ArtSake

Rachel Mello (Painting Finalist ’10) recently returned from a one-month residency at Ucross Foundation, an experience that allowed for deepened explorations of her unique, cut-silhouette paintings.

Rachel drove out to the Wyoming cattle ranch, where artists, writers, and composers take up residence for intense focus on their work. Bringing only what she needed, she worked spare. And she got used to it: upon return to her workspace at Mad Oyster Studios, she immediately thinned out her supplies and gave away older artworks to anyone who would donate to the charity Food for Free. Spaciousness is well-suited to Rachel’s practice, which requires several distinct work stations – and yields truly distinct work.

Rachel’s paintings exist in multiple places at once, with surfaces cut to silhouettes (often urban scenes) painted with contrasting landscapes (often rural or pastoral). The urban/rural tension is a theme the artist has been grappling with for years, and her ideas began to crystallize during the 2000 mile drive to Ucross, winding through Midwest farmlands and ranch communities of the Great Plains. So much of the world’s population lives in cities, with little awareness of what it’s like to be in a rural setting (Rachel, living in big cities all her life, among them). Yet city dwellers are more dependent than ever on food and farming practices of rural areas. Despite the disconnect, there are always two sides to the way we live, urban and rural livelihoods that depend on each other even while they are separate. Rachel is passionate about this interdependence and interconnectedness, and what she thinks of as the shared humanity of disparate people. “These differences in how we live and see the world are simultaneously deeply profound and at the same time profoundly superficial, when you come down to it.”

Here, you can see Rachel sketching at her drawing table. Sometimes, Rachel paints from photographs, but at Ucross she began experimenting with painting from her own loose sketches. A passing storm cloud – too ephemeral to capture with the more time-intensive process of painting, and too dramatic in lighting and color to capture in a snapshot – inspired her to grab her colored pencils and sketch. Later, she would work from the sketch to create a painting, giving her landscape one further magnitude of artistic intervention. The rest of her time at Ucross after that evening, she spent alternating between sketching and painting, developing a new process for herself that she has continued on returning to Somerville.

Rachel’s cut-silhouette paintings make intriguing use of her educational backgrounds in architecture (undergrad) and theatrical design (graduate school). Her silhouettes, which she cuts with a vintage Cutawl K-11 saw, depict grids, powerlines, buildings’ angles, architectural but abstracted.

Installed, the paintings play with dimension, making depth and shadow part of the visual experience – as would a design for the stage. For the new works from Ucross, she painted both sides of her silhouettes. The works are meant to hang suspended from the ceiling rather than against a gallery wall. She plans, for her next show, to hang all of the works this way, overlapping and filling the space, with the only work on the walls being the shadows of the suspended pieces.

The new paintings embody Rachel’s past concepts and expand them. Duality encompasses the work. The pieces contrast imagery and landscapes but also artistic disciplines, suggesting sculptural depth while rooted in two-dimensional forms. Inside and outside, urban and rural, flat and planed, past and present: all co-exist in where we are now.

Images: Rachel Mello, A SUPPOSEDLY GOOD IDEA (2008), Oil on hardboard cut to silhouette; relief prt of silhouette 21 1/2 h x 37 in diptych total; WHITHER SHALL I WANDER, oil on hardboard, cut to silhouette, 21 1/2 in hx37 in w total; photos of Rachel’s studio and work, taken by ArtSake.

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Peek into the studio and process of Edie Bresler (Photography Finalist ’11), an MCC-funded photographer and faculty member in the Art and Music Department at Simmons College, as she prepares a public art project in Somerville, this December.

A large part of my practice involves being out in the world with my camera and digital sound recorder. I shoot mostly with a 4×5 view camera and a DSLR depending on the subject. Since all my printing is done digitally I work in the sunlight which is a nice change from the darkroom days. I usually listen to music or podcasts like Fresh Air and Radio Lab. The dress hanging on the wall has been part of every studio I’ve worked in for the last 25 years. The hand-sewn pouches contain personal keepsakes from past projects and places I’ve lived.

