ReFrame

Uncouth @ Paper Crane - See it before it's gone!

2011-09-22T10:53:00.000-07:00

“Uncouth,” showing at Paper Craneuntil this Sunday Sept. 25, approaches the art show convention from adifferent trajectory. With decidedly low-brow roots in tattoo,street, and comic book art, the aptly-named show features around 20pieces produced by three local Bloomington artists: screen printersJarod Isenbarger, Jeremy Sweet, and tattoo artist Colin McClain.

The trio’s method of collaborationwas also different than convention would dictate. Each piece beganwith an agreed-upon image, perhaps a portly boxer, an exaggeratedsuperhero, or even a Don Juan-esque conquistador. From there, eachartist independently spent time with each piece, adding his markbefore passing it onto the next guy. This continued until the piecesfelt complete. The trio agreed to not communicate about any of thepieces or the show as a whole during the creation process, and as aresult, no one artist disproportionately controlled the end product.

The show is politically incorrect,inappropriate, and delightfully improper. The message is strong:culture isn’t always pretty. Art shows don’t always serve wineand cheese and fine art isn’t always a pastel-hued still-lifepainting.

Lust for the brazen, bare femalesuperhero shouldn’t take precedence over fear of her. Strengthisn’t always a six-pack in the case of the portly boxer. And as forDon Juan, the native women don’t always swoon.

Ditch your preconceived notions andcheck out “Uncouth” before the show ends Sunday! Paper Crane islocated at 401 W. 6^th Street and their hours are:

Friday 2-8 PM

Saturday 10AM-4PM

Sunday Noon-5PM

If you can’t make it, why not get intouch with one of the artists? You can find Jarod Isenbarger workingat Pygmalions, Jeremy Sweet at the Grunwald Gallery, and Colin McClain at SkinQuake.

Jarod Isenbarger and Karol Stewart @ Uncouth on opening night.

Dawn Adams Interview: Peace and Serenity in Water

2011-09-03T06:51:00.000-07:00

Painter Dawn Adams has been a part of the Bloomington art scene since the 1970s, when she came to IU to pursue her MFA in painting. She earned her BA in painting from DePauw in Greencastle. For many years, she and husband Dale Steffey collaborated on art in stained glass, fused glass, and fired glass. In recent years, Dawn's personal work has returned to painting, specifically the subject matter of water. You can find out more about Dawn Adams, purchase prints, and contact the artist through her website, at www.dawnadamspaintings.com. You can also find Dawn at this weekend's 4th Street Art Festival in Bloomington, near the corner of Dunn and 4th, across from Siam House Restaurant.

Can you tell me about art in your childhood, how you got into it?

In our house, we had some pictures that my dad had done when he was young. I always knew my dad could draw. He lived in Pensacola, Florida, and he was making a decision about either going into the Art Students' League or the FBI. His FBI letter came in when he was on the way up to the Art Students' League in New York. So he got stuck in Washington D.C. My mom made her way to Washington, too, and that's where they met.

Fast forward, they have their little lives and they have us. Of course, we children don't even think our parents had lives before they were born. I'm about 12 years old and my mom decides she wants to take painting lessons from a local painter in Greensboro, North Carolina.

In painting, the teacher always sets up a still life; it has the drape, the wine bottle, fruit, and usually a goblet. Mom brought hers home, and I just couldn't believe my mom did this painting. I would get right up to it and wonder, “How did she do this?” My mom asked me if I wanted to take painting lessons and I said, “Yes!” Lessons were on Mondays and they were the best days of the week because of class. I spent a couple of months doing drawing lessons. She showed me how to measure, plot it out on the paper. That helped me train my eye. I learned things like vanishing point, proportion, head proportions, people proportions.

How did you make the move into producing work for profit?

I took more classes when we moved to Charlotte, North Carolina. I was taking classes all the way through high school, from age 12 until I was 16 or 17. In high school, I got a job at the local theme park on the North Carolina-South Carolina border. The summer before college and the summer after freshman year, I was doing portraits at the theme park. I made a fair amount of money doing portraits, and I got to look at a lot of people's faces. It was good work to do.

For college, I went to DePauw University in Greencastle. I studied painting. It was decided way back when I was 12; it was a done deal way back then. When I graduated, I moved to Bloomington and lived here for a year. I went to critiques at the painting graduate school. There were barracks that were over where the School of Education is now, and that's where the painting studios used to be. One thing I miss, there was a sculpture garden that had a lot of David Smith's sculptures. I don't know where they are now, but I'm sure they've got them all somewhere. I attended critiques during my year off and I worked in Nashville at Trilogy Gallery. Three guys owned it. A stained glass artist, a woodworker, and a metal sculptor. That was my introduction to the craft, art as craft. Craft in general.

Do you see a difference between art and craft?

My definition of art is approaching an image or an idea and making decisions all the way through the process. Art is something that you have to do, look at, and make assessments. If it's already programmed out, I feel like the implementation is just the craft part of it. There're always exceptions to that. That definition is a little unconventional. I don't think most people would define art that way. Generally, art is two-dimensional. Most of the traditional art media are two-dimensional, painting, graphics, printing, drawing. Craft, traditionally, refers to things like glass, ceramics, fiber, jewelry, metalsmithing. That's all considered craft. There's some of that stuff that goes over the line, and how can you determine which of those does? There can be people who do really wonderful finely-crafted work, and even though their craft is really stellar, it's still craft. If they make a one-of-a-kind, break-the-mold idea, the idea helps push it over. We're getting a little philosophical here, but art can be made in those traditional craft media. It's not limited to the traditional subjects or media.

