Sunday, December 28, 2008

The Next Brushstroke

Here are some excerpts and photos that I have put together from Martha Rock Keller's talk about her work in her exhibit The Next Brushstroke. The talk was held at the gallery at 2 pm Sunday December 7, 2008 (full disclosure -- I am one of Martha's ardent fans, and a co-owner of WSG Gallery along with 15 other artists).






Martha Rock Keller







Martha was inspired by Rainer Marie Rilke's poem Entrance:

With your eyes ...
you lift very slowly one black tree

and place it against the sky, slender, alone

And you have made the world. And it is huge ...
White Pine, Lake Michigan Bluff

Paraphrased from the artist's own words:

"Three things of importance in my work:
  1. I look at my painting as rebirth, as mirror and window, as an exploration and investigation of the known and unknown.
  2. I like to see passion in the paint.
  3. I often reach visual bliss -- an intensity that recharges what I see everyday.
One of Martha's great brushes






























1. I want my painting to be a love letter to existence, to the world of nature and ideas...I love to read art books in the Ann Arbor Public Library and write about art in my journal..words and images are intertwined.. Preparation for painting: reading the New York Times, music, walking in the Arboretum, breathing, mindfulness,...feeling available energy..choosing the brush and paint...One brush or 15 or 50? Light! Weather!!...









Perspectives on perspective: all is relative -- light, surface of canvas, atmospheric pressure, homeostasis, organic adjustments, a painting is a live thing, changing, adapting ... I can change light to dark, bright to dull ... Radiance. Vitality. A lesson in awareness.





















Black Spruce I, Lake Michigan Bluff
















Martha at work












2. quote by Van Gogh in The Creative Process, Ghiselin, p.46: 'I draw repeatedly 'til there is one drawing that is different from the rest ... more typical and with more feeling and life.'


Young Evergreen II








3. Arriving at visual bliss through long narrative lines and variation within repetition, and constant contact with the canvas or paper. Sensing sensitivity and emotion with the motion of the brush and through subtle repetitive nuance and variety of marks.



Martha with her sketchbook at her talk






Art as life experience re-interpreted: the life force that reverberates through all the ideas that generate a work of art, beginning with the materials and the look they supply.


















Black Spruce II, next to Large Spruce, both Lake Michigan Bluff, as hung in the gallery, side by side








The design builds on basic frameworks referring to our sense of gravity (horizontal and vertical structure lines/directions) and is based on perspective and the science of how we see things.






Ice Floes










Beyond that, the artist lends love, the emotional edge, the spirit of the piece.
"

-- Martha Rock Keller

Martha's sketchbooks and brushes


To see more of Martha's work in this show, please go to www.wsg-art.com. Then navigate to Martha's exhibit, November 2008 (either by clicking Current Exhibits, or Previous Exhibits)





Submitted by Michelle A. Hegyi
Photos of Martha's talk by Michelle A. Hegyi

Friday, November 14, 2008

Waterfall



Lynda Cole's "Waterfall"

Lynda Cole's work conjures open-ended contemplation on art, materials, intricate technical detail versus large-scale simplicity. It's the multiplicity of means and ends that holds the viewer's rapt and enquiring attention.

For example, in "Waterfall" , there is no sign of water but rather a cascade of silver leaf covered curved rectangles punctuated by clusters of tiny rectangular holes that recall the holes in early computer punch cards. This piece plays creatively with light as its "water." Move your viewing stance just a few feet and everything on these bright curved surfaces changes dramatically as you can see in images of it with visitors. The effect is one of elegant restraint combined with ethereal opulence. Could this be the Rosetta Stone for a new imagistic age?

Stillness in Motion

Indotempo

Bulge Flat

Lynda Cole's "Stillness in Motion"


Highlights of Lynda Cole's show

Saturday, August 23, 2008

Marie Tapert's Dialogue

Nora Venturelli's Demo



During the Art Fair, Nora Venturelli stands in the WSG window and paints flowers in a demonstration of her oil painting. Just a few feet away, on the other side of the window on Main Street, hundreds of people are milling about.

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Marlee Hoffman and Van Gogh



Here’s Marlee Hoffman

Had a chat with Marlee as she sat at the gallery desk the other day.

(Whenever the gallery’s open, you’ll find at least one member artist sitting there.
And a standing invitation to chat about art!)

We talked about her painting of the asylum at St. Remy where Van Gogh stayed and the beautiful clear intense light ot the area that she made the subject of her painting.


