair, probably in her own back yard, to pose for her husband. She poses, of course, in natural light that filters through shimmering leaves while daisies glow like dim stars toward the back. Mary's fingers, grasping the tennis racket, are strong. --- She's a painter! Her wrists are small. She's a lady, a no nonsense woman-lady. Her face is thin, sweet, earnest --- she looks straight at you, and, if you observe carefully, you notice sensible brown "athletic"shoes peering from beneath the ruffled skirt.

I know Mary is accurately dressed in the tennis playing vogue of her time because I have seen very old photographs of my father's aunts playing tennis in Marion, Ohio, around 1900. Sometimes they played croquet and wore similar dresses and once in a while a very young guy named Warren G. dropped by and joined the crowd. Aunt Letty wouldn't let him smoke in the house. But that was later.

The Midwestern Visions exhibit allows us to time travel. Good painting orbits beyond time!

EXCELLENT EXHIBITS

2008-08-22T13:28:00.013-04:00

GETTING REAL at High Road Gallery in Worthington is an eclectic and enticing show which closes on August 24, this weekend. This article is belated but the show was so good that I wanted to congratulate the exhibitors and the High Road Board.

One wouldn't want tastes in art to return solely to a realist emphasis, but this exhibit proved that Realism is alive, well, and a many splendored thing! The exhibit includes/included many paintings that made me say "Wow!" AND, the exhibit included at least one painting that is likely to, eventually, earn a place in the collective art memory of our nation.

TOM BAILLEUL'S RAINMAKER really packs a punch and deserves its Best of Show Award. (The Board of High Road, all of them art professionals, educators, artists, juried the show.) Baillieul's art is precise, not rigid, and is color-full. The man is an ecological scientifically based artist. --- Yet, paradoxically, one might describe his art as talismanic, or symbolic --- as in religion or analytic thought!

RAINMAKER. This large, strikingly simple "canvas" was painted in acrylic with dull yet lustrous paints. The figure of the Rainmaker stands "open to" and "against" unidentifiable darkness which has been rendered in subtle dark bands. --- That is, he, or she, stands in the night, or in the underground, or in a prison, or perhaps in the darkness of our collective souls. --- YOU decide. From some where above a single trickle of rain, a lit string, hits the Rainmaker' s right hand which is cupped in his left. He, or she, becomes an iconic and/or symbolic figure. Youthful, yet ageless, he stands tall, receptively, wearing an old white-gray shirt and long baggy trousers, faded, of course. The artist knew exactly how to use simplicity and where to cast light from a mysterious source onto the Rainmaker's solemn face. And he knew that the Rainmaker would likely wear his hair in a long loose pony tail and not in a Mohawk or a crewcut. --- Perhaps my analysis of Baillieul's intent is incorrect, but nevertheless --- Rainmaker is iconic!

You can find Baillieul and his talented other half, the fabric artist Deb, on their website --- But, of course, the Rainmaker should be seen live and close up! Baillieul is a scientist by profession. He has lived in Third World countries, has seen the borders melt between magic and science. From "aboriginal" people he has learned how to telegraph an instant image that goes beyond written language. --- PINK ALERT! My aesthetic radar tells me that its likely a herd(!) of Baillieul's pink flamingos have nested at Camelot Cellars, 958 N. High.

SUZANNE! At this writing the amazing Suzanne Gallagher, portraitist and painter, has a studio at High Road Gallery.--She's the artist in residence. If her studio door is open or if you knock she may invite you in to see her in progress and completed art works.

SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW closes on August 30 at Weisheimer Gallery in First UnitarianUniversalist Church 93 W. Weisheimer. The exhibit is open when the church is, which is most of the time before 9 pm. In the worship center, John Dickinson's "The Salvaged Cabinet 2007" filled me with awe. Realism on speed! You must see it in order to appreciate the dignity and the detail. The oil can, the cabinet itself, the T square . . . And Karen Rush Jones' dancing red trumpetflowers . . . And Claire Hagan Bauza's yellow barn and . . . A fine show, but too late to cover it now. . .

CLAIRE HAGAN BAUZA'S IRELAND: IMAGES FOR A SACRED JOURNEY will run until August 30 at Jung Haus Gallery, 59 West Third Avenue in Columbus. This exhibit, in its variety and depth, provides a solid yet lively retrospective of a visit to Ireland in 2007. Here are paintings that are abstract, representational, and yes, impressionist and expressionist! Hagan Bauza is an earnest painter --- imaginative, skilled, hardworking and prolific. Her use of color is alive in its variety and warmth, yet it is never rash. There are ten watercolors and ten oil paintings in the show. Among them you will find plain spoken scenes melded with legend. You will find hints of emerald and purple! --- There is not much time, so I hope these titles will lure you in: Tree Spirit; Glendallagh Valley; Kilkenny, Early Morning; The Stones that Wept; The Rock of Cashel. And my favorite, Madonna of theBirds. --- Hagan Bauza's art is not photo realist. Yet, it reveals subtle, authentic --- and sometimes mythical, glimpses of the Irish countryside, --- its bridges and outbuildings, and, of course, its trees, stones, and enchanted waters. Irish eyes will certainly be smiling. Jung Haus Gallery, despite its rather abbreviated hours, is a gorgeous space located in the lovely, impressive building that is the C.G. Jung Society of Central Ohio. Hours are 11 am to 2 pm Tuesdays-Saturdays but it's best to call first, 614- 291-8050

from an INTERVIEW WITH STEPHANIE SYPSA

2008-03-07T13:23:00.001-05:00

She's a romantic with a cutting edge. Columbus resident Stephanie Sypsa graduated from Columbus College of Art and Design in 2004. She hails from near Biloxi Mississippi, which is "just a hop,skip,and a jump fromNew Orleans and the Gulf." She has been married to Jason, a mechanical engineer, for nine years. Jason also is from the South, and "we love our visits there, and lots of family stuff." Sypsa possesses a strong sense of history. When she visited Dresden , Germany, during her OAC residency, she was haunted by awareness of the World War II bombings, and by the then recent damage done by HurricaneKatrina in the U.S.
When Sypsa visited Rome (during the residency) she was fascinated, indeed, engaged, by monuments, reliquaries, burials,cemeteries.--When I asked her what she was reading, she replied that she had been "spending most of my reading time on researching memory and memorials. I was struck by that feeling in Rome, how we need to connect, need connection to those gone before.. And memory. . . how we need to be remembered. I've been reading about
that, especially as regards Victorian times Funeral wreathes,hair lockets, that sort of thing.
I've even been researching light machinery from that period."
Sypsa appreciates photography, and incorporates photographs into her art. Yet, she
states, emphatically, "I am not a photographer.--At CCAD I was lucky to study art, painting and drawing. I did have a photography class that inspired me. In it I learned much about old time photography. I learned traditional stuff--Brown tones. Old nasty chemicals. Not digital.
I learned how you could color photographs, like painting!"
Stephanie and Jason like to travel, at home and abroad. "I love traveling," Sypsa said.
"We've been to Costa Rica, New Zealand, to Paris. Dresden. Rome. And, of course, we look at art, and I do take photographs.--I'm an over documentarian!"
Like most visual artists Sypsa likes to listen to music, and there again, her tastes include
"some vintage." She loves the music of Jeff Buckley "who died young and had such a beautiful voice. And I love Billie Holiday who died a long time ago."
Recently, Sypsa began to work out of a new studio in Grandview. She remains excited about belonging to the Phoenix Print Making Collective. She enjoys working at Riffe, especially being a teacher or assistant at Family Days.
"What's good about the Columbus art scene? New groups are emerging and merging. There's a new art scene in GrandView--Their gallery hop is huge! The art scene is what makes Columbus special. If not, I wouldn't stay here!"
Connections II, Ohio Artists Abroad, is open until April 8 and exhibits fourteen very contemporary and agile artists who created work during OAC residencies in Germany, Poland,and the Czech Republic. It is a varied and cerebral show and you are bound to see things you like and love and puzzle over.
The Ohio Arts Council's Riffe Gallery is at 77 S. High St. in Columbus, Ohio in the Verne Riffe building. Admission, like the best in art, is free.

STEPHANIE SYPSA at THE RIFFE

2008-03-07T10:50:00.004-05:00

At the Riffe Gallery's Connections II, Ohioans Abroad exhibit STEPHANIE SYPSA's images serve as striking talismans for Women's History Month. Or Herstory month!
ENCLOSED IN GRAY MATTER I. consists of progressive images, three presentations of a young woman's vintage, somewhat colorless, face on three separate 8x10 inch papers. The first image is stark, earnest, unembellished. The second and third reprints of the same face have acquired overlays, marks,. . .symbols. Although Sypsa wants to convey the idea of "vintage" --the collar, the sweet earnest visage, the hair drawn back, parted in the middle--she has chosen images that lend themselves to chronological ambiguity. She suggests , I think, that we, as women, are stamped, or patterned, by cultures and events.
Superimposed marks, blocks, patterns--suggest the necessity of women to conform at home or in the work place. Yet, the same repetition can also symbolize the power of connection. Combining photography, xerox, prints,reprints and overlays,
with--graph paper, clear plastic, straight pins, and yes, thread --Sypsa conveys aspects of regularity and repetition, even factory work.
In the haunting AFTER IMAGE OF A YOUNG GIRL, photo lithograph, pins on paper, (24 x 36 inches) a single , indefinite , woman figure glows.--Well, part of the woman's face glows! So does part of her arm, and a purse--or midriff--no matter.
The purple-black-wine-velvet- background dominates, envelopes the woman.--Yet she shines thru! Her environment is Jung's "Dark" . Standing inside it, the woman calls to us from a distance,from the past, most likely. Thru stark , nearly primitive , rendering
the young girl becomes iconic, archetypal We can imbue her with meaning: Our mothers, their mothers,our sisters, our selves.
Sypsa earned her bachelor of arts at Columbus College of Art and Design in 2004. She has done free lance work for the Columbus Museum of Art and has taught continu
ing education classes for CCAD. In 2006 she took part in an Ohio Arts Council international residency at the Dresden Graphic workshop in Dresden Germany. She is a gallery assistant and preparator at the Riffe Gallery. Her phone interview follows.--Happy Women's Day, everyone!

SING THE BODY ELECTRIC!

2008-03-01T22:58:00.003-05:00

March. Women'shistory month. I'll begin my annual celebration by writing about a guy who loves women! --He thinks that 'Women and flowers are God's greatest projects!"--In fact, Jerry Tollifson, State Art Education, Consultant Emeritus, was recently asked to remove his female
totems, sculptures, from a Westerville Gallery. Fearing a lawsuit he removed the sculptures almost immediately!
Nothing succeeds like notoriety. When I spoke to Tollifson on February 29, he said that The Other Paper had taken up his cause, and as a result, one of his "censored" nudes had sold almost immediately.--Like the next day! (I haven't read The Other Paper article yet, but I shall! They're usually right on target in that sort of matter)
Tollifson goes to church each Sunday. I didn't ask where.--And afterward, still wearing church-appropriate suit and tie, he visits the Ohio Art League where, among frayed jeaned paint spattered artists, he practices drawing and painting from live nude models.
"Yes," he admitted, "So far all of the nude models have been women, and some of the women artists say there should be men models too."--Right on!
In his letter to me Tollifson , in describing himself, wrote " a problem has arisen. Tollifson
has been suffering from an identity crisis. He doesn't quite know whether he identifies more
with Larry Flint, the pornographer and publisher of Hustler magazine, or with Michael Angelo, the 15th century artist whose nude paintings were objected to by officials of the Catholic Church at the time.--Apparently Tollifson's crisis has been resolved by hismaking a choice of identity, for when last seen he was searching for places where he could purchase fig leaves."
YOU TOO can work from live models at the Ohio Art League Sundays 1 to 4 pm. It's not necessary to reserve, but for more information call theOAL at 614-299 8225. Jerry Tollifson's
Fabulous Flowers will be shown at a one man show at Inniswood Park during August, 2008.
The artist is a big tall guy with a lot of cool white hair, and he often wears what is, or is similar to, a white panama suit, like the one the author Tom Wolfe wears.--Perhaps Jerry should pose fully clothed, for a Sunday afternoon modeling session.--Jerry, on a grayday your letter was a breath of fresh air!
ELECTRIC LADIES : Last month I was reborn, renascent as poet Edna St VincentMillay would say, when I visited Electric Lady Land at Mahan Gallery, 717 N.High. (More than once!) Liz Markus lives in New York and her large"Protector " abstracts were to die for!
The peripheral remarks by Colleen Grannen, co director and gallery guide, informed me, beamed me up! Grannen's sense of Now and Then and Popular Culture was, indeed, a breath of fresh air. Kime (Kimmy)Buzzelli, now of L.A.,blew me away with her big neo romantic fashion drawings.--Well, romantic is a non linear state of time and mind). Lithe women,"retro flower women,"Grannen explained. Figures, graceful and lyrical, cutting edge, on big paper. Flowers tendrils,stenciled on walls by Kime Buzzelli herself. The woman is an NFL running back! (New Fashion Life.)--I found Kime's blogg. I wanted to visit Show Pony in L.A.! I wanted to be young and thin, like those lithe sixties women on Kime's big papers. Iraq was blowing up. More Ohioans were losing jobs. But Liz Markus had painted abstracts in honor of such icons asJim Hendryx (sp) and John Lennon,who wore helmets and goggles or dark glasses, and were,as Colleen said, "protectors."-- I want to live in Electric Lady Land, even if only part time!

ERNEST LOCKRIDGE: WINTER DREAMS

2008-01-17T10:15:00.001-05:00

WINTER DREAMS: PAINTINGS BY ERNEST LOCKRIDGE
"Still life is a contradiction in terms." -- Ernest Lockridge

Winter Dreams, a one man show by the contemporary American artist Ernest Lockridge, closed at The Worthington Art Center on January 14, 2008.-- My holiday rush had evolved into a smush, but I'm glad I got to the Art Center before Winter Dreams closed! The artist is working in acrylics,and his twelve painting exhibit was substantial.-- In other words, well painted, exciting.

An "unretired" Professor of English from The Ohio State University, Lockridge once taught at Yale and has three published novels under his belt. He is able to paint full time now, hence his descriptive "unretired," and he loves to travel. A few years back he and his wife, Laurel Richardson, poet/sociologist, co-authored Travels With Ernest, a lively mixed genre account of their travels. Lockridge's artistic efforts, many of them originating plein air, have taken him from Taos, New Mexico, to the Yucatan Peninsula, to Hawaii, and to other exciting places, including Schiller and WhetstoneParks in Columbus! Winter Dreams is visual evidence of the Richardson/Lockridge penchant for globe trotting.

