Happy Birthday Odilon Redon!

Odilon Redon is one of my favorite artists! He would have been 173 today. 

"My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined."

More pictures after the jump!

Artist Spotlight - Alison Moritsugu

As I was going through boxes at my internship, I found a gallery handout for Alison Moritsugu and I instantly wanted to do a post on her. This was the installation that had me so enamored:

I nearly exploded with excitement! My friend Sam and I have had several conversations about landscape painting. You can be a great artist and a skilled painter or drawer, but landscapes often run the risk of being repetitive and boring. Alison Mortisugu has totally rocked the landscape here. What makes this landscape so much more than a lighthouse or barn? 

The fragmented "canvas" (by the way, doing this on tree cookies? love, love, love) is awesome. This fragmentation of the picture allows the viewer to "fill in the blanks" creating a more visually stimulating experience. I love that the tree branches twist and turn through the piece. 

I don't know if you can tell, but the pieces of wood extend out to different lengths, creating more of a space for those who are seeing this in real life. 

Doesn't this picture just make you want to walk around the installation, looking at it from every angle? (That's how it makes me feel!)

This picture above is part of her log series, a sort of extension from her landscape series. This is what she has to say about it: “There is also a kitschy tradition of painting on log slices, which I like, I think that these works subvert painting and turn it into something else.” She had previously been painting on wood panels and had been looking for a way to make her paintings more of an object. She saw a wood pile and a lightbulb lit up! Something else that I enjoy about her landscape and her log series is that although they are a beautiful piece of art collectively, they are also small pieces of art individually. 

Wai Hookahe, 2007

Mixed media, 38" x 46½" x 46½" deep

If you're wondering a little bit about her... Alison Moritsugu was born and raised in Hawaii and left the islands after high school. After graduating from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, she earned a Master of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York. On return visits to Hawaii, she noticed the drastic changes to the local landscape. She not only has done the fragmented lanscapes but she created amazing wallpaper that features flowers and plants native to Hawaii. 

If you look within the design of the wallpaper, you can see the silhouettes of plants and animals. But she employs imagery as social commentary, picturing plant life that has driven out native forms in vivid colors, while the extinct and endangered plants and birds are seen as white contours. Here is a detail of that: 

In 1999, she created a piece for the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. I was 9 then and I remember it, but barely. I wish I could see her again, I guess I'll have to keep my eyes peeled for her next show near me! 

Adventures in Art - Picasso and Chicago

In 1913, the Chicago Institute of Art was the first museum in the country to exhibit the work of Pablo Picasso. 100 years later, there's a spectacular exhibition at the institute featuring such diverse and significant works from the museum's own collection and from collections throughout the city, Picasso and Chicago not only charts the full gamut of Picasso's artistic career but also chronicles the growth of Chicago as a place for modern art and the storied moments of overlap that have contributed to the vibrant interest in Picasso from 1913 to today. 

One of my favorite parts of this exhibit was the video they made about the research they did on the paintings. If you've ever done research on Picasso's blue period, you have no doubt stumbled on this piece:

The Old Guitarist is one of Picasso's more well known pieces (Unless you're George Bush... his favorite is the "The Party So Fun They Invited a Horse.") During the research film, they showed how you could see the paintings underneath The Old Guitarist. You can actually see some of the outlines of the former paintings in the piece if you look at it under the right light.

There were so many pieces that I had never seen before! Picasso not only did the paintings we're familiar with, but also illustrated books. One of my favorite things that he did was interpretations of paintings from the great masters.

Can you tell which paintings this is?

Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe!









If you're near the midwest/Chicagoland before May 12th, I suggest you give it a go! It's an excellent exhibit for sure covering not only the things that people think of when Picasso is brought up, but also gems not usually seen.

Museum of Wisconsin Art - West Bend

When my aunt and uncle suggested I come with them to meet the director of the West Bend art museum and a tour of their new building, I agreed, but admittedly wasn't expecting much. 

I was pleasantly surprised by a great museum, with a rich collection of Wisconsin art and a gorgeous new building by Jim Shields, who also designed the Discovery Center in downtown Milwaukee, along the lake. 

I was also able to sneak some pictures! 