Lately I’ve become fascinated by small local shops that sell lottery tickets. These neighborhood convenience and liquor stores are fairly invisible to the wider public even though each year our communities grow more dependent on the small portion of direct local aid we receive from lottery profits. Combining information culled from the Massachusetts lottery website with google map, I locate shops across the state where a winning million dollar scratch ticket was sold. Dedicated players tell me it makes a store lucky. This store is in Somerville.

The fading blue twilight against the bright yellow interior mirrors this transformation. I seek to evoke a poignant connection to these shops and the economically challenged citizens across the Commonwealth who are unfairly relied upon to shore up budget shortfalls. This tiny shop is in Canton.

I arrive early and first introduce myself to the vendors. Then I spend time looking at the store and its surroundings. There’s nothing worse than an unexpected cloud front obscuring the twilight effect at the last moment. When that happens I spend time interviewing the players who are usually scratching their tickets in the parking lot. Here are a few excerpts:

After I received a grant from the Somerville Arts Council (a percentage of arts funding in MA comes from lottery proceeds), I decided to see how lottery sales impact a single city. I met and subsequently photographed the proprietors from a variety of neighborhood stores. Frank and Rafaella DiFonzo have been running Bill’s Food Shop for 54 years, making it the oldest family-run convenience store in Somerville.

Inêz and Antonio Andrade are the proprietors of Cross Street Market. Their shop offers home-made Portuguese and Brazilian meals daily.

On December 1st, I’m installing these photographs along with pertinent lottery graphs and charts in the Inside-Out storefront windows in Davis Square. I will then be in residence by the windows on specific days inviting the public to contribute their stories and thoughts about the lottery in surveys like the ones below. Incorporating hand-written responses into the installation helps foster a community dialogue about the lottery. This is especially relevant in light of the recent passage of the casino bill. Such an open-ended artwork will evolve week-by-week. I hope you will check the schedule and stop by to add your comments and read what others have to say.

Edie Bresler’s YOU SCRATCH MY BACK, I’LL SCRATCH YOURS will be installed in the Inside-Out storefront windows in Davis Square, Somerville, in the month of December.

All images courtesy of the artist.

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In the early 20th century brave explorers traversed the outer regions of the North Pole without the luxury of modern navigational technologies to rely upon. The risk to the crews’ lives and ship was great and often explorations resulted in a shipwrecks. Artist Heddi Vaughan Siebel has created an installation about one such failed attempt in which her grandfather was a member of an expedition team traveling to the North Pole. Let’s take a look at her work and process and what drove her to make this installation.

“Are those really boats in your yard?” my neighbors ask as I prepare for my installation AIMS, HOPES, AND ENDEAVORS at the Stamford Museum in Connecticut. (Sept 9-Oct 30, 2011)

I am inventing the skeletal structure of a polar camp in prints and film—art that also will respond to a simultaneously displayed historical exhibition LAST FRONTIERS: Anthony Fiala and the Race to the North Pole by Collections Curator Rosa Portell. My work is the outcome of a 15 year project that began as a painting expedition to the Arctic. Since 1998 I have been interpreting the historical materials of the Ziegler Polar Expedition of 1903–05 and investigating my grandfather John Colin Vaughan’s role in it. The men failed in their attempts to reach the North Pole. Their ship was crushed by ice, marooning them on the Franz Josef Land for two years.

I want to evoke the interior place of my grandfather’s arctic camp, and allude to the conflicting identities of that place as both safe haven and prison. A tent catches the shadowy figures of the men as they decide to quit the effort north.

Hand-pulled etchings on translucent gampi paper and cyanotypes are stretched like skins on gridded navigation-like structures of wood lashed together with gut.

The etchings are printed at Mixit Studio a collaborative I’ve been working at since 1980. The screens begin by suggesting an illuminated and somewhat inscrutable glacial landscape but end by transforming into a stack of what they really are—unused and useless frames. Even the most lavish amounts of supplies taken north by the Ziegler Expedition could not guarantee polar success. The images and texts of the prints are hand drawn or photographically created from the archival texts I have collected about the Ziegler expeditions.

On hanging scrolls of opaque white paper printed with horizontal bands of woodcut I project and integrate a film imagining the moment when my grandfather’s curiosity and dreams collide with the disappointing reality of their endeavor. Part documentary and part invention, this fragmented narrative mixes actual archival films taken on the expedition and quotes from the mens’ journals with invented scenes and animation.

