I just finished a brief examination of Picasso’s full and long life in the book Pablo Picasso: A Modern Master by one Richard Leslie. I’m not sure the book is worth commenting on in depth, but I sat down to write a little about it and we’ll see what the html editor spits out.

The presentation of Leslie’s short biographical work is impressive. The reproductions of Picasso’s work are very nice, printed on heavy, glossy paper. It feels good in your hands. That’s where my praise for the book ends, however. The short work is adequate enough in giving a person an overview of the artist’s life, but it does so with pretentious and unsubstantiated language. More than once I read a paragraph and came away wondering what orifice the writer pulled that out of. These recurring and somewhat convoluted observations would bother me less if they were elaborated upon. They might actually be accurate or warranted statements if Leslie gave us citations, or even if he prefaced certain paragraphs with “in my opinion,” but the author makes no reference to where his ideas are coming from.

As already noted, the writing does communicate the basics of Picasso’s life and work, from his youth and background to cubism and from harlequins to minotaurs. Unfortunately, the images of his paintings don’t follow the text with any semblance of order. I found myself paging around after seeing a reference to a particular work, wondering if it was pictured in the book on some far flung back page. The writing is chronological. The images are, in a very loose sense, attempting to chronological. But not.

I eluded a few weeks ago to the fact that, as I read through this short book, my respect for Picasso was ebbing. This caused me to wonder where this respect came from in the first place. Sure I knew who the artist was from college courses — even from culture at large — but I knew very little of him other than “cubism” and “Guernica.” He’s held up as this mythical figure in the art world, but few details go along with this unspoken heroism in my experience. It takes independent research to really examine an artist’s life and body of work. History classes don’t cut it.

I’m still smitten with Guernica. The painting above of the war in Korea is impressive too, although this painting isn’t one from the book. A lot of the paintings and sculptures featured in A Modern Master come across as scrappy. I’m hard pressed to see the craft I expected to see from a man so revered in the art world. Perhaps this book chose poorly when selecting works to represent the life of this prolific artist.

I’ve spent a lot of the evening nosing around the internet looking for good ways to market the small sculptures I’ve been finishing in the last month. Without much success, I might add. I don’t need much in a website, but the top results in Google for the search terms that seem best to me are terrible. Maybe I’ll enlist the help of a friend and devise something simple. I’m not in a great hurry, but I need to start thinking about it.

During this search tonight I landed on Etsy, which I’ve known about and actually used in a very cursory manner. Looking for other ceramic artists, I found an Etsy user called Stepanka. This New York City artist handbuilds with porcelain, which is something I don’t come across very often. Her small works, most of which she refers to as “wall pillows,” are soda fired. I really like the end result. If I ever get the chance again I’ll be using porcelain in salt or soda firings in this way.

Something about these hold my attention. I like the contrast, the finish and the delicate yet lighthearted line work.

That’s about all I know of her. The one sentence in her Etsy profile doesn’t say much, and there are no outside links I can find either. Thought I’d share one of her works though. The above work is titled “Standing by the lake” and measures 3.75 x 2.75 x 1.5 inches.

Thanks to Sue Ellen, a former resident of Siloam Springs and neighbor of Ella May Mason, for emailing me the following photograph of another Mason watercolor.

My gut level reaction upon seeing this work was to identify it with the kind of generic paintings one sees on the wall of a hotel room. I think, in part, the frame in this photograph isn’t living up to the complexity of the painting. With a more neutral matte and elaborate (or, perhaps, just wider) frame, my gut would probably think differently of this watercolor. My eyes are telling me that Mason was an very proficient illustrator. This would, I imagine, be a very time consuming work of art. Of course, every Mason work is interesting to me since I live in her former home.

Sue Ellen’s comment imparted a number of interesting details about the artist. Here’s an excerpt:

She was extremely intelligent and loved to talk about any subject, she excelled in the world of art. She knew so many painters personaly. I always looked up to her. I used to take my small daughter down to her house in hopes that some of that “fiesty’ spirit would rub off on her. I think it did, and I may pay for that one day, but I don’t mind.

See other Ella May Mason paintings via this link.

One of the few television programs I try and catch regularly is This Old House. I’m watching, as I write this, the last in their present series where they’ve renovated a shotgun single in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. While it’s been one of the less interesting series for the show in my opinion, I kept watching because the house was owned by a ceramic artist named Rashida Ua Bakari Ferdinand. A blurb from her vessel gallery about her process is worth reading:

I create my ceramic earthenware vessels using an Ipetumodu Nigerian coiling technique. I then apply terra sigillata, a fine particled slip to my forms to achieve a soft, colored sheen on their surface. After bisque firing, I reduce my pots with oxides, salt, and combustibles, to result in a dark, smokey pattern from the carbon reduction. My spirit vessels are metaphorical representations of bodies as objects of physical, as well as spiritual containment. The emerging and introspective faces on the vessels evoke serenity and bring spiritual peace to my work.