You used to work in glass with your husband, but have transitioned back to painting. How did you get into painting water after the death of your son?

Working in general was the lynchpin for me to get back to normal, the new normal. Wade, my son, was missing for nine weeks. That was just torture. Every day you wake up and you go, “I don't know.” How do you move on? How do you rearrange your life that way? I had artwork to go back to. I sort of forced Dale, my husband, to go back to art fairs. That's how we made our living, and what else were we going to do? It was a casualty. He was ready to move out of being in that partnership and working. I had already started to elbow him out with all my experimentation. There was room for him to step up and do what he wanted to, but he wasn't motivated anymore and he'd already started another business. So I said, 'OK,' we don't have to do the glass anymore but I still wanted to do this.

I had to make stuff. I still had to make something. When you get an idea, and you're implementing your idea, and you're getting close to it, there's a kind of channeling thing. You put yourself into the place, and there's a bit of time lapse. You can see how that's really helpful. You've got something that's a distraction, that's positive, and you've got something to show for it. I made a conscious decision. I said, “I want to do work that's accessible to people; a lot of people.” I have to pay attention to my clientele, who I'm showing the work in front of. But I want to have something to say, as well.

This is where our dog comes in. My stepdaughter gave us a dog for father's day. Dale really wasn't ready for him, but he didn't know enough to say no. We decided it would be better to have another creature that you could love, that would need stuff and could take you away from yourself for a little bit. He's what's called a Giant Schnoodle. Walking him was not an easy thing to do. I have a few dog walking partners, and one woman in particular. She's had dogs and been walking dogs for 20 years. She knows all these trails and paths around here. I started taking my camera with me, and I'd walk all year long. A lot of the paths she knew were beside creeks or lakes, and I started taking pictures when we walked. We got lots of wonderful images, and I collect water images anywhere I go. I take tons and tons of pictures, and certainly not all of them get painted.

What do you want your work to say to people?

I want this work to give people peace and serenity. I want them to de-stress when they look at it. I want it to be healing and helpful. It doesn't always make you think that much, but I like that visceral response. That's probably the clearest I've been as to what I want my work to do. The clearest function I want my work to achieve. The other work, everything would have its own message or its own response, but nothing so specific.

When I started, I just did water and light, all kinds of water images. lately I've tried to be more minimalistic, and pare down the kind of information. It ends up being bigger water, more spread out kinds of imagery. Not as many trees, not as intimate, but bigger water. Not as much creek bed material.

One of the reasons I picked water is that it has a lot of aspects to it. You could do the surface of water and it's an abstract painting. You could do the same image at different times of day, and it would look really different. Water changes, reflects, and changes the reality that surrounds it. It gives you lots of different looks, and it changes your perception of things. It makes you think a little bit. It's not boring, it's not static, it moves, it has waves or it is still, the light on it gets reflected. There's a lot of interesting things that happen to it. It's a subject matter that has a lot of facets to it.

You show at a lot of art fairs. How are art fairs different from traditional ways for an artist to sell work?

It's a little difficult as an artist to sell your work on your own. There was very little instruction in that in graduate school. I never did this, but as I understood it, you were traditionally supposed to build up a body of work and find a gallery to represent you. With university programs, most folks who graduate, the way they can go is to teach on a college level. I had been exposed to all these craftspeople who were making and selling their own work at art fairs and in galleries like Trilogy Gallery. At one point, I would try and do the highest quality art fair that I could because my price points are up there. But it's really very hard to be the big fish at the art fair and sell anything.

Since then, craft galleries and art fairs have gone through a morphing. It's not just a bunch of craftspeople getting together anymore, some people have really figured out the business. It's a real pressure cooker of ideas. You get to see all kinds of work. It really is inspiring. You meet some really interesting people. There is something to having deadlines and getting work prepared. You have to think about what might be sell-able; that's something that's really high up on the radar about what you do. Otherwise you don't make any money. I've lost money on a number of art fairs, it's one reason I don't do every fair that comes along.

You've been involved with Bloomington's 4th Street Art Festival for quite some time. Would you tell us about that experience?

I've done 4th Street more times than I can remember. I've been on the committee for 10 years. Something about like 20 years total. The festival is run by artists, and most of those artists do the show. That's a kernal that stays the same. Some of it has evlovled because the technology for doing fairs has evoloved. You used to apply with slides. Now there's a couple of services that assemble your digital images, put it all in a format so you can have jurors look at it on their computers. We've used a couple of different services. That allowed us to use judges/jurors from outside the area. When that started happening, the look of the show changed some because they didn't know anybody. This will be the third year that we've extended our reach; the city allowed us to use one more block, so we cut off Dunn St. during the show hours. We started using our yard signs and getting a bit better publicity. We got more applications because you get access to everyone that has accounts with the services. We got pretty good reviews in publications, and the show has gotten less regional and more national. I see it moving up, and I think the committe's doing the right thing.

Thanks so much for your time Dawn! Next week, I review a unique collaborative show, Uncouth, featuring collaborative work by Colin McClain, Jarod Isenbarger, and Jeremy Sweet. Uncouth is currently hanging at Paper Crane Gallery in downtown Bloomington.

