SYNTHESIZED NATURE

Seeking Resolution by Mars Woodhill

Polished Agate

You will undoubtedly find color combinations that attract you in Mars Woodhill’s paintings on display at Quinta Mazatlan in McAllen, TX.  I was immediately reminded of polished agate stones with their beautiful striations of color.  I was also reminded of carnival spin art.  British artist Damien Hirst transformed the lowly technique of carnival spin art to high art in his spin painting series.  Well, that's debatable I suppose!

Beautiful by Damien Hirst

I wouldn’t classify Woodhill’s work as a spin painting, but the dynamic of motion is required to achieve the effect of fluidity in the work.  The term for this is “fluid painting.”  Woodhill states that they are created by varying the viscosity of the paint.  She won’t divulge specific technical information about her technique, but the technique is not new.  I came across an artist at a show in Phoenix, AZ about 20 years ago, who was utilizing the same kind of technique with the same effect.  He wouldn’t divulge either. 

I have my own idea about how it is done.  Paint pigments are different sizes molecularly, and the water and the pigment act as resists to each other, creating the striations.  The word “resist” is used in art to designate something that acts as a barrier.  Did you know that plain old water acts as a resist?  I watched a youtube video on Turkish marbling that exhibits this tendency a few days ago.  There are fissures in Woodhill’s surfaces, a look that can be achieved using Golden’s crackle paste medium.  Similarly there are thinning mediums that can be added to paint.  

This work isn’t original conceptually or aesthetically, but Woodhill has mastered her medium.  You can see this development if you compare her 2009 paintings to the 2012 work on her website.   The work relies upon the formal elements of color, pattern, line, texture and movement, and all those elements are manipulated effectively to achieve an interesting and pleasing result.   

Quinta Mazatlan, 600 Sunset Dr., McAllen, Texas, 956 681 3370, www.quintamazatlan.com

Enriching Your Artistic Life

Leslie Elsasser, an artist who paints miniatures, traveled to our neck of the woods to talk about her exhibition at STC.  Unfortunately, the exhibit has ended, but if you want to read a review of this wonderful exhibit, check out Nancy Moyer’s review in The Monitor.  I want to talk about something else.  

In the promotional materials for her presentation, she was referred to as a Fulbright Fellow and, she referred to her Fulbright experience in her talk.  Something she said about it made me want to pass on a little more information about Fulbright Scholarships.  She said that a new experience inspired dramatic change in her life.  It is a generally held belief that travel can enrich our lives immeasurably.  Travel writer Rick Steves says:  

“Ideally, travel broadens our perspectives personally, culturally, and politically. Suddenly, the palette with which we paint the story of our lives has more colors.”   

Receiving a Fulbright Scholarship gave Elsasser the opportunity to spend two years studying miniature painting and traveling in India.  Her research lead to the work she completed for her Master of Fine Arts thesis.  For Elsasser, her experiences “provide a rich source of inspiration and reference for her ongoing artwork.”   I had a similar experience.  I received a Fulbright Scholarship, and spent a year (1995-96) conducting research at the Danish Design School in Copenhagen, Denmark.  The research I conducted also lead to the completion of an MFA at Arizona State University.  A profoundly moving experience during other travels lead to an inspired work of art that won the top graduate student prize in the School of Art in 1999.  The award?  Money for more travel!!

So, we are two people who had our lives changed dramatically by taking advantage of a Fulbright grant.  But, how did we know about this grant?  I would never have known about these scholarships if I had not attended a lecture by a professor from the University of Arizona.  Elsasser says that she became aware of the scholarship while she was searching for grants.  I might have bypassed looking at the Fulbright, because I was under the impression that they were only for professors.  However, that is not the case.  Fulbright offers competitive, merit-based grants for students, scholars, teachers, professionals and groups.  They also vary in the length of time you spend in the country.  You can get all the details by going to the following website: 

 http://fulbright.state.gov/about/frequently-asked-questions#faq1

Embroidery Series

Ana (Argentina)

embroidery by Manju Ben

thread, mirrors and screen printing on cotton cloth

16 x 20 inches

Women In Miniature Series

Devi

handmade pigments, gouache and 14k gold on handmade paper

“Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend.” 

--Hypatia

CONFUSING EXHIBITION

Pedro J. Perez at STC Library Art Gallery-Technology Campus

This exhibition is in a library, so I am going to draw a parallel between the organization of an exhibition and a written essay.  This makes sense because the exhibition begins with an artist’s statement that is an essay about the exhibition.  Perez’s statement is completely lacking the most important element of an essay, the introduction.  