As to painting, Lockridge's is grounded in his technical aplomb and in his familiarity with work of "greats"-- ranging from Sargent to Grandma Moses to Native American pictographs to the cave paintings at Chauvet." -- On his artist's statement he says that he began to use his first set of Sargents(!) paints when he was eight years old. Now he uses thickly applied paint and obvious brush strokes, like the Impressionists did. He is not afraid of color. His use of it although broad, is harmonious, meticulous. The tall BURNING BUSH, TASMANIA, seems about to explode with raw color and linear shapes.

THE FIRE THIS TIME, TAOS, 24 x 36 inches, a gorgeous canvas (board) was, of course, painted in Georgia O Keefe country in New Mexico, and in it masterful gradations of reds, oranges, browns, form a blizzard of tree foliage that nearly covers the side of a non-descript ranch house. The colors on both of these paintings are on fire, smouldering. Having lived in Ohio for years when he taught at The Ohio State University, Lockridge has internalized the audacious hues of Ohio autumns and has transported them to other venues, tamed them to his palette. -- And, speak of "taming," -- in LOST IN ICELAND, 20 x 24 inches, the strangely elided and juxtaposed shapes of two big horses stand flank by flank, nearly fill the "canvas," and create a study in design and color that is baffling. -- As I recall, a splat of midnight sun, or perhaps a day time moon -- is visible here. And iconic white aurioles, sun-like splats, glimmer in other of Lockridge's paintings. -- But you have to look.

The aesthetics of design and abstraction are present in Lost in Iceland. Yet, the large truncated shapes of the two horses suggest something primitive and one cannot help but think of pre-Norse myths and legends.

Again. Lockridge has mastered the elements of composition and color. Yet, his canvasses (or boards) manage to shimmy, to emit an electric charge. -- It's brush strokes in motion! This is true of TIDAL POOL, YUCATAN, 24 x 36 inches, in which a very small man in red trunks swims his way thru huge sheafs of white water toward the opening crevice that might suggest the birth canal. Lockridge's paintings are all somewhat abstract, yet the majority of them include elements of the representational. The swimmer in red trunks is a swimmer in red trunks! Lockridge's chosen modus, wisely, tends toward the maxim that "less is more."

FOUNDATION, a foray into grids and pure abstraction, is striking yet understated. The hues of SEDONA SUNSET emit lavender-sagebrush-deep purple-fragrances -- if you can see fragrances!

For Winter Dreams Lockridge's most "outre" effort is NO PARKING ZONE, CARMEL. We wonder what was going on there. An afternoon exercise of the painterly arts perhaps. In "Carmel" we see the backside of a white convertible, top down, and the contents of a jagged and narow back yard. And long weedy grass. I think it's long and weedy! And a No Parking sign and a skinny watch dog. A mutt. The colors dance and so does the feeling of a familiar, perhaps lackadaisical, moment, when we ourselves captured, in words or paint, the unvarnished and uncropped splendor of a hot afternoon.

THE WORTHINGTON COMMUNITY CENTER is at 345 East Wilson Bridge Road. and it is open every day of the week. Call 431--0329. Ernest Lockridge has exhibited at High Road Gallery and Weisheimer Gallery and thru most of January and February he and Laurel have paintings and sculpture in what is bound to be a very exciting MEMBERS SHOW at the beautiful, I mean beautiful, JUNGHAUS ASSOCIATION GALLERY, 59 West Third Avenue, 291-8050.

JUNGHAUS Gallery is open to every one, but it is best to call first. Claire Hagan Bauza curates JungHaus exhibits which are always outstanding. The current Members Show includes oils, acrylics, watercolor, fibers, sculpture, an array of art media. Coming soon: a Members Show including photography and digital imaging.

DECEMBER 31, JOIN US, RIING OUT WILD BELLS!,

2007-12-27T14:36:00.000-05:00

POETS, WRITERS, LISTENERS, LOVERS OF LITERATURE AND HISTORY, ATTEND: Lend us your eyes, your ears, your radiant and attentive presences! Come to Areopagitica Book Store, 3510 North High Street between 730 and midnight, on December 31, 2007 and ring in, or almost ring in, the new year of 2008! as Lord Tennyson so ably put it: Ring in the good that is to come. SPEND THE EVENING IN THE PRESENCE OF THE GREAT WRITERS, PAST and PRESENT. Punch, tea, coffee, cookies , conversation and lots of good solid literary work by writers living and dead, yet all alive. literary quizzzes, book raffles. Books to savor and to buy.
Suggested donations of five dollars or more will go to the Poets and Writers Guild of Central Ohio. Celebrate their upcoming publication, made possible through a Greater Columbus Arts Council grant,for War, Peace, Earth. Honor the Guild and its founder Dotte Turner. Words by your favorite authors read by YOU Your original prose and poetry welcome too. Bring cookies or snacks if you wish. C ome dressed as your favorite author if the spirit moves you..If you insist upon more information call 267 3085 and ask for Robert or Elizabeth Browning and leave your phone number.--And remember, "Marley was dead to begin with."--Ring in the good that is to come!

EDNA THROWS A PARTY

2007-12-17T10:04:00.000-05:00

One of the most delicious exhibits anywhere in the U.S.A. is bound be be EDNA BOIES HOPKINS which will glimmer at the Columbus Museum of Art to March 2nd 2008! Edna died in 1937. She was, and is, a woodcut artist supreme. She's one of the supremes! The Hopkins often vacationed in France before and after the First World War. Like her some-what-contemporary Zelda Fitzgerald, herself no stranger to Paris night life--Edna loved parties, and some of her block prints are party invitations. I first met Edna at Keny Gallery, 300 East Beck St. You can read about her in a previous ArtScene, Women & Art: EDNA, March 21,2007.

TRIBUTARIES

2007-12-14T12:20:00.000-05:00

TRIBUTARIES AND GILDA. Whenever I can I visit the National Galleryof Art in Washington D.C. There, around the time of Gilda Edwards' death in 2000, I saw an exhibit of paintings by artists who used to visit Monet on the river. The Impressionists, a few of Monet's close friends and their families, came there to paint and to visit, and, "kit and kaboodle," they stayed in Monet's house! They liked to paint the river, and they liked to fish on the river. They liked to eat the fish! A grocer's cart passed by each day. There was an actual green studio boat with an oil lamp in it. Sometimes Monet stayed on the boat all night. Sometimes it rained.. . . Somehow, the studio boat at night presented me with the image of a woman artist near death in a hospital.--In my poem the studio boat became a hospital bed, and Monet became the spirit of art which strengthens the woman. The woman is not actually Gilda Edwards, but Gilda's vivid imagination inspired me, and I dedicated the poem to her, and it was published and received an award from Flashpoint magazine.(I can't find the issue!)

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST IN INTENSIVE CARE
for Gilda Edwards, 1955 --2000.

Needles spring from her arms, tubes
meander the esophagus into what's left
of her stomach.
She knows the cool "port" of morphine.
"I'm tripping,"
she whispers. "It's raining
behind this screen.
My steel beds rockin!"

Distanced from bodily pain
she is able to imagine
somewhere else. Monet's bleached-green
studio boat, the sides hooked down.
"A tub," she giggles. A man sits beside
an oil lamp in the boat. She can sense
his being, solid, yet the color of charcoal dust.
Bowed above the thick paper while he tries
to explain in French, "this morning painted . . .
light, water, pure sky.
Now, a chalk study. . . One day
the Zambesi River."

He unwraps dry bread and a mango.
She manages a whiff. Ripe fruit. Brie.
Anaesthesia. The cavity of her stomach
fills with orchids and lilacs. She exhales
knows in her own way the painter will remain
beside her until day break. She hears
a series of bleeps, raindrops
from the monitor. She's unafraid. For years
this has been her strength. Breath.
The focusing . Images.

*******************

The Lure of Giverny is a tone poem of connections. Langston Hughes wrote: "I have known rivers, rivers as ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep with the rivers."
gs.

TRIBUTARIES: Monet, Gilda, and Edna

2007-12-14T12:19:00.000-05:00

IN MONET'S GARDEN: THE LURE OF GIVERNY

2007-12-13T11:56:00.000-05:00

Like a pond. With as many twists and turns as Langston Hughes "Rivers." --That's the way
Claude Monet's gardens and ponds will meander thru the upper realms of The Columbus Museum of Art, 480 East Broad Street, until January 20, 2008.
The show contains evrything from geometric abstraction to romantic impressionismto inventive garden scenes. Wall charts, audios, and photos, present and past present the chronology and connections of Monet's life and art! The melange of art and events works very very well.
Will Cotton's brazen "Flannpond " (New York, NewYork, 2002) attracted a lot of attention when I was there. --Monet did love cooking, you know--And over the years the ponds and the gardens and art groupies and Impressionism itself have gone through various phases of dishab ille and rejuvenation. Not to mention two world wars. Flannond shimmers with double entendres, many meanings.--Andthis is a marvelous show to look at!
Monet's colors--as in "The Artist's Garden, 1900," --are earthy, but not of this world.
Monet's brush strokes bear the chalky warmth of Degas'pastels, yet they are oils.
Monet's Field of Irises,-- they are Yellow Irises--is flat, layered, like farmland strung with jewels.--Some of Monet's lovely scenes become less abstract when you step back from them
and more abstract when you stand up close! And, of course, you'll see the legendary water Lilies, the Nympheas, which shimmer, float, and threaten to disappear.
Some of Han Xin's work is exhibited close to the Monet exhibit. Han Xin is a world class painter. A few years back I asked him, "how are you able to make your Giverny tributes shimmer without using gold or silver?" After some thought he answered:
"I was trained to draw. I can draw fountains. Light, shadows. With a pencil, graphite.
I think that has something to do with the way I can make my paintings seem to shine. Like water. "
The Giverny exhibit includes photographs of Monet and his blended family. In one tiny photograph we see Monet's earnest step daughter who, with her stepfather's guidance,
became a painter too! In a lovely painting, La Debacle, painted in 1892 by
Theodore Robinson, we see a well dressed, straw-chapeaued woman resting on a low garden wall. We know by the length and breadth of her hobbled skirt , that she has paused, letter in hand, to think of a lost love, perhaps, before the First World War.
Monet's history at Giverny blossoms with water lilies, flows like a river, and gleams like a pond. The Columbus Museum of Art is at 480 East Broad Street,614-221-4848.
www.columbus Museum.com
Transcribed on December 13, this post will continue with
"Tributaries and Gilda Edwards " and "Edna Boies Throws a Party!"

POWER AT THE RIFFE!

2007-11-30T13:46:00.000-05:00

HIGH POWERED VARIETY IS THE SPICE OF LIFE .
A vibrant multi-faceted show, New Horizons: Rewards of Time and Place, opened at the Riffe Gallery in down town Columbus on November 8 and will close on January 6, 2008. Sara Johnson, director at the Southern Ohio Museum in Portsmouth, curated this exhibit which is so excitingly eclectic and has been so elegantly hung.
NewHorizons gathers a range of work--from painting to sculpture to fiber arts--that was created during, or inspired by, Ohio Arts Council domestic residency grants . These grants allow artists to live and work in an art-centered facility outside Ohio for three months.
Such coast-rimmed places as The Fine Arts Work Center in Province Town, Mass; The Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, Ca. , and the Arts Center/South Florida in Miami, provided inspiration and available work time for 11 Ohio artists. The exhibit is an adventure. Each artist possesses a strong technique and more than a dash of daring- do. Rather than
"review" the entire exhibit I decided to give myself a Christmas gift and "go" with a few of my own emotional responses.
EMORY. Paul Emory's work tends to be large, on canvas, and painted with much strength--in color, composition, and the manipulation of paint. His prowess includes originality; his work is distinctly individual but not ostentatious. His "Horizon" paintings worked best for me when he allowed the slightly grotesque or daemonic/demonic,as in creative, to emerge. In FINCH KISS two large shiny birds,accurately painted, pause beak to beak! Quarreling
or kissing, no matter. Their circular background is puzzling, yet unabashed in color and balance. The painting succeeds-as a painting and as a contextual puzzle.
In Emory's CAGED a giant squirrel grinds and sputters nuts. The floor of the slatted cage is littered with shells. Two strangely fierce boys, their skin sun-tinged, hang from the side of the cage and stare at the squirrel.--In fear? In threat? No matter. They are like monkeys. The painting has impact. The"tight" largesse of the composition succeeds The white farm house and the vigilant farmer are barely visible. One thinks of Wlliam Saroyan's lines, "I had a dream to open cages and I did."
LAURA AND THE LORELIES! Laura Saunders knows how to paint water, large and small bodies of it, tranquil and stormy! She paints canvasses that sing to you from across the gallery. (I thought I heard the sea shore,and maybe I did.--After all, Todd Slaughter's humungus steel and fiberglass Red Riding Hood was guarding the Riffe outdoors. All things
are possible in art.) In Saunders' WAVE WITH CHILD, a large rectangular oil on canvas,--the water--a bay, an ocean, a lake, -- seems magical and turbulent and quite real. The artist gives us "the feel" of vastness by placing a diminutive young girl, a child in a white dress, to one side, and allows the child to trail a hand in the water. The child is unafraid. An unseen Mom, perhaps the painter herself , is near by. We know she is near by. She must be.
In DRAIN AND FILL, a grand three- canvas work, another child braves the water, this time in the center canvas, with two marvelous water studies--they are more than studies--on each side. This is not a sentimental painting but one of grandeur and reality.--If water has texture, Saunders knows how to paint it!
When I got back home I sat on the sofa. I remembered JuliaFriedman's big black paper sculpture of a tree.(Untitled cut-out paper, 84x54x10 inches) It cast a shadow and it was as tall as I am. I know it was paper because I touched it with the tip of my smallest finger, for a nano second! It reminded me of Turner Classic Movies, the infrequent times when Robert Osborne shows the1900s black and white Silhouette Silents on Sunday night.
I thought about Gerry Fogarty's Bamboo Lattice. BAMBOO LATTICE exalts simplicity. Fogarty collects, cuts, weaves, staples, glues,affixes. The results are awfully good,and the earth and indigenous cultures are celebrated.
Yes, back at home I sat on the sofa and imagined I was sitting in the sun in Douglas Unger's MARIETTA ALLEY SERIES with hollyhocks. I saw plant poles and a garden too. I chose a shell from my shell dish and held a shell to my ear. I heardLaura Saunder's oceans I saw LINDA GALL or someone who looked like her , having a great time at the beach and painting like mad.
I heard LACEY LUCE, Marketing Specialist at the RIFFE, say , "Each day I come in,and I ask myself what 's my favorite today, and it's always different."