Wayne Manns, Part 2: Artists are Abnormally-Normal People

2011-08-23T14:47:00.000-07:00

After a slight delay, we're back to posting Artist of the Week interviews here at ReFrame! Here's Part II of our interview with Wayne Manns. Follow this link for Part I if you missed it. You can view more of Wayne's work and contact the artist through his website at www.waynemanns.com

How did you become an artist?

The raw truth of the matter is that I was in prison. I was in San Quentin and I had this epiphany. I had this dream. I had always had the ability to draw, but in San Quentin or any prison, all you've got is time. So what'd I do? I would sell my sandwich, my breakfast, my lunch and buy pencils. And so I started sketching a mural on my cell wall on the west block of San Quentin. The guards would come by. Then some of the inmates would have me draw their girlfriends or wives -- their picture, with the gun tower in the background, and a tear drop on their face. I would use this as a way of making money. A way of earning cigarette money. It was a monetary thing, cigarettes or a can of sardines with or whatever. People would barter with you, art for stuff. And that's what I did, and I became known as the Artist of San Quentin.

When I got out, I married this woman whose father was a painter. The marriage was short-lived, but she did encourage me to paint. Her father was a painter and there was this huge easel. And she would tell me, “Why don't you go try to paint.” There were all these old brushes. Old crusty brushes, old crusty tubes of paint. And I went up there and I saw this easel, and I thought, “Oh my God, what am I going to do?” Her father had died about two years earlier. He was more of a jazz pianist, but he was also a painter. He wasn't bad. He did abstract kind of things. His easel became my easel. His paintbrushes and old tubes of paint became mine. I started playing around. Then I started showing work in San Francisco because I was living in the Bay Area. I showed it to one woman, she was vice president of a bank, and I didn't realize how big a collector she was. I showed her a small piece. She said, “Well, what do you want for it?” I said, “I don't know.” I was trying to play big-shot back then. I said, “I don't know. Give me five.” She said, “I won't give you five thousand, but I'll give you forty five hundred.” And that's how I started my professional career. I scratched my head and said, “Well I wanted five, could you do forty seven.” And she said "OK," and wrote me a check.

How did you end up in the Midwest?

I left San Francisco and moved to Bloommington. I was still struggling with addiction, and this professor threw me a life-preserver. She said, "Hey, I've got a job, you can go out there and paint, recover, do what you need to. You don't need to worry about bills, you can just work on your recovery and paint." She saved my life pretty much. She's one of the angels that saved my life. I got here and I was like a duck out of water. I didn't know what the hell I'd done. I was so discombobulated. I'd always lived by bodies of water. I'm from the east coast originally, Atlantic City. So it was kind of a cultural shock to be here in Bloomington. I met David Baker my first week here and he kind of looked after me. I kind of locked into the jazz scene here. I would go to art classes. I'd never had an art lesson in my life. So I'd go to the Fine Art Library and get books on Matisse and Picasso and I'd study.

How'd you get the bug to sell art?

I was in this drug program called Delancey Street in New Mexico, trying to get clean. I was working at this ranch in Sante Fe, one of the art centers of the world. Some of the biggest donors to Delancey Street were artists. I got to visit studios, and I fell in love with the paint, the smell, and the feel of being in this space. I started looking at paintings in New Mexico. I didn't know anything about them, but I started looking. In my free time, I just started educating myself. I'd go to museums, I'd go to art galleries, and I'd look at paintings. When I'd go abroad, the first thing I'd find out is where the museums are. If there were painters, I'd go to painters' studios. I just like being in that studio space. Asking myself, where did he do this? Where did he come up with these paintings?

Do you think studio visits are a good idea?

I think it's a great idea. It dispels a lot of myths about artists, that we're all eccentric. I think we're all kind of abnormally-normal people. Some of us have gifts that we can translate into these artifacts, these things that we tote around the world and try to sell. I think, what it does, is it gives people the opportunity to see, to smell, to have that close contact. There's a lot of myths about artists, that we're struggling. But there's a lot of successful artists that are not struggling. And there's a lot of artists who are struggling. I think it's important for people to see both. And also to see the workspace where things go on because I think people really are amazed when they see it. Sometimes I have open studios on Sunday at my place. I open it up for people to come by. I like people to come by and I like talking about my art – how I do it, how I arrive at it. All the things that go into a painting.

People don't realize how complicated something like painting really is, do they?

Oh my, you have no idea. A lot goes into a painting. Painting is expensive. A tube of paint, Cadmium Yellow, is 49 bucks. A little small 30 milliliter tube. Canvas, oil, mediums, varnish, it just goes on and on. Before you know it, a thousand bucks is gone and you have to recoup some of the money.

Artists need to keep selling paintings to make more paintings. How do you sell your art?

I just go. Guerrilla marketing, that's what I do. I go to people, I take my work to the people. I work on the street and travel a lot. Recently, places like Indianapolis, Boston, Howard University, and such. I've got a couple of galleries that have my work. You've just got to have the right work in the right place.

Thanks Wayne! I'll return next week with a new interview from local painter, Dawn Adams, whose work you can see on display at the 4th Street Art Festival in Bloomington on Labor Day weekend.

Wayne Manns, Part 1: The Spaces in Between

2011-08-11T11:32:00.000-07:00

Bloomington painter Wayne Manns comes from a musical background. His father was a pianist who played jazz with the young Nancy Wilson and Philly Joe Jones. His parents were both natives of Atlantic City. His mother worked as a telephone operator which stabilized their family. His father worked many clubs and cabarets. Wayne also played piano but was drawn to art.