The most critical component of an introductory paragraph is the thesis statement, and without it you are lost at the onset.  The result is an unfocused and undeveloped exposition of “ideas.”  Perez starts off with some plagiarized text about Marx’s economic theory of alienation.  He then segues to talking about alienation in a completely different context and with a completely different meaning.  He states that "social" media has caused people to become socially alienated, isolated, and devoid of emotion.  The additional two documents don't explain how these terms are similar or different.  They just add to the confusion.  Perez states that he is not judgmental in one document and then refers to “capitalist bastards” in another.  

The artwork in the exhibition clearly reflects his lack of focus.  The 11 artworks in the exhibition can be separated into four distinct groups, or paragraphs.  The first paragraph contains digital artwork that is interesting.  The artwork “Modern Man” is a composite of four faces. It’s a neat photoshop trick, but if we don’t have the explanation, how do we know it is a composite face?  The clearest visual cues are the sad facial expression and references to social media in the background. Is it about being alienated from the products of our labor, social alienation, lack of emotion or social isolation?  How do these ideas inform the two other digital prints that seem to explore humans being monstrously transformed by technology?  

The remaining paragraphs are so different in style, technique, and aesthetic that it is difficult to understand how they might relate to each other and the mix of ideas presented in the artist’s statement.  I did see some connection thematically, but I left the exhibition wondering if it was really all Perez’s work or if it was a group exhibition.  On view until Dec. 9, 2011.

Making Art RELEVANT

Chris Jordan is a photographer who focused on creating beautiful colorful images for 20 years.  He began to think that his artwork wasn’t relevant or cutting edge.  He wasn’t ready to let go of beauty, but he found a beautiful abstract composition of color in compressed bales of garbage.  He enlarged the image and hung it on the wall in his studio.  A friend and well known photographer suggested to him that he had found relevance in this “macabre portrait of America.”  This exchange changed the direction of Jordan’s artwork.  Jordan’s concept is to show the enormity of the waste that is produced in the world by our consumption of products.  

Initially, he wanted to give a sense of the scale of the waste.  He utilized some design techniques like only showing a sliver of sky or ground and having the objects extend off the picture plane.  Not satisfied with the sense of scale he was creating, he decided to photograph groups of objects and then stitch them together using Photoshop to create large scale patterns.  The objects were photographed at extremely high resolutions, so that even though a patterned image is huge, when you inspect the artwork from a nose’s length you can see accurate detail.  Finally, he evolved to photographing individual objects.  Go to http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/rtn/#moon.  Click on the image.  There is something fascinating for you to see.    

I learned all of this first hand from the artist at IMAS last Sat.  It was so interesting I wish I could give you all the details.  Jordan highlights an important issue for artists.  It is not enough to focus solely on the elements of design in your artwork.  In order to take it to the next level, and become an internationally recognized artist, you have to make it conceptually relevant.  That, combined with the development of cutting edge technique, makes him a singularly unique artist.  

The ends of box cars make up the pattern

MODERNISM & POSTMODERNISM AT IMAS

Maria Linzoain

The two exhibitions currently at IMAS are an interesting juxtaposition of modern and post-modern currents of thought. Maria Linzoain’s artwork represents the modern, with its abstract expressionist representation of space, its Fauvist color palette and modernist philosophy.  One of the primary ideas that developed in modernism was that rational inquiry could reduce everything to its essential elements. Once established, these principles were thought to be universally applicable. In art, they became the principles and elements of design taught in art schools and artists like Rothco, O’Keefe, the Albers, and Mondrian became ambassadors for these principles.  

In addition to the foregoing, Linzoain combines the existentialist idea that every individual must find their own meaning in life with the Objectivist theories of Ayn Rand that promoted a narcissistic preoccupation with ones own happiness and welfare. Linzoian utilizes saturated color and expansive gesture within an ambiguous background to represent her existential quest for self realization and expression. The central, and usually solitary, figure is the locus of action and movement, while the exterior landscape is reduced to only its essential elements. 

If you are a fan of modernism, then you will find Linzoain’s work very appealing, because she reproduces this style very effectively.  Ron English’s artwork is intentionally anti-modern in that it rejects the essentialist narrative of modernism.  His work represents the failure of modern ideology.  

English employs a majority of the artistic devices of postmodern in his artwork and projects. He has bulldozed his way through much of the iconic imagery of the last two centuries, appropriating it for his own use.  He recontextualizes these images by juxtaposing seemingly unrelated objects. For example, he places Mickey Mouse faces on Marilyn Monroe’s breasts in one of his paintings.  The image makes a blatant and crude reference to our culture of consumption.  American style prudery is unsettled by English’s “cow girls” with their multiple teats waving at them in his larger than life digital prints.  Text initiates a redirection of thinking from viewing the image as an anthropomorphic depiction of a cow to viewing it as a grotesque genetic mutation of a human female caused by the consumption of bovine hormones.  