Here the men enter a white landscape from which there may be no return, and wrestle with fear and longing as they search for value in their efforts. I conflate the print forms with the film editing to build a sense of endlessness in both sea ice and time, and make a synthesis which flickers spatially between near and far—‘here’ and ‘there’.

One of the coolest aspects of my show is exhibiting my work with a Ziegler Expedition horse sled from the Museum’s collection!

AIMS, HOPES, AND ENDEAVORS: An Art Installation by Heddi Vaughan Siebel will be on exhibit through October 30 in the Stamford Museum’s Bendel Mansion Museum Galleries.

Image credit: All photgraphs courtesy of Heddi Vaughan Siebel.

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Lisa Nilsson‘s Tissue Series, currently on exhibit at the Lavender Door Gallery in Stockbridge, depicts anatomical cross sections, created from rolled paper.

How did she come to make this work, this way? We asked the artist for a look into her work space, and into the history and process behind this enthralling series.

I was out “junking” and came across an antique quilled piece of religious art. It was a very fancy filigreed crucifix-gilt. I later learned that nuns and monks used edges of old bibles to make pieces like this. I incorporated the technique into some assemblages I had been making that contained many different found and made elements. Around this time I encountered a French hand-colored print of an anatomical cross section. I loved the colors and shapes and felt that the way paper behaves when rolled and shaped in quilling could work very well in representing what I saw in the anatomical print.

I started creating anatomical cross sections made of Japanese mulberry paper and the gilded edges of old books, using that same quilling (or paper filigree) technique.

Here I’m just getting started on a new piece. I build the work over an image or drawing, pinning parts to a piece of Styrofoam insulation (probably the single most useful and versatile material in my studio). I tend to work from the center out. When the piece is finished, I turn it over and brush the back with PVA (the white glue that book makers use) and the piece takes on enough strength and rigidity to hold its shape without pins.

I like to have several sources of reference material for each piece so that I can pick and choose elements from each that work to the piece’s advantage, and I can more fully understand what I am looking at.

This piece represents a cross section of hands in prayer position. The section passes through laterally at the level of the metacarpals (the bones of the main part of the hand).

I’ve partially made the bones of the thumb knuckles and some tendons.

This part of my studio was originally the laundry room, and is where I make the boxes that contain my pieces. I make them out of cherry wood and old glass and cover the outside with Japanese silk book cloth. It is beautiful stuff to work with. I’ve had the good fortune to have friends in the book arts that have taught me good paper and paste technique. It’s fussy, precise, clean work that I enjoy in a certain state of mind.

This piece represents a lateral section through the head at about nose level. It is life-size. I love how asymmetrical the body looks in cross section. We are so symmetrical on the outside and so asymmetrical on the inside and everything inside fits so perfectly. This is the connection I made to quilling. Rolled pieces of paper are amenable to being squeezed, shaped and shifted to fill a space. I use mulberry paper for its fabric-like strength and flexibility and the sophisticated color palette it is available in.

This piece represents a midsagittal section (the one that cuts through the center making a left half and a right half) of the head and chest. I employ a device of making all of the bones in my work from the gilded edges of old books. I do this for aesthetic reasons as well as a means of pulling the pieces away from the world of scientific specimens and a bit more in the direction of religious reliquaries. I like to emphasize the reverential and the precious; to have a look inside is such a privilege.

I continually challenge myself to increase my vocabulary of quilling shapes and textures while sticking to the inherent grammar of the technique. It is important to me that the viewer’s eye does not grow weary of looking at swirls.

I like for my works to read more as objects than as images. To that end, I show the lateral sections lying flat on shelves and the vertical ones, standing upright in an altarpiece-like fashion.

Lisa Nilsson’s Tissue Series: Anatomical Cross Sections in Paper will be on exhibit at the Lavender Door Gallery (37 Main Street, Stockbridge, MA), through August 24, 2011.

Lisa Nilsson is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design where she studied Illustration, and more recently of the McCann Technical School’s medical assisting program, where her life-long aesthetic interest in anatomy and cool-looking medical things grew a bit more informed. She lives in North Adams, Massachusetts.

