Mary McCoy

Review: James Turrell Perspectives at the Academy Art Museum

April 24, 2013 by Mary McCoy Leave a Comment

James Turrell, “St. Elmo’s Breath,” 1992, Private Collection, Copyright James Turrell, Photograph by Florian Holzherr.

“St. Elmo’s Light,” by renowned light artist James Turrell, bears a fleeting resemblance to a movie screen. It’s rectangular and it glows, but viva la différence. Looking into its purple luminosity is like looking into infinity. It taps the theater of your mind.

On view through July 7, this spellbinding artwork is receiving its premiere right here in Easton’s Academy Art Museum. Named for the weather phenomenon in which glowing light in the form of luminous blue or violet plasma appears at the tip of a pointed object such as a lightning rod, ship’s mast, or plane wing, it plays with your perception and straddles the divide between science and magic.

It’s a real coup for the Museum to host work by a major living artist of Turrell’s caliber, especially as this show is concurrent with the artist’s retrospectives at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Following on the heels of its splendid exhibits of work by Mark Rothko and Pat Steir, the Museum is quickly making a name for itself by bringing the work of major artists to the Eastern Shore.

Turrell at Roden Crater, Copyright: James Turrell, Photo By: Florian Holzherr.

Turrell, who resides part time in Oxford, was brought up in a Quaker family. His lifelong interest in perception was sparked when he encountered the phenomenon of “inner light” experienced in silent meditation. He got his pilot’s license at age sixteen and soon became fascinated with aerial light effects, including the mesmerizing sensation of flying through sunlit fog. This led him to major in perceptual psychology at Pomona College (where he also studied art, geology, math and astronomy). By the time he finished his MA in art from University of California, Irvine, light itself was his subject matter, and his work became associated with the Minimalist and Land Art movements of the late 1960s to 1970s.

Strange things happen to your eyes as you gaze into the dreamlike field of color of “St. Elmo’s Light.” On my first visit, I saw veins of deep blue appearing along with hints of orange. The edges sometimes seemed to tinge almost grape-colored. The next time I came, fragments of white light flashed by for the first few moments, then as the soft luminosity calmed me, gentle shifts in the deep, undifferentiated expanse of color took over.

As Turrell recently told a New York Times reviewer, “Light is this thing we usually use to illuminate other things.” Aside from beautiful sunsets and the occasional shaft of sunlight falling on the floor, we generally don’t focus on light itself, yet it has long been a significant subject in art both as a visual phenomenon and a spiritual metaphor. Painters from J. M. W. Turner to the Impressionists to Mark Rothko are celebrated for their painterly illusions evoking the soul-stirring effects of light. Turrell takes it a step further and makes art that explores the mysterious ways we perceive light.

Eight holograms glow in the low light of another gallery across the hallway. They neatly line the walls like so many framed paintings, but they refuse to stay put. A triangle of orange light edged with green leaps out toward you as you approach; another triangle in shades of peacock blue and emerald pokes backwards into the wall. From the side, there’s only a faint glow of color but as you walk up to each panel, a simple geometric form materializes in the space in front of you. Hold your hand out in the brilliant colored light and the illusion momentarily vanishes, then swiftly reasserts itself. It’s as if you’re seeing two realities simultaneously. Like many of Turrell’s works, these holograms are just plain fun to play with and they leave you marveling at the physics of light and perception.

Much of the space is devoted to models, plans, maps, and photographs of Roden Crater, Turrell’s 40-year magnum opus, a work still in progress. Turrell located the extinct volcano in 1974 after an extensive search during which he crisscrossed the southwest by air. Since then, he has been steadily transforming the crater into a naked-eye astronomical observatory that is the largest single piece of art on the planet. Following in the footsteps of ancient peoples whose monuments mark celestial cycles, Turrell is in the process of constructing apertures, chambers and tunnels from which the paths of the sun, moon and stars can be viewed.

James Turrell, Roden Crater Aerial Photograph. 1979 Photograph (carbon print), with Wild RC8 camera image 23” x 23 ¾”.

Just as the heelstone at Stonehenge marks the rising of the summer solstice sun, the rays of the sun will penetrate a tunnel in the crater at the solstice to illuminate a wedge of black marble inset with a disk of white stone. Moonlight will light the opposite side of the stone when the moon reaches its most southerly position on the horizon. This event, called the major standstill, occurs every 18.61 years. It isn’t something most people are aware of nowadays, yet it was important to the ancients, enough so that a number of stone circles in Aberdeenshire, Scotland were oriented so that at the major standstill, the moon appears to roll along the top edge of a large horizontal stone on the southern side.

From the myths and monuments of cultures worldwide, we know that these celestial events have long inspired wonder, awe and a sense of unity with the cosmos. Roden Crater will offer a direct experience of that cosmic dance, tracing sun and moon cycles, the day-to-day changes in the angle of noon light, the rising of constellations, and the turning of the stars around true celestial north.

Since prehistory, religion and folklore have affirmed light as the first ingredient in creation, so take some time over this show. Gaze into the light, play with its effects. If you hurry through it, you’ll miss the deep experience of opening your perception to a wider universe, even a wider consciousness.