It is unclear to me what English was trying to accomplish with his “street art” excursion to the Mexican side of the border, because it seems to have been more insulting than politically or artistically informative or meaningful.  Ron English is up til August 14 and Linzoain is up til August 7.  

Ron English

Ron English

Shaping Boundaries-STC Weslaco

The exhibition concept, “Shaping Boundaries” is aptly supported by three artists:  Andrew W. Martin, Anne Longo, and Shawn Camp.  The overall exhibition is visually dynamic.  All three artists have delimited space within their artwork, but Martin’s soft flat charcoal surfaces contrast nicely with Longo’s busy textures and glazed planes and Camp’s glossy sculptural reliefs.  

In landscape/divide, Martin extracts an image from a featureless background. He shows us the specific area by marking it off with masking tape.  This secondary view of the landscape is tacked up with masking tape over the background image.  It allows us to see details of the landscape, but it further limits our aspect.  Both background and foreground views are bounded by our own limited ability to see beyond the framework that is provided us.  The casual application of masking tape to the image implies that the boundaries are ephemeral or lack importance.  

We see a landscape of a flat plain with an unbroken horizon line In Frontera #3 by Longo.  A road leading to the horizon provides an additional element of perspective.  The area above the horizon line can initially be perceived as sky, but slowly, a secondary landscape emerges out of the haze.  A highly textured scrawl of veinlike patterns reminiscent of earth covers the entire surface.   Close inspection of the substrate reveals that these are the contour lines on maps of New Mexico and Mexico.  Longo requires us to look into and under the surface to discover the shifting nature of boundaries. 

Camp combines expressionistic and impressionist style with studied linear elements that intersect the surface.  He creates the impression of actual terrain with thick acrylic and oil impasto in varying shades of blue, green and brown.  The lines appear to be an underlying element from which the surface is pulled away, revealing an order underlying the seemingly random and plastic undulations on the surface.  This technique doesn’t jive with his stated concept of humans imposing order out of chaos.  However, the inclusion of a 1997 painting by Camp in which he employed the technique of scraping away a built-up surface, as opposed to building areas around background elements, provides some insight.  Camp has not reconciled an old concept with his new technique.  

Martin and Longo teach at Texas Tech University, and Camp has a studio in Austin.  All three hold Masters of Fine Art degrees.  The exhibit was curated by Tom Matthews, an art instructor at STC.    

McAllen Arts Council 3rd Annual Exhibition

3rd Annual McAllen Arts Council Fine Art Exhibition in Conjunction with Festiva

The McAllen Arts Council recently held its 3rd Annual Fine Art Exhibition.  The organizers invited secondary school teachers teaching in Hidalgo County to showcase their artistic talent.  

Jessica Monroe, who teaches at Med High, explores scenes from a very close range, creating a somewhat abstract effect.  Surface patterning in each scene, such as the street in her painting Rank, is emphasized, and geometric grids are also integrated into the surface.  The surfaces values on the grid are modulated in such a way that they recede and advance over the entire picture plane to great effect.  The geometric grids counterbalance the fluidity of curvilinear shapes within the scene.  Although you can understand the concept of the artwork by its title, the picture tells the story.  The high ranking bird is established by its placement in the composition, and the contrasting values that allow it to stand out as the primary focal point.   All of the other elements are subordinate to this focal point, and have a corresponding visual weight.  A reduced color palette allows value relationships to stand out.  Monroe is a clear stand-out, because she successfully integrates concept, technique and aesthetic in her artwork.  

Several other artists exhibit effective technical skills.  Isai Mireles sets up an interesting visual tension through the subtle use of complementary colors in his painting of a pair of shoes.  This tension creates an optical effect that appears to animate the shoes--as if they are about to set off walking or dancing.  Isabel Link’s Tres Peras is a textbook example of how to use  line, shape, value, texture and color that is aesthetically pleasing.   Lisa D. Saldivar tames spiraling shapes and a psychedelic color scheme by corralling them within larger shapes in varying sizes, and by allowing areas of rest within the picture frame. Geographic coordinates stand in for perspective lines in Sol, Llios, Naytheet Ah Kin, Qurax, Grian, Surje by Marco Antonio Sanchez.  Oddly juxtaposed imagery of Nordic skiers and ancient icons populate a surreal landscape seemingly inspired by a 70’s rock song.  

The ability to successfully integrate the three fundamental aspects of a work of fine art, concept, technique, and aesthetic, is what makes a “fine” artist.  Artwork that falls short of this can be categorized as a sample, sketch, or study.  Work that is simply decorative, moves it into the realm of commercial art rather than fine art.  Much of the work in this exhibition falls short of a fully realized “fine art exhibition.”  Perhaps MAC should remove the word “fine” from its title.