--Don't miss New Horizons! --Take a notebook,write your own journal responses.
The Ohio Arts Council's Riffe Gallery is located at the Vern Riffe Center for Government and the Arts, 77 S. High St. Columbus, Ohio. Visit www.Riffe Gallery.org or phone 614-728-2239. Admission is free.
gtu

I CATCH UP WITH DAINA & VIV!!

2007-04-03T15:40:00.000-04:00

Better great than never! Women's month is really over now, but I want to mention two female comets who passed thru recently and are likely to return soon.
In January at REBECCA IBEL Gallery: An open conversation by DAINA HIGGINS , graffiti art celeb, and JOE HOUSTON,-- yeah, he's a guy,-- the curator of Contemporary Art at the Columbus Museum of Art. Higgins and Houston discussed High and Low art , and Higgins work. In addressing the issue of elitism Houston and Higgins agreed that the artists themselves tend not to be "elitist" but are "democratic." They spoke of Atget and Man Wray, and maybe even Basquiat! (which doesn't rhyme.) The afternoon was a treat. Higgins, once a street artist, has great art school credentials and is formerly of Columbus. She's now a genuine New York (and Brooklyn) artist working with Melissa Meyer who is a major player at Miranova and Rebecca Ibel Galleries here, as well as in the New York area. Higgins' (mostly) monochromatic works at "Rebecca's" had been finely honed in the making ---repeatedly screened, cut out, stenciled, rendered, and never dripped! Small and exacting for silk screen, the "paintings" suggest faded yet incisive photographs. They present viewers with a "take" on urban houses and scapes. --Cool. Poetic.--Go, Daina, go. And come back soon.
Looking spectacular in Kelly green VIVIAN RIPLEY was glimpsed rushing out of the current High Road Gallery show, DAZZLE, which runs thru April. DAZZLE dazzles. Vivian Ripley gets my vote for ART WOMAN. For years she has been teaching painting AND piano, and her students win awards at both. She has earned more than one artist in residency in the state and national park systems. At a recent Trillium soirree she concertized beautifully while presenting a brief history of music, and managed to remain calm under the duress of more than one fire alarm! When she rustled by me at High Road, she whispered something about having "won first place at the Mill Run show"(for painting) and was "on to another gig." Whoosh! All the comets aren't in the sky. FRAN MANGINO, dazzeled at DAZZLE and so did the curator of High Road, CAROL HERSHEY who, herself , moves in a glowing and versatile art orbit. --OKAY. Women's month 2007, is over.--COME HEAR ME READ POETRY AT AREOPAGITICA BOOK STORE, 3510 N. High 7:30 pm April 27.

WOMEN& ART, ART & WOMEN

2007-03-21T16:39:00.000-04:00

This is in Women's history/herstory month. YOU MAY WANT TO READ THE PREFACE WHICH IS TOWARD THE BOTTOM Art dances on . I dedicatethe Edna Boies Hopkins piece to my cousin Jill .

SHORT NORTH:ART & WOMEN:MARCIA & LAURIE, WOMEN & ART

2007-03-21T16:21:00.000-04:00

Celebrate MARCIA EVANS, Petite, talented, courageous Art Consultant 8 East Lincoln, who, in cooperation with the Puffin Foundation, will show Eva Andry's solemn and interactive exhibit PUTTING FACES TO THE NAMES . The exhibit consists of 300 original photographs representing the (American) Iraq war Fallen.. This interactive event is a witnessing. Educator and consultant Evans comprehends public and private needs for art enhancement in all communities. She is to be commended for sharing her upscale professional gallery with Putting Faces to the Names. The exhibit, if not the war, will close on April 15. See the current Short North Gazette for more. See the April Gazette for my review of LAURIE VON ENDT's imaginative LAY OF THE LAND, an exhibit of colored infrared photographs at JUNG HAUS GALLERY 59 West Third Avenue. This exhibit closes on April 28.

WOMEN&ART: BERNICE TAKES OFF!

2007-03-21T16:04:00.000-04:00

THE PAINTERLY BERNICE KOFF "took off" like sparks from a comet's tail--with Explorations in Color, original works that augmented Dale Chihuly's glass culpture at Franklin Park Conservatory thru Feburary 25. Koff's responses, her "associations," --with growing things, with her daily life, and with glass sculpture--have been expressed thru bold, not rash, brush work--and thru tiny spots and dribbles. Her use of bright greens, oranges, reds--all the colors -- is exciting yet balanced. Her sense of design is unfailing, yet her affect is that of spontaneity. Koff is basically an abstractionist--but her representative side came thru, if slightly, in this show, and I wish I could have covered the Explorations earlier. Always a strong painter, Koff is a tireless artist and an excellent docent. Her "Franklin park paintings" danced on the walls; they were never trite.

WOMEN&ART AT RIFFE: ANN WITH TWO VASES

2007-03-21T15:25:00.000-04:00

Art is a journey, and FAR, NEAR, HERE presents a treasure trove of varied selections from the Columbus Museum of Art. AT RIFFE CENTER GALLERY until April 15. The curatorial guidelines stipulated that selected works had not been exhibited for at least five years. Viewers are soon greeted by ANN DEWALD's Beyond the Limit, one of her neon and aluminum structures. The shiny "sign" resembles, well, a shape,a quirky road sign! Two red lights, cocky as leprechaun ears, blink on and off. BTL plugs into a socket.--You could have bought a Dewald for your home, and connoisseurs did! Dewald (1930-2003) was a meteroic influence on the Columbus art scene, and famous for her parties. She was kind, yet outspoken. Frail, neurotic ,driven, she lived "Beyond the Limit."--I can see her flashing now.
For whatever reason, whenever I think of the Far/Near show, I recall with delight two slender VASES poised like ballerinas, side by side in a glass case. I've recalled them frequently.
Simple, curved, glistening. Jade, turquoise,sky, lavender. Unadorned. Their label? "Tiffany glass and Decorating Co. or Studio or attributed to Tiffany Studios, American. blue iridescent glass, possibly favrile, the gift of MRS. RALPH H. TRIVELLA in 1978."--I wondered if, possibly, Mrs. Trivella gave wonderful parties, or if she ever met Edna Boies Hopkins, or Ann Dewald.--Maybe I'll find out! Whatever. I'm glad she gave the vases to the Museum! Again: The Riffe show, Far Near Here, runs to April 15 and exhibits a panoply of valuable paintings, including such contemporary heavies as Toldstedt, Rauschenberg, Shineman.--Yeah, they're guys, but they're darn good. The exhibit includes tiny Japanese Traveling Shrines and an Anasazi pueblo Jar from the 13th-14th century, as well as Apache coiled baskets, and you will find much to consider, much that will dazzle you!

ART & WOMEN, WOMEN & ART: EDNA

2007-03-21T14:41:00.000-04:00

KENY GALLERY, 300 Beck Street, recently offered one of the most beautiful and varied exhibits ever. Kindred Spirits: Cross Currents in Modernism at the Pennsylvania Academy 1907-1930 closed at Keny on March 2. It was at Kindred Spirits that I "met" EDNA BOIES HOPKINS (1872-1937). At the opening I heard other viewers oohing and ahhing about Edna too! Boies Hopkins' woodcut prints--many of them of familiar garden flowers --"Cineraria," "Zinnias" and "Sweet William" --were executed around 1915. The dusty, luminous oranges and yellows, the chalky lavenders and pouty greens, reveal an elegant "palette."--Woodcuts are a most difficult medium, yet, Boies Hopkins' prints manage to be warm and delicate, cool and sharp--all at the same time!--In 1917 Edna crafted the simple but moving "Homeward Trail/The Circuit Rider." In it a gangling, slouch hatted man leads a mule down hill against monochromatic sections of rural land. The sky is a dull lemon; the white mule points his ears toward the tall man's white shirt. This cut, and some other Boies Hopkins, remind me not only of pastel paintings, but of charming quilt designs, appliques! --I've seen no woodcuts like hers!
In 1904 Edna Boies, from Michigan, married James Hopkins from Ohio. (of the Ohio State University's Hopkins Hall.) Edna and James were able to live in Paris for months each year, "during the formative years of European Modernism."--Roughly the same time Fitzgerald and Hemingway hung out there. If the Hopkins gave a New Years party, Edna made gorgeous invitations, and Keny Gallery owns them!
Boies Hopkins became a member of the French Engraving Society and the Society National des Beaux Arts.--Her extensive list of permanent collections includes The National Museum of Stockholm and the Biblioteque d'Art et Archeology in Paris, France.--I want to see more of Edna's prints and learn more about her. (She's a permanent resident at Keny, but you may have to ask.) The Keny opening included a real-live-in-the-flesh TAMIE BELDUE. Beldue accompanied her own large Fine Drawings, Graphite Watercolors(!) of semi nude women. These full length portraits suggest a classical past; they are poetic , serious. Fetching. First rate.
ALAN GOUGH. The master painter Alan Gough, --yeah, I know he's a guy--opens at Keny on March 9 and runs thru April 2 in Alan Gough: Recent Landscapes. "Little Red Bud Tune; Pond Pads; Paint Creek" emit the vibes of Mid West Rural, yet, they're universal, like a William Blake phrase about eternity. Curators and owners, James Keny and Timothy Keny--yeah, they're guys, brothers,--run a superb gallery, and I'm always a better art person when I've been there.

ART & WOMEN, WOMEN & ART : PREFACE

2007-03-21T14:29:00.000-04:00

preface: March is women's history, or herstory, month, so I've been trying to write a woman-honoring collage, a paste and cut from current and recent shows. --To say that the last few weeks have been heavy with technical glitches and bad weather, is an understatement. However, better late than never. --I am actually having difficulties as I type on March 21st from the out of home office.

ANGELS SING AT O.S.U. AIRPORT

2006-12-21T13:49:00.000-05:00

ANGELS SING AT O.S.U. AIRPORT HANGAR

It really IS a cold, cold, world. In it, photographs of tortured detainees mingle with TV images of bombed civilians, and a scantily clad Paris Hilton on a spree! And the polar ice is melting --- yes, I'm a believer. --- Yet, amidst all of this very real negativity, I can testify: I have heard the angels sing. I've seen Them too.

They wear long black evening dresses with airy white stoles. Most of Them possess dark hair which they wear long, like angels do. THEY are the Dublin Kauffman High School Women's Symphonic Choir under the fabulous and generous direction of Cyndi Brewer.

I heard Them! They sang Silent Night, The Night Before Christmas, Rachmaninoff's Carol of the Bells, and other classical and semi classical offerings. They included their favorite Rag Time/ Jazz Age song, Ma He's Makin' Eyes at Me, --- with choreography! Some of the young women --- I mean angels, --- came in late, inobtrusively, from a swim meet! But the ensemble never missed a jingle or a beat!

The scene of this concert was the vast Ohio State University Airport Hangar at a holiday party given by the Experimental Aircraft Association Chapter 9 on December 16. The atmosphere was gala, and the acoustics resembled those in a European cathedral. The angelic voices rose angelically, on pitch and pure, to the rafters and the beams, which one US AirForce veteran, age 90, speculated "are wood beams, not metal, so there's a different echo, and this building goes back to the twenties or thirties."

The esteemed poet T.S. Eliot once wrote that he had "heard the mermaids singing, each to each." In similar fashion I can testify that I've heard the angels sing to a twenties beat, and They sound absolutely. . . celestial.

For 2007 the motto for LizJames ArtScene is: If I experience art that is in some way exceptional, I'll try to write about it.

WEXNER SHINES: HANNAH DANCES WITH ANDY

2006-12-05T16:19:00.000-05:00

Sugarplums at Wexner: Hannah Dances with Andy: Hannah is three. Her hair is as pale as tinsel. She loves to visit Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, because the best art is ageless. She loves Jeff Koons huge stainless steel Balloon Dog -- She loves the big shiny TeaPot she can step into but "don't shut the door." She loves the camels and fish that wander thru Hiraki Sawa's film, The Box. Best of all she loves Andy Warhol's Silver Clouds, just the right holiday treat! The big helium filled pillows dance, drift and dangle and kids of all ages can play with them! The nice security guard predicted it: "She won't want to leave the pillows. They never do" Andy lives, and never more so. SHINEY continues at Wexner Center for the Arts to December 31.

VANISHING LANDSCAPES at MORPC

2006-12-05T13:41:00.000-05:00

VANISHING LANDSCAPES AT MORPC: This is the first time I've ever reviewed an exhibit without visiting the actual gallery site! On line, Linda Wesner's Vanishing Landscapes of Central Ohio appears so well crafted, so pertinent, that I decided to write about it. The exhibit will show at the Mid Ohio Regional Planning Commission's Art in the Halls to December 29.
Delaware Crossing #I, colored pencil on paper, 18 x 34 inches, presents an austere Ohio landscape that should be familiar to all of us. --The scene may be, increasingly, No Where, except in memory, which is a pretty exciting place. The hour is, possibly, a cold dawn.
We recognize that gray Ohio "bland", the flatness that seems to have no vanishing point.
We know that pale blue milk glass sky. It's as heart wrenching as stained silk. We recognize the big two storey white frame, its two chimneys, the racky front porch.--Yes, people used to carry their cold coffee out there and watch cars go by!--At one time horses and wagons passed, and farm kids waved to the trains which really existed and carried trucks and pigs and rich people in lit dining cars. Yes, we note the inexorable crux of railroad tracks to the right.
Wesner's skill at colored pencil is photographic! Yet, she manages to be lyrical. Her "eye, " the places she chooses to "take,"--is what makes her "paintings" so evocative.
SOME OF HER VANISHING LANDSCAPES WILL BE FEATURED IN The January 2007 Issue of AMERICAN ARTIST, and that's quite an honor.
Over the past fifteen years, approximately, there has been a resurgence of colored pencil art and a proliferation of Colored Pencil Societies . I've enjoyed the re emergence of the lively representational art that the Societies foster. Linda Wesner is a signature member,and a charter member, of The National Colored Pencil Society, and also of the Ohio CPS and the Columbus CPS.--Bit by bit, there has been a Colored Pencil revolution, and I'm glad.
FEBRUARY SKIES
is a cool-toned colored pencil on paper, 18 x 27 inches. From an unseen winter sky the sun hits a white frame store front and the cement sidewalk in front of it. Light filters shadows to the correct weathered spaces, forms a strong composition. Wesner possesses an eagle eye and an eagle lense. The lidded trash can casts a shadow. An elderly woman, bundled up, leans into the wind, yet we see nothing blowing. Perhaps she's on the way to the church rummage sale or the miniscule U.S. Post Office. She wears stout shoes. I think they are my grandmother's shoes, maybe my own. I find myself recalling images of Kansas, Ohio.--That's in northern Ohio, near Bettsville, in case you didn't know, and extra ordinary life does continue in these villages, but you have to look for it, and Wesner does, while she drives the fast commute to work.
Linda Wesner grew up on a farm in upstate New York . An earth lover by nature and an Ohioan by adoption, she describes herself as "in a race to capture my impressions of landscapes before they disappear in the face of rapid urban development." In only one year, 2005 , Wesner was juried into , and won awards in, five national shows. Quite recently she won Best of Show at the I Can't Believe It's Colored Pencil show in Akron, for Delaware county Crossing #3.
Linda Wesner's Vanishing Landscapes of Central Ohio will show at the Mid Ohio Regional Planning Commission (MORPC) at Art in the Halls Gallery, 285 East Main St. Columbus, Ohio. to December 29. Hours are 8 to 5. Call 613-228-2663 or 800-886-6722, to be sure the gallery is available. If you feel that you can't make the trek, visit www.lawesner.com, and be sure to check out the January 2007 issue of American Artist.