For more information, including curator-led tours, visit: www.academyartmuseum.org

By Mary McCoy

Filed Under: Arts Lead, Homepage Slider

Art Review: Katherine Allen at the Academy

March 12, 2013 by Mary McCoy Leave a Comment

Katherine K. Allen at the Academy Art Museum

“Clothed in Air” acrylic paint and screen print inks on silk over buckram, two layers, machine stitching, 52″ x 58″

Nature and art are entwined in “Meditation on Nature in Paint and Stitch,” Katherine Allen’s captivating exhibition on view at the Academy Art Museum through March 31. In an unusual hybrid method of working, this Easton artist stencils silhouettes of actual plants, outlines leaves with animated machine-stitching in gem-like colors, and makes seeds and blossoms from countless French knots and splashes of paint.

Drawing on her background in painting, sculpture, graphic design, and textiles, Allen has developed a unique art form, fusing painting, silkscreen and fiber arts. Working with lengths of canvas or silk, often layered to create translucency and shimmering effects, she paints abstract fields of color, then lays plants on top and screen-prints ink over them so that when she lifts the plants away, their silhouettes remain, reproducing the details of their leaves, stems and seed heads with photographic crispness, while revealing fragments of the painting that came before. She never knows exactly how it will look, and that’s the fun of it. It’s a kind of collaboration with nature in which tangles of grass and curving stalks of goldenrod mingle with brushstrokes and stitching.

“Blue Moon” (diptych), acrylic paint and screen print inks on silk, three layers, batting, hand and machine stitching, 51″ x 50″

Curator Anke Van Wagenberg describes Allen’s creative process in an illustrated booklet detailing her development and explaining her method of working. There’s also a display case containing some of her tools and materials, including some of the paint-encrusted leaves and grasses that Allen used for screen-printing. At noon on Friday, March 22, Allen will give a talk and demonstration of her technique.

Allen has been in love with nature since childhood, and she spends a lot of time outdoors, gardening, kayaking, and gathering the plants she will stencil into her works. There’s a curious parallel between her interest in ecology, the science of the interdependence of organisms with one another and their environment, and the artist’s awareness that the space around objects is just as important as the objects themselves. For Allen, the background or “negative space” must be just as alive as the plants themselves.

In “Blue Moon,” an ivory white full moon rises in the golden sky behind the dancing forms of shadowed clumps of tall grass and falling oak leaves. The sky is negative space where ghosts of underpainting can be glimpsed through the slightly translucent paint. In a fascinating visual twist, the shapes of the plants are another version of negative space where the underpainting is revealed directly as colorful washes, brushstrokes and traces of other plant silhouettes. You’re seeing many layers at once, and they seem to shift back and forth, like multiple layers of memory.

The rectangular shape of Allen’s small silkscreen repeats across the sky and mimics the squares of gold leaf often burnished onto Japanese screens. This creates a subtle, casual grid suggesting a rhythmic order underpinning the natural world. The use of metallic gold also encourages a feeling that this is a sacred moment, a split-second opening into a higher, more meditative view of the natural world. The more you look, the more you see, as Allen’s gentle shades of gold, purple, green and black disclose seemingly countless interconnected strata of activity.

“Four Seasons Suite – Winter” acrylic paint and screen print inks on unprimed canvas, hand stitching, 94″ x 60″

In the “Four Seasons Suite,” she steps away from stenciled plant forms and uses only painted and sewn elements. Consequently, its four large canvases are fresh and direct, almost like sketches compared to the other works. Sparkling white dots of paint melt into the blue and black surface of “Four Seasons Suite – Winter” as stitches streak across the canvas. Spring plants creep and blossom up the surface of “Spring,” while yellow and orange paint and thread conjure the swirling heat of “Summer.” A lone bird perches on what might be a stalk of grass amid the stains and spritzes of red and green in “Fall.” The bird’s presence reinforces a sense of introspection but it’s also problematic. Painted in a different style from the rest of the canvas, it becomes the focus, stealing attention and energy away from the intricate splashes of color.

Birds can symbolize flight and freedom or be the messengers of change, but these ever-shifting aspects of nature are more successfully and effortlessly evoked in Allen’s spiraling clouds of stitches, French knots and spatters of paint. Calling to mind the flight of sunlit swarms of insects or clouds of pollen lifted into the wind, they bring the air alive and share equally in the dance of the leaves and grasses.

It’s fascinating to study these works and unravel Allen’s process of working. Her engaging balance of chance and skillful control, subtleties and boldness creates a joyful meditation on change and the shifting of seasons as stitches, paint and plant forms join in telling an energetic narrative of the deep interconnections of life on earth.

By Mary McCoy

Filed Under: Arts Lead, Homepage Slider, Top Story

Review: artNOW DC at the Kohl Gallery by Mary McCoy

February 20, 2013 by Mary McCoy Leave a Comment

In the second of Washington College’s thought-provoking series of exhibits featuring work by prominent young artists from nearby cities, the Kohl Gallery is presenting artNOW:DC. On view through March 30, the show is a bracing collection of contrasting approaches by five innovative Washington artists. Selected by curators Heather Harvey, Assistant Professor of Art, and Natalie Cheung, a Washington art consultant, teacher and experimental photographer, all of them are rule-breakers bent on making their way beyond the confines of traditional art.

