housekeeping

couple things:

A Good Line: Artist on Poems has opened at Richard Hugo House in Seattle.   You are all officially invited to join us for the big reception on April 12th from 6 to 9pm!  Promises to be a great time.  Nancy Guppy from Art Zone (Seattle Channel) stopped by Hugo House to chat about their plans for National Poetry Month, includes a glimpse (don’t blink!) of one-half of the work I’ve have in A Good line; all begins around the 9 minute mark.

http://www.seattlechannel.org/videos/player5.swf?config=http://www.seattlechannel.org/videos/videoConfig.asp%3FID%3D3351112

Seattle Channel Video can be played in Flash Player 9 and up

Already in progress is this year’s Strait Art exhibition at the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center; excerpted from the show text:

Counsel Langley’s precisely textured mixed media paintings hinge on dynamic tension between an underlying architectonic structure and organic bleeds that ebb and flow.  In AM Radio a matrix grid of perfectly aligned pulses blink weakly in the nocturnal landscape, while a sparkly wave of bright plastic crystals encrusts the landscape below like the lights of farms and cities seen from a jetliner flying through the night by instruments.

Strait Art runs through May 15th.

I am honored and excited to be a part of the visual arts team for PT Public Library’s first ever Teen Community Read.   There are many incredible events happening around this book.   I look forward to holding visual art workshops along with two fantastic artists, Jesse Watsonand Margie McDonald!!  All the info can be found in this week’s Leader.

I am nearing the one month mark in my role as fill-in on the daily photo blog A Year of Days.   Am pretty sure that last time a one month anniversary felt significant I was in junior high.  AYOD has been an excellent visual workout routine and has solidly become a habit.   If I were a big cheater there are some days I might be tempted to sub-out a day’s crummy shot for something from one of those great days when I have two or four to struggle to choose from, but no pain no gain.  And besides I’m wicked honest.  Here’s one of my favorites to date:

Nature Awareness

Rather than business as usual, PTSD’s ICE Program kicked-off 2011 with an experiment: 

Cancel all regular classes in favor of a week of intense focus on a particular subject.

During this amazing Project Week, I teamed up with teacher/consultant Daniel Molotsky to lead students, K through 8th grade, in a concentrated look at Patterns in Art and Nature.  For four straight days we worked inside and out to explore environmental art and visual concepts, such as, pattern and line, accumulation, repetition, symmetry. 

All the images in this post are rad student work.

Our days began with an introduction of a new concept, some discussion and a look at examples of the days’ idea from both visual art and nature.   Students then spent time working on projects indoors.

These projects encouraged independent thought and work and introduced a particular design concept: repetition, symmetry, pattern. Then around lunch time we bundled-up and went outdoors to work on-site.  Now students could get their hands (and knees) dirty and express what they were learning about environmental art.  My take on it is that environmental art improves the artist’s relationship with nature.  It is artwork that emerges from the essence of a particular place and is created entirely from available natural materials. And, most importantly, it is ephemeral; made to change and eventually disappear.  The kids embraced these ideas--moving with grace and confidence they took their time getting to know the places–-woods, meadow, beach–-that we ventured to.

The future of the environment depends largely on this generation having a healthy relationship with the natural world.  Environment-based education education expert David Sobel puts it this way:

“It’s good to have streams where kids can and obstruct the ecosystem; the nature of that play is more important, and worth it to the environment in the long term,” he says.  . . . . “You can make the same argument about tree houses, which undeniably damage the tree, but that occasional damage to a tree is not as important as what children learn when playing in that tree.”

Without exception, the students were gentle and respectful in their interactions with the natural world. There is some unavoidable impact when taking twenty-some students out into the wild to make art. With this in mind we were sensitive to select work sites that were near trails or other spaces already frequented by people/

I came across this David Sobel quote while reading Last Child in the Woods, by Richard Louv.  Louv’s view is:

“Passion does not arrive on videotape or on a CD; passion is personal.  Passion is lifted from the earth itself by the muddy hands of the young; it travels along grass-stained sleeves to the heart.  If we are going to save . . . the environment, we must also save an endangered indicator species:  the child in nature.”

I am happy to think the environment might benefit from kids who know it well.  As I watched my students at their play/work/interaction with the natural world I see in them respect, understanding, and love.  These children are the ones who grow up desiring to protect the environment. Even greater satisfaction  came of witnessing the effect the great outdoors had on all of us-–making us happier, more-tolerant, creative and playful.