THE LAVENDER KOOLADE TUTU CONNECTION

2006-11-20T13:48:00.000-05:00

THE LAVENDER KOOLAID TUTU CONNECTION: EDGAR DEGAS MEETS THE PHANTOM

Dear Reader: I was rummaging thru books at the Upper Arlington Library Sale when I spied a used paperback of Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of The Opera, one of my favorite reads .--If you read my descriptions of the dancers in the current Columbus Museum of Art exhibit* (Look farther down on this post) and if you like hit musicals, you may be interested in knowing that Edgar Degas, and the Phantom, and Leroux, the Phantom's author, were, loosely speaking, contemporaries! At least , all three of them haunted the same vast Paris Opera house --its mirrors, dressing rooms, marble corridors-- during roughly the same times. And although Leroux was the younger, his life as well as Degas' touched La Belle Epoch, the lush yet impoverished period between the Franco Prussian War, 1870,and World War I, 1914 - 1918. Both Degas and Leroux observed first hand the scampering ballet kids and the angular bare shouldered, ballerinas, the leading dancers. Indeed, Leroux,-- a gregarious, rotund, woman-chaser -seemed to know the interior of the Opera, like the linings of his own expensive suede gloves! Degas knew his way around the Opera too, but having rationalist and upper crust sensibilities, it is unlikely that he saw the Opera Ghost, and his relationships with the Opera dancers, were strictly for art's sake. --Yes, children there was a Phantom before there was an Andrew Lloyd Webber, and hence I am sharing with you some passages (!} from Leroux' novel, followed by my own descriptions of dancers in the current Art Museum exhibit. It is up to you to connect the invisible dots, and it is up to you to verify the existence of the Opera Ghost. . . From the novel:
"Suddenly, the dressing room of La Sorelli, one of the principal dancers, was invaded by half a dozen young ladies of the ballet, who had come up from the stage after dancing Polyeucte. They rushed in amid great confusion, some giving vent to forced and unnatural laughter, others to cries of terror. Sorelli, who wished to be alone for a moment, looked around angily at the mad and tumultuous crowd.
"It was little Jammes --the girl with the tip tilted nose, the forget me not eyes, the lily white neck and shoulder--who gave the explanation in a trembling voice:
"'It's the ghost!" and she locked the door.
"La Sorelli's dressing room was fitted up with official commonplace elegance. . . A pier glass, a sofa, a dressing table and a cupboard. On the walls a few engravings, relics of the mother who had known the glories of the old Opera in the Rue de Pelletier.
BUT THE ROOM SEEMED A PALACE TO THE BRATS OF THE CORPS DE BALLET
who were lodged in common dressing rooms where they spent their time singing, quarreling, smacking the Dressers and Hair Dressers, and buying one another glasses of cassis, beer, or even rhum, until the call boy's bell had rung."
Degas painted his large Foyer de la Danse in 1872. Leroux, younger than Degas, published first edition of The Phantom in 1911. In 1879 Scribner's magazine published this (partial) description of The Paris Opera.
" The Foyer de la Danse of the Opera is a place to which the subscribers to three performances a week are admitted between the acts in accordance with a usage established in 1870. Three immense looking-glasses cover the back wall of the Foyer, and a chandelier with one hundred and seven burners supplies it with light. The paintings include twenty oval medallions in which are portrayed the twenty danseuses of most celebrity since the Opera has existed in France... . While the ladies of the ballet receive their admirers in this Foyer, they can practice their steps ! Velvet cushioned barres have been secured at convienient points, and the floor has been given the same slope as that of the stage, so that the labor expanded may be holy profitable to the performance."
Again, children, there was a Phantom before Lloyd Webber wrote his opera and even before Lon Cheyney Jr. appeared in the 1925 Silent, its opening punctuated by a quavering bevy of --guess who--"young ladies from the ballet of The Paris Opera!"
YES, YOU'LL SEE HIS BALLERINAS!
On handbags, note cards, frig magnets, Degas ballerinas have spread like berries in a patch! They're angular pretty dancers, and everybody loves them. In his prime Degas painted dancers on stage at the Paris Opera and at work at the Opera School with its vast practice floor. He always separated the dancers from the dance, that is he always caught them in an off moment so that painting was painting: the actual choreography remained a separate art.
As a figure painter Degas painted transitions. A collapse on a bench. The caught breath in the wings. "The space between." --For example, the split second when a dancer lands from, or pushes off, into a grande jete, a leap There is one "ballerina painting" in the current exhibit, and one "ballerina sculpture."
DANCER WITH BOUQUET, 1895 to 1900.
An unseen audience applauds. Our prima ballerina, nearly life sized, stands alone on the Opera stage in this large, broadly painted canvass, 71 x 60 inches She wears a long tarleton skirt--dusk purple lanvender--which has not yet evolved into a short tutu! Mademoiselle stands up front where the stage is dark. Yet, her face is turned toward the light. Her jaw is strong, her hair pulled straight back, crowned with pink blossoms.
She's on the upswing from a reverence, a curtsey, and her right arm springs, awkwardly, lightly, up toward her face. Her left hand holds her skirt. This "candid camera" effect is a Degas hallmark.
A painted backdrop--forest, pink-streaked sky, ocean(?) with two rocks--gleams behind her. Two large bouquets --red roses in paper cones--have been tossed from the Opera "boxes "and lie close to her feet. Our ballerina--face shoulders arms, illuminated--closes her eyes at the glare from--a gaslight? an electrified spot? A painter's perogative? She's a veteran dancer, a long time "favorite." She appreciates her applauding admirers, but she is exhausted.
Degas' eyesight is diminishing with age, yet he has captured the split second off guard expression on her face. The performance is over.
( The Phantom may be watching. Connect the dots to Madame Sorelli and the little dancers crowding her dressing room, as described earlier, and to the Scribners magazine description..)

THE LITTLE DANCER AGE FOURTEEN
She's 39 inches tall and consists of bronze, tulle, and silk ribbon. Degas originally sculpted her sometime between 1879 to 81. She is the most famous little dancer in the world, and she spends a great deal of time posing n the collection of Abigail and Leslie Wexner. The Little Dancer is small for fourteen. She is likely "a rat," the slang term for the near extras, students who filled out the Corps de Ballet. (connect the dots to Little Jammes)They were often, not always, the children of the working poor. Their lives at the ballet school with its rigorous disciplines, leering hangers-on, (oh, that Foyer!) were precarious, but a way up. The 1881 art critics sawThe Little Dancer as "impudent" and "from the gutter."--Her tough but easy stance , her skinny body and finely honed face, form a timeless picture of determination. Yet, in 2006, she seems familiar, confidently middle class. She might be a young, competitive BalletMet student resting, if sassily, listening to a transistor between rehearsals for BalletMet's Nutcracker!
The satin ribbon continues to gleam. Connect the dots on the time machine screen!
Degas: The Last Landscapes, will show at the Columbus Art Museum, 480 East Broad St. thru January 21, 2007. The two ballerinas will be there, and the wonderful landscapes, and who knows, the Phantom may show up! note: Liz reviewed The Last Landscapes for the 2006 December issue of The Short North Gazette.

CLINTONVILLE IS HOT! (Part I.)

2006-11-09T14:01:00.000-05:00

CLINTONVILLE IS HOT, PART I:
Booze-free, smoke-free, and the music is free in more ways than one! At 7 p.m. second Saturdays at Areopagitica Book Store, 3510 N. High .
In September a delighted audience heard folk music by At Wits End and AWE's founder and lead singer, FRED BAILEY. At Wits End consists of four more-than- accomplished musicians. Slender Nancy Bailey handles sound and back up for AWE, and when there's a piano available, she plays it. She is married to Fred Bailey who admits that "Nancy does a lot of the arranging and also listens to songs while they're being composed and yes takes care of sound."
Charlotte Custis "sings the high part" and the other vocalist, Pam Raver, "sings in the middle range" and plays something called a marimbula. A marimbula, Fred Bailey explained, "was invented in the outbacks of Ohio by Mike Allen of Delaware County, who named it after and builit it something like, the African and Caribbean instruments that are thumb pianos."(Hope I got that right!) Pam and Charlotte possess clear voices suitable for an opera chorus or a church choir. --They sound good!
Fred Bailey sings lead. He is the chief raconteur and founder of At Wits End, and his presence is inimitable, to say the least, and that's a compliment.--When I asked him, "Well, are you a baritone?" he responded, "I've been called that."
Bailey knows a great deal about the history of folk music and about history in general, and he is wonderful at anecdotes and quotations. His repertoire is a mix of his own original songs
and other folk songs, some more familiar than others. His butterfly song, "Why don't they call them Flutter Bys," is popular with young and old alike. . . "Small wings like these can only tease/ and not disturb the air/ and our starships really just two folding chairs."
In his off-guitar remarks Bailey said that all authentic folk songs tell a story.
Like sparks from a coal furnace his own words, and words by others, glittered, yes glittered, during the Areo concert. . .
"Gray hills along the Cimarron. . . Comanche, Cheyenne. My home on the Great Plains. He hit the railroad crossin' like some kind of shootin' star. . . Us kids all lined the gutter . . . just to see old Clayton comin' into town.. . It's dark as a dungeon down in the mines. . . Got away with Annie Laurie when the east was turning gray. . ."
Bailey is a tall rangy guy with kinda long stringy hair that looks okay! He was born in Oklahoma "where the grass looks like desert." Although he hasn't been back for over twenty years, his songs about "a cavalry officer's ghost" and "tanks rusted up 'til you'll never pump
water again" prove that he never really left, and that's good for us. His vocal range has the nuance and finesse of a Molotov cocktail. His chainsaw voice goes beyond Willie Nelson's, and
his baritone(?) is so gloriously unvarnished, it's marvelous!
He's had air play on more than twenty stations, including KTBOO in Aslaska; KAFY in Colorado; KTEP in El Paso, Texas; WETA in Arlington Va. and KRCL in Salt Lake City Utah. He sometimes performs at one of the most sophisticated gigs in Columbus, The Last Saturday Coffee House sponsored by the Columbus Folk Music Society at First Unitarian Universalist Church, 93 West Weishiemer, on the last Saturday of the month. Bailey has CDs and a web site, and so does the Columbus Folk Music Society.
On SATURDAY, NOV. 11, 7 pm. LARRY DRAKE , Blues Man, will sing the blues at Areopagitica. Some are his own songs, some not, and you'll hear a lot of good blues guitar. JOHN AND JANET SCHOMBURG , long time CFMS participants,-- their musicality is peppered by a sense of humor, traditional, old time, zingy--will play from 8 to 9 after Drake's gig. --In October I was absolutely enthralled, yes , you can quote me, by JOHN LOCKE's mellow voice and its English drift. By his low key, off beat stories and original songs. About haunted Welsh coal mines and other whimsical and spectral locations. This understated guy has charm, big time.