Van Gogh loved the light . Its brilliance fired the colors of his paintings and was the reason (as I recall) he wanted to start an artist’s colony there (with Gauguin as the first member).

Marlee’s light wanders through her painting mostly as unpainted paper and as delicate washes depicting the vines reflecting the light. Her exquisite realistic style and her technique were developed in France on a workshop with the painter G. A. Schellar who took her group to a number of sites in Provence such as Arles and Aix-en-Provence important to painters.

Marlee tells the story of how she converted gradeschool kids in northern Michigan (Alcona) to be arts enthusiasts by taking on the persona of Van Gogh. She was the “picture person” which meant she tacked up art posters and talked about art with the kids. When she talked about Van Gogh, she looked like him - complete with candle on broad brimmed straw hat and bandaged ear - a never-to-be-forgotten image for sure.

Marlee says she is still thinking about light and reflections in her current work with red ceramic bowls that have extremely bright reflections. You can see them in the gallery now. (Incidentally, someone mentioned as I was looking at themyesterday that Marlee places a tiny cross in her paintings - see if you can find it, it’s less that a quarter inch high.) These bowls present bold circular shapes that fill the picture plane and energetically move the viewing eye through it.

Dutch painter Marlene Dumas was our next topic of converstion. She was written about in the NYTimes Magazine June 15 because she has a show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles that travels to MOMA in December. Her watercolor portraits (as seen in the Phaidon monograph I have of her) are painted on a very wet ground

Friday, July 11, 2008

Michelle Hegyi in the gallery

Michelle's exhibition

Michelle Aminoff Hegyi's exhibit Gardens of Love and Fire

Martha Rock Keller's comments
followed by an interview with the artist

Michelle A. Hegyi's entire show has an epiphanous feeling of complexity centered by simplicity. Of elation guided by serious thought. This show is about the line, color, space, and time that underpins everything... The lines and splashes move toward a lightness and airiness that suddenly strikes you as your eye sweeps through a stretch of dense line imagery and then through the simplest means 'sees the light.' All her works are related to one another through the layering of elements. This interconnectedness of works in this show to each other and to work in previous shows lends all the work a feeling of cutting edge sophistication and professionalism. One has the feeling that Michelle's work is fastidious but free, the outcome of focused visual energy that can cut through diamonds - gently.


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

MRK: About the title of your show, Michelle, can you tell me more about how that came about? I know the words are from architect Daniel Libeskind whom you met when he was here in Ann Arbor and I know it is the title of his public artwork in the Netherlands.

MAH: It's a title I used for one of the artworks in my solo show at WSG in 2004, Spaces of Encounter. All the works in that show, and also the title of that show were words by Daniel Libeskind, from his book The Space of Encounter, which I found very inspiring. Libeskind, himself, in titling his work in the Netherlands, Garden of Love and Fire, was inspired by a poem written by Juan de la Cruz. 'Gardens' refers to all the amazing stuff in the world that surrounds us. As for 'Love and Fire', I like to work with contrasts such as line versus painterly splashes of color. In Libeskind's title, and in his actual artwork in the Netherlands, a tension, a contrast, is implied between the organic and the geometric.

MRK: How did you get interested in art, Michelle - I know you studied mathematics as an undergraduate? And that you took a dance class with Gay Delanghe and art classes with Jim Cogswell and Mark Pomilio at the U-M School of Art and Design.

MAH: I've been drawing and painting ever since I was little -- I've always loved color and light -- perhaps from my first experiences in the desert in Israel where I was born. I grew up in Buffalo, New York and visited the Albright Knox Art Museum many times as a child -- not knowing at the time how much I would be influenced by their collections of Abstract Expressionists. My mom really encouraged my art -- she was an artist in a way herself, a dress designer. My high school art teacher told my mom I should definitely go into art as a profession.

At the same time I was also interested in math and computer science. In an assignment in my high school computer science class, I was supposed to combine computers with another interest of mine, which of course was art. So, we had to trudge downtown to the boy's technical high school in Buffalo to use the only computer in the city school system (it filled a whole room) for which I designed a program which generated random numbers designating size, location, colors and shapes of objects which I then painted using real paint. This was my first foray into digital art -- long before interactive computing made this feasible.

In college I did major in math (encouraged by my father) but at the same time I was very much into dance and expressing myself through movement in space. A lot of my earlier art was influenced by my interest in dance. (I did paint from life for many years under the amazing tutelage of Ellen Moucoulis who encouraged me to show professionally.)