All images courtesy of Lisa Nilsson.

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Ariel Freiberg‘s paintings intrigue and implore, exaggerate and embellish, all the while eliciting “a bit of an adrenaline rush.” Here, she invites us into her studio – and as collaborators on her new project.

My Dream Harvester community arts project is an open forum for accounts of dreams from slumber or wished aspirations. Dream Harvester and I will be live and dreaming at ArtBeat, July 16th in Davis Square from 11 AM to 6 PM, part of the Somerville’s festival of music, performance art, craft vendors, dance, theater, food, and more.

Once I harvest the dreams of the visitors of ArtBeat (and I invite you to join in), I will create visual representations of the collective accounts. These works will be shared online and exhibited in the Boston area (location yet to be determined).

Art can draw on the unconscious collective ideas of our time. I would like to investigate this further by expanding my usual private process of working in the studio by harvesting a collection of my communities’ dreams. Through the visual translation of these accounts, I hope to highlight the connective tissues of thought through our global village.

My art practice is, in part, an invitation to the viewer into a visual and conceptual dialogue with the narrative of my personal experiences and observations.

I am working on a new series of paintings of gardening tools and shoes. The ideas for this work have been percolating in my head for the past year and have infiltrated my drawings and several small paintings on panel. I see the gardening tools paired with shoes as signals to the viewer of the tension between sexuality within the natural world and human narratives.

With all of my work, I crave to break the ground of tradition, revealing an unconscious second language. I work the soil, trying to find the meaning behind beauty’s seduction. The second language speaks to our bodies, in unfamiliar spaces, pushing expectations of what is seen and what is felt.

Here you can see a couple of the small panel works.

My process also involves the sorting and collecting of reference materials. Reference materials can involve objects like shoes and colored papers and photos from fashion magazines and drawings from models. I draw from all these forms, combining them into a two-dimensional image. I prefer to work all of the space and forms out by hand. This process helps me understand what I really feel about these forms and how color and touch can correspond with those emotions. I also draw great inspiration from many Rocco artists for their use of color and space. Watteau’s psychological landscapes inform the environments of my paintings. Sometimes I employ Italian artist Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s use of space, so the viewer has the sensation of being in the painting.

Here are some images of my workspace and my latest large canvas. I usually build my own frames from poplar and I use canvas that I prime with both acrylic and oil grounds.

Photographed here are objects that are the subjects of the work in progress.

While creating this setup, I deliberately ripped the photos and papers. For some of the small paintings on panel, I ripped up some recent woodcut prints. I’ve also experimented with color and form in watercolors.

I see the trowels and cultivators breaking ground that expose the internal trauma. These paintings of gardening tools and shoes in various scales, earthing the ground, contrast subterranean fantastical groundless environments of my earlier works.

Ariel will attend ArtBeat at Davis Square in Somerville, July 16, 11 AM to 6 PM, to discuss and “harvest” dreams from ArtBeat attendees.

Images: all images courtesy of the artist. Photos by Ariel Freiberg, Ralph Pennel, and Chris Yeager.

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Through persistence and hard work, Joshua Meyer (Painting Fellow ’10) has found that ultra sweet spot where paintings hover between order and chaos. One of the delights of his work is the transformation of the physical material of paint into a seemingly living breathing figure inhabiting an interior life. Let’s take a look at his studio and paintings.

I try to keep a lot of paintings going at the same time. I like to see works in progress in my peripheral vision while I’m at work on other pieces. When everything is going on simultaneously, the paintings can keep each other company. They talk to each other, start a little dialogue. If I’m stuck on on piece I can leap into another. On a really good day I am working on three or four paintings at the same time. (And on a really bad day I am destroying three or four paintings in one fell swoop). The ideas and colors and energy leap from one to another—they solve each other’s problems and teach each other their tricks.

There is always noise in the studio. Silences are awful—I can’t concentrate when the room is too quiet. I am usually listening to music, sometimes podcasts of radio shows. Since I don’t have a clock in the studio, I often tell time by the length of the songs or podcasts that have come and gone. It has something to do with focus and rhythm.