These are blown glass sculptures made by Doug and Renee Sigwarth from Sigwarth Glass. They're a husband and wife team and they work out of River Falls, Wisconsin. It took them about a year to complete these sculptures. If you're interested in the making of these massive sculptures, there's an album of pictures on the MWA facebook. Here's one of the pictures, if you're so inclined:

I love seeing behind the scenes shots like these! It's always fun to see how they put these giant sculptures together. It looks like it took a pretty long time. It kind of makes my arms hurt just looking at it.

Below is a shot of a few paintings that are being prepared to hang. 

They're still moving everything in, so I got a once in a lifetime chance to witness a museum moving. As you can see, the artworks are all wrapped individually and then safely stacked. Luckily, the new Museum of Wisconsin Art is only about 3 miles from the old one, so they didn't have to travel far.

The picture below is a bunch of Richard Lorenz paintings. He was a fairly prominent wisconsin artist. I haven't had too much of a chance to research him, but from what I got to see; he does beautiful landscapes and some portraits too. 

Hope you enjoyed these quick snapshots! The new museum officially opens in April! 

Artist Spotlight - Jeanne Opgenhaffen

At first glance, what do these pictures remind you of? What do they look like they are made of? Close up of skin cells, repeating patterns in nature? Paper sculptures?

Remarkably enough these pieces by Jeanne Opgenhaffen are handmade, colored, porcelain tiles. Her large murals are created my thousands of tiles, overlapped in different shades and tones. 

According to her website, Opgenhaffen draws inspiration from the earths layers and rock strata. She attempts to bring movement into her pieces, like breeze blowing through a field. I really see that in her work. You can tell she is inspired by the natural world: rocks, the earth and geology. 

She is based in Belgium and continues to create her murals, along with other realms of ceramics. Living and working in Belgium, Jeanne has been exhibiting her internationally recognized work with natural and colored porcelain since 1980. With awards and exhibitions in Australia, Germany, Egypt, England, Isreal, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Belgium, Slovaikia, Taiwan, and USA. 

"THE RIVER AS WILD AND BEAUTIFUL AND TORRENT AS ANY ON THE FACE OF THE PLANET PICKED ITS COURSE, ONCE AGO AND BEGAN ITS MASTERWORK"

I really like how Opgenhaffen uses color and the layers to create a sense of depth within her work. I keep looking at the picture above, expecting it to move and change.

 This piece is called "As Darkness Falls"

Characters and numbers

Commission from the Flemisch Community 1997. The mural work is an installation of a mass of printed porcelain cuttings, where in digits and characters appear, signs, figures and contrasts of dark in a sensible field of white. Like inscriptions on a noble support.

It's this kind of abstract work that really stirs me. I love the simplicity, the beauty and the subtle connection to the natural world.

Artist Spotlight: Mary Nohl

The Fox Point Witch!

Just down the road from my university, down a curving hill and past the blue waters of Lake Michigan lies the Mary Nohl Art Environment. (Also known as The Fox Point Witch's House and the Mary Nohl House) 

Born in 1914, Mary Nohl graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago and taught in junior high schools around the area and eventually opened her own ceramics studio for 10 years. 
After her parents died, Mary Nohl received an inheritance which allowed her to create a massive collection of folk art, including statues and architectural features. After Mary Nohl's death, the Kohler foundation acquired the property and began cataloging the hundreds of pieces that she had made from 1961-2001, the year of her death. Although she donated many of her pieces to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center when she was alive, they've also acquired her house after her death and are working hard to preserve and conserve it (as well as make it available to the public - fingers crossed!)

The whimsy of the home jumps out at you when you drive by. The house has bright, wooden reliefs of blue, turquoise and red.  The house is surrounded by concrete sculptures with different natural elements mixed in- like driftwood, rocks from the beach and glass. She drew much of her inspiration from the lake right outside her house. One of the things I admire about Mary Nohl is her perspective that everything could be a medium. She transformed everything from her lawn to the inside of her house; making it go from drab to expressive. The house is a private residence and the other people in the neighborhood don't really like having people hanging out and looking at the house. That's why it isn't open to the public, unfortunately. 

Although she is most known for her concrete sculptures outside fo her home, she also worked with...

Wood
She carved faces out of wood and made them into a playful fence. She eventually hung the wooden faces from the trees surrounding her yard, because vandals were stealing them.

Metal
She created jewelry! Often depicting people in boats, likely inspired by her home on the lake. You can actually still buy her designs at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center store page.