MRK: Which artists have inspired you? Or influenced you aesthetically?

MAH: There are so many. Richard Diebenkorn most of all but also Susan Rothenberg, Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell, Caio Fonseca, Daniella Woolf, Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Bourgeois, Jun Kaneko, Nina Else, Eva Hesse

MRK: Any artists from earlier centuries or locally?

For a classical artist I'd say Vermeer, more recently Cezanne and Matisse. Locally, you of course are one of my very favorite artists; also I've been inspired by many other local artists but especially by Lynda Cole, Takeshi Takehara, Mignonette Cheng, and Vincent Castagnacci.


********************************************************************************************
In sum, Michelle's work has been, and continues to be, a counterpoint encompassing huge amounts of experience and intellectual interest boiled down to a 'to and fro', an easy swing through a landscape of thought and feeling.


-- Martha Rock Keller

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Marilyn Prucka's "Gatherings"


Here you see Marilyn Prucka speaking at her WSG gallery talk just before her show, "Gatherings," closed on June 22 - quilts inspired by the "gatherings" of pine needles in puddles on her driveway.

About her fiber art, she says, "Dyes pulled me in. I fell in love with dyeing....there was something about making my own color..."

After a career in nursing, Marilyn studied for a B.A. in Art at the University of Toledo and then a master's degree in art (MFA) at Eastern Michigan University.

For three years she was president of the Art Masters Association at Eastern, an organization of grad students and faculty. That bolstered her self-confidence because she organized shows and there was one every year at Riverside Art Center. She says the context of a gallery setting changes the look of the work itself: "When you put it up on the wall and put a spot on it, it looks different..."

Her favorite fiber artist? Hiroyuki Shindo who works with indigo and dips wrapped balls of fiber into the dye.

Her workplan? "My work is not well-planned," she says. "I start a journey...." She has a "design wall" with an 8'x8' piece of felt attached to which she pins work - "little pieces tucked here and there" and she works on 3 pieces at a time over a long period of time as the work develops.

Her palette? "I save everything... I have baskets full of fabric separated into color." She says her work may look like quilting but it is "more about collage and painting."

Parting remarks? "Everyone sees differently. It's a creative act for people to see your work."
Note: This is Marilyn Prucka's last appearance at the gallery as a member. She lives in Monroe and she says time and distance constraints have kept her out of her studio too much. We wish her well; she's a real pro!

Martha Keller

Friday, May 30, 2008

Saturday, May 24, 2008

Tubingen in Ann Arbor



Reflections by Martha Keller on her artist exchange visit toTubingen, AANews, 10.10.89
(edited)