Half of the time I have someone modeling for me in the room, and the rest of the time I am alone. It is an important balance to strike. When I have company I get very self-conscious and even compulsive, and when I am alone I can get lost in the paint. So the paintings hang in that balance between facts and memories, between details and exuberance, between paint and ideas. Too much in any direction and the paintings would be stale. Without the model I can paint ferociously, endlessly. Then the model comes back, and I realize all of the ridiculous exaggerations I’ve made, so I focus and fix, search and seek. Then when they leave again I can finally step back and see all of the myopic and overwrought things I’ve done in search of some unnecessary accuracy. I do this dance over and over until the paintings are full of interesting contradictions and ideas.

Of course when I paint from life, the studio itself becomes a character in the pictures. The chairs and the shelves, the nooks and the crannies have anchored so many of my paintings. There are gargoyles, power tools and piles of books, and they return again and again to the images. My paintings are collections of everything that is going on in my life, so of course the state of the studio usually reflects some of the same as well.

Joshua’s paintings will be exhibited in the exhibition New and Recent Work by 13 Massachusetts Cultural Council Award Recipients in Painting and Drawing at Tufts University Art Gallery,The Aidekman Arts Center, June 2-July 31, 2011, Wednesday-Sunday, 12-5 (closed July 2 and 3). Opening reception and artist talk Thursday, June 2, 5-8 pm.

Image credit: All images courtesy Joshua Meyer

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Some artists will never, ever, color outside of the line. For them, accidents are an anathema meant to be erased, gessoed over as quickly as possible, sanded away, and left undetected before the art police sees the evidence (you know who you are and we love you for it). For other artists, accidents are encouraged to occur. These daredevil souls welcome and seek out unpredictability in order to enthusiastically produce their work.  Adria Arch dares to tread a fine line between order and chaos to produce her work.

My paintings deal with the accidental flow of materials such as paint drips and sprays, in contrast with the deliberate placement of lines and marks derived from found sources such as doodles and stencils. I seek an interesting and provocative interplay and tension among the elements in each piece. My painting process is one of addition and subtraction until the piece feels resolved.

A recurring element in my work is the use of doodle shapes from my son’s discarded high school notebooks. I discovered pages of his tiny geometric drawings sandwiched between lecture notes and sprinkled in margins. Created in the unselfconscious state typical of doodlers, the shapes seemed to represent a secret, indecipherable language.

The enlargements of the doodles result in expressive, burred lines that I reproduce as closely as possible in paint. While initially I was drawn to the tiny glyphs on a purely visual level, working with them over time has created a visual dialog between myself and my son. I have incorporated these iconic shapes into my practice since 2007, and I continue to find resonance in them as the source for my work.

“Adria Arch: On the Mark”, is currently on display at the Danforth Museum of Art (through June 5). Also, be sure to see her installation at Lesley University Porter Square campus, entitled “La Loba”.

Image credit: Photograph of Adria Arch by Elliot Eichen. All artwork images courtesy of Adria Arch. Pink Constellation, 60″ x 90″, 2009, acrylic on paper; Constellation 1, 2009, 65″ x 65″, acrylic on paper; Black Glyph 1 2009, , 22″ x 15″, acrylic on paper.

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By sheer force of artistic will (and vice grips and wood glue) Michael Zelehoski (MCC 2010 Painting Fellow) finds three dimensional objects and forces them to behave and leave behind the land of 3D that they occupy and instead perform as sculptural paintings inhabiting a 2D space. Say what you will, but he’s found the perfect way around cleaning paint off of brushes. You can see some of his work at the upcoming June exhibition of fellows work at the Tufts University Art Gallery, but for now, let’s look at his magnificently cluttered/organized space.

This is my studio in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. My landlord calls this accumulation of detritus ‘art creep’ and I’ve probably been called worse myself. My process involves the selection and re-contextualization of found objects, meaning that I find stuff – usually in dumpsters or on the side of the road – and literally collapse it into the picture plane. This translation of three-dimensional volume into two-dimensional surface is integral to much of what we think of as representational art. I just do it in a very literal way.

This is more like it – my invisible girlfriend and I putting the finishing touches on Stack of Pallets, 2010. This modular, geometrical assemblage is very much in dialogue with Minimalism, (see Donald Judd’s modular, cantilevered boxes) in spite of being hand crafted from time worn materials and framed in pictorial space.