“Slurry 2″ by Katherine Mann

Katherine Mann does what countless artists have done before her—push the boundaries of painting, but she does it with such vigor and inventiveness that it’s enthralling. She uses simple materials, just acrylic and sumi ink brushed onto paper, but in such energetic abundance that they practically explode off the surface. In “Slurry 2,” Mann literally pushes the boundaries right off the edges of the traditional rectangular sheet of paper by painstakingly trimming along the contours of the painting, no matter how complex. Wriggling fields of painted ribbons are trimmed into actual ribbons of paint on paper; drips of ink wash are snipped so precisely that they seem to be staining the floor. The two-dimensional painted illusion mingles and merges with the three-dimensional space of the gallery. As if to rub it in, Mann allows her patterns to climb up the wall onto the ceiling and flow out across the floor in a glorious blossoming of activity.

If Mann’s complicated, mismatched fields of paint weren’t violently colliding with one another, her imagery—flowers, leaves, ribbons, geodes—would be invitingly decorative and sensuous. But in the labyrinthine chaos of their clashing presences, they seem to be breeding out of control. Cancerous growths and squirming masses of maggots come to mind. They fascinate even as they creep you out, and they urge you to stop and consider the implications of our superabundance of imagery and busyness.

Jonathan Monaghan uses his formidable skills as a 3-D animator to make art instead of entertainment. Like Mann, he’s well aware of the bewildering choices and complications imposed by life in the present day, but his reaction is to ditch the details and boil it down to a concise summary suitable for quick consumption.

“Dauphin 007″ by Jonathan Monaghan

A master of shorthand for stories we’ve all heard before, Monaghan used high-end computer animation to create “Dauphin 007.” It’s an engaging short video splicing the tragic tale of the heir-apparent to the French throne together with an array of high-tech medical gizmos. Following the familiar storyline, the prince (in the form of a regal, Aslan-style lion) loses his crown and then his head (in a guillotine resembling a CAT scan machine). It’s all wrapped up in just over three minutes, but it’s overseen by a film crew (so we know it must be important) and features a ballet of surgical couches circling over the palace, cum gothic cathedral, as the prince is born amid a chorus of heavenly voices. Succinct and dreamlike, it offers no particular wisdom, but gives an impishly straight-faced comparison between the old model of the divinely ordained monarchy and our current worship of technology as the solution to all our problems.

Chandi Kelley also weighs in on the foibles of contemporary culture. Splicing photographic images together, she inserts a waterfall into a display window along a city sidewalk and presents a stuffed wolf howling at a light fixture on an office ceiling. First you react, perhaps with amusement, to the clash between nature and the urban setting. Then you’ll probably consider how photographs can no longer be trusted as a truthful source of information.

This is old stuff and fairly shallow. But Kelley’s work has a certain strength in its jarring quality. It’s not pleasant to look at and there’s no

“Remembrance of an Untouched Wilderness” by Chandi Kelley

chance you’ll be carried off into reveries on nature’s majesty. Her real message is that while we have a penchant to long for nature’s glory yet fear its wildness and power, what we know about the natural world comes primarily from textbooks, documentaries and museum displays. Few of us know nature directly. We’re a culture of secondhand information. Kelly doesn’t pin it down, but the inference is that we just don’t know enough. Against the backdrop of unprecedented storms, sea level rise, and shifting climate patterns, we are only beginning to see the folly of believing that humans can ignore or outwit nature.

By contrast, Michael Dax Iocovone’s work is all about direct experience. In the tradition of English artists Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, Iocovone’s primary art form is walking. His two installations on view are artifacts representing much more involved artworks that explore how history and culture live in our landscapes. “DC Walking Project” involved walking every square mile of the District of Columbia. Although he documented the process with photographs in each square of the grid, what’s on view here is a diagram of his paths drawn with string on the wall.

“DC Walking Project” by Michael Dax Iacovone

To cover a lot more landscape, Iocovone got in a car for the “Mason Dixon Project” and drove across this historic division between North and South on each of the 270 public roads that straddle it. Again, a string diagram of his travels is presented, this time accompanied by a video documenting each crossing. In a monotonous and mesmerizing hour-long loop, one road fades into another as he names each one. As an abstraction of the actual terrain, this project acts as a silent witness to the unspoken matter at hand—the great divide on the question of slavery and race. Illustrating how artificial and permeable was the line between North and South and how plentiful the connections are in the present-day, it offers an almost subliminal provocation, a far more powerful way to invite consideration of the schism still haunting us than simply stating the facts.

Kendall Nordin “draws” in space by stringing clear threads from one wall to another. Each thread stitches through countless tiny squares of transparent acetate dotted with glue. Both acetate and glue cast fairy shadows onto the walls as the acetate glints in the gallery’s lights. (Imagine how effective this would be with the shifting light of the sun.) Instead of drawing illusionary space on a flat surface, Nordin invades the “empty” space of the gallery and brings it alive. This has the inspiriting effect of prayer flags or cloutie rags disseminating good wishes as they wave in the breeze.

Nordin’s two installations are easy to overlook in the midst of the visual and auditory liveliness of the other artists’ works. It’s too bad because these airy sweeps are gentle, uplifting works that quiet the mind and invite a feeling of heightened awareness. There’s an ingenuous elegance in Nordin’s simple materials that she uses to remarkable effect. It’s all about light, shadow and space. You can’t help wishing her work could have been set apart from the rest of the show in some peaceful, sunny corner.

In a sense, it’s the same with all of these artists. There’s so much to take in with each one’s work that you need time to absorb it and turn it over in your mind. Besides their shared disregard for boundaries in method or materials, what they all have in common is an urge toward developing a clearer understanding of how to be fully human in the commotion of everyday contemporary life.