Tubingen, in an aerial photograph on the full-color poster I brought back, resembles an abstract painting. The red tile rooftops, nestled in the hills of the Neckar River Valley, look like brushstrokes, the green trees are like a flow of paint.
Granted, my painter’s eye, if I don’t watch it, will turn everything into painting. But, living in Tubingen for three weeks as the third Ann Arbor-Tubingen exchange artist allowed me to compare notes with artists on art - an activity I regard as the ultimate in cultural exchange. I saw uncanny similarities between the artworlds of Tubingen and Ann Arbor but the differences make all the difference.
Tubingen’s heritage goes farther back than ours, way back to evidence of Neolithic and Mesolithic settlements, though the town’s name first appeared in a document in 1078 and the current town hall was built on the market place, an area comparable to our Farmer’s Market, in 1435. (With its spacious meeting rooms for large groups of people, the town hall is more functional in the late 20th Century than our own city hall is today.
For me, Tubingen exudes a special visual charm that depends on this heritage but doesn’t sleep on it. I imagine that it’s had a boost - or a boot - from its former inhabitants - from the introspective poet, Holderin, or the philosopher, Hegel, with his broad-ranging view of art and culture, toying with ideas about the end of art and history. In 1790/91, Holderin, Hegel and the philosopher Schelling lived in the same room in the Protestant Seminary. The yellow Holderin house with its tower today remains an important landmark.
In my bedroom in the city-owned apartment above the Kunstlerbund, the art association, I woke up gazing at timber beams that were five centuries old. I looked out the window at the Collegium Illustre across the street, (now a Catholic Seminary), where the Protestant nobility had been educated. A landmark in the middle of my poster photo, the Collegium is easily recognizable by its large size, square inner court, and prominent towers. Today, a recent art-site work adorns the high thick walls as small squares of primary color placed so sympathetically that they look part of the original structure.
A canal, the Ammer, ran alongside and under my building and the Collegium. A Roman road (now a pedestrian walkway) once ran alongside it in the 1st century A. D.. In medieval times, the canal carried waste from the slaughterhouse that the Kunstlerbund building once was. Close by was a nun’s convent, now an apartment building. And now, too, you see kids climbing and sliding on a large white marble sculpture of a book, across the canal from a bookstore.
A shopping complex with an underground supermarket, and a cafe’ with colorful striped umbrellas shading its tables adds to the urban density, the urban renewal, of the canal area, but the single-storied building is human-scaled, so it doesn’t feel crowded or dense. At the Stadtfest, the city festival in late August, the canal area became a temporary visual funhouse, a dark tunnel of art with visual creepy crawlies and flashing lights.
You see teenagers wearing their hair in Mohawks or spiky sprays hanging out at the local McDonald’s, once an intrusion much resisted by some residents but recently redesigned. Now it’s the most pleasant McD I’ve seen anywhere.
If all this sounds like it borders on caricature - well, yes, there is that slight danger. But Tubingen won’t stand still long enough or rest on its aesthetic laurels; it reaches out culturally to nine cities in Europe and the U.S. through its active sister cities program. In fact, that’s partly what my poster (a gift from the cultural affairs office) says along with the words: TUBINGEN STADTFEST 1989: Wir feiren mit allen unseren Partnerstadten. (We celebrate with all our partner cities.)
Of these cities, 3 are in Switzerland (Aigle, Kilchberg, and Monthey): 2 in France (Aix-en-Provence) and Kingersheim, County Durham in England, Perugia in Italy, Ann Arbor in the U.S., and in the Soviet Union, for the first time, Petrosawodsk (still in process of becoming part of this circle of siblings.
No artist could have said it better than the Lord Mayor Dr. Schmidt in his greetings to the partner cities and the citizens of Tubingen, August 25th, at the City Hall: “...colorful diversity would be sought as an enrichment and not perceived as a threat.”
After his speech, representatives from the partner cities responded, including Dr. Richard Dieterle from Ann Arbor, one of the RFD Boys who, attending with their wives, brought a musical message of celebration. As an Ann Arbor artist, my exhibition at the Stadtbukerei (city library) was scheduled to open the night before the main festival started.
In the city hall celebration the next day, Tubingen high school students sang American music. “Let the Sunshine In” and “There’s a Place For Us”, songs that might sound cliche-like to me here took on international significance in that setting. they seemed anything but maudlin - the equivalent of the mayor’s words about “breaking down prejudice through human encounters.”
For a view of the art scene, I went to the opening of an exhibition that might as well have been at the Simsar Gallery so closely did the Hartl & Klier Gallerie resemble it in size, in style, in clientele. But this opening was on a Saturday afternoon from 3-6 p.m.- rather unusual hours for an opening here. On that rainy, misty September afternoon the artist, Fritz Klemm, a tall ascetic looking seventy-ish man with thinning white hair, sat in the center of the crowded gallery in rapt dialog with a young woman from the University radio station which was taping the interview.
Klemm’s work looked abstract and very restrained - earthy sepia washes on collaged paper in various surfaces from shiney to dull. Its restrained elegance seemed elegiac and very postwar German in its monochromatic darkness.
Klemm, a long-time teacher at an art academy in a nearby city, Karlsruhe, commanded admiration among the viewers I talked with - especially from Gerhard Feuchter, the Tubingen artist who exhibited at the Art Center here last year. Gerhard had complaints about other exhibitions in the city such as the student exhibition at the Kunsthalle or at the artist’s book exhibition at the bookstore equivalent of Borders - but only praise for Klemm.
