Marie Tapert's full-size sculpture

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.

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

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.


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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.


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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

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