“Pollination can be defined in so many ways: literally, emotionally, metaphorically, politically or poetically. I chose each artist for his or her unique vision and ability to use encaustic to express it. I looked for artists whose work speaks to movement, change, storytelling and reformation… Laura Tyler uses flower parts, the essence of pollen itself, combined and reconfigured to convey a sense of rebirth.”

- Gregory Wright

You’re warmly invited to check out the show on Beekeeper Day. I will be there with Gregory Wright and Tony Lulek, President of the Norfolk County Beekeeper Association and will present my documentary, Sister Bee. We’ll talk about about art, wax and the bee.

Beekeeper Day
Saturday, November 19th from noon to 4:00 pm
Brush Art Gallery and Studios
256 Market Street
Lowell, MA

LINKS:
Pollination: Beyond the Garden, Gregory Wright’s curator’s statement
At Long Last, Pollination, opening night by Nancy Natale
Driving directions, Brush Art Gallery and Studios
Brush exhibit is the bee’s knees, Lowell Sun
Lowell art gallery exhibit explores Pollination, Encore
Sister Bee

Northwest corner, Rembrandt Yard Gallery

It was brave of Karen to invite me to show with her before we’d ever met but I’m so glad she did. Even though our paintings show different things we share an approach and it’s been a joy getting to know her.

Girl with the Steel Nose Ring by Karen Conduff, oil on canvas, (left)

We played with weight and light while balancing Karen’s epic portraits against my abstract botanicals. My favorite pairings (above and below)…

Reservoir and Sailing, encaustic and ink on panel

Karen’s, The Freidaphile, a Freida-esque portrait of Boulder’s Jan Kleinbord, is on the left below while a grid of my dandelion paintings is on the right. (I didn’t know this until the show, but Jan Kleinbord really does dress up like Frieda Kahlo for art presentations at local schools.)

From the entrance looking in, Rembrandt Yard Gallery, Boulder, CO

Karen is inspired by the way light falls on form, while I’m into shapes, especially edges.

From left to right starting at the top, Hawlike, The Sisters, No Detail Unlovely, Fluffy, Lick, Present, Rethinking the Fossil Record, The Way We’re Made, and Good Morning!

Some paintings seemed to ask for grids while others called for pairings or rows. (This row was particularly tricky to light.)

Lilac row, nine encaustic paintings

North wall, Rembrandt Yard Gallery, Boulder, CO

I like thinking about color as punctuation.

East facing pillar, Rembrandt Yard Gallery, Boulder, CO

The painting on the left below was drawn from a maple key (for some reason the maple shapes all ended up having a shield-like quality) while the one on the right was drawn from a dandelion.

Regal! and Anther, encaustic and ink on panel

West facing pillar, Rembrandt Yard Gallery, Boulder, CO

From left to right starting at the top, The Way We Stand, White Flag of Courage, Reflecting Tool, Spitting Image, 1989, See How We Lean Together, Soothsayer, Kewpie, and With Longing

Circle of Life by Karen Conduff, oil on canvas, (left)

Ox and Pancake, encaustic and ink on panel

Southwest corner, Rembrandt Yard Gallery, Boulder, CO

From top to bottom, It’s Hard to Say, Pickle and Walking Stick

The One You Want, encaustic and ink on panel, 22″ x 16″

The way we stand, you can see we have grown up this way together, out of the same soil, with the same rains, leaning in the same way toward the sun. See how we lean together in the same direction. How the dead limbs of one of us rest in the branches of another. How those branches have grown around the limbs. How the two are inseparable.

- Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature

Links:
Karen Conduff
Rembrandt Yard Gallery
Susan Griffin

Light and breezy, Studio 108 in Boulder, Colorado

My biggest challenge teaching-wise these last few years has been finding a consistently available, big-enough studio with reliable electricity. (My personal painting studio is too small for classes bigger than two or three.)