Again from Last Child in the Woods:

“Natural spaces and materials stimulate children’s limitless imaginations and serve as the medium of inventiveness and creativity observable in almost any group of children playing in a natural setting.”  [Louv is quoting Robin Moore, a play and learning environments designer.]

resonance

Tomorrow I’ll cross the bay to Whidbey Island for the third time in a week.  Day one, I went to La Conner to deliver paintings to the Museum of Northwest Art.  Two days later, I delivered my husband to a fishing boat in Anacortes that will take him to Alaska for weeks.  They asked me if he’s a good cook.  He is.  Tomorrow I put on boots, shark ring and lip gloss and return to MoNA for the pretty part.  The opening of this show:

installation view of work by Charles Stokes and Counsel Langley

RESONANCES: CONTEMPORARY ECHOES MODERN

March 13, 2010 – June 13, 2010
Curators’ Panel:  Saturday, March 13, 1-2pm
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 13, 2-5pm

From a MoNA brochure:  “Four Northwest curators compare the work of older and newer regional artists, in pairs that resonate.  The specific pairings combine artists from different generations and areas, using various mediums.  Resonances features these small two-person exhibitions sharing formal qualities or subject matter including architecture, color, landscape and abstraction.”

The concept–echoes over time, space, generation being picked up though some sort of regional osmosis–intrigues me deeply.

Participating curators: Sarah Clark-Langager, Director, Western Gallery, Western Washington University, Bellingham; Kathleen Moles, Curator, Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner; John Olbrantz, The Maribeth Collins Director, Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University, Salem, Oregon; and Jake Seniuk, Director, Port Angeles Fine Art Center, Port Angeles, Washington.

Sarah Clark-Langager chose Jacob Lawrence and Whiting Tennis for their renderings of construction and buildings.

Kathleen Moles paired Guy Anderson and Jan Hoy, with their shared affinity for iconic forms and strong pallette.

John Olbrantz selected Darius Kinsey and Michael Brophy for their sweeping portrayals of the Northwest landscape, timbered and logged.

Jake Seniuk selected Charles Stokes* and myself for the “highly abstract, structured and organic compositions” we have in common.

One Langley in the middle of two by Charles Stokes

Excerpt from Jake Seniuk's exhibition text:

“Stokes’ virtuosic gouache and aquarelle cosmos, sometime glibly characterized as Tobeyesque ‘white writing with added drop shadows,’ is an arena where modern physics and more primal metaphysical impulses vie for the viewer’s rapt attention. Repeatedly crisscrossing the border between the referential and the purely abstract, his paintings give visual basis to both scientific explanations and to more spiritual notions of the movements that comprise the dance between matter and energy.

In Stokes’s more casual works, biomorphic forms drift on soft washes that ooze like the pregnant fluids of a primal soup, awaiting the spark of life. In his more labored masterpieces, complex crystals of linear geometry rise and fall like prehistoric ghost cities or surge like nature’s formative forces, tattooing their routes through an elemental landscape.

The pathways of perception stay a little closer to the grid in Counsel Langley’s highly engineered ink, acrylic and mixed media paintings. Drawing on her formative metalsmithing internship, she creates precise architectonic designs of scribed lines and systemically arranged discs that might be of use as game boards, circuit diagrams, subway maps or any number of genres of codified information.  When layered with organic bleeds and washes that ebb around the edges, these rational structures are a picture of intellect rising from the unconscious mind. Here she’s wandered into the same territory as the heretofore unknown master before her, but has begun to draw her own maps.”

* As Seniuk puts it “A deep trawling of Google offers little more on the man or his paintings than his 2008 obituary. An impressive and surprising feat in the cyber age for anyone living ordead, but not wholly unexpected of this reclusive savant by those who knew him.”

Charles Stokes. I, for one, would have very much liked to have met this man.

In thinking about the implications of this show, It occurred to me to look up the definition of the word resonance.  At times the nuanced specifics of a word’s meaning can help to clarify it use.  Turns out resonance is owned by its scientific meanings.  Which, to my mind, is sexy, but went only a short distance to unwrap the reasons why this exhibition works.  These science-based definitions helped on some level; this is why I picked out the quote at the top of this post.  I can get into comparing the artists to particles, or thinking of them as part of a linear system through time, picking up specific vibrations and putting them into their work.  (By the way, I included the Galileo discovering resonance bit just because the guy is awesome.)  Wanting a little more I went to the word resonate.

According to Miriam-Webster the third meaning of resonate is:  

3 : to relate harmoniously : strike a chord.

“Strike a chord.”  That is really all there is too it.  These artists have been paired to draw out a common chord they have struck in their work.  With each pairing the chord is different; more or less subtle; more or less felt on an intuitive level.  The moment of richest resonance occurs in the viewer.   Here the same chord responds/resonates/vibrates.  It is very much like that magical thing that happens with pianos, guitars and other musical instruments; when more than one of these instruments are in the same space and a string is plucked or struck on one the corresponding string of another will vibrate.

The Stokes piece in the center (above) is titled Ultra Very.  Oh, yes yes!  I resonate.