Filed Under: Arts, Arts Lead, Top Story, Visual Arts

Art Review: Midstream – Alessandra Manzotti and Kelly Parisi Castro at Massoni Art

February 16, 2013 by Mary McCoy Leave a Comment

A work of art, framed and hung just so on a gallery wall can seem perfect and untouchable. But for the artist, it’s the product of a never-ending search and struggle. The creative process is a path of exploration, questioning, and honing of skills. With Midstream, on view through February 24, Massoni Art offers a glimpse into that journey.

This gallery is well known for its flawless presentation of beautifully crafted art, so it’s curious to find photographs by Alessandra Manzotti and Kelly Parisi Castro pushpinned directly onto the wall, side-by-side with framed works. In explaining this casual presentation, Carla Massoni noted that matting and framing finished work is one of an artist’s most time-consuming and expensive tasks, a chore that takes away from her creative energy. One benefit of this approach is that there’s more work on view. Another is that somehow the pushpins make the work more accessible. It feels almost like seeing the work in the artist’s studio where it’s easy pick up on her impulses and her thinking.

Where two worlds meet
by Alessandra Manzotti

Manzotti describes herself as restless, and there’s a sense of uneasy searching in her stark photographs of snowy landscapes and solitary figures. The images are beautiful but lonely. Skies are cloudy or white with snow; windows are obscured with shadows and reflections. But there’s always a feeling of a crystalline moment caught to hover in memory. It’s the still point, that private instant of solitude when you see yourself in a distant lone tree or an anonymous nude woman folded in on herself in an armchair. It’s the moment when the mind is so quiet that you are able to view your own relationship with the world without being caught up in its busyness and confusion.

Manzotti blends heart-piercing beauty with quiet, affectionate humor. “Tree Study III” shows a tree with two bites taken out of it, one from the loss of a large section of branches (presumably in a storm), the other by the sun, low in the sky, obscuring the foliage as it shines through. In “Love Story,” a print so tactile you almost feel its grainy texture, a small stone is wedged between two halves of a split boulder. Manzotti turns this bit of nature into a narrative and a metaphor for all love stories.

Both artists clearly enjoy the range of possibilities digital photography offers, chief among them the ease of experimentation. For Castro, photography is a kind of treasure hunt into the chaos of activity hidden in plain view. This show presents selections from three series of photographs she is currently working on.

“Catholic Girls,” represented by three large prints and a book of several others, is a series of photos of 1950s Avon thimbles molded and painted to look like well-dressed young women. Arranged in twos and threes and shot close-up with a macro lens, they become characters in wordless narratives, the nuances of their clothing and hand-painted faces suggesting a remarkable range of interactions from confidences to cattiness.

Water always looks seductively beautiful in photographs, a quality Castro explores in her other two series, “Ocean” and “Pool.” The “Ocean” prints, both on paper and on aluminum panels, are striking but problematic. The ocean is a familiar icon of vastness, timelessness and possibility, but Castro is haunted by the knowledge that it’s being polluted, overfished and sullied with floating plastic waste. Searching for a way to convey the dichotomy between its majestic beauty and its vulnerability, she splices sea foam into unnatural patterns and mirror images, turns waves sideways, and generally interrupts the flow. Unfortunately, the conceptual meat of her efforts is overshadowed by the pure elegance of these kaleidoscopic images. There’s also an annoying feeling that she’s treading too close to Photoshopped gimmickry. It will be interesting to see how she sorts out ways to convey a stronger sense of artificiality or wounding as the series develops.

Florida Keys Pool #4
Kelly Parisi Castro

The “Pool” series is more successful. Capturing the shimmering patterns on the pool’s curving steps or in the inviting view looking down its ladder, Castro presents a world of light and beauty contained in the mundanity of a barely used Florida

pool. In several photos of deck chairs surrounding the pool, she discovers a fascinating web of activity. A close-up of a rhythmic tangle of hollow aluminum tubing and turquoise plastic webbing is simultaneously orderly and chaotic, humming with energy. It’s a secret world that we’d normally not even notice. Like Manzotti, Castro is capturing a precious moment of awareness.

Aquifer by Vicco Von Voss

As a bonus, serendipitously reinforcing this look into the creative process, several of Vicco Von Voss’s newest pieces of sculptural furniture are interspersed throughout the gallery. Freed for a time from commission-based work to prepare for his upcoming show at the Academy Art Museum in 2014, von Voss is focusing specifically on developing his personal creative process. “Finding Water,” a functional shelf featuring a root sprouting from a hidden acorn, is one of the inventive and finely crafted works Massoni Art is presenting to announce The Seed Project, an effort by collectors and friends to assist von Voss during the time he is without income from commissions. (See www.massoniart.com for details.)

In von Voss’s work, just as in Manzotti’s and Castro’s, it’s clear that art doesn’t just appear, finished and ready to hang on the wall. It arises from an artist’s urge to understand the world and develops in an exciting but painstaking process as the artist follows that compulsion. Sharing in this knowledge, you automatically become part of the process and the art comes alive.

Filed Under: Arts, Arts Lead, Top Story, Uncategorized

Art Review: Joanne Scott at Heron Point

November 8, 2012 by Mary McCoy Leave a Comment

It’s pure pleasure to see the work of a skilled artist who loves her subject matter and loves the process of making art. Unpretentiously tucked away in a quiet hallway at Heron Point of Chestertown is the work of just such an artist, Joanne Scott.