It’s exciting to find someone who hand-builds and uses terra sigs. This isn’t as common as ceramic artists throwing and finishing with glaze or raku firing. These kinds of finishes seem to prevail in most craft fairs and galleries lining the streets of places like Eureka Springs or Hot Springs, Arkansas. I like her sculpture, although I’m not really following her comment about “spiritual peace.” The following piece is called Beholden Vessel.

The work is 10 x 10 x 10 inches, from 2008 and made of fired earthenware clay. She also has a page on her website, Currents of Clay, detailing some of her mixed media installations. She writes this about her installations:

I work in installation to transform spaces into living environments. As extensions of my clay vessel forms, my installation works are continuances of spaces which reflect the possibilities of our inner power as human beings. My multimedia installations pay homage to my ancestors, as I seek out deeper understandings of my existence. They are my attempts to share my belief in the interconnections of all life forms and the power of God’s presence in our world.

The following installation, March of the Tapetum Lucidum, stood out among her mixed media works. It’s from 2006 and uses clay, glass mosaic and wire.

She also has galleries on the website with examples of her “tree totems” and masks. In my opinion, her vessels are the strongest works. The mixed media mixed into the tree totems seems a bit awkward, and the masks lack the visual complexity and interest of her other pieces. The vessels are very nice overall. The shapes and finishes are wonderful, and the metaphor — combining containers and faces — is strong and intriguing.

I was flattered, albeit slightly confused, yesterday to receive a call from the Better Business Bureau. Apparently someone had made an inquiry as to my business’s credibility and they were following up for that person. This website was originally begun as a front for freelance design I intended to do, but never really got around to other than three or four random projects. In fact, I was surprised when I caught the blogging fever. My first idea for The Aesthetic Elevator was to be no more than a portfolio with some contact information. I do maintain a page whereby people visiting the website can contact me for freelance design work, but I don’t push it and, in truth, am much more interested in pursuing my tactile art than doing any more graphic design at this point in my life.

Although the money is good in freelance design, and sometimes that’s hard to pass up.

A while back I found LeAnne Martin’s blog titled Christians in the Arts. I followed it for a short time without being interested in much of the content — her interviews weren’t usually with visual artists — but for some reason I re-added it to my list of blogs a few months ago. I’m glad I did; a number of her recent posts have been with tactile artists.

The most recent entry is part I of a conversation with Stephanie Tumney. Tumney is a gifted stone sculptor. I don’t find many people working in stone (or other traditional sculptural media such a bronze, for that matter), so I was intrigued. Her website is a bit scant in the gallery department, containing images of only five works, but these works are quite nice.

I like the scale and style of the abstraction she’s using with the figure. It’s reminiscent of Leonard Dufresne’s characters, which I’m quite fond of. They almost seem more human to my eye despite being slightly out of proportion. The exaggerations somehow increase a viewer’s affection towards the people being portrayed in the stone and pigment and, if you’ll allow me to extrapolate even more, give us hopeful perception of humanity.

It’s a thrill to come across artists of faith like Tumney, whose works will endure aesthetically and physically.

I wandered through the Taylor University art building this afternoon and took a few photos of some interesting works with my cameraphone. The newspaper wasp nest was particularly intriguing. I’m also somewhat enamored with the tall, narrow painting of read flower-ish forms.

This is also a good excuse to try out the new gallery feature on WordPress 2.5; I’m not sure why the tool has spread the photos out like it has in Safari (on my own screen), somewhat randomly. Using Firefox on my wife’s MacBook, all of the thumbnails are in a row across the post. As I recall, this is how the WordPress demo showed them.

My impression was that these are all student works with the exception of the collage, which may have been a professor’s piece. The student works were in the hallway of the art building; the collage was part of a show in the college’s small gallery space. This is some pretty solid work from a student in my experience. Craft and concept are, very pleasantly, beyond what I’ve come to expect in recent years.

Adding: It seems this was, with the exception of the collage, a senior’s BFA exhibit. I learned this after going back to look at the aforementioned painting I liked so well. The painting was gone along with all of the other works, and another senior show was going up. Unfortunately the new works were covered in paper. The artist didn’t want them to be revealed until the 7 p.m. opening, which I wasn’t around for. I had half a mind to see how much (or, sad as it may be true, how little) I could purchase that painting for. Maybe I’ll call up to the art department if I remember. From what I can tell on the Taylor website, the name of the artist whose work I did see is Lindsay Schiller.

