Middy Potter's Art and Math: a sweeping vision from classic to modern

Middy Potter's versatile art life ranges so widely a blog post can barely scan the highlights.

His show at WSG running through September 13 demonstrates the reach. Here's a look at some of the works at his studio.

This is the logarithmic spiral in progress. It's related to the Fibonacci spiral and the "golden spiral."

Here, a red geometric elliptic hyperbolloid contrasts with the green grass:



These two mosaics reside on his sunroom floor and foreshadow the large pyramid in the gallery, as well as the spiral design:



Here is a look at how his works appear, first in progress at his studio and then as final versions in the WSG.

This cube shows Middy's penchant for art play: "It's fun to do sculpture related to geometry," he says.

At his studio:



And in the gallery:



A polyhedron-fish uses a Platonic solid dating from ancient Greece and contemporary fish form. Here is the work at Middy's studio:



Here is the final product at the gallery:



This is the mosaic pyramid inside the gallery door, referenced above in his sunroom mosaics:



This cyclide form was invented by a French naval engineer. Here is the cyclide in the studio, next to his double cone:



At the gallery:



These spirals were formed by wrapping strips of various woods along a cylinder:



These works are the classic counterpoint to his silver people:



You can see these pieces and more at Middy Potter's "Art and Math" exhibition at the WSG Gallery, located at 306 S. Main street, Ann Arbor, MI 48104. The gallery is situated between Le Dog and The Ark. His show runs from August 4 - September 13, 2009. We hope to see you there!

Marlee Hoffman: On technique and being In the Moment

by Martha Rock Keller

Marlee talked with me in the gallery about her painting and her technique - all of it enhanced by the focused close observation shown by all the great realist painters and by being "in the moment."

She begins each day with a 3 mile jog and an attentiveness to "smelling the roses." "It's all about getting as much as I can from each day," she says. "Feeling it. Enjoying it."

As for the "moments" of technique, Marlee works from photographs and a lightly penciled drawing on paper. She uses Winsor/Newton brand watercolors and a limited palette of five pigments: two blues - French Ultramarine and Cobalt, two yellows - Winsor Yellow and Winsor Lemon, and one red - Alizarin Crimson. She paints on 140 lb. Arches watercolor paper dampened and taped to a 1/2 inch watercolor board. She masks the light areas with a brush filled with W/N liquid masking agent (which she keeps in a bowl of water and dish soap to keep the brush from getting ruined by the masking liquid). Then she begins layering with washes of color - up to five in the darkest darks. She mixes blacks with ultramarine, alizarin, and lemon yellow. After removing the mask she layers the lightest lights. Note her skillful handling of strong contrasts in the light and shadow areas of "The Abbey" painting with soft-edged color in the lavender. One triangular rooftop glares almost white in the strong sunlight.

Here's a game any viewer of this exhibition can play: find the crosses. "Among the first couple things I do when painting," she says, is to place a small cross (about 1/8 inch high) in the composition. "The funny part is that no one noticed it for years." The crosses refer to the fact that for Marlee, painting is "something God and I do together." It's not that easy to find ALL the crosses, but it's a fun challenge to one's powers of observation.  (Details of 2 of her paintings are shown above and below.)

"God is in the details" could be her aesthetic. We checked on Google to find the phrase may have originated with the French writer, Flaubert, and is associated with the German architect, Mies van der Rohe and others. To extend the international reach of Marlee's aesthetic, here's Japanese Buddhist, Shunryu Suzuki's, take on the "magic of the moment:"

Moment after moment,

everything comes out of nothingness

this is the true joy of life.

Valerie Mann's "Fortunes"

Meet Valerie Mann, here wearing a Circle of Art t-shirt. She is one of the WSG Gallery artists most attentive to social issues. She was one of the organizers of the recent art auction, Circle of Art, which raised thousands of dollars for Food Gatherers. Here she tackles one of the most important issues of all: parenting.