Artists at work, Studio 108, Boulder, Colorado

You can take Beginning Encaustic here on Friday, July 15th.

Thanks to Lisa McDonough for the tip and to John Horner for the warm welcome.

The way we stand, you can see we have grown up this way together, out of the same soil, with the same rains, leaning in the same way toward the sun.

- Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature

Out of the Same Soil
New Paintings by Laura Tyler and Karen Conduff
Opening reception, Thursday, June 23rd from 5:30 – 7:30 pm
Rembrandt Yard Gallery
1301 Spruce Street
Boulder, Colorado

Nine paintings at BMoCA

A couple of years ago the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art underwent a massive facelift including a re-furb of its museum store. Boulder artist, and friend of mine, Sarah Kinn merchandised the space turning the formerly dusty, dog-eared shop into a destination shopping spot for local art and craft.

Paintings and books

Though not a conventional gallery, it was a pleasure to hang some of my early 5″ x 4″ botanicals there. A changeover in management last year brought new faces and ideas to BMoCA. (It’s an ever-changing place.) My friend is no longer there. Nor are my paintings. But for one short season it looked and felt like this.

Raking light

A newish painting on exhibit at Art & Soul in Boulder, Colorado through the end of February, 2010.

I pulled the title of this post from Insectopedia, a book of A to Z insect essays by anthropologist Hugh Raffles. Chapter Three is about artist Cornelia Hesse-Honegger who became a controversial figure in the late 1980′s when she started documenting radiation damaged leaf bugs in a series of feverishly made paintings of specimens she collected from around nuclear reactors.

Harlequin Wanze Nähe Three Mile Island by Cornelia Hesse-Honegger

Here is Hugh Raffles quoting Cornelia Hesse-Honegger:

Painting, she insists – reaching back to the sixteenth-century Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner; to her inspiration, the painter-explorer Maria Sibylla Merian; to the autodidact fossil hunter Mary Anning – is research, not merely documentation. It is a way of achieving multidimensional knowledge of the subject, a way to see it in its biological, phenomenonological and political fullness. Not simply a way to express what we see, painting is a discipline through which we learn to see – to see, that is, in the broad sense of gaining insight. Through painting she is able to map anomaly, to recognize patterns and relationships across her archive of collecting sites, to realize that she has encounterd this deformity somewhere before…

“It’s a discovery of a new world,” she says. “The more I look, the more I dive into this world, the more I can connect.” If only life would allow her to spend six months painting just one leaf bug. If only… “I would like to go deep, deep, deep, deep …”

I love this reminder of how engaging and deep the material world feels when you’re painting.

If you’re a culturally oriented person who likes scientific things, you might just love Insectopedia. Some of Raffles’ essays are poetic. Others have a more descriptive, informational bent. All explore areas where human perception interacts in interesting ways with the vast and largely invisible world of insects.

As a filmmaker I’ve watched with dismay as high-speed internet access, alongside a hard push by Silicon Valley intellectuals to make everything “free,” has gutted the music and newspaper industries. As broadband streaming becomes the preferred way to watch long-format TV shows and feature films it’s only a matter of time, I worry, before filmmakers’ livelihoods follow those of freelance writers and musicians down the proverbial drain.

Thank goodness for Jaron Lanier’s humanist manifesto, You Are Not a Gadget. Lanier, a modern-day Renaissance Man (musician, technology guru and philosopher) reminds us that we make technology to serve our human needs and shouldn’t feel obligated to “flatten” our lives to serve the needs of technology. A former proponent of open-source creativity Lanier now advocates for a new digital commerce that will hopefully enable artists to receive payment for their digital creations. This influentual book is a must-read for any artist working in music or film and highly recommended for anyone using social media (blog, FaceBook, Twitter, etc.) to promote their analog works.