My good friend Joel Armstrong recently started his own blog. He’s a prof at John Brown University teaching drawing and illustration. His own work is more three dimensional in nature — other than his art cards. He “draws” with wire and creates small iconic wall sculptures out of small found objects, such as the following “Rust Bird.”

Wheaton professor of art Joel Sheesley visited the John Brown University gallery last night with a collection of his recent paintings.

The works were impressive in their technique and scale, all drawing their inspiration from two puddles in his driveway. He spoke for roughly 45 minutes about the exhibit, although I’m not sure how much I took away from the lecture. This is partly my own fault; for whatever reason my mind wandered at that point in the evening. A lot of the speech was recited, where the artist read from Scripture and various literature. I was personally hoping to hear something that seemed a little more directly tied to the paintings on the wall (although supposedly what he was reading was), something with either more practical information about the works or words to spur me on in my own artistic pursuits. But that’s just me.

Two things stood out as he spoke, his honesty and his process. He talked openly about simple nature of the subject matter, not making more of two puddles in the asphalt than one “should.” It’s easy for me to imagine certain artists using lofty language in an attempt to justify certain subject matter. With regard to his process, these new works begin with him laying a canvas on the driveway and applying a solid color using a broad scraping tool to go over the fabric as it lies on the asphalt. From the resulting image he begins the painting, allowing the imperfections of the drive to guide his brushstrokes.

The one weakness I found in several of the works was a certain flatness or lack of modeling in the reflected objects. This was particularly true of the crows in the above work — the composition of whole of this piece I find stunning — and another where a person on a ladder is mirrored by the puddle. Perhaps this is his style, or the way things actually looked in the shimmering pools, but the missing detail left me wanting something more in these paintings.

Sheesly uses photographs to come up with some of the content contained within each reflecting puddle. He has also begun exploring a subtractive process, sanding and scraping paint already applied to the canvas. Painting is, quite obviously, generally an additive medium. I really liked the resulting appearance of the two works he pointed out where this subtraction took place. They had a sense of realism and depth the neighboring paintings did not.

These are pretty successful works in my opinion, and the show at the JBU gallery is worth seeing. Being a Friday night on campus, fewer people were there than at past shows.

A friend gave me a book of sculpture this morning which, at this point, I’ve only been able to page through in a cursory manner. The book is called Celebrating Nature: Craft & folk art. One of the featured artists, Sally Metcalf, caught my attention as I scanned the album. Metcalf’s sculpture titled Treasure Trove, featured in the book, is very similar to certain ideas that I’ve worked on recently.

This piece is, frankly, much more dynamic than anything I’ve attempted up to this point, and since I now have a kiln I’ve turned most of my attention away from wood and towards clay. My own wooden wall pieces lack the depth and movement of this freestanding work. The most significant similarity is the repetition of the “dots” which are apparently fabricated with “waxed linen, cotton, hand forged copper pins, copper washers” according to the description on her website. The pins, it seems, are actually what holds the work together. I’m fascinated by the thought of hand forged copper pins, assuming the artists forges these herself. This deeply tactile act in the process of creating a sculpture is something I can very much admire.

Even in my own ceramic sculptures I’ve often lined up objects pressed into the clay, most often semi-precious stones. I seem to use repetition in a lot of my own work. This is, in part, a tactic to draw attention to more organic forms or materials by creating contrast with a more geometric visual.

All of Metcalf’s work featured on her website combine wood and fiber. Other than Treasure Trove, I’m partial to a smaller work called Come In.

Adding: On the art marketing side of things, take note of the very professional photography on her website. This is the same look I was taught to strive for, although, frankly, it’s not always that easy to achieve. Her website gives credit to the “Jordan Schnitzner Museum of Art & Department of Art, University of Oregon” for the photography.

John Brown University photography student Natalie Slater held her senior show this evening at the Sager Creek Arts Center. I generally don’t talk about photography here — it doesn’t fall into my definition of tactile art — but her show is worthy of a blurb. My scrappy photos here were taken with my cameraphone.

All of her photographs in this collection were taken at night and printed on metallic paper. (This is only my second exposure to metallic paper, the first being Tuesday night at the JBU gallery which featured student’s work while touring Spain.) Both of these facts in and of themselves present the opportunity for very interesting works. What sets her work apart, however, is some very nice composition and a sense that she pays good attention to details in the frame. A few of the pictures really caught my attention, including the one in the foreground of the above snapshot, taken in a railyard.

It’s difficult to describe the visual power of her works with words. More than most photographers, she gives you the feeling of actually being in a place, something I value in a photograph. This seems to be a result of how she frames the objects in combination with her use of the metallic paper, which adds depth to the image.

Neal Holland, her professor, told me the images were all taken with a digital camera. I didn’t get to talk much with Natalie; we were kicked out of the upstairs gallery before a play began in the adjacent theater. I would have liked to walk through the show again.