EDWARD S. CURTIS: THE WOMEN

2006-10-02T14:17:00.000-04:00

EDWARD S. CURTIS and THE WOMEN: A PERSONAL RESPONSE
The Women: Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian will show at Schumacher
Gallery to October 18, 2006. There are forty two photographs in this five star photography exhibit. The subjects, North American Indian women, were not photographed "in living color"--such technology did not exist in the early 1900s--but they have, like lovers on the Grecian urn, been "caught forever" in "tissue" and "gold."
Thus, they can speak to us from pale, almond-toned "canvasses" which suggest a perennial twilight. . .
BUFFALO BERRY GATHERERS, 1909: A sky as vacuous as unbleached muslin meets the scruffy Plains half way. Two very young Mandan women, their hair smooth and black, "star" in this simple composition: Sky, women, berry tree, the prairie. (Or a meadow.)
By 1909 these girls' "every day" dresses were likely "store bought" or, at least, were dresses cut from traders' calico. Edward S. Curtis, photographer, probably asked the girls to wear traditional, perhaps ceremonial, garb for this photograph.
I like to think the two women are sisters. Near Sister has donned a wide white robe, kind of a tent dress, softened white leather,maybe. She wears it bunched-in at the waist by a wide belt. We see only one of her hands. Curtis has asked Near Sister to pose with one hand touching the scraggly fingers of the berry bush. It's a classical pose, a benediction. Her face is hidden.
Second Sister, standing less than a foot away from Near Sister, reveals half of her earnest sweet face. She appears to be younger and smaller than Near Sister. Mr. Curtis knows his classical composition. Second Sister wears a sporty long dress, one with studs and beads on the shawl collar. Near Sister wears more fringe!
The teenagers stand motionless for a long time while Mr. Curtis takes photographs.
They can't see me, but I am standing beside them. Our thirty toes hide in tough prairie grass. The prickle- leaves push through my tee shirt and my cut offs. --Suddenly, the sisters yelp, drop their poses, and run barefoot down the dirt path to where Mother is beating on a cook pan, calling them home.
They throw their picture clothes on the bed, and, wearing home made petticoats, commence to clear a wobbly table and scrape off the dishes. Mother wraps the fancy dresses in used pattern paper, saves them for the next "pow wow" or another photo shoot.
THE RUSH GATHERER, 1910. In this long narrow sepia tone the hour is Curtis' apparent favorite: dusk or dawn, an indescribable half light. The scaly bark canoe turns up at each end, floats like a sea monster, smack dab in the middle of a seamless lake.
The horizon melts into the water, exactly half way up. (Well, almost exactly.)-- As it does in Buaffalo Berry Gatherers, a simple photo composition "works." We can notice the razor sharp lines of the reeds, or rushes, standing erect, brashly, on each side of the canoe which casts its own shadow. This Kutenai woman, the Rush Gatherer, consists of a small hunched blob in the canoe. She wears a slouched straw hat. A rush hat. To us she is a nobody, a dark shape. The reeds are taller than she is . Weaving reeds, cutting them, selling them--that's her subsistence job! The Rush Gatherer is dirt poor. She reminds us, as have feminist scholars, that "Anonymous was a woman."
Again. There are forty two photos waiting for you at Schumacher Gallery. Nesplim Girl. A Cachula Child. Daughters of the Chief. Two Bear Women. Mohave Potter. They will tell you stories if you let them.
OPENINGS . . . At Schumacher Gallery, at "The Women's " well attended opening on September 8, The Native American Indian Center of Central Ohio provided a Blessing ceremony and a drumming. I noticed, happily, one or two women drumming in the circle.--At least they were chanting in the circle!--After awhile a young college guy played soft jazz on his guitar. That was cool. Cheese, fruit, and pastries were for the tasting. Real crystal and clear plastic glittered on steel refreshment tables. The guests were not only "speaking of Michelangelo" as T.S. Eliot would have said, but they were discussing football scores and looking at gorgeous photographs of Native American Indian women who had posed over a hundred years ago
against what Teddy Roosevelt had named "the Vanishing Frontier." --If you were over twenty four, wine was available.
--Strange things happen during Ohio's "Indian Summers." The ghost of master painter/teacher Robert Henri, American, 1865-1929, plastic glass in hand, strolled in from an adjoining room. He was pleased. he was puzzled. Nobody saw him but me!-- He was thinking of the rapid traverse of culture --since 1876 at Custer's Last Stand, since the Wounded Knee Massacre, 1890, since the takeover of Alcatraz Island in 1969! --"It is a mad, mad world," he mumbled, and asked the pony-tailed waitress to refill his glass. He remembered. . .
In 1905 the photographer Edward S. curtis and his partners had thrown a brilliant party at the Waldorf Astoria in order to celebrate, and to sell, Curtis documentation of Indian Life. There were 20 volumes and 270 photographs and prints and they sold like corn cakes. The "opening" was a scene worthy of the novelist, E.L. Doctorow: the railroad tycoons --Jay Gould, James T. Hill, yes, J.P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbuilt --their socially prominent wives poured into satin gowns, --were in attendance. One can imagine that champagne flowed, like the East River. Curtis' large "Indian" photographs were accompanied by a lantern show, stereoptican slides, huges prints, early sound narration. Diamonds glittered, orchids bloomed. it was, indeed, a night to remember.
Robert Henri shook his head: paradoxically, the railroad, its voracious slaughter of buffalo, and Indians, had been, and would be, a prime factor in making the American frontier and its indigenous people "vanish." Henri's ghost, familiar with the (socialist) Masses magazine and the Ash Can school of painting, asked for another drink and thought about a recurring phenomenon:
Indigenous tribal people continue to vanish, to be bombed and exploited, to migrate, to live at risk. Their children, or grandchildren, will drum at art openings, nibble cheese , and sip Seven Up among chatting art lovers. Henri's Ghost realized that these images--distanced, rearranged, recalled--form a kind of reality that is both actual and unrealized. Of the way we want it to be, the way it was. The way it is now. He realized that Curtis' beautiful photographs can stand on their own.
"After all," he whispered to the young wait person, "the greatest photographers studied great paintings."
TheWomen is a transcendently beautiful show. A don't- miss. There's a book, too: Edward S. Curtis: The Women, by Christopher Cardozo. The Schumacher Gallery is on Fourth Floor of Blackmore Library, Capital University, 1 College and Main in Columbus, Ohio. Hours are Monday-Saturday, 1:00 to 5 p.m.

HE(ART) AT COLS ARTMUSEUM BEATS HEAT!

2006-08-04T12:56:00.000-04:00

Art can nourish broken hearts. And art can, temporarily, beat the heat and counter the despair emanating from a war torn world. A few hours at the Columbus Museum of Art can provide a peaceful yet exciting interlude.
On June 29 the inimitable Charles Kleibacker,noted fashion designer and Adjunct Curator of Design at the Columbus Museum of Art, offered a marvelous guided tour thru his exhibit. UNCOMMON CLOTHES , which will show at the Museum thru September 3rd.
Kleibacker possesses a low key and utterly charming presence.--He was, of course, impeccably dressed. Born in 1921 he's the Gregory Peck of the fashion world.--I'd guess at least 50 people crowded around him at the lecture, and some lovely pencil thin models were among the throng.Photographs, many from fashion magazines like Vogue and Harpers Bazaar, accompanied the gowns, dresses, coats and accessories. The show includes, but isn't limited to, some celebrity fashions. The lovely songstress Hildegarde is there, and so is her lovely gown,-- thanks to Kleibacker-- and, of course, she had to have a handkerchief to hold on to while she sang. --"Dahling, parlez- vous Francaise?--Je vous aime beau coup."
On loan from "Linda Claire Meissner, New York" is a Kleibacker-designed black dress, stunningly classic, "a midi length dress of black wool crepe." --We can also see the dress Carroll Baker wore in the film"Harlow" (1968) when she played the short lived platinum star, Jean Harlow. Harlow and Baker were/are petite women barely up to Clark Gable's long gone powerful shoulder. Pierre Balmain designed this deliciously provocative evening gown for Carroll and Jean. It's a "long dress of bugle beads and sequins on nude silk, 1965."--Sounds like a poem, and it is. All of the Uncommon Clothes look like, and read like, poetry. Try this on, by Mme. Gres: " a long dress in celadon green silk crepe, 1955." Or, by Ralph Rucci, "Tunic of silk cigaline and gazar with hand-looped ribbons; silk velvet pants, 1955. "
Isabel Toledo, a kid,(!) "American born 1961" has provided "a short dress/bolero ensemble in cotton; silk linings, 2005" and it is Hot, as in Cool!
And not far from the fashion exhibit is a marvelous photographic painting by Norma Jean Ray, b. 1970 of "Isabel Toledo in Toledo's New York City Studio, 2004." This is a fantastic representational work which gives us insight into its subject, a highly successful contemporary designer and her professional environment.
In The Museum's New Aquisitions space, are many wonders. XAN PALAY, from whom The Museum recently purchased a sculpture, is one of the most in-fashion artists around! Her slight majorette stature adds to her whimsical persona and aesthetic. How DID she do it? Circle City, a cast iron sculpture combines a Gorey-like atmosphere with a black smith's prowess. The piece reminded me of an encampment of iron sandwiches on Old Round Top during the not too civil American Civil War. As I gazed I thought I heard the Anvil Chorus as played by Phillip Glass, and I whispered "Go XAN go!"
In the same room people were commenting on Evan Penny's astonishing "The Back of Kelly." This big guy's head is so lifelike that it's worth a trip to The Museum to see him! (And to listen to people talk about him!)
The Ohio Art League juried show and the Richard Avedon exhibit were as substantial and Wow as anybody would see in New York, if not more than, and I'd like to conclude with a homily: SUPPER by Joseph Hirsch, American 1910 to 1981, is an irrefutably fine social realist painting in which the beatific Last Supper is brought up to date. Each of these twelve homeless men has been treated with compassion and honesty as they dine at a blazing white table cloth amid much wine-red decor. This work is timeless and timely, and a winner.
Today is August 4, 2006. The international news is horrendous, and so is the heat. --Yet, art heals and inspires. At The Columbus Art Museum amid a high fashion show and a dinner for the homeless, life, for a moment, can be as Hildegarde --or Edith Piaf--would sing it, "La Vie En Rose."

AT NORTHWOOD: A BRILLIANT FOCUS

2006-05-31T13:10:00.000-04:00

IN FOCUS, a photo exhibit at Northwood ARTSpace, 2231 N. High St. will run thru June 2006. This exhibition shines in its own specific way.--
In Focus is so pristine it's gorgeous!--The way Bach Etudes are gorgeous.
There are 32 photographs in this show, each of them is around 8 x 11 inches. Each hangs in a narrow black frame, and the affect is pleasing. Almost all of the photos contain one subject, or objet.
Entering the show one first sees Chuck Zelm's Stained Glass Sky, a haunting "cut" of a stone Madonna's face. Next to Her loiters Chuck Perry's amicable uncaged wolf from the front quarters up. Wolf stares into our eyes. His mood is inscrutable. This is a portrait. Farther down,
Perry's eagle soars against a wild environment. Wolf dominates his own color photo.
The In Focus photographers have mastered the basics of their craft: color, black and white, composition and cropping, and yes, focus.--Sometimes that focus elides into a form of abstraction, as in the case of many flowers, insects, and creatures.
GARDEN FOCUS
Rick Reiger has a treasure hunter's eye. He sees a butterfly on a piece of Chihuly glass (at Franklin Park, of course.) His two masked boobies, a la Darwin, are --I was going to say "the cats pajamas" --and he has internalized the patterns and paths of Inniswood Park.
Irene Verweij has created large magical "blow ups" in Green and Blue Green. As I recall, her pleasing abstracts portray a green mantis and a dragon fly. Verweij creates poetic earth tributes, whatever her actual subjects. Large up-close petals provide a self contained terrain for Yellow.--Tulips reign, and I do mean with lustre, as photographed by Mike Johnson and Dan Borzynski. Herbert Mirela's Bark 1 and Bark 2 provide rich textural environments, give us a sense of pre historic pasts. So does Chuck Zelms' Old Man's Cave. Henry Tan's
Munising Falls is a moment frozen in zen time; my eye traveled up and up, without traveling.
Earl English's Y50 and Y50 A take the art of flower abstractionism to new heights. And widths. William Blake's poetic ethos, that the infinite is found in the ultimately small-- "find eternity in a grain of sand"--is evident in English's striking abstracts.
Judy Fettman's flowers are absolutely gorgeous. No garden expert myself, I think she has chosen single camelias and peonies for her focused single subjects, and whatever they are, they are very very lovely.
The aesthetic of "large" as contained in "small" is evident in much of the Focus show.
Ah, yes, and soon we will be dreaming and walking in Dan Borzynski's Fall Colors.
ON THE FAR WALL
Will Brenner has captured a professional, brilliantly costumed
ballerina,--on stage, on pointe in a grande developpe as Sugar Plum Fairy. Farther on, Brenner's lovely "modern" dancer displays her own "extension." There is no blurr or whirr. One can enjoy the moment with simple choreographic joy.
Breaking out of the one subject format Doug Rutledge has exhibited recent examples of photo journalism. Working in black and white he has captured group images . Watching inDebaab and Waiting in Debaab offer a poignant look at people in the horrific refugee camps of Kenya. One man, Dyrios, gesturing on the moment, pontificates in his shop of touristy shamanistic wonders in the third photo, Dyrios.
Rutledge's austere groups congeal into a sobering whole. His visits to the camps in Kenya are beginning to bear witness, and he is writing about them.
Wen Tong Lin's haunting Pool Table, as well as his Looking Beyond in which a woman tourist rushes into traffic, provide high water
marks for In Focus. Excellence can express loneliness. Henry Tan's Late Lunch proves that a slice of ordinary life can be explosive.--Nothing will actually explode, however,with Mike Johnson's Queen's Guard standing watch.
AS I PREPARE TO LEAVE I think of how I'd like to award a blue ribbon to Dan Boryzsnki's Orchids. This photo manages to be: luscious, smart, representational, minimal, and very NOW, all at the same time!
In Focus shines in its own specific way. Despite a post holiday crunch I wanted to cover this show; I hope I didn't leave anyone out while I was writing fast.
My father, a musician, once told me that each concert pianist should "master Scarlatti's beautiful exercises and when you hear them they're more than exercises they're high art."--So it is with In Focus. The show will run thru June and is a don't-miss.
note: Veteran photo artist Abdi Roble is the founding member of In Focus which meets regularly at Upper Arlington Library. Call 294-5113 for more infiormaton about the group.

DON JONES: AN ARTIST FOR ALL SEASONS

2006-03-02T14:25:00.000-05:00

Paintings by Don Jones will show at The First Unitarian Universalist Church, 93 West Weisheimer, through March 2006. There are thirty large paintings in this exhibit, and they are a pleasure to behold. Art connoisseurs and uninitiated viewers alike should enjoy this array which provides a compleat journey through painting.

AN OVERVIEW

The artist knows how to draw and paint and has been doing that for quite some time. Yet, his Weisheimer show is not actually a retrospective but consists of paintings done over the past eight to ten years.

Jones is a representational painter, knows the human body, knows portraiture, and is a more than accomplished technician. His brushwork is not very textural, or thick, yet his colors dance from a warm palette that emphasizes puples, magentas, blues, green, and dull golds. His flesh tones are pleasing and rosy except when they're gorgeously copper.

The artist loves life and the earth, and he is the master of eco colors --- especially bright blues --- that surround and enhance his "solo" humans, the focal points in most of his paintings.
Jones tends toward the impressionistic, yet ventures into an exciting mix of abstractions and line drawings from time to time. He cannot be defined, or confined, by any "school." When he was quite young his painting and drawing gave him a "voice," and now he creates art because it is there, inside him and around him. --- How shall we tell the archer from the bow?

THE MUSICIANS

The solitary person, not necessarily a lonely one, dominates Jones' exhibit. The artist is, after all, an art therapist of long standing. His single figures, presented alone amid familiar and usually austere backgrounds, emit a warmth that includes individuality, self expression.

LONELY FIDDLER practices, seated in a kitchen chair, in an almost empty room where everything is gray and two dim parakeets sing in a tarnished cage.

JIM PLAYS THE BLUES could be a pastel! Colors are bold and flat. Jim is a medley of golds and browns. His brown-shod feet hold the chalk blue music book steady on the floor. The guitar and the rag rug are vivid chalk blue and almost leap into the air!

MORGAN WITH GUITAR is 24 x 36 inches, the average size of most of the paintings, and is more detailed, more " filled out" than the other "musician" paintings. The blonde boy with longish hair is around twelve. He is Jones' son, Morgan. He's seated on the piano bench, his back against the keyboard. His white shirt "plays off", balances, the white music pages and the narrow strip of piano keys in the shadowy room where he's practicing. Morgan's face and figure present a specific young man, his earnestness caught forever in a special moment. The blended, inobtrusive, background --- dull gold, purple, rosy-magenta strokes, sunlight against shadow --- is testimony to Jones' painterly skill.

SELF PORTRAITS

"Looking into the mirror, painting a self portrait, is one way of saying 'What's goin' on Don?'"--- Don Jones.

As an art therapist with many years experience at the noted Menninger Clinic, and later at Harding Hospital, Don Jones paints himself in order to learn about "le Moi," the Me. There are nine fascinating self portraits in the show. As a technician Jones knows the compositional gambit of using a bright splat, this time a red brush tip, in order to "set up" a painting. He does this in the marvelous THE ARTIST POSING AS ARTIST in which he's shown at work in a studio pleasantly cluttred with objects and symbols.