After working and showing paintings across the globe, Manns moved to Bloomington in 2000 to attend Indiana University’s graduate program in Museum Studies. At IU, Manns was the curator of several exhibits at the Kinsey Institute and the Mathers Museum. He has also had numerous group and solo exhibitions in Europe, South America, and throughout the US. His works are featured at Indiana University's Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center, the permanent collection at the Indiana State Museum, and numerous private and public collections. He has presented paintings to many notables including Bill Clinton, Milt Jackson, and Donald Trump. For more information about originals and reproductions, you may contact the artist through his website, www.waynemanns.com.

As part of the “Artist of the Week” interviews, ReFrame is offering 10% off frame orders for any Wayne Manns original or print.

Who are your influences?

I like everybody. I like Caravaggio. I was just in Ottawa, and I went to the National Gallery. I was just taken by Caravaggio, and I love him. I love Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, Munch. Kees van Dongen is one my absolute favorite painters.

I love Gaugin. Gaugin gave me my palette, I think. He gave me the palette that let me paint people of color. When he went to Tahiti, he was painting these people. He would take cadmium orange and sap green and come up with these wonderful browns. Sometimes cadmium orange with ultramarine or cobalt blue. I think I learned my line from Matisse. I look at Matisse for real economy of line. Lines are usually hard and sort of cold. I love to draw, but I really like color. I think I'm a colorist more than anything. I like concentrating more on form and color.

I look at space, the space in between the lines. I'm aware of the space between figures. My father was a piano player, a jazz pianist. And I play piano. And my father told me in music, “Don't worry about all the notes, worry about the space in between the notes.” I try to use the same philosophy in art. I try to look at the space between figures, between objects. I think you can clutter a painting up with a lot of stuff. I love the spaces in between, they're very important to me. Not cluttering the space up, letting it breathe so you can focus on the figure. I am a figurative painter, and I want you to look at my figures. I don't want you to get caught up in the props in the painting.

Could you tell me a bit more about why you tend to paint groups of people?

People don't exist, really, by themselves. I think it's important to show groups of people because people socialize, people like to engage and interact with each other. Especially black people. Black people like to get dressed up and go out, and they like to put on their Sunday best even if it's Tuesday or Monday, then go out and chop it up, have a good time. People when they're together, they tell stories. I don't necessarily have to fill in all the lines. When you have a person by themselves, that tells a story, but you have to fill in a lot of stuff. If you have a dancer, you've got to have a stage or have the dancer performing. But when there's groups of people, the position of their bodies – I call it lingua de corpa – the language of the body – the bodies will tell the story. Just the way the body is positioned, the movement of it, the lifting of an arm – these things all tell stories. For a long time, I didn't feel like I wanted to paint anything but just these bodies. Painting groups lets me complete a story without having to fill in all this extra stuff.

Painting itself is totally, totally, totally the antithesis of what I work on. It's necessary, though. A necessary function, being by myself. There's a lot of solitary time, just working stuff out by myself. It's challenging. It all falls on me.

You're a busy painter. What drives you to produce the work now?

I've got to stay busy. I've got to work. I don't know when my time is up. I want to leave a legacy, for my family, just for myself maybe. I want to leave a body of work. I've met with some successes recently, and that's a nice shot in the arm. I used to think I was invincible, I really did. That's why I did drugs and did crazy stuff. I thought I would live forever. That's the way we lived in the turbulent sixties. There was all this identity stuff I was wrangling with, coming from kind of mixed bag upbringing.

Even though both my parents were black, materially, my mother looks white. That was kind of a challenge. To be the light-skinned family in this black neighborhood we grew up in. But we had a piano, and that was the center of activity because my dad played, and I played. And that was where the whole neighborhood kind of converged on. I saw the attention my dad would get playing the piano. He'd take me around to his rehersals and I said, “I'm gonna learn how to play that piano. This has got some drawing power. I'm gonna learn how to do this thing.” I think people coming together has been a part of my whole life.

What role does race play in your work?

Oh my God. It's all about race. I think when you grow up and you're colored, negro, black, African-American – whatever we are at a particular time – I think that I have an obligation to at least explore some things dealing with the black experience. I think that black imagery is really important for America to have in places everywhere – museums, universities, and such. The more that's out there, it's going to give more young people the idea that they can become the president, they can be the corporate head, that they can be painted – someone can paint them. When I was growing up, I never saw black images in schools or anywhere. There were no black images anywhere. We had two magazines, Ebony and Jet. Now there's all these different magazines, but there only used to be Ebony and Jet.

I think it's important for blacks, but also for whites, to see black images. It's real important for us to know that America is a great place because we went down this road, and we've gone through a lot of stuff as a people together, and separately, we had different challenges but we came through. We've got a long way to go, it's not all over with, even with Barack in the White House. There's still a lot of things that need to be done, when you look at the numbers for blacks in prison, unemployment, mortality, economy. I'd like to see more images in museums. I'd like to see more black women represented.

When you look at my work, the people that I'm focusing on are people of color. I sort of identify with the way that we wear our hats, the way we walk, the way we sort of cock our heads – it's my jazz upbringing. Men with hats and caps and stuff like that. You didn't go anywhere unless you had a hat on. Now it's the opposite. And jeans? You wouldn't be caught dead in jeans. Jeans? Nowadays, every article of clothing I have has paint on it somewhere.