Lately I’ve been working with a lot of humble, utilitarian objects such as boxes and pallets. These objects, usually thought of as means for moving other things around, become ends in themselves when incorporated into the picture plane.

Suspended in two-dimensional space, the pallet finds itself inert and impotent, yet it remains perceptually active and productive.

This spatial transformation is often intense. The objects can resist mightily and every step in the process involves cutting and joining, using sometimes dozens of clamps at a time. I have often asked myself why I can’t just grab a pen or paint brush and call it a day.

The object’s concreteness is in direct contrast to the spatial illusionism of its composition.

This is my second and perhaps last stack of pallets. It’s composed of almost four hundred individual pieces and took about a month and a half to complete.

For now this piece adorns my kitchen (see fridge for an idea of scale). I look forward to exhibiting it in the MCC awardees show at Tufts University this summer.

Image credit: All photos courtesy of Michael Zelehoski

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Daniel Ranalli (Drawing Fellow ’10) is at heart an environmental artist working conceptually. His snail drawings are evidence of one who explores and values the fragile impermanence of life. Let’s tread lightly and take a look into his studio.

I have now, by far, the best studio I have ever had. I live in a converted elevator factory in Cambridge and my studio, a darkroom and a small wood shop are all on the first level. Our residence is on the 2nd level – bright open space with a big east-facing skylight.

My wife, the painter, Tabitha Vevers has her studio on a mezzanine that overlooks our living space and it is like her private nest high in the sky. We like to say that our living area is sandwiched between our studios.

My studio is simple – concrete floor and visible heating ducts, sprinklers and electrical conduits. There are large windows facing north, which interest me less than the fact that twenty feet past those windows are the railroad tracks for the MBTA commuter line. When I was a kid I had a model train set in the basement and spent many hours making mountains and buildings and little villages for it. I can hardly remember ever actually running the trains on the track, but I loved the whole business of creating things for it.

Out my window the trains lumber past – only four or five cars long, and a big diesel engine. In the winter when it is dark during the commuter hours I love seeing the passengers moving past me. They are reading or talking and bathed in the warm yellow light – a Hopper painting that he never made.

At this stage I rarely use my darkroom. At first I was glad to be out in the light, and working more with a computer screen and digital gear (photography is at the core of a lot of my work), but that has become less appealing over time. On the other hand, all those toxic chemicals are now in the past for me. In recent years I have started tomato plants in my darkroom sinks.

What I never seem to have enough of is table surface and storage. When I am really working, and making larger pieces, I seem to run out of surface areas in no time.

Daniel is one of thirteen artists participating in the upcoming MCC Fellows Exhibition at the Tufts University Art Gallery.

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Yanick Lapuh (Painting Fellow ’10) is another MCC fellow who will be exhibiting at the Tufts University Art Gallery in June. Lets find out what he’s up to in his studio.

I built a studio in the basement of my house. I love it; it’s very convenient and there’s no more commuting! Recently, I finally added a wall to separate the wood-working and painting areas so I can paint and build at the same time.

All my work starts with drawing so my desk has always been an important part of my studio. I even have a second desk upstairs in the house. Since the mid-90’s I’ve kept my drawings in books which I often refer to. I call them my ‘memory’ and I use them to cross-pollinate ideas that inform new designs.

Once I’ve chosen the designs I want to realize, I start the building process: make the base, cut and assemble the wood pieces into the design as I fix them on the base. I usually build a number of these reliefs at one time and later prime and paint them.

Movable panels give me a chance to rearrange the painting area so I can view multiple works in progress at one time. It’s not just the panels though, almost everything in my studio is on wheels!

Be sure to check out Yanick’s work in the upcoming show New and recent work by 13 Massachusetts Cultural Council Award Recipients in Painting and Drawing from June 2 – July 31, 2011. Opening reception Thursday, June 2, 5:30-8 PM. Artists’ Talk, 5-6 PM, featuring Cree Bruins, Jan Johnson, Yanick Lapuh, Joshua Meyer, and Michael Zelehoski. Tufts University Art Gallery, 40 Talbot Avenue, Medford, MA.

Image credit: All photographs are courtesy Yanick Lapuh.

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