I REFLECT ON WATER is a Jones par excellence. In this striking painting the artist has painted himself as two triangles within circles --- well, within two half circles! His arms bend at the elbows, and his hands are clasped. Thus, he's triangular! His hair is as white as Merlin's, or any wizard's, while he peers into his own reflection which seems to reside in a pool of the night sky, or the universe. He is encircled by strips (medicine hoops?) of eco blues and greens, of white and black, and a few stars glitter in the surrounding darkness. --- From across the room this portait reminds me of a peace sign. --- "Don't look for any hidden narrative, rather respond with your own ideas," Jones has printed on a placard elsewhere in the exhibit.

In one portrait Jones has depicted himself, his wife Karen who is an art therapist, and his son Morgan, a strong infant. The triad is, perhaps, Jones' U.U. portrait of a classical holy family --- loving parents and a child. Karen's lovely straight-planed face glows; she has short hair; she wears a dull lime green dress against which she cradles Morgan, a fine strong baby. Don, the tall Joseph figure, gazes over Karen's shoulder, his face in shadows.

THE SHIMMER

Jone's landscapes, and yes, many of his other paintings, emit a a rare sheen. Whether to label certain paintings as "acrylic" or "oil" proved a conundrum. --- Something else seemed to be going on! When queried the artist explained that he works in "mixed media," that he uses, and combines, layers of polyurethane varnishes and acrylics for his paintings. He says he doesn't know "anyone else who does it just like this, although I've tried to teach other painters to do it."

In the center of MY NEIGHBORS YARD IN SPRING (24 x 36 inches) one large tree empowers, "lights up," the painting from the center, emits a glory of white blossoms that have dropped in a circle under it. In the background, the neighbor's low slung house and the meld of aquas above it, have been appropriately, sketchily, painted. In the right corner a tall audacious forsythia explodes with unabashed yellow. In the distance small navy blue (!) bushes form a row against the house. Here's a contra dance! --- Each color sashays, if gently, with the other. Yet, this painting explodes with spring. --- The Shimmer has done its thing.

AFTER THE RAIN. If you love Jones' "Spring" painting, his gorgeous, yet familiar condo-scape, After the Rain, will blow you away. In my opinion you won't find a better contemporary landscape anywhere. And you'll have to look far and wide to find a similar natural light, or sheen, that glitters as it does in Don Jones' After the Rain.

BALLERINAS AND GROTESQUES

Jones' simple pastel-like renderings of costumed ballerinas are naturally posed and appealing. His DRAGON FLY brings the green mist of Avalon to an arabesque penchee. His version is as charming as Anna Pavlova's in vintage posters for "Dragonfly." As is typical of Jones work, the dancers nearly "fill up" their large frames.

The artist's forays into abstract art are vivid and successful. EXPRESSIVE DANCER, NO EXIT, and INSPIRATION WON'T STAY ON THE CANVAS, are but three of his quality abstracts which include overlays and bold lines.

The artist shines at his own brand of social commentary which means that he expects viewers to, calmly, fill in their own dots. THE LAST FLOWER is a strong abstract expessionist work, a rush of bold strokes, that speaks to the urgency of ecological issues. Here the ultra urbanized have thronged to see a single dandelion, "the last flower."

Although we may read our own meaning into the grotesque and murky expressionist painting which presents scowling elders sitting against a wall, SMILE AT SOMEONE TODAY, indeed, speaks of Jones' concern for the warehousing of the elderly, for their being forced to become "other."

The Gallery is in the First Unitarian Universalist Church, 93 W. Weisheimer. Myra Hine is the curator. Jones' paintings are also displayed in the halls and in the vast and pleasing Worship Center. If the church is open, the art show is available. Admission, like your many-splendored thoughts and reactions to the art, is open and free. Call 267-4946 for hours.

ARTSPACE WOMEN!

2006-02-06T13:59:00.000-05:00

ARLENE COX TEAL is a mixed media powerhouse. Her attention-grabbing work has been executed with technical aplomb, and her color-full art dominates the walls at Northwood ArtSpace thru February 2006.

Cox Teal is not only an imaginative artist, she is an expert collagist, seamstress, and "maker" who can combine textiles, stitchery, weaving, metalwork, porcelain, doilies, glass objects, painting--yes, even saucers from a doll's tea set -- with consummate skill. Indeed, her art has shown at the noted Dairy Barn at Athens, Ohio, as well as at Columbus City Hall and the Ohio State Fair.

Arlene loves her one woman shows upstairs at the Columbus Cultural Art Center. She makes art continuously, which is a good thing, because work by Arlene Cox Teal is well crafted, appealing, and sells!

THE HAWAIIAN AND HIS FRIENDS

Cox Teal's iconic Hawaiian is around 36 inches tall and 16 inches wide. He is a duality: a-mask-as-a-dark-man set against darkness, a black midnight blue. His face, painted metal, is scarred and grooved; it's a found object. His creator knows design and composition. Portrayed from the collar bone up, he IS his own composition and nearly fills up his own background. He glares at us, with encircled red glass eyes. His royal collars and his headress consist of thick crochet-lace dyed orange and arranged in tridents. Batik helps to form his face and his portrait. His adornments, his visage, and his background, create a single powerful design. He speaks with shamanic power thru time and location.

Arlene Cox Teal began At My Kitchen Table at Arrowmont, the noted craft center in in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. --She does, indeed, make most of her art at "my great grandfather's kitchen table. I ate off it, he did too."

Indeed, Arlene was busy making art on that very kitchen table when I called! At My Kitchen Table, a wall hanging, is about the size of a luncheon cloth. On it the artist has affixed six small dainty china dishes to a linen matting that appears handwoven. "They're a gift, very very old, but not from the family" she said of the dishes "they used to hold salt." (And they're not really doll dishes, they're just that small.)

The "table" has been spread with a painted-on pastelly quilt. On it : uneven blue green blocks. And the centerpiece is a small bright applique rooster nested against tan braid on a wine hued plate that contains white linen stitches! Edges curl. At my Kitchen Table is a delightful and original piece that speaks volumes.

The actual Cox Homestead which stood a hundred years or so in Madison county, burned twenty years ago, and is memorialized in a simple, poignant construct of thin, charred boards.

Leopard Arrangement is a blast and contains a leopard tail! (decorative, not real)

Cox Teal's Vintage Roses were formed by "feeding melting crayons into an old soldering iron!--It's a difficult process," she said. "It took awhile for me to figure out how to do it ." To call this painting "textural" would be an oxymoron. Each of the thick brazenly red roses blooms on a stem with three pronged leaves. The sun casts a rich strawberry gold in the background.--Yes, the Roses have already sold.

MARILYN GRAY JONES, printmaker and painter, has shown at Northwood and various venues in the Short North. For the current Northwood show with Cox Teal she has created styrofoam wall constructions in white. They are dreamy, earth resonant. Luckily for us, Gray is in love with the sea and the shore. For her foamy box-like wall sculptures she uses shell and plant imprints, convex shell forms, tiny creatures, glass and pebbles, wood bits, various embeddings. One sculpture seems to include cobwebs and/or spidery dirt!

In a not so dreamy mode Gray Jones has created True Colors, an adorable wall piece. It includes one thick, pudgy scalloped bright BLUE paper plate and one thick, pudgy scalloped bright RED paper plate. Each plate has plastic game chips for eyes and mouths. Each plate seems about to leap out of its bright yellow styrofoam background. --Is Marilyn trying to say something about the plate of the nation? Yes, or no, her True Colors is a blast, and her styrofoam constructions provide a much needed winter's dream.

The exhibit and its work by the two differing artists, hangs beautifully together as one show .
Northwood ArtSpace, under the talented and enduring curation of Diane Efsic, is a gem of a gallery with ample parking out back. On High Street it's just north of the Ohio State University. In fact, it's an O.S.U. outreach, at the corner of Northwood and High. If the building is open, the ArtSpace is open.

TRANSCENDENTAL RAIN

2006-01-05T14:06:00.000-05:00

TRANSCENDENTAL RAIN: personal recollections of the old year, 2005.
On December 24, 2005, a cold wet snowy night, an unassuming yet dedicated group of readers and writers met at AREOPAGITICA BOOK STORE, 3510 N. High St. There were about twelve of us -- the Poets Guild, founded and convened by Dotte Turner, is open to all-- and we read established work that reflected the season. The much honored poet Jean Desy read a piece written by Thomas Hardy around the time of World War I. In this poem the animals who, traditionally, knelt at midnight to worship Baby Jesus, are compared to soldiers slumped against the sides of trenches. Desy read her own hard edged intricate poem about a gas station and the city in winter.
Jackie Wetmore read poetry by Emily Dickinson. In it there were "leaden sieves of snow."Jeanni Ray enlivened all with a reading from David Sedaris.
Liz James read Kathleen Gallagher's poem "for Anna Akmatova," and Irina Ratushinskaya's "I will live and survive." In both of these "dissident" poems, images of light and ice radiate from the walls of a prison in winter. Pat Peterson read the traditional elocution piece, "jest fore Christmas" by James Whitcomb Riley.--A little nostalgia is good for everyone, like pepper on popcorn! Mark Stoll rocked his own version of The Twelve Days of Christmas, and Diana DelBianco looked like, and read about, a wintery goddess.
Best, and most revolutionary, or evolutionary, of all, was Rebecca Rutledge's reading from John Keat's The Eve of St. Agnes written in 1819.--Letting go, closing my eyes, I saw the moonlight, the luscious fruit on a silver tray, the heroine's beautiful hair. I saw, I heard, a necklace of words smouldering with imagination and craft.
I thought about Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti. . . Yes, Kerouac and The Beats--how they knew the master poets -- not only Whitman, Dickinson, Rukeyser--but how they mastered the ballades
and villanelles of some bottle tossing young French guys. I recalled how the Beats studied and practiced and when they did break free
the pure gold glistened waiting to be panned.
These were my thoughts at Areo on December 24.
I pictured us , the readers, as an enduring, marginal people.--We're the new Subterraneans, maybe, or maybe the new Transcendentalists!--We who sip pot-brewed coffee and nibble cookies while we listen to Keats on a bleak winter's night.
The name, Areopagitica comes from the great English poet John Milton's dedication to free speech, in case you didnt know. I didn't.
Areopagitica hosts an easy going writer's workshop from two to four p.m. on the Third Thursday of each month.--You're welcome to
bring copies of your own work. The Poets Guild meets every Fourth Friday at 7:30 p.m.
Doug Rutledge owns and manages Areopagitica, a marvelous second hand book store patrolled by a marvelously literate dog, Zack.
MORE TRANSCENDENTAL RAIN, more personal recollections. BalletMet and Toulouse Lautrec in 2005.
As one who has studied and loved ballet for over thirty years I think I've developed an "eye." I hope our Columbus audience knows how good their Company is! The Nutcracker was a confection with just the right vintage pouf or elan, in costuming , scenery, casting. Choreography was icicle clear and candy cane sweet! Everyone was perfect. I went on opening night. For some reason two details continue to dance in my memory. Randolph Ward was incredibly light and precise as he manipulated his sabre as a swordsman (a toy swordsman, of course.) And Hisham Omardian as the sardonic and mysterious visitor who brings the Nutcracker toy, seemed to have taken a direct flight from Tchaikovsky's Russia.The dance-technique was finely honed, igniting snowflakes,diamonds and, of course, sugar plums!
Alice inWonderland will run from Feb. 9th thru the 19th. Call 229-4860 for tickets..
TRANSCENDENTAL RAIN III: LIZ AND LAUTREC It is June 2005. I'm at the Lautrec and Montmartre exhibit at The National Gallery in Washington D.C. The exhibit is crowded and noisy but everybody is nice. Lautrec is popular! Hannah is two; she rides in Mommy's arms, or on Daddy's shoulders. She loves the black cats. There are a lot of them--Remember The Black Cat night club? Things really rocked there, not far from the Moulin Rouge. Ganny is impressed with what a great painter Lautrec was. How strong and versatile. She loves seeing his posters of the actress Jane Avril and she double-loves the serious and respectful oil portrait he painted of Avril, where shes a beautiful, fine featured woman in a long coat and it's dawn and she's leaving the theatre. She's a three dimensional human being. Berthe Morisot sits , without make up, serious, fine featured, at her dressing table. She's thin. She reads. I think she's beautiful. So did Lautrec. He took his subjects, yes, even the women, seriously. Morisot is lovely, she is his friend. A man says, "Ugh. Not sexy or pretty." I want to smack him but I don't. --Later, I see the Renoir's Women exhibit at the Columbus Art Museum. Lautrec seems more versatile than Renoir, and in most ways, as strong a painter as Renoir. I try to censor my thoughts . But I continue to remember the portraits by Lautrec. His women seem , well, to be thoughtful individuals. In a way, I think, its Lautrec who really loved women; he could be a friend. Hannah and I love to watch the 1890 film clip of the barefoot dancer Loie Fuller who is performing in Paris, like a butterfly. In black and white film she flutters and skips and her wings and scarves never stop moving. Isadora Duncan will be influenced by Loie and long after Lautrec is dead she herself will die in a phantasmagoria of scarf in Paris.--Isadora was right. she said "Art is greater than governments."--Hannah calls "Kitty, butterfly!"--Happy New Year,everyone.
If you read my blog and you want to send me positive comments you can send them to AMSCON Box 141251 Columbus, Ohio, 43214.