When asked what started her thinking about the art in this show, she said "'Fortunes' is a meditative piece on parenting. It's about my role as a parent" and it was inspired by "dear friends who pay attention to how they parent their children, how they pass on coping skills."
Remarks made by the first Bush administration about how parents feel about their children in the middle east - "They don't value life like we do" - also stirred her thoughts and feelings feeding into this work.
However, she says, "I have always been really leery of using words in a piece of art so it was a big departure for me - the 'Fortunes' piece." Ultimately, Valerie says, "the piece is about transcending one's own situation." The response she would like to see in the viewer is "compassion for other people and oneself."
When I asked Valerie if the feminist art movement (its focus on sewing and embroidery and "women's work") had influenced her, she said "I would say 'yes' although in school there was a backlash." Still, she says she was afraid of power tools at first but in the end was teaching others.
Tools and techniques are what concerned her most during her education beginning at Purdue in Saturday classes when she was in high school and continuing at Illinois and in grad-school at Michigan State in the sculpture department. "Fortunes" can be considered an installation/sculpture piece.
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Asked what medium is her favorite of the many she uses in her work she replied, I love rubber (from inner tubes) but I also love paint and mixing color and wood as well as reclaiming materials. She says she has re-used materials since her undergrad years. The alphabet piece is an example of this as well as "Fortunes."
"When Isaac was learning his letters, I started the alphabets (in 1998/99; above is the seventh in the series) and began to think of letters as tools. They also push my design sensibility."
She says that when her daughter, Ellery, 10, saw the "Z" in this last alphabet, she said, "I want to buy one!"
The "Z" is hard to see within this high contrast overlay; come to the gallery and check it out!

Rilke on "living the artist's life"

"Everything is gestation and bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, and wait with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life. Being an arist means not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap, and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them so unconcernedly still and wide.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Elizabeth Schwartz: Color and Texture in Motion

"I'm having a love affair with paint," Elizabeth Schwartz says with a blazing smile during an interview about her exhibition featured at WSG Gallery. "There's never a plan, but a relationship develops with the paint and the painting. I start making marks and become part of the painting." One of the main features of her work is the access she offers the viewer to the sheer raw energy available in the process of painting. A five-part work titled "Primordial" (above ) demonstrates this. Let's say it suggests galaxies in transition or dragons thrashing ; energy becomes palpable with an assist from color and the texture supplied by the touch of the brush, its angle and pressure. Though this painting may recall ancient Asian techniques of play with the brush, it also reflects Jackson Pollack's flinging of paint: it's about personal freedom that transcends culture.

The search for the feeling of freedom is what lured this painter away from her full-time practice of law (she was Ann Arbor City Attorney, '92-'95) where the mindset is very controlled. It's right-brain versus left. Elizabeth says she sees the contrast in her desk which is orderly versus her studio which gets quite messy. The energy she expresses in her work may have evolved during her growing up (in Detroit) in interaction with 3 brothers (all became lawyers) and a powerful lawyer father. Educated at the University of Maryland and the University of Michigan Law School, she still practices as a part-time administrative law judge (appointed by the governor) dealing with governmental agency issues.

This coming June '09, she will be in residence with the Glen Arbor Art Association in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, an area of Michigan which has inspired much of her work. Where better to feel, as Elizabeth puts it , "the grandeur, power, beauty and turbulence" - the freedom - of nature? Incidentally, it was at the GAAA' s summer workshop program that the painter took her very first painting class. I was privileged to be her teacher at that time and now I'm fortunate to be her interviewer. What I recall about her work then is the focus and motivation she brought to it. I could see glimpses of the open-mindedness, the experimental vitality and dynamism she expresses now with greater ease, brilliance, and directness.

Martha Rock Keller

Dee Ann Segula's Portraits from "Through the Looking Glass"

"I work from the heart - from a private world that I'm finally exhibiting." So says Dee Ann Segula who reveals her "private world" as a stunningly colorful and imaginative one you might find in Alice's looking glass. Dee calls them "dream-scapes." Here you see people (harlequins) riding zebras ("dressed-up horses," Dee says) with cats as tag-along riders chasing a wasp, say. Having grown up on Alice in Wonderland, Grimm's Fairy Tales and the Greek myths - and games such as chess, Dee has a memory and imagination stored with many combinations of these. She creates a new world of art out of "just being human." Perhaps she inherited some of that world from her mother and grandmother who were painters.

Why so many animals in Dee's work? For one thing, "They're easier to get along with - people scared me as a kid." For another, her Dad was a vet and she grew up surrounded by animals. "Zebras are the most graphic animal on the planet."

Where do her themes and images come from? Dee says she doesn't know; they just appear in her imagination. "I see the final painting in my head and then figure out how to do it."

A visitor notes: "I'm amazed at how many colors she gets to work together." However it happens, it's intuitive. She says she doesn't think; she just does it.

Dee says that artwork offers security and serenity in the face of a chaotic and threatening world. Right now, she's turning to knitting "as a meditation and a comfort - therapy for the next few years." Dee knows something about therapy: she had a lung transplant 15 years ago and has had other medical procedures since then.