Any advice for our readers?

You gotta find your own way in life. You've got to write your own rules. If you don't, someone else is defining what you do. How could they know who you are, what you do from the time you get up to the time you go to bed?

Come back next week, dear readers, for a very personal discussion of Wayne's beginnings as an artist in Part 2 of ReFrame's interview with Wayne Manns.

Gregory Scott: "Be remarkable..."

2011-08-03T08:39:00.000-07:00

Gregory Scott is a Chicago-based artist who mixes painting, photography, and video. He received his BFA from the Institute of Design in Chicago and his MFA from Indiana University. He continues to maintain personal and business ties with the town. Recently, his work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Arthur Roger Gallery and the Rockford Art Musuem. Scott’s work hangs in the permanent collection at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. Gregory Scott is represented by Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago. His work can be viewed with its full video at www.gregoryscottimages.com.

This week, his “In Still Motion” solo show opens at gallery406 in Bloomington, Indiana (116 W 6th St, Inside the Wicks Bldg, North Side of Courthouse Square). The opening is a part of the Downtown Gallery Walk on Friday August 5, and his work will hang until October 1. “In Still Motion” features a mix of works, including several that were shot here in Bloomington.

What inspires your work?

I’ve always used myself in the work, usually as sort of an everyman character, a stand-in for humans in general. Some of it is truly self-portraiture, in the sense that it reveals something about me. I’m hoping the things I reveal are universal, that people recognize situations or emotions. An earlier body of work was black and white still photography, and in that work, I would do a painting of something and align it with the scene it was placed in. The paintings are placed in the scene and I’m in the scene, and the painting changes the reality of that photographic image. Even though you can tell in the photograph that the painting was placed there intentionally, you still tend to read it as real space instead of two-dimensional construction.

In grad school, I started playing with video a bit more, and started combining the video. The real ‘what-if’ was – what if you could make a painting or a photograph move? That was my exploration, to take these static, still objects that we place on walls and have them be animated and do something. So the new pieces look very different than the older work, but the ideas are still the same.

There’s an element of trompe-l'œil. There’s some sort of touch on the human experience, I still play a role in each of the pieces, occasionally with other people, sometimes alone. There’s still a mix of painting of video, painting, and photography. The media are all mixed together and interacting with each other. So you have still, static imagery interacting with video back and forth. There’re several levels at work. In the work in “In Still Motion” there’s also a commentary on the world of art in general. In the new work, the setting is always the place where we view art, be it a gallery, museum, the refrigerator with children’s work and pet photos, or a little piece of art over a dresser in a bedroom. There’s art commentary, a sense of trompe-l'œil and illusion, and there’s the human elements working in each piece.

Did you always mix media, or did you start with one and move into another?

I was working on becoming on a better painter at times, and at other times I was working on becoming a better photographer. I was doing the two very independently, and what happened at one point was I was taking figure painting classes and I didn’t want to paint the environment, I just wanted to paint the figure. So I started cropping the body in very tight, so the painting might be from the shoulder to the knee and you don’t see the whole body. And I had this sort of ‘aha’ moment – what if I fill in the rest of this body? So I placed a photo, suspended it in the air with some brackets, and got behind it and lined myself up so my legs finished the legs and my head finished the head. That’s where it all kind of started. And that was a lot of fun, and with the video, I’m still doing kind of the same thing but it’s evolved.

Could you tell us about the Bloomington pieces in the “In Still Motion” show?

There’s the picnic table piece, “Dinner for One.” For that one, a group at the college had invited me down to be on a roundtable discussion in the winter. I came to Bloomington and finished up, and my plan was to head back to Chicago. I got on the road and was headed north when it started to snow very, very heavily. I was just five miles out of town, and figured I wasn’t going to make it or it was going to take me a day and a half. So I turned around and got a hotel room. And by that time, there was this beautiful snowfall. And I thought – what can I do? So I drove around and I saw some picnic tables. I’m drawn to the absurd or the odd, and I thought wouldn’t it be odd to use these picnic tables as they were intended in the middle of winter during the snowfall.

I had my camera with me, luckily, but I needed to round up the props I needed quickly. So I went to Michael’s Uptown Café downtown, and they were kind enough to loan me full sets of silverware, plates, glasses, a tablecloth, the whole setup. I went and bought a bottle of wine and some food that I brought in a bag. So I set up and shot this scene of a beautiful black and white panoramic of the clearing in the park with trees all around and the picnic tables covered with snow. I set the table for two people, including pouring wine in the two glasses, and I had my meal alone in the snow. I probably shouldn’t tell, because you can’t tell in the video, but it was just a hot dog and some fries and a cheap bottle of wine.

How do you find life as an artist after grad school?

I’m enjoying myself a great deal, and happy things have gone as they have. I guess one of the things that surprises me is how much work it is. I definitely have a lot of down periods, where I’ve got a lot of time to paint and come up with new ideas. But there are numerous times where I’m working seven days a week, working fourteen to sixteen hour days for weeks at a time. There’ve been some growing pains. I’ve got an assistant who helps me pretty often, and a whole bunch of other assistants who help me do other things related to the work.

What’s the best compliment you’ve received on your work?

“It keeps your mind busy.”