With a clear eye and a sure hand, Scott paints and draws the landscape, revealing her special love of trees and stones, not to mention garden flowers, the moon, and the ubiquitous grain silos that dot the Eastern Shore. There’s even a tiny etching of a watchful cow in this exhibit on view through December 31. Although it includes only 22 works in a variety of painting and printmaking mediums, the show spans more than 40 years of work by one of the area’s finest artists.

“Winter on Mill Creek,” lithograph

With exquisite draftsmanship, Scott brings every line and shadow alive. In a small lithograph from the 1980s, “Winter on Mill Creek,” she effortlessly captured the sweeping curve of a creek by leaving the white of the paper to denote its snow-covered ice while deftly sketching the rhythmic growth of trees along its banks. This is an artist who knows just what to show and what to leave out.

Scott has a true understanding of how the eye moves as it gathers a sweeping impression of a scene while focusing in on the important details. In “Tracery,” a large watercolor of Maine spruce trees from the 1990s, her mastery of intricate details and broad simplification is key. Fascinated by the silvery branches of spruces stripped of their bark by blight, she painted a bewilderingly detailed web of twigs, a feat made more amazing by the fact that she used no resist to preserve the white of the paper, but defined the branches by painting the space between them. There’s an illusion of great depth as you peer inside this tangle to the twigs of trees behind trees, while an infinite variety of greens, purples, blues and browns mingle to create the fragrant shadows of the spruce forest.

Some of the works date back to the late 1960s, but though now in her 80s, Scott is still at it. Spending the summer at her studio on Monhegan Island, as she has for the past 30 years, the two full moons of this past August inspired her to paint a series of moonlit landscapes. In “Escaping Moon,” she captured the night mist on the forested hills of the island in simple swaths of blue, purple and gold. Small touches of pigment suggest the treetops silhouetted against the light of a huge full moon.

Scott studied at Rhode Island School of Design and the Maryland Institute College of Art, two of the country’s finest art schools. A firm believer in the importance of creative work, she has published several books of poetry and art, helped found Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts in Annapolis, and has taught art in Maine and New Jersey, as well as in Maryland.

When she moved to Heron Point two years ago from her home just two blocks away, she joined with other resident artists in requesting a studio where they could work and hold classes. Heron Point complied by converting an apartment into a bright and airy studio where Scott now teaches drawing and watercolor.

“Tracery” detail, watercolor

Like all true artists, Scott sees the world with a special clarity and curiosity. In two masterfully simple monotypes, she turns grain silos into monuments to agriculture. Her large watercolor of red roses, far from being pretty or sentimental, presents the blossoms as stately and serene, and in another watercolor entitled “Guardians,” the mammoth rocks lining Monhegan’s shore stand like ancient sentinels.

When I spoke with her just after the show was installed, we talked about her fascination with capturing the spirit of stones, trees and flowers.

“I look to paint the mystery,” she explained. “I’m always looking for that mystery underneath everything.”

In “Evening,” a quick, spare watercolor sketch, aureoles of subtle color bloom around murky shapes suggesting trees and a pale moon over water. Here, Scott’s talent for honing in on mystery is paramount. Few artists could evoke this magical stillness and radiance, and even fewer could capture it with such simple and playful means.

Cover: ”Escaping Moon,” watercolor

Filed Under: Arts, Homepage Slider, Top Story, Visual Arts

A Conversation with Dumbarton Oaks’ John Beardsley by Mary McCoy

October 12, 2012 by Mary McCoy Leave a Comment

Back in the 1980’s, when I was reluctantly braving life in the big city of Washington in order to establish myself as an artist while longing for the peace and open spaces of the Eastern Shore, my view of art was changed forever when I read the first edition of John Beardsley’s seminal book, Earthworks and Beyond, Contemporary Art in the Landscape. Imagine my excitement when The Spy invited me to interview Beardsley about his upcoming talk at Washington College.

James Beardsley

In this, the first of the College’s new lecture series on art in the environment, Beardsley, currently Director of Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, will give an illustrated talk on Wednesday, October 17 at 5:00 at Decker Theater entitled “Art in the Environment, Sketches from the Field.” Much of his talk will outline the development of art made not for the gallery, but created out in the environment, relating directly to the landscape and the way we experience our relationship with the earth.

“Broadly, it’s about art in the environment beginning with the great age of landscape art in the 19th century,” Beardsley explained, citing artists such as Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt whose breathtaking paintings of rivers and mountain ranges helped to form our collective view of the American landscape. “These artists were concerned about changes in the environment—loss of habitat and loss of biodiversity.”

In keeping with Washington College’s exciting new initiative focusing on interdisciplinary approaches to environmental studies with environmental art as a core element, Beardsley plans to show the continuity between the aims of these landscape painters and recent artists who share the same concerns.

“I believe we’re now in a 2nd great age of landscape art,” he said. “In both instances, we see the way artists react to environmental concerns, how art helps articulate our relationship with the environment.”

To understand why this is so important, think about what we have here in Chestertown and on the Eastern Shore in general. While we lack the major museums and inspiring artist-designed parks you find in big cities like Washington and New York, we have the open landscape and beautiful water that those city people long for. We’re well aware that this fine and beloved region is threatened by overdevelopment and environmental degradation. Environmental art can provide a context for addressing these problems and celebrating the beauty, richness and heritage of this place.