Gerhard introduced me to one of the gallery directors as the Ann Arbor exchange artist who had an exhibition in the Stadtbukerei. She said, “I’m too busy in the gallery to get out to see other shows. I can believe it; I’ve heard gallery directors here say exactly the same words.
Admittedly, like Klemm’s, Gerhardt’s own work has an earthy tonality and intensity and tends toward the mystically minimal. Seeing his early and current work in his studio when I had dinner with his family in their wonderfully renovated 16th century farmhouse in a nearby village vastly increased my appreciation of it. Not to mention the pleasant surprise of learning that perhaps the best painting I saw in Tubingen, spot -it in the apartment of a Tubingen bookseller, was Gerhard’s.
About 30 people came to the opening of my own exhibition on a Thursday evening. Gerhard talked about my work - in German, of course, so I didn’t quite know what he said, except from a quick summary in translation afterwards from Martin Bernklau, the reviewer from the newspaper equivalent of the News.
In his review, Bernklau said my work was “a fascinating document of the shifting from the sensual to a formal impression” and that the exhibition was “a difficult but rewarding visual adventure.” But translation is a problem. What I’ve referred to in my work as “body metaphor,” Gerhard and Martin referred to with the English “bodying.”
Giving background information on the artist at an opening is not unusual - it’s why the reviewer comes, perhaps. There may be more than one speaker and sometimes the artist adds remarks (as I did, showing slides of my studio here in Ann Arbor). I heard four such speakers at the three openings I attended - one was an actor who gave a performance that, judging from audience response was witty as well as dramatic. Live music also is common.
The Kunstlerbund in Tubingen occupies a smaller building than the Art Center here and has less outreach to the community, especially in education. A core organization of artists votes on new members; some of the younger artists complained about this exclusivity. Printmaking is such an important activity that the Kunstlerbund is almost a printmakers’ guild
Peering through the window one evening, I saw several printmakers intently inspecting a print under a pool of light - like a happy band of printmakers left over from the Renaissance.
A grassy yard borders the window-wall of the building and there an ensemble played for the opening of a painting exhibition, the work of a teacher from a local academy. People with their beer and wine and finger food spilled out of the building into the yard, enjoying the music on that summer’s night. (A student I met that night, now at Antioch college, has already visited me in my studio here.)
Ann Arbor has nothing quite comparable to the Kunsthalle, the city art gallery. It has exhibited work by the Kunstlerbund and has exhibited drawings by Joseph Beuys and Cezanne and paintings by Morandi. It is located too far from the town center; I got lost trying to find it. An exhibition of work by graduating students from the art academy in Nurnberg, equal to the work of graduate students at U.S. art schools in my view, filled two huge skylighted galleries. Square towers six feet high displayed paintings in dynamic monochromatic brushwork on all four sides and stood at staggered intervals on the broad staircase leading to the main galleries.
Among artists I met were:
Egon Bauer, a member of the Kunstlerbund, who keeps two birds in a large cage in his sculpture studio. Unsurprisingly, his best sculpture (looking a bit like Moore and Marini) and his best prints are of birds. He said he found one of his birds, the water chicken, as a half-dead young chick near the river and revived it by warning it in his pocket, The other, a song-bird, flies through the high reaches of the studio, up near the bas-relief by his sculptor father. Egon drives a new station wagon at breakneck speed, has sailed from Landsend in England (his daughter attends Oxford) to the Greek Islands, and has traveled in Thailand. Like most artists everywhere, in order to do his art, and to support his lifestyle, he does some he doesn’t particularly care for - in his case, it’s carving tombstones.
Sigrid Perthen, a wood sculptor of boomerang-like shapes and Ulrike Weiss, a printmaker, who share a studio in the nearby Village of Reusten. The studio occupies one end of a window-walled industrial building with sheep grazing on grassy banks nearby. In this remote, idyllic setting, these two artists produce sophisticated, exciting work. Yet they struggle with problems and issues common to American artists, particularly women - issues of marriage and family and abortion. Sigrid, married, has three children; Ulrike teaches at the design school in Stuttgart.
Robin Broadfoot, an American ex-G.I. from Florida, married a German woman and lives in Tubingen as an artist producing wall and floor lamps. These extremely well-designed art deco lamps cast delicate shadows and subtle color along the thick plaster walls in their renovated centuries-old building.
Comparing notes from this Tubingen visit and our current Ann Arbor art scene gave me a stereo view - perhaps a better sense of how art relates to culture, to people and to particular places. Given my non-competitive neutrality there, I felt I could see the art and artists of Tubingen with objectivity and dispassion.
I felt an oddly similar preview of objectivity on my flight to Tubingen as my Northwest DC-10 flew over England. Dawn was just breaking in a narrow blaze of yellow-orange on the horizon, Out of the total surround of darkness, the towns below emitted clusters of lights exactly the same color looking all of a piece, as though sky-dust had blown willy-nilly onto a black mirror.
To my painter’s eye, it looked like a painting.

Friday, April 4, 2008

Barbara and crew - Congratulations on tonight's art opening!

Hey everyone, good wishes for happiness and success at tonight's opening! We'll lift a glass to you!
from Paul and Lynda in Beaver Creek, CO