TRAVELS WITH ERNEST

2006-01-04T16:23:00.000-05:00

ArtScene's First Book Review: Travels With Ernest: Crossing the Literary Sociological Divide
by Laurel Richardson and Ernest Lockridge

I recommend this book enthusiastically, for several reasons:
First, amid the helter skelter of my own life, I treasure books I can enjoy in segments. Second, I enjoy books which I consider well written, and third, I relish non fiction books that read like imaginative prose but are actually non fiction works.--Some of Truman Capote's magazine articles , for example.
Travels With Ernest, Crossing the Literary/Sociological Divide meets each of these criteria. The book was published by AltaMira Press in 2003 as part of the Anthropological/Sociology Ethnographic Alternative Series. Savoring, dipping into this book, was a joy.It IS a joy,
I continue to dip in.
SUNBEAMS: LAUREL
Travels With Ernest enabled me, a compulsive stay-at-home, to see distant places. For example, as I write it's deep winter in Ohio, 2006, and I'm writing about Laurel and Ernest's ninth sojourn at St. Petersburg Beach, Florida in March 2002.
Laurel, an accomplished poet, writes first, revealing her sharp yet lyrical talent for descriptive prose. It's her first trip since 9/11 and she breathes deeply "imagining millions of zaps of the happiness potions that live in the sea, some call them 'negative ions.'"
She describes the GulfGate Condos as "color coordinated, swirls of turquoise , shrimp, and shells on the Wall Tex, chair covers, upholstery, pictures, dishes, towels, sheets. I sink into the comfort of the cliche."
Her description of the beach and its "five miles of white sand" is breathtaking. What satisfies her most is "the crescent shape of the beach, like a new moon." Anywhere on the beach she can see "the whole beach, its ending and beginning. Which is which depends on the direction I walk, I feel cradled and safe."
Earlier, Laurel had noticed the Holiday Inn, "round and perched like a spaceship readying for take off." She noticed "Young couples, mid age couples and leathered octogenerations in skimpy suits."
When they return to the condo Ernest and Laurel leave the sliding doors open "so the sound of the waves can lull us to sleep." In the morning when they beach walk, Laurel praises "the brown pelicans. . . The Old One commanding the T of the fishing pier, like a security guard checking passports. . . A gray heron arrives, stares unmercifully at a juvenile pelican, until the babe leaves its prime post atop the highest outcropping."
One this morning walk we're also allowed to relish a previous visit to Evander Preston's jewelry store where Ernest once bought Laurel "a pair of gold earrings, flat and smooth with wrinkled edges like the sea."
SAND: ERNEST
When they awake, Ernest, a professsor emeritus in English at The Ohio State Universitiy, quotes Tennyson's "the wrinkled sea beneath him crawls." Theirs is a double pilgrimage. First, they want to revisit the Don Cesar Hotel which was built in 1925 and used to be a haunt of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Coincidentally, they want to see President George W. Bush and his motorcade drive up to the Don Cesar for a $2500 a plate rundraiser. As two retired professors they exchange hilarious wisecracks about the price! They also intend to have lunch in an ice cream parlor which was once named Zelda's, but they have to settle for the new Uncle Andy's.
Ernest, who is an aficianado of--indeed, an expert on--F.Scott
Fitzgerald and the Great Gatsby--describes the scene with accuracy and literary elan. As Laurel puts it "Ernest can riff." He describes the Don Cesar as "our goal the flamingo pink mirage shimmering up ahead in the Florida heat, gigantic yet fragile looking, a Hansel and Gretel castle that might at any moment dissolve like sherbet into the Gulf of Mexico."
When Laurel and Ernest sight some kind of surveillance craft Ernest describes it with "the sleek black trawler has been shadowing our southward progress down the white crescent ever since we left our condo a few minutes ago. The trawler bristles with black domes, black antennae. Black radar grids whirl and pirouette."
"Better watch our p's and q's" whispers Laurel. . ."otherwise they'll get the impression we're speaking in code."
"Dot," I say, "dash."
N.C. AND GEORGE W.
Laurel asks Ernest whether he remembers George W. Bush at Yale. This sets Ernest off on a riotous yet highly informative ramble on those Yale days, 1963-1971, when he (Ernest) was assistant professor of English there. He recalls "classrooms full of good looking kids who'd rather discuss yachts than Yeats. Most of them looking like, oh, clones of the Kingston Trio."
Ernest writes skillfully, fearlessly, about N.C., the then-new New Criticism, and explains how and why N.C. eventually contaminated,--yes, nearly murdered --the craft of literature, yea, education. Here is a marvelous expose, a must, for a throng of serious writers who have been suffering in silence and wondering for some time what really went wrong.
Ernest explains how, eventually, grades were inflated and "Yale-ies were getting into Phi Beta Kappa with a grade average in the low eighties."
When Laurel says "too bad you can't talk about Bush with the People you know" Ernest responds with "Yeah, the 'just before you and I'
crowd mocking the Mother Tongue."
In his ramble Lockridge also defends the worth and history of Yale and takes pride in his time there. Some readers may disagaree with his indictment of N.C. but his explanation is first rate, convincing.
ORBITING
With Ernest Lockridge and Laurel Richardson you can visit Beirut, Lebanon in 1999 and "see" Ernest's daughter Helen marry Jean-Paul. You can travel to death Valley and Copenhagen and Petrozabodsky and Sedona and wind up in Worthington, Ohio, where Ernest and Laurel live.--The Ireland trip is special for literature buffs because of Ernest's
pungent relationship to W.B. Yeats and James Joyce.
HOW THIS BOOK WAS MADE
Laurel Richardson is an accomplished poet and a sociologist and ethnographer. She is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Visiting Professor of Cultural Studies at The Ohio State University.
She is the author of five books. Ernest Lockridge is Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing at the Ohio State University. He is the author of three novels and works of literary criticism and the editor of Twentieth Century Interpretation of the Great Gatsby. He did, indeed,
teach for eight years at Yale. Laurel and Ernest are a real life married couple who write, who travel together, converse amiably and frequently, and eat three meals a day with each other.
In the Appendix Laurel and Ernest, with Carolyn Ellis, one of their co editors , explain the nuts and bolts, the nitty gritty, that goes
into their writing. One of their aims is to crack the common expectations of context, text, and content. I found the Appendix as fascinating as the main text. In Laurel's statement she explains "in twenty six words, this was that collaborative process: we traveled; she saw, he saw, she writes; he writes; she reads his, he reads hers; they talk; he tapes; she transcribes, they 'vette,' they publish."
FROM EVERYWHERE WITH LOVE

In Travels With Ernest the authors break down societal barriers of alienation by sharing their conversations, thoughts, experiences.
The Travels may function as a sociology text book--after all,sociologists RECORD--but it's also the actual story of two people who love each other and share their work and their lives.--I treasure this book. It's kind of like reality TV, but the ideas are more exciting, and the language is platinum.

THE FABRIC OF INSPIRATION

2005-12-15T11:20:00.000-05:00

A review in blocks and scraps by Liz James

THE FABRIC OF INSPIRATION: TEXTILES INFLUENCING TEXTILES, a superb show of fabric art by Deborah Melton Anderson, will be on exhibit at the Columbus Cultural Arts Center thru January 8, 2006. Anderson's exhibit includes not only her own extraordinary needlework, but fabric art, traditional and contemporary, which has inspired, influenced, her own new and original work.--Thus, "textiles influencing textiles."
BLESSED BE THE TIES
For much of her art work Anderson cuts out myriads of tiny fabric necktie shapes...Ties. Hundreds of these small pointed cloth "scraps," -- which are not really "scraps"--must be cut, folded, turned inside out, reversed and stitched on!
Such work is labor intensive. When sufficient ties have been completed, Anderson strings them on large safety pins and arranges the pins so as to form patterns, shapes and colors that form a painting. The necessary visible quilting stitches serve both an aesthetic and a pragmatic purpose.--Quilting creates a kind of texture and also holds the fabric layers together.--Quilting, affixing, and now, heat transfers, have become time honored traditions, and so have the little ties!
BANNER
Anderson's large (51 inch square) BANNER greets guests to the Center. On the Banner, large ties represent the ceremonial feathers once used in Pre Columbian America. The Ancient Ones used actual feathers in their ritual art. Anderson's banner resembles a shield, yet it's a banner linked together with blue tabs. These tabs not only support the heavy banner; they enhance the design in which cones and feathers (large ties) dance harmoniously. The Banner is a wonderful high sign for the show, and is more complex in hue and pattern than my description suggests.
Anderson is a patient raconteur and teacher; indeed, she holds a Masters of Arts in Education from the Harvard School of Education, and she has studied with Nancy Crow, Michael James and other fabric masters. In one year, 2005, her work was exhibited
in five prestigious juried and invitational venues! Although I barely know Deborah Melton Anderson she was more than patient in explaining her use of the ties, and in showing me such traditional patterns as "Log Cabin" and "Hour Glass."
Anderson's art makea a strong first impact; it is also imbued with examples of the techniques and history of needlework, and deserves a long look. The show's concise print matter is first rate.
TIME TRAVEL AND CONTRASTS:
CELERY STALKS AT MIDNIGHT is marvelously "Now." In this medium sized fabric "painting, which certainly IS painterly, the light from the kitchen and the frig is apparent! Thin light green stalks slash this bold, meticulous painting which should prove a platinum gift for someone. --The daring, beautiful, BOUQUET, on the other hand, is a scrumptious, romantic, pastelly piece fit for a prom queen's boudoir! Both pieces show Anderson to be a master of shape-cutting, forming designs, and affixing!
TIME-LOOMS
Anderson can weave back and forth in time: New UPS codings, markings, have been included in the show, both in their original format and in Anderson's striking, slick, black-white-gray "painting" which includes a bulls-eye, a target! At 45 inches square, it's a black and white formal dance! The tracking system, Anderson commented, "goes beyond words."
An authentic Anatolian prayer rug from the nineteen hundreds, is echoed by Anderson's own dazzling fabrications. And a huge "tie quilt" made by two anonymous women in the 1930s, resembles a large striking abstract, and that back/forth concept reverberates to other paintings in the show.
TONE POEMS
Anderson uses rich dusky colors. "Large, tech brite, flashy" are neither her cup of tea, nor her skein of floss! As to prints, she tends to choose prints which are smallish and paisley-like. Her palette is not loud or brash.--Yet, the exactitutde of many rich colors flows like a river from piece to piece. Oddly, while I walked thru the exhibit--I kept thinking of French surrealist poets --those guys liked autumn, winter, and rain,--and they wrote poetry in which astounding images have been strung on a rhymed, cadenced, structural whole.
FALL RAIN/RAIN FALL is a tone poem in fabric, 42.5 x 43 inches. If I have a favorite Anderson, this is it. Here, ties seem to have become autumn leaves. Or rain drops. Never matter. Their points are down, like rain, and we see a meld of deep browns, purples, rusts. Color tones elide. The more you look the more color variations you see! Winey shapes fall thru Anderson's forest, or park. --Did I imagine tiny gold and coral stitches? The "painting" is divided into branch-like, or wing-like, sections Everything is abstracted --wing shapes, the dusky sky. Yes, it's an autumn symphony.
IN CONCLUSION
Although the judgement of art is subjective, I feel confident in saying that, by virtue of technique and creative imagination, Deborah Anderson's work remains unsurpassed. The historic Cultural Arts Center is at 139 West Main Street in downtown Columbus, Ohio, and is open every day of the week. Exhibits are free;
classes are reasonably priced. Call 645-7047.

REALISM PLUS at GALLERY V

2005-09-28T15:10:00.000-04:00

"Art's a staple. Like bread or wine or a warm coat in winter. Those who think it is a luxury have only a fragment of a mind."
Irving Stone.

JAMES MOORE
There is only one James Moore and he is showing at Gallery V thru October 15. Moore paints in oils on canvas, or linen. He has reinvented, thru hard work and inspiration, the painting technique possessed by old masters. -- Yet, his offerings are not of fruits and vegetables lusciously arranged on silver trays; neither are they sumptuous depictions of curled shrimp and gleaming grapes among crystal goblets. No. Moore prefers simplicity, austere groupings.
Six Red Tomatoes glow against a red plate and a soft coral cloth, for example.--And are they gorgeous! -- Pause, take a breath:
White Onions & White Bag imparts to onions an earthy luminosity.--Yet, they are just three or four plain white onions; we've seen them in our kitchens. Thru Moore's painting they become special because they re presented without distraction. We focus on them.
Orange Squash is a field-marred pumpkin, dull orange, and
so real you want to thump it. Bright Lemons dance in a brass bowl.-- Ah, those White Peaches made me think of sunrise.
Moore's fruit and vegetable series are around the same size, 22 x 28 inches. Each same-kind grouping is set against the neutral tones of a wall and a linen cloth. You can see the texture and creases of table fabric on these relatively small paintings. You can count your breaths in the presence of the ordinary.
GONG, TINGSHA, AND SINGING BOWL
From across the room it gleams, and it rings, if silently. James Moore's Gong, Tingsha, and Singing Bowl is oil on linen, 36 x 40 inches. Here is a legendary "golden bowl", but it's actually brass, and it's actually a disc, and from across the room it does appear to be actual gold. It shines, yet no actual gold or glitter has been used. Moore, the alchemist, can depict gold without using gold. (I know how, and I'm not going to tell you. I certainly can't do it myself.)
The gong can be rubbed or struck with the tingsha. The singing bowl, which is much smaller than the gong, will sing when it is struck, or rubbed around the rim. Echoes and reverberations await.
The brass gong, its "cymbals" and it's "striker," hang from a carved wood frame that one might find in a meditation center. These meditational objects take up most of the canvas, with dull shadows and textured linen behind them. They balance each other in a proper compositional way. Gong, Tingsha, and Singing Bowl is truly a
remarkable painting.-- Koan: All that glitters is and is not. . .
TAMIE BELDUE
In her artist's statement Tamie Beldue explains why she choose graphite for her lyrical renderings, portraits, actually, of nearly life-sized nude women: "I primarily use graphite to reinforce the concept that pencil can be erased as easily as facial expression, or as the way a bone pressing against the skin can disappear."
True, Beldue's realisticlly depicted women, each one by herself, stands or reclines (to paraphrase Virginia Woolfe) in a "canvas of her own" and exudes an ephemerality, a delicacy, of aspect.
Yet, these are strong women, quietly self confident, happily at ease with themselves and their bodies. They look as though they might be attorneys or tennis stars when they're not posing. Their figures are substantial, neither Renoir-voluptuous nor fashion-model-thin. They're earnest, centered, and like all good models, totally unconcerned with their painter or other viewers.
Each "painting" has been executed in fine soft blacks and grays, of course. Because Beldue's sophisticated yet monotone palette consists of pencil, ink, and sometimes watercolor.
In Traverse, 25 x 48 inches, Beldue's model lies full length on her stomach, yet her head is turned, and she's looking straight at us from an ordinary neutral sofa. In this windowed room everything is as gray as rain. The sofa and the woman take up most of the canvas. Beldue is an expert, a poet, at drawing the human figure. Her renderings of feet and hands, always a challenge, are especially marvelous. Again, Beldue's
women do tend to "fill up" their separate but equal canvases. The backgrounds, although compatible, seem unimportant, yet vital. That is why I sometimes refer to Beldue's nudes as "portraits," and that's a compliment.
Anatomy With Albinus definitely takes place in an art school. The model is seated in a familar "at rest" manner, and a drawing
explicating the musculature of a male -- as in Albinus' seventeenth century On Anatomy -- his back turned, his arms outspread, --stands on a platform. -- One is reminded of the late nineteenth century and all of those photographs in which smocked and bereted students, some of them women in long skirts, worked at their easels, with models, in echoing drop clothed studios that resembled museums. And that's a compliment.
James Moore completed his MFA in Painting at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena California. From 1986 to 1993 Moore was Assistant Professor of Art in Columbus College of Art and Design. He currently teaches at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California.
Tamie Beldue completed her MFA in Drawing and Printmaking at the University of Cincinnati in 2005. She is currently teaching at Columbus College of Art and Design.
Realism Plus will show at Gallery V, 694 N. High St. in the Short North, thru October 15. Call 614-228 -8955.