Unlike paintings and sculptures on pedestals, environmental art isn’t cloistered within the white walls of a gallery. It’s right out there in the landscape. It draws attention to the surrounding environment, helping us to empathize with the natural world and connecting us to the deeper truths of the environment that we may easily miss in the rush of everyday life.

As Beardsley says, “Art has a way of drawing awareness to the environment and providing a symbolic language, building the relationship between people and their landscape.”

With its Center for Environment and Society and the Chester River Field Research Station, Washington College is becoming known for its innovative approach to environmental studies. Its first class in environmental art was launched this autumn by Lecturer Alex Castro, using the latest edition of Beardsley’s Earthworks and Beyond as its textbook.

The author of numerous books on contemporary art and design, Beardsley is currently serving as Director of Harvard University’s Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. There he oversees various programs including annual symposia, a fellowship program, and an ongoing series of temporary art installations in the Dumbarton’s gardens. Currently on view is “Cloud Terrace,” an amorphous sculpture by Andy Cao and Xavier Perrot formed of wire mesh and water-drop crystals suspended over a reflecting pool on Dumbarton’s Arbor Terrace.

“We present temporary pieces that don’t change the historic gardens,” Beardsley explained. “They introduce different ways of seeing the garden. The Cao-Perrot piece explores the importance of light, reflection and color.”

Emphasizing that although Dumbarton’s gardens are historic, they do evolve through the seasons and over time, he said, “A garden is a living thing, changing all the time, reminding us that it’s a dynamic space.”

The same is true of our Chesapeake Bay environment. Both natural processes and manmade interventions are constantly changing the Bay region. Beardsley sees great promise in Washington College’s plans for environmental studies linking disciplines including the arts and sciences. This interdisciplinary approach is an exciting venture into understanding the processes behind these changes and providing a broader context for how we can work to preserve and enhance our beautiful but fragile environment.

Filed Under: Arts, Arts Lead, Homepage Slider, Lectures & Readings

Review: Marcy Dunn Ramsey at Massoni Gallery by Mary McCoy

September 20, 2012 by Mary McCoy Leave a Comment

For at least a decade, Marcy Dunn Ramsey has been painting marshes. You’d think she’d be ready to move on by now, but no. In her new show, “Aspiration,” on view at Carla Massoni Gallery through October 14, there they are again—yet more tangles of marsh grass with yet more reflections dancing in the shallow water. But far from being tedious, these new oil paintings are captivating glimpses into the secrets concealed in this boggy realm.

The slightest ripple slides across a narrow channel of bright blue water between stands of phragmites in “Torso.” A movement soft as a baby’s breath, it speaks of the shifting tide meeting a slight breeze.

“Torso,” oil on canvas, 40” x 36”

Marshes used to be considered wastelands, soggy and smelly, best drained and filled in. But now we realize they are one of the most biologically diverse of all ecosystems, providing invaluable habitat, acting as sponges that filter and purify water, stabilizing our shorelines, and sequestering greenhouse gasses. They have been called the lungs of the earth.

As President of the Chester River Association, which works for the health of the river and its watershed, Ramsey is well aware that marshes are environmental gold. While the show casts the marsh as a living, breathing environment, the theme, “Aspiration,” doubles for the ambition to protect and nourish these precious spaces. But it does even more than that.

Meditators learn to “follow the breath,” to hone their awareness of the continuous rhythm of that vital connection between the body and the outside world. In Ramsey’s paintings, awareness is the key. The quirky angle of a broken reed and the jittery curls of reflections broken by rings of ripples each have a grace and comic charm akin to haiku, along with its keen focus on interconnection.

“Seduction” is a painting of nothing but a patch of shallow water where a few leaves float, but it’s an enchanted realm. Reality manifests here in distinct but interwoven levels. The leaves float on the water’s surface but cast sharp shadows on the sand below. Sunlight pours through the water and across the sand throwing long shadows of leafy branches, their luminous, soft edges contrasting with the crisp shadows of the floating leaves. Dancing on top are glints of reflected blue sky flickering through the silhouettes of more unseen trees. It’s a masterful balance of contemplative quietude and teeming life.

“Seduction,” oil on canvas, 48” x 54”

In these scenes where land and water mingle, Ramsey finds the fecund meeting place of biological and physical forces. It’s a liminal space, the threshold between worlds. Rhythm, light and color infuse her work with both activity and tranquility. The late summer’s breeze conjures daydreams and is the same breath that takes the meditator into realms of deep knowing. Here is the place where states of existence meet: aquatic and terrestrial, earthly and spiritual, reality and dream, where fertility is tangible and the possibilities are endless.

For information visit: www.massoniart.com

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Review: What Comes Later at the Kohl by Mary McCoy

August 30, 2012 by Mary McCoy Leave a Comment

It’s a common misconception that the purpose of art is to create something beautiful to enjoy hanging on the wall. This is a very limiting view of the creative process that explores our existence as human beings, and with the help of the two newest members of its art faculty, Washington College is intent on dispelling it.

Haystack by Benjamin Bellas

“What Comes Later,” an exhibit introducing the work of recently hired art professors Heather Harvey and Benjamin Bellas, explores the creative process of art, but it’s definitely not about beautiful pictures. On view through September 16 at the College’s Kohl Gallery, this show presents work that springs from two curious minds playfully teasing out the poetry and significance of the human experience.