Woodcut & Printing

In the book Mary Nohl: Inside and Out, there are many pictures of her woodcuts. I was unable to find any pictures online, unfortunately. They are of people and rooms and streets, likely to be Maryland; where she was an art teacher at the time. If you look at Van Gogh's bedroom painting, they look a little like that. With wiggly, expressive lines and energy bouncing from the images. 

Ceramic

After she traveled and taught, she became a potter and opened her own studio and sold her own designs. You can see the clear beginnings of her whimsical style that would later define her concrete works: curious faces and expressive bodies.

This is an intern for the Kohler Foundation making an inventory of some of the ceramic items in Mary's home after her death. 

Mary Nohl also painted, drew and experimented with all sorts of mediums in between. She truly is an inspiration to artists who want to try everything. There is much more that I can say about Mary, but instead I will end with a quote from her:

"No amount of disorder will induce me to give up my front row seat on the changing moods of Lake Michigan- the ice hills against the blue water in the winter, and the afterglow of the sunsets in the summer, and the infinite variety in between."

Artist Spotlight: Henry Darger

One of my favorite folk artists is Henry Darger. I think he embodies the great mystery that is folk art and self-taught artists. A virtual unknown, overlooked for most of his life, Henry Darger has become known for his 15,145-page, single-spaced fantasy manuscript called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. With the manuscript are several hundred accompanying pictures, done in watercolors and created over six decades, most of which were discovered posthumously. 

Born in 1882, Darger had a less than ideal childhood. His mother died when he was four and his father when he was 13, after which he was institutionalized in the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children in Lincoln, Illinois. He eventually ran away from the institution, walking over 100 miles back to Chicago where his godmother helped him find a job. By this time, he was 16. The job he got was a custodian in a Chicago hospital. He would keep this job until his retirement in 1963. 

In Elizabeth Hand's Darger/Darger/Tolkien, she points out many parallels between Henry Darger and J.R.R. Tolkien; a connection I had never made before. More people are familiar with the depth that Tolkien infused within his creative universe, there were maps and an entire language developed. Tolkien and Darger were born just a few months apart and died less than a year apart. They were both orphans and both wrote incredibly massive single-subject fictional epics with Darger's work being the longest work of prose fiction ever created. 

The story of the Vivian girls chronicles the adventures of the daughters of Robert Vivian, seven princesses of the Christian nation of Abbieannia who assist a daring rebellion against the evil regime of child slavery imposed by John Manley and the Glandelinians. The children defend themselves and are often killed in battle or maliciously tortured by the Glandelinian overlords. 

Nearly all of his drawings are conglomerations of tracings and you'll often see the same poses over and over again in his meticulously created artworks. Many of them are double-sided and panoramic, like the one above. (Other side below)

If you're interested in learning more about Henry Darger, there is a permanent collection of his work at Intuit in Chicago or you can watch the movie (which I highly recommend, link below).

Sources: 

Intuit: http://www.art.org/collection/henry-darger/

http://www.folkartmuseum.org/darger

The movie: In the Realms of the Unreal

Tracing Perspectives... What's it about?

Welcome to Tracing Perspectives! 

Tracing Perspectives is an extension of my History and Conservation of Folk Art study. It's my last semester at Cardinal Stritch University and I designed this independent study so I could carve out time to pursue one of my passions - art history! 

In the past few years I've become really interested in folk art. Lucky for me, I've been able to visit a few folk art sites around Wisconsin. If you're interested in looking at a few of them, you can check out the Wandering Wisconsin website. 

I'll be working on this project with the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, a not-for-profit art museum in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. I'll be collaborating with curation and exhibitions as well, learning about how an exhibit gets from research to gallery. I hope to be featuring pieces of art on here (if the copyright allows) and telling about my exploration into art history and research.

So, why "Tracing Perspectives?" I'll be looking at the world through others' eyes, through their art, through the manifestation of their perspectives and tracing their views in hopes of obtaining a deeper understanding of their art and art in general. 

This is a picture from Fred Smith's Concrete Park, He's a Wisconsin folk artist who made larger-than-life art out of concrete and glass. He even made the Anheuser-Busch Clydesdales team! I'll be dedicating a whole post to him, so stay tuned!

Thanks for reading!
Jenny