GISELLE VISITS COLUMBUS

2005-09-19T13:25:00.000-04:00

THE WORLD'S MOST ESTEEMED BALLET WILL BE PERFORMED AT THE OHIO THEATRE BY WONDERFUL BALLETMET
I can't wait! She's in the wings(!)and she's gorgeous! She's got the stamina of a long distance runner, the integrity of Joan of Arc, the passion of Emma Bovary, and the lightness of a Cocoa Puff!
She's Giselle, a ballerina/heroine nearly two hundred years old, going on eighteen. The ballet, Giselle, was first performed at the Paris Opera in 1841, even before there were gas lights. The vivacious Carlotta Grisi danced the title role.
As entrusted to Artistic Director Gerard Charles in 2005 by the spirits of the original choreographers, Jean Coralli, 1779-1854, and Jules Perrot, 1810-1892, the choreography is bound to be first rate.
Charles' derived choreography for Cinderella was crystal-slipper
perfect. Not too old, not too new. Not too busy or too flashy, and never dull. It was a champagne and candy kiss evening, and the audience seemed to love it.-
Giselle, the ballet, possesses an eternally glorious score -- peasant dances, love trysts, hunting horns, moonlight and redemption--as composed by Grisi's friend Adolphe Adam, who wrote specifically for the ballet. A few measures of this, a couple of bars of that--bourree and jete there, levitate here. Pause for a forbidden kiss.
With Carrie West and Christine Mangia alternating as the soulful and perky Giselle,--and with Dmitri Suslov and Christian Broomhall as Albrecht, Giselle's flim-flam aristocratic lover,--the dancing should be expressive and of highest quality. (Believe me, our heroine Giselle is no Desperate Housewife.)
Into a disheartening environment of war casualties and Katrina's devastation, Giselle's ageless story continues to beam flashes of beauty and hope. I can't wait.
In Conclusion:
With choreographic works by Stanton Welch, James Orrante, Gerard Charles and Maria Glimscher, Balletmet continues to win kudos
and fellowships in New York and other places. I'm proud of all the BalletMet dancers and I wish them the best.
BalletMet Columbus will present Giselle at the Ohio Theatre September 22-25, 2005. For tickets call 614-229-4848.--Best wishes from Liz.

A RESPONSE TO BETSY DEFUSCO's PAINTINGS

2005-09-13T20:48:00.000-04:00

A Personal Response to Betsy DeFusco's Paintings: Three paintings by Betsy DeFusco are on exhibit in Made In Ohio, Diverse Images, at the Riffe Gallery thru October 16. DeFusco's large and wonderful abstracts are "about" light and painting, if abstracts can be "about" anything. Annegreth Nill, curator, refers to DeFusco's abstract paintings as "perceptual." --Yes, the longer I look at them, the more layers of aesthetic meaning I receive, perceive. The embodiment of light and color as a dynamic, is always present.
The artist has painted a red strip, a wine-red blend, on at least one edge of each canvas. In each painting, razor straight lines, vibrant pastel stripes, appear with bewitching irregularity.--DeFusco's stipes are translucent. Colors appear thru colors. This artist is an over-under color weaver, and she's a darn good painter!
On each canvas one sees a pale gold, with variations on yellows and whites, that emanates from an unseen nucleus, infuses the canvas with radiance.
WINDOW TO THE SUN is an apt title for this large square oil painting.
Pale yellow emanates from the center, evolves to dull wheat-hued bars, straight edged, of course. Red ribbon runs across the top and bottom. Greens,--pale, bluish,forest,--frame each side. The green sides are shadowy, like a pond Gazing we can "see" many kinds of windows. Our sight itself becomes a window, interior or exterior.
SEA CROSSING , also, is square and large, and at least as tall as I am. Again, the center is light-filled, and we note the red-gold bars. Various blue stripes hem this splendid painting in, and, of course, because this is a sea crossing, wide blue stripes dominate. Color strips/stripes have been painted upon other color strips, and you can see them all. Like the sea's, the painting's variations are endless and pleasing. Although the possibilities for revelation are endless DeFusco has tamed the sea. The poet ArthurRimbaud said it, "Eternity. It is the sea mixed with the sun."
OCEAN VIEW, the third painting, is long and narrow, around 72 x 30 inches. On the left side this rectangle is bounded by a wine-red strip, and on the right side, a straight brown strip. Various blues --faded Alice, bleached navy, aqua sateen,--have been interwoven with yellow stripes. Fine burgundy lines pin the painting down at strategic places. Ocean View has overpowered my professionalism; I've begun to think of fabric and ribbons! I recognize the tan stripe as a sash from Gran's attic! Her
church-going dress!--An orange streamer sails like a roman candle! The various blues attack me and catch me off guard, and images attack, like jay birds. My best friend, Helen Marguerite, and I wear blue and white plaid dresses. We have long brown braids and people think we're sisters and I'm allowed to call her mom, "Aunt Loma." We're seven or eight. We whirl in the wet garden. Our skirts stand out, our black patent shoes crush bachelor buttons, and our plaid ribbons stand out with our braids as we whirl and whirl! We love to buy ribbons and hair bows at Kresges. Our favorites are white satin criss crossed with egg colors and dinner mint stripes. We know who Elizabeth Arden is. We're allowed to buy face cream and nail polish and Blue Waltz perfume.--We're discouraged from buying candy cigarettes, but we do, and we paint our nails red and we whirl in order to dry them until Mother calls, "Stop, you'll muss your dresses!"
This prose poem/review is dedicated not only to Betsy DeFusco but to my childhood pal, ever a beauty queen, Helen Marguerite Taylor who died in August after a heroic battle with lung cancer. She and I--we're whirling in the sunlight of Betsy DeFusco's paintings.

BUSH UP YOUR SHAKESPEARE!

2005-06-29T12:56:00.000-04:00

MARJORIE BENDER, long acknowledged for excellence in printmaking and ceramics and for her unfettered imagination, has surprised everyone again! She has combined her disadmiration for the Bush administation with her unimpeachable (!) knowledge of Shakespeare! Sometime in 2004 she built and painted a wooden theater, 30 x 5 x 24 inches. Inside it she sculpted and placed familiar, if recalcitrant, dramatis personae.--The name of her mixed media construction? THE NEW SHAKESPEARE PLAYS, ACT I: SCENE II FROM the FIRST BUSH ADMINISTRATION, A TRAGEDY.
In this clay and mixed media sculpture the well known players, seen mostly from the shoulders up, as in Roman busts, have been depicted realistically if whimsically. Again, each character is recognizable and, actually, has been portrayed with a kind of droll empathy.--CARL ROVE,as Iago,in full figure, dominates the stage, in a non period costume which includes a plaid vest! He gestures affably, like a used car salesman or a Hyde Park agitator. Behind him red curtains open to reveal an exploding tank and flying soldiers.--Is this a swagger I see before my eyes?
Out, out, acrylic spot,lay on, MacDuff. A sympathetic COLIN POWELL delivers the soliloquy from Hamlet . LAURA BUSH and CONDOLEEZA RICE, in evening dresses, appear as Ladies in Waiting from MacBeth. They're lovely, and were actually sculpted from wooden sock darning forms!--As red headed Cardinal Wolsey in drag, who else but DICK CHEYNEY! JOHN ASHCROFT wrings his hands as Richard III. GEORGE W. BUSH appears monarchial, recognizable--ah those elfin ears--as King John. Pleasantly goofy, suitably crowned, and caped, he probably doesn't remember the little murdered princes in the tower.--Or did somebody else do that?
What's remarkable about Bender's theater is it's finesse. The figures have been painted with accuracy and skill.--No slap dash poster art here, but a serious, if zany, work of art worthy of consideration.--As Laurence Olivier once said, and Colin Powell never did, but might have, "the play's the thing in which. . . oh well." Bender's creations are available thru Gallery V which shows the very very best in contemporary art.

SPECIAL MOMENT,SPECIAL SHOW

2005-06-29T12:33:00.000-04:00

LINO TAGLIAPETRA, born in Murano Italy in 1934, is likely the greatest living
glass artist and master blower of our century. He is the last working practicioner who, at age twelve, was apprenticed to a master. His elegant, powerful glass sculptures will show at HAWK gallery, 153 East Main Street, Columbus, Ohio, thru July 31. The show is titled FROM VENICE TO COLUMBUS, Da Venezia a Colombus, and it's a don't miss, the chance of a life time! Abstracted glass "dinosaurs" form a series, as do sea crafts, gondola-shapes, in the "endeavor" series. "Bilbao" reflects images from Spain.
For our troubled times: ANGEL TEARs (there's more than one) is at least 4'tall.
Its long stem stands straight up, heavenward, from its lute-shaped globe.--Inside the globe? Ribans, ribbands, ribbons.--Bright, slender, variegated, sky blue, green, scarlet, rose, webbed, cellular--they curve, winding upward into the stem.
Once streams of molten glass, these ribans run the curved gamut of a Tear.
They flow, touching each other but not overlapping, inside glass as clear as a raindrop, almost invisible.
Lino's unassuming yet debonair presence graced the opening on June 11. It was an honor to see him quietly discussing glass art with awed students and visitors, and making an effort to shake each hand.

SERENDIPITY

2005-06-21T22:22:00.000-04:00

Photographer Marguerite Cox Molk is presenting Serendipity, a show of extraordinarily pleasing colored photographs thru July. Her exhibit takes place at a newly discovered gem of a gallery, Studio B, at 21 Brighton.
Serendipity is an eco-centered exhibit. Molk values the natural world and its creatures.--And yes, she likes people too. In still lifes she knows the value of simplicity.
REGENERATION, OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK, WASHINGTON, 1996: A weathered, blotched bone, or possibly a marked piece of driftwood, casts its own shadow on gray, sun-baked sand, or fine gray sediment. This photo is around 12 x 21 inches.
The large central object casts its own shadow and, as is typical in Molk's photos, takes up most of the space. Several smooth round pebbles, strategically placed, surround this iconic "bone", and a pine sprig has sprouted in one corner of it. The ambiance is primeval. An invisible sun is the protagonist. Georgia O'Keeffe's spirit is nodding approval, smiling down.
GRANITE FALLS WYOMING, 20 x 12 inches, like Regeneration, is an example of how "excerpting" or "cropping" nature creates a kind of abstraction. Here, close up and cropped, the dark ridge of granite bursts thru a magnified barrrage of startling white spray. There is no horizon and no sky.
In RUBY BEACH, WASHINGTON, Molk's shore scape is less abstracted, yet her composition is one hundred per cent! In this 20 x 12 inch photo she has caught the angled yet razor straight line of the shore: farther back pointed gray rocks form turrets with silhouettes of tall birches behind them. Here again the dancing foam manages to be startling white in just the right places and the horizon consists of modulated contrasts, darks against lights. Ruby Beach is a study of dark night blues and grays against foam whites.
Sun and shadow are important in most of Molk's photos, even in the "people" ones. The wandering, bearded ARTHUR smiles at us from his wander-bike! He's a lavender and sun guy in faded plaid shirt and faded purple jeans. His sport shoes and socks are white and so is his beard. He's beaming straight at us, his weathered face kindly as St. Nicks'! Three big plastic bottles hang from the bike which has numerous metal carriers and appendages. Arthur's bedding rides on the handlebars, and the photo is enlivened by three red plastic baskets jammed with groceries and other stuff. The sun beams on the pavement where shadows of rider and bicycle cast sharp safari-like shadows.
In TOO MANY TOURISTS, Costa Rica 2000, a little white monkey seen from the shoulders up, stares out of the frame. He, or she, is sticking her tongue out--ugh--at all those tourists! The background is negligible. The monkey is an adorable protagonist!
Molk knows the value of simplicity. She's kind of a minimalist in that she makes her charming subjects quite central; they fill up most of each frame. My emotional favorite? MARMOT MATRIARCH who's standing up, like a pet kitty cat or Buckeye Chuck'
Studio B. is a salon directed and owned by cutter and hair stylist BOB ENSLEE who is himself an accomplished photographer. Studio B Gallery, although it serves as a waiting room for the salon, is a lovely art-friendly space, uncluttered, with walls reserved only for the hanging of art.--A single vase of chicory echoes the SouthWest emphasis of Molk's photos.

WHAT IS THE MIDWEST?

2005-05-27T22:12:00.000-04:00

The Midwest is a section of my body concealed by the left side of my ribcage. When I lived on a desert town near the Oman border, that left side of me throbbed, and I mean that literally.
One noon I was in line at Bader's Hypermarket when the muzak began to play "the green green grass of home," and I bawled like a baby.

My spiritual Midwest is limited to a long flat "prairie" running across northwest Ohio. A prairie's a kind of desert, like the desert, it's alive when you view it through live memory:

Alfalfa fields, rows of corn, shrubby gold soybeans. Brick churches, white frame houses, grain elevators, used car lots, abandoned gas stations and boutiqued-up thrift stores.

Houks, The Carey Hardware Store. -- In Carey, Ohio on the Feast of the assumption the statue of Our Lady of Consolation, dressed in a gold prom dress, is carried down the street to the Shrine. If it rains the rain falls only on two sides, never on Our Barbie Doll Lady. -- The Carey Public Library is as small as a mausoleum and as powerful as the Monolith in 2001.
On certain days when the sun gleams supernaturally and the sky's a drop dead automotive blue, my sister tell me, "if you look at the right angle you can see cloud reflections across the sycamores at Crawford Park." -- And you can.
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My internal Midwest is a dirt road: On it my grandmother and her mother are walking to church. On it my great great uncles carry their Civil War swords "up Chestnut Hill" at Bradner because it's always Memorial Day up there, and my mother is a little girl in a white dress. She's waiting on the porch for the parade to go by.

5/23/2005 Love to all at Heartlands Magazine from Liz, Elizabeth Ann James. Feel free to throw out paragraphes and lines; this mini-essay works that way too.

June Show Opening, Lindsay Outsider and Folk Gallery

2005-05-21T21:55:00.000-04:00

Friday, May 20, I attended a very exciting opening at Lindsay Outsider and Folk Gallery. The painters got my attention hands down, and I hope to describe these three fantastic artists very soon. I'm also a strong supporter of BalletMet, and when the new season begins, I hope to provide enthusiatic but accurate coverage of their performances. The first production will be Giselle, sometime in September, and I can't wait!

I just finished a monthly article and it may be a few weeks before I actually get the hang of this blog. But I'm excited and in this for the long haul.