Expect the unexpected. Odd shapes in dreamy pastel colors grow seamlessly right out of some of the gallery’s walls. Blithely disrupting the politely pristine white space, Harvey attacks the conventions of gallery art head-on with these restive protrusions. Defying the logic of architecture, they anxiously push their way into existence, taking shape but not quite formed. They’re like ideas you can’t quite get into focus or perhaps thoughts you’d rather not think.

A peculiar range of meanings arises. While these uneasy forms can be seen as physical manifestations of the kind of internal, intuitive forces that knot your stomach or thrill your nerves, they are also a kind of protest against the forces of the art market. Fused with the sacrosanct walls of the gallery itself, they can’t be moved, so they can’t be sold. Born within the structure of the art experience, they can’t be separated out as commodities.

As teachers of art, both artists are quite comfortable referencing art history. Bellas recreates a Monet haystack; Harvey mimics color field painting. But there’s more to it than homage or imitation.

Heather Harvey working on Burnt Red Cosmic Sunshine

Bellas actually hand-cut and stacked the hay himself as a performance piece focused on physical involvement, then continued the process by photographing the haystack, taking care to compose, size and frame it to match the Monet paintings he found in the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection. Harvey painted one of the gallery’s walls with layers of color then gleefully drilled holes straight through the sheetrock, effectively undermining the illusion of a two-dimensional painting as 3-D space. The literal void behind the wall substitutes for the symbolic void of emptiness or infinity so often eulogized in treatises on abstract art. But still more cosmic, the holes chart the daily positions of the sun relative to nearby Baltimore.

These artists teach drawing but both are happy to extend its definition beyond pencil and charcoal. Harvey draws with her drill, as the work’s lengthy title makes clear—“Burnt Red Cosmic Sunshine 133-11-544 (Hole Drawing—Solar Elevation and Azimuth Recordings, Baltimore).” Bellas draws with other things, a carpenter’s rule, for instance. In another of his works combining performance and photography, a series of photos find him standing before a mountainous Vermont skyline tracing its contours with the angles of a folding wooden ruler held up in the air.

Bellas’s titles are even longer than Harvey’s. They don’t fit on the wall. More like poems or formulas detailing his thoughts and process, they’re available in a 25-page booklet, but reading it is optional. You can get a deeper understanding of what the artist was considering when he created his various photos, sculptures and videos, and it’s a fascinating read. However, you can and should feel free to experience the work from your own point of view.

A perusal of the much less unwieldy exhibition catalog will confirm how both artists work with an interdisciplinary approach that embraces literature, science, history, psychology, and personal experience. This is the real point of the exhibit and the focus of the College’s new direction for its studio art department. Studying art isn’t simply about achieving skill in a particular technique. It’s about developing a process of analytical thinking and intuitive awareness that can be applied to any discipline from drawing to marketing to cancer research, making it an important field of study for art and non-art majors alike.

The Kohl Gallery is open Wednesday through Sunday. For information visit: http://kohlgallery.washcoll.edu.

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Review: “Pat Steir: A View” at the Academy Art Museum

August 13, 2012 by Mary McCoy Leave a Comment

“Wolf Waterfall” two-color screenprint, 58” x 34”, 2001

Silvery drips course down over a coal-black background. The intricacies of their passage are achingly beautiful. This is “Wolf Waterfall,” one of four silkscreens from Pat Steir’s extensive “Waterfall” series. Included in “Pat Steir: A View,” a mesmerizing exhibit at Easton’s Academy Art Museum through October 14, it’s a work that hovers between representation and abstraction, and owes its incredibly delicate details to the force of gravity.

A major figure in American art since the 1970s, Steir has worked from many different angles tackling a problem that all painters face—how can mere painting say anything meaningful about something as dynamic, complex and changeable as life itself? One way or another, she’s found that the answer is like a Zen koan: You can’t but yet you can.

Anyone who has ever fallen in love with a painting knows that there’s more to it than just color cleverly applied to a canvas. A work of art feels almost alive. You can talk about the painter’s skill and creativity, but it’s still a mystery how some marks in oil or acrylic can have that spark.

More than 20 years ago, Steir became known for pouring and flinging paint onto canvas, “collaborating” with gravity to create exquisite splashes and drizzles of diaphanous color resembling waterfalls. She had already found notoriety in the late 1970s when she painted a single rose, an image weighted with symbolic content, dead center on a monochromatic canvas, then X-ed it out. It was a way of simultaneously calling out the symbol and negating it. In the years between, having developed an interest in traditional Asian landscape painting, she took to borrowing the subjects of one important artist from Western art history and painting them in the style of another important artist. The title of a painting from 1986 will give you an idea: “The Wave after Courbet as Though Painted by Turner with the Chinese in Mind.”

This restless searching was not as haphazard as it sounds. From her early days as a student at the prestigious Pratt Institute, Steir was in love with art. She found its history, its materials, and its process irresistible. Born in 1940, she is part of the unsettled generation of postmodernist artists constantly calling the conventions of art history into question. Except for six curiously compelling drawings from the early 1970s, this show covers only the past two decades of Steir’s work, but you can get a good idea of her quest from the nearly 30 works on view.