How do you define success since grad school, and have you achieved it?

By my definition of success, I am successful because I want to do something that I’m interested in, enjoying, and having fun with. But I also want to support making more work. These pieces are pretty expensive to put together – there’s an LED TV and a small computer in each one. I need to pay someone to help set up the computer, I need to pay assistants to help with the woodworking, I need the large printing, and I need the equipment to do this stuff as well. Financially, if I want to do this work, it needs to support itself and provide a living for me so I’m not doing another job at the same time.

The market doesn’t always respect the difference between a photorealistic piece that took one hundred hours over a piece with a looser, faster style that took ten. Unfortunately, the market doesn’t necessarily care about style. And that’s the sort of thing you have to remember. If you’re doing something that’s so expensive to do, and so time consuming, but the final product isn’t something that very many people want to put in their home, it sort of doesn’t matter. Even if it took eight weeks of solid work, if they don’t want it, so what?

I always tell artists, it’s not enough to be good or even extremely good, you really need to capture people’s imaginations. Be memorable. Be remarkable, in the literal sense of the word. It’s such a crowded world of people trying to make it in art, there’s so many good painters, so many good photographers – what are you doing that makes you any different from anyone else? For myself, I’ve found while putting these pieces together, the more fun I’ve had doing the piece, the better received it is, and the faster it sells, generally. It’s a tough world in art, but I think if you’re honest with yourself and you stand out and do things that are remarkable, you’re ok.

Thanks to Gregory Scott for taking the time to speak with us before “In Still Motion” opens at gallery406 on the square.

Don’t forget to read, follow, and share the interviews widely if you like to read about local arts and local artists. Next week, part I of our interview with Bloomington painter Wayne Manns!

Jeremy Sweet - Influence and Devotion

2011-07-26T11:46:00.000-07:00

Jeremy Sweet is a local printmaker whose distinctive work has been shown at Indiana University SoFA Gallery, The Kinsey Institute's Annual Juried Art Show, The Uptown Cafe, Tutto Bene, and numerous temporary galleries and installations in vacant spaces downtown. Jeremy hosts the yearly Devotion art show, a one-night gallery for local artists every November. He holds a BFA in printmaking from Sonoma State University and an MFA in printmaking from Indiana University. Jeremy currently works for the SoFA Gallery, and resides in Bloomington, Indiana with his wife, Amy, and daughters Isabelle and Kaliah.

His work combines traditional folk art imagery with modern printing techniques. His unique style, substance, and skill shows in the juxtaposition of images in his work, as well as the careful layering of color, pattern, and meaning. He sells a wide variety of work, from 2-layer prints on paper to wall-sized panels. You can view his work online and contact him through his website.

Jeremy Sweet is ReFrame's Artist of the Week until August 2, 2011! Bring in any Jeremy Sweet piece for framing this week and receive a 10% discount on the order.

Where's your inspiration come from in your art?

I look at a lot of old traditional tattoo flash. I look at a lot of folk art. I'm into things that seem unrefined, stuff that's accessible, things that I didn't find in art history. I spent a lot of time in Mexico as a kid, and saw a lot of things that influence me today. There's the simple tradition of someone painting their own business sign on their wall and doing it all by hand. The simplicity of that act is beautiful, the colors they use, the choices they make. I like Day of the Dead art, old posada woodcuts. They're not super slick, they're rough, they tell stories, they're animated. They're beautiful and ugly at the same time. I enjoy that.

In Bloomington, I find inspiration a lot of places. For me, tattoo shops are a great place to get inspired. I can always go in there and talk about art, see art being made. It's one of the more active artistic venues, if you think about it. I don't know any artist that sits down and draws as much as those guys. Every day, you can see how they're solving some problem, or you can compare books, share imagery. There's just not any other place where that happens every day.

How does music inspire you?

I'm a huge music fan, almost to a fault. I've spent way too much money over the years on music. I always have music on when I work. I'm really random, and have affinities for a lot of different kinds of music.

If you were to choose a musical style to describe your work, what would it be?

I'd say mash-up. The kind of music I really like is a fusion of work, two different things coming together to form something new and interesting. I argued that for critiques in school, and some professors felt that I wasn't creating anything new, I was just combining two things. To me, though, it's undeniable, when you layer things they become intertwined. Then when I do the extra work to add to them and turn them into my own thing, it couldn't be anything else but something new. We're supposed to learn off of each other, we're supposed to build. By following these influences that I have, and trying to make work that I like out of those influences, I feel that I'm paying respect to those influences.

How does family affect your artwork?

It's made me hungry. I don't always have the opportunity to work, so I get eager. I get frustrated because I want more time. You don't have to have kids to be working full time. You don't always have the freedom of college to work all the time. A family has made me eager to still make art. I'm hungry, and the kids don't always make it any easier. But eventually, with hard work, perseverance, and just staying interested in the work, it'll come. I mainly want to create something that my kids will be proud of and inspired by, so they know that I had some passion going on.

How'd you get into art?

Through the influence of my father. He was trained as an architect and then would draw at home. He used to draw a bunch when I was a kid and show me his drawings, then I got into it. My folks always gave me supplies to work on art. My dad used to draw these little cars that I thought were awesome. So I'd draw Bigfoot trucks with the biggest wheels possible. Back in the '80s, that stuff was really popular. I was also into skateboarding, BMX, so I was getting those magazines and the artwork in those was inspiring, so I'd just doodle in the magazines. It wasn't until college that I had a professor who introduced me to printmaking, things like intaglio. I just loved it, and really decided that's what I wanted to do.