Jaron Lanier on painting…

A physical oil painting cannot convey an image created in another medium; it is impossible to make an oil painting look just like an ink drawing, for instance, of vice versa. But a digital image of sufficient resolution can capture any kind of perceivable image – or at least that’s how you’ll think of it if you believe in bits too much.

Of course, it isn’t really so. A digital image of an oil painting is forever a representation, not a real thing. An oil painting changes with time; cracks appear on it’s face. It has a texture, odor and a sense of presence and history …

In a world where everything digital is seen as “free,” physical paintings matter more than ever to artists and people seeking a respite from their online selves, I think. The physics of paint, the way it carries pigment and reflects light, its texture, its realness, is a worthy subject of painting. Encaustic is especially great at showing these things.

This candy-esque chunk was inspired by a gone-by garlic blossom. After a year or so of swearing off Alizarin crimson I am unreservedly back on it again.

My downtown Boulder painting studio will be open to the public from noon to 6 on Saturday and Sunday October 2rd, 3rd, 9th and 10th. You’re warmly invited to stop by and say hello.

Open Studios 2010
October 32rd, 3rd, 9th and 10th
Noon to 6:00 pm
In the alley between Pine and Mapleton at 15th in Boulder, Colorado

Tusk, encaustic and ink on panel, 5″ x 4″

Using a new pigment here, Burnt Scarlet from R&F.

Serpent, encaustic and ink on panel, 5″ x 4″

This one, Chalice, could be a cup or a snout/trunk.

Chalice, encaustic, gold leaf and ink on panel, 5″ x 4″

I love white encaustic.

The opening is coinciding with the Louisville Street Faire, a small town food and music fest, so there will lots to do and see should you choose to stop by. There’s a nice little arts community budding in Louisville. If you’re in Colorado it’s worth checking out.

That’s what co-exhibitor David A. Clark said about juror, Joseph Carroll’s decision to give these three paintings a wall of their own at Flow & Control. I agree. It was ballsy choice and as the artist it was thrilling.

Three paintings anchoring the main wall at Montserrat’s 301 Gallery

I have a large gesture. It’s my tendency to draw things larger than they appear in life. Encaustic, however, encourages smallness. The paint cools quickly and it’s not unheard of for it to harden mid-stroke. Though it’s possible to work large in wax, I have better success rate, more of my paintings get completed successfully, when I keep my panels small.

Three paintings, 5″ x 4″

I knew when I shipped these pieces there was a chance they’d get relegated to smaller wall in a supporting role, especially if the show was more crowded or arranged more timidly. That’s the chance one takes when submitting diminutive paintings.

“Old Fashioned Rocketry,” “Castle,” and “Rainforesty”

Though small in size, my paintings read large (an inheritance from the drawings they started as, I suppose). I am thankful to Mr. Carroll for boldly giving them a wall of their own.

Though you can’t see them in the above image, the two pieces that hung on the wall to the right are wonderful. Hot and cold glyphs by Michele Thrane.

Ooh! Have you seen the new Ab-Ex postage stamps at the USPS? I just picked up a sheet and man, oh, man. They are they great. Love the enormous Pollock stamp. Motherwell, too. Other artists on the sheet are Hans Hoffman, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, Clyfford Still, Joan Mitchell, Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman.

Interesting to see Gorky getting his due. (I think the de Kooning biography had a role to play in that, don’t you?) And I’m wondering, if they included Joan Mitchell, why they didn’t include Helen Frankenthaler, too? Had they chosen two women instead of just one it would have seemed less like a token.

There’s a good interview with Pamela T. Boll, director of “Who Does She Think She Is?” at Salon.

A choice quote:

“… In the arts, there’s no guarantee for success. Even if you’re working at Wal-Mart, if you show up, you get paid. In the studio, you don’t. It’s very risky business. You have to create your own life and have a very strong understanding about what your have to offer. There will be a lot of people telling you that you’re just fooling around. Society just doesn’t consider an artist’s work as “work” — just like motherhood isn’t often acknowledged as being real work.”