“Diptych W” silkscreen monoprint with hand-coloring, 2008

Making art has become something of a spiritual practice for Steir. Like a Japanese master calligrapher, she starts with a breathing meditation and builds her concentration and energy up to the moment when she releases the paint. Through years of practice, she has learned how different pigments and thicknesses of paint will trickle down the canvas. The layers of color are preplanned, but the final image is a matter of the paint’s own physical properties of viscosity and transparency, and their relationship to other layers of paint. Although she owes much to the gestural tradition of Abstract Expressionism (Mark Rothko is a favorite of hers), Steir is a conceptual artist. In keeping with her friend John Cage’s Zen-influenced embrace of chance, she never alters her plan for a painting. Whether or not it works, she learns from it.

Steir’s work can be breathtaking. The vertical fall of ink or tempera in each panel of “Winter Group,” 1991, is spectacularly sensuous as the painter’s gesture flows into rivulets of pigment as naturally as water etches its patterns into sand. The vast canvas, “Valentine” from 2009–11, reaching from the gallery’s baseboard to a sliver short of the ceiling, beams red so forcefully that you get lost in its nuances of crimson, scarlet and candy apple red, even as maroon and shades of orange splash in from either side. Lost that is, until one tiny broken stroke of lichen green right in the middle reminds you it’s just a flat panel of oil paint.

Seduction is not Steir’s aim but considering its implications is part of her agenda. Standing before one of these paintings, feeling its lightness even as you consider how gravity drew the pigment downward, you can easily fall deep into a meditative reverie of inner space, but Steir gleefully reminds you that it’s an illusion.

“Silver Waterfall” five-color screenprint, 58” x 34”, 2001

With the misty spaciousness of a Chinese landscape, gossamer veils of pastel pink and blue laced with gold seep down the surface of “Diptych W,” 2008. But the fairy-tale softness is abruptly counteracted by bold pinstripes in blue, red and black hovering along the edges of its two panels. Even more jarring, showers of gold and silver glitter splash across the canvas. The image flattens, illusion melts, and the painting is revealed as marks on canvas.

“Diptych W” may not be one of Steir’s most comfortable works to spend time with, but it gives an excellent sense of the contradictions inherent in art. In one sense, the artist is creating nothing but a colorful mirage; in another, she’s revealing an experience that might otherwise be unknowable. For Steir, it’s an open-ended process of exploring the enigmatic confluence of matter and spirit.

Curator-led tours of the Pat Steir exhibition will be held on Wednesday, September 19 at 11 a.m. and Friday, October 12 at 1 p.m. For further information, call 410-822-ARTS (2787) or visit: www.academyartmuseum.org.

Filed Under: Arts, Arts Lead, Homepage Slider, Visual Arts

Review: Kyung-Lim Lee’s “The Order of Contemplation” at the Academy

April 10, 2012 by Mary McCoy Leave a Comment

In a stroke of curatorial genius, Easton’s Academy Art Museum is exhibiting the work of Korean-born artist Kyung-Lim Lee in the gallery adjacent to its show of Mark Rothko’s work on loan from the National Gallery of Art. Both exhibits continue through April 22. The visitor can follow Rothko’s development from his early figurative work through to his iconic meditative rectangles of color, then cross the hall to deepen the contemplative experience with the quiet power of Lee’s luminous drawings.

Like many of her drawings, the tiny “Sphere Gyul,” grows more and more curious as you look at it. It’s nothing but a sphere floating on a shaded background. There’s no sense of scale in any of Lee’s drawings, so it might represent a planet or just as easily, a subatomic particle. The strange thing is that although the sphere is apparently suspended in space, it casts a shadow upward—onto what?

With meticulously fine pencil marks, Lee shades the sphere dark at the bottom against a background of pale space but lightens it to a soft white glow at its top as the background smoothly shades to dark. The sphere seems to have a strong effect on the presumably empty space around it making the background appear concave. As if you’d just cracked a Zen koan, you suddenly realize you’re seeing a very simple way of saying that everything exists in relationship to everything else.

Sphere Gyul, pencil, 4" x 5",, 1999

Geometry can seem cold and dispassionate, but Lee’s drawings of spheres, ellipses and shafts of nuanced color are made luminous and inviting through her masterfully subtle drawing technique. For her, drawing is a meditative process. Although her compositions seem simple, they are alive with paradox underpinned by a beauty derived from long hours of drawing transparent layers of resonant color using various drawing mediums.

There’s something riveting about “Shadow Spill” with its pitch-black circle in a field of velvety purple paired with a circle floating nearly invisibly in ultra-pale milky green. Smoothly rendered in charcoal, pastel and pencil over digital imagery, these surprising colors seem to simultaneously suck light in and radiate it outward. Although the two forms share the same invisible baseline, in a strange optical effect, the circle seems much lower and much more distant than the ellipse.

Lee’s drawings are full of such contradictions. An egg-shaped orb may seem flat but cast a deep shadow; a shaft of color with parallel sides may align with the edges of an ellipse while similar shafts fan out from the sides of a nearby circle like beams of light. In drawing after drawing, Lee plays the flat picture plane against illusionistic space, hints at the laws of physics while slipping in a contradictory set of rules, equates unlike shapes, sizes or colors, and generally puts paradox on center stage.

Like a koan’s impossible riddle, these drawings throw you off balance. The more you ponder them, the more they make you wonder, until suddenly something clicks and you feel your mind (and perhaps your spirit) open. It’s an indescribable feeling that leaves logic behind. Lee achieves it again and again, gently invoking a reassuring sense of calm and deep insight.

Homepage Image: Returning Circle, dry pigment on paper, 24″ x 36″, 2009

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