I still have a lot of fun with stuff that's just stupid boy stuff. There's still a part of me that just wants to draw something that's just rad, like my Bigfoot trucks, just 'cause they're freaking awesome. I still have that in me from growing up in southern California. There's a part of it, like skateboard graphics, you don't have to explain it to someone. They just look at it and think, “That's tough looking,” or “That's awesome.” Sometimes, I just want people to get that feeling. I don't want to hit them too much with what I've been thinking about while I've been making the work. That can be just a burden for them. I'm open to sharing, for sure, but sometimes I just want that immediate reaction from people. I want people to see things that they think they recognize, some things that they definitely recognize. I want them to feel that there are entry points that are comfortable for them. Then, once they get into it, I want to unsettle them a bit and I also want them to see that there's skill and time invested.

You were a professional soccer player at one point. What was that like?

I played soccer in college, which was great. After college I was playing in men's leagues in San Francisco and the Bay area. I had planned long before I graduated that I would go and hook up with a buddy who lived in Holland and give professional soccer a shot. I saved some money and went over there, started playing and coaching kids. After Holland, I got jobs playing soccer in Belize, San Francisco, Seattle, and Costa Rica. I wasn't making a lot of money, but I was able to live and travel around a lot. Finally, I ended up in Indianapolis, and that's where I met my wife.

While I was in Holland, I took a job with an art shipper that was really cool. I learned how that whole side of the art world works – getting into the back doors of museums, looking into private collections. We actually got to transport the Van Gogh collection that was going to the airport to do its U.S. Tour in 1998-1999. It was crazy, they had this police transport of thirty or forty Dutch police who escorted us to this non-commercial hanger at the airport. At the time, I was beyond my three months for my tourist visa, so little did they know that their most valuable artifacts were being transported by an illegal American soccer player.

What's a tip about art business that you can share with us?

Sometimes I ask my buyers to sign residuals contracts. Especially for bigger pieces. Most people are not trying to take advantage of artists, but if I feel that if someone's just looking at me online, maybe someone who's trying to flip paintings, then I try to get the residuals document from them. The contract secures me a percentage on future sales and retains my rights for use of the work. All that stuff is written in the contract, which I got out of a book. There's a bunch of them, like The Business of Being an Artist. There's also a ton of resources online. Just search around and ask around for advice. There's a lot of free legal advice for artists out there.

What is the annual Devotion show?

I've been hosting the Devotion show for three years. This will be the third, on November 4. The first year was seven artists, last year was about ten. It's a one-night thing. I rent the space above Subway on Walnut, I get kegs from Upland, get a DJ, and I make it an event. A party, really, where people can talk about art. We call it Devotion, because depending on each artists' situation, you have to have a certain devotion to your craft to even get it made, a real devotion to that lifestyle and that vision. I try to make it the gallery vibe I'd like to have while creating opportunities to show work. The first year was great, and last year was even better. We were busy all the way until midnight when I was supposed to shut down.

Remember to follow the blog and vote us up if you like the interviews! Stay tuned for interviews with Wayne Manns, Gregory Scott, and many others to come!

Joel Washington Part II: Innovators, Bloomington, and the Future

2011-07-15T16:37:00.000-07:00

Bloomington painter Joel Washington has been drawing and painting since he was a teenager. His aggressive use of color and pop art stylings have made him one of Bloomington's most recognizable artists. Last year, Joel was mentioned in the Washington Post as a notable artist in the Bloomington area, and celebrated his 50th birthday with a show at the Showers Plaza downtown. His work has been shown locally, nationally, and internationally in venues such as the Indiana University Memorial Union, Neal-Marshall Black Cultural Center, the Indiana State Museum, and the US Embassy in Bangkok. His work is currently on display at the Indiana Governor's Office.

Around town, you can purchase his work and his Lab Ratical line of skateboards at Laughing Planet Cafe, Amused Clothing, and Rhett Skateboarding.You can contact Joel through www.joelwashingtonart.com. To coincide with the interviews in this blog, ReFrame has started an "Artist of the Week" discount. This week, if you bring any Joel Washington piece (original or print) to be framed, you'll receive 10% off the job!

This is Part II of the interview with Joel, and we talk more about Joel's influences, the reception of his work, and his plans for the future. Part I of the Joel Washington Interview can be found here.

Who are some of the artistic innovators that you admire?

I really like Frank Frazetta's stuff. There's a great documentary called Painting with Fire. They show how amazing that guy was. He used to do things like finishing an oil painting in a single night. The film shows the stuff he did when he was young, 8 years old or so. And you're just amazed by this guy's talent. One thing that he did that was cool when he did the covers for Conan and all those others, he gave the publishers the rights to the cover art, but in his contract specified that he got to keep the actual painting. This meant that he got the rights to the image for prints and reproductions, and that made a huge difference in the way his career went.

Ralph Bakshi is an interesting guy. A really interesting animator. What was so cool about his film Wizards was that his style was rotoscoped, and it was different from the average. The way he drew batwings and monster features on stuff and critics praised him for it. He said it wasn't that he was trying to come up with a new rotoscope technique or anything, it was that he just ran out of money and was desperate, so he resorted to a lot of Xerography, taking stock footage from war and drawing batwings on the Nazis and things like that. And when you see it, it looks really revolutionary for the time it came out. But he just ran out of money and as a last ditch effort finished it any way he could. It's another one of those stories in art where restrictions create the style.