She works in a two year cycle through her triple skills: painting , knitting, and jewelry design and fabrication. The first year is for research and the second for development - that's her master plan.

All her work keeps her "excited in a world dark and hard to deal with." She is one of many artists who say, "Art saves my life."

Jean Renoir on Art

"Among seekers of truth, painters perhaps come closest to the discovering the secret of the balance of forces in the universe, and hence of man's fulfillment. That is why they are so important in modern life...Painters know that material needs are relative, and that the satisfactions of the mind are absolute"
-Jean Renoir, Renoir, My Father, p.395

Art: Why? What? How? NOW

Why we need it, what it does for us (brings us bliss), now is the time for it.

When was the last time you looked at the art on your walls? If not recently, perhaps you should mix it up - move things, add a new piece so the others look different in relation to the new one.

And look more intensely. As one gallery member says: “Many times my day has been enhanced considerably by seeing something new in the same work of art that I pass by everyday.”

Art connects us to the world, to other people, to ideas. This is a hugely complex process that can also seem simple: it comes down to seeing as keenly as possible and with as much intelligence as we can muster.

Through art, we learn more about the world. Art suggests a kind of understanding, of play, of dream. We often need the timeless entity of an artwork to maintain a resting place - a place for contemplation - a place that is part of the outside world but that originated in one human being’s consciousness. All an artist can do is suggest - but a good artist can evoke feeling and emotion through his/her art.

If you’re in a state of visual awareness, your life is like, big-time different. To dwell in seeing and revel in sunny days and cloudy ones too is equally revelatory when we really look and see. Art sensitizes a large number of cells in the visual cortex of our brains (this is my speculation on how art-bliss works). As we develop our seeing and love of art all these visual thought-memories can be accessible to us, bringing us visual joy and a state of existential pleasure. This is precious and priceless and personal in the response it brings; it doesn’t matter what the market place is doing or what the “artworld” thinks. What matters is how much you love the work. Individual viewers put the value on individual artworks.

Of course, art has an economic side as does any human product of work that moves from one person to another in a marketplace. (See the recent Feb16, 2009 article, “Making the Case for Culture as an Economic Force,” in The New York Times and future blogs here.)

The word “artwork” or the phrase “work of art” implies energy and labor. The basic material is the awareness of the artist and viewer joined together. Here’s an example of “connection.” As a friend puts it: “Art conveys the unsaid, and when the artist skillfully guides the viewer’s mind into the artist’s mystery, that beautiful connection happens.”

Which is not to say all is sweetness and light. To appreciate the peace, calm, and serenity of art, you have to acknowledge the savagery and terror. As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in the Duino Elegies “...for beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror... Every angel is terrifying.

Martha Rock Keller

27 February, 2009

"Among seekers of truth, painters perhaps come closest to discovering the secret of the balance of forces in the universe, and hence of man's fulfillment. That is why they are so important in modern life...Painters know that material needs are relative, and that the satisfactions of the mind are absolute"
-Jean Renoir, Renoir, My Father, p.395

Adrienne Kaplan's New Work

Adrienne Kaplan and I sat on the small white sofa where people sit and view works at the back of the gallery and discussed her recent show of landscapes, as well as portraits and figure studies. Our conversation covered art in general and what art means to her. "I want to be true to what I'm seeing but I like to move away so the painting becomes more mine - more what I think. The feeling of movement and gesture is important as well as materials . " She referred to Jim Dine's recent work at the Getty Museum as having an aesthetic she admires. "'Hands on' is critical," she says. As well as directness, energy, focus.

Adrienne says, "I love painting the domestic environment. Whatever I do, I'm always drawing as a way of understanding life and the world; creativity comes out." Right now, she is contemplating using internet images of a falling man in an "event" painting, because she saw a man fall recently and she "can't help making up a story."

Referring to figure painter, Lucian Freud, Adrienne says she loves his drawings and etchings - "the way he captures character." She doesn't care for Freud's color palette in his paintings, however - the grays and earth colors. After doing a number of full-length portraits, shown in her recent exhibition, Adrienne has been attempting a portrait of gallery member Nina Hauser. Adrienne says the work has come to a standstill. "I want it to be Nina - who she is. " This is not an easy task; in fact, we agreed the "ups and downs" of painting can refer to "the give and take of life - the "synchronicity" as Adrienne put it: "art is an interaction."