Your work has always featured a playful use of color. What other inspirations brought you to your style?

In addition to the animation, I've always liked graphic design. MY first progressive rock group I ever enjoyed was Yes. They were my first concert, too. I got hooked on Roger Dean's artwork, and once again was drawing that stuff in school and no one knew what in the world I was drawing. I saw them back in 1974, and that's when Roger Dean was still designing their stage sets so that they looked like his artwork. It was killer. I'm still a fan of his work. The Yes logo is one of my favorite logos of all. I was real big into the album Brain Salad Surgery by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, and that was the album H.R. Giger did the artwork for. I've got a book called the 100 Best Album Covers, and it shows the covers and explains the history behind them. It's really cool to learn the controversy some of them started. Those covers, that packaging was just as much art as the music. I remember when I first got the Alice Cooper Billion Dollar Babies album. That album was really cool. It looked like a wallet, and when you opened it up and it had a giant dollar bill with Alice Cooper and his band in the center of it. Kiss, they always used to have something going on in their packaging. In their album Love Gun, it came with a big paper gun that you snap and it made this loud popping sound. Issac Hayes had this album called Black Moses, just him in this desert robe on the front, but when fold the album out, it turns into this giant cross with his arms out. Just the way these albums were designed was amazing. You just don't see stuff like that anymore. Album covers were an art form, and most CD covers don't really have much going because they're so compressed. You just can't admire it the way you'd admire an album cover, which is big enough that you can put so much depth into the image. Whether it's animation, movies, album art, painting, photography, music, posters, comic books, it all inspires what I do.

Do you have any shows coming up?

I'm kind of in hermit mode right now. I've done a few shows recently, and I'm trying to get caught up on some commission work before I get ready for another one. Each show is a really hard thing to prepare, and it takes a lot out of you. One thing is coming up, though. The IU Cinema asked if I would do a display of some of my production drawings and animation cells from my collection. I still have to see what space they have available to see which one's I'm going to put up. So that's all still in the works.

You're a long time Bloomington resident, but not from here originally. What brought you to Bloomington?

We first started coming to Bloomington when I was a kid for visits and it was a fantastic place where I had a lot of fun. I was really worried as a grew up that if I moved here, the place would lose its magic. But I decided that this was where I wanted to be, since I had so many great memories of being here when I was young. And wow, in the time I've been here, Bloomington has really grown. The arts have always been important here, and there's so many people here doing great work. It's just really amazing to go anywhere in town and just take some time to see how much great stuff you're surrounded by everyday. It's just a great town.

What are some of your thoughts about the art scene in Bloomington?

I feel like the artists have lost some of the sense of community that they used to have in this town. It's still a small town, and still a great place for the arts, but these days people don't seem quite as connected as they used to be. Maybe that's just me, but I like going to see people's shows and get to know the people that are making the work. It's good to talk to people, find out what goes into their work because you appreciate it more then.

Every artist has to deal with other peoples' opinions. What's the worst criticism you've ever received about your work?

Once, years ago after a show here in town, a critic published a review that was just really insulting. He said that I made my work just to make a quick buck, and that's why I painted so many celebrities. People can think what they think about the work, but to judge me and my motivations when you don't even know me, that's just insulting. I paint people that I'm interested in, people who've influenced me, people who've mattered in my life. That's why I paint who I paint. And people I'm very interested in, I paint them a lot. I don't even know how many times I've painted Jimi Hendrix now. But to say that I just did this for the money, that guy was so wrong, and it showed that he didn't care about about the truth of a situation. So many critics just want to make a point, get heard, that they sometimes don't care about what they say.

What other things are you looking forward to doing with your art in the future?

I'm wanting to finish up a few large scale works. I don't have a show coming up, but I really want to do a show with just larger pieces of mine. That's one of my big ambitions, and it comes a little bit from Basquait again. When you look at his work in books, you think, oh that's got to be a small piece. But when you see them in person, you realize the scale that he was working on. A lot of his pieces, they're as big as a wall. And when they're that size, you can just put so much into a painting. I want to put together a show of just large works, and see how much I can put into each one.

As far as work that's done, There's a piece I did, a portrait of Rahsaan Roland Kirk, that I'm really proud of. Rahsaan Roland Kirk was a great jazz musician who was best known for being able to play four saxophones at the same time. He was blind and an activist, and some of that shows through on his records. He was an innovator and so talented for his whole life. He had a stroke that left him partially paralyzed, and still toured and played music for two years after that. He died from another stroke in 1977, just after he played his last show in the Frangipani Room at the Union. One of my dreams would be to have my portrait of him hanging in the Frangipani Room, just to memorialize this great musician who gave his last performance there.

Any final words for the readers?

One thing that's stuck with me is something a movie critic once noted, and this just says it perfectly about how important it is to have a life outside of struggling to make it as an artist. The critic refers to it as a merry go round. I don't know if they still do it, but a long time ago, when you'd go on a merry-go-round, they used to have a brass ring hanging from the top and you tried to grab the ring as you go around. And the critic put it perfectly when he said, “Sometimes we try so hard to grab the brass ring that we forget to enjoy the ride.” And I don't see how it can get any more truthful than that. Keep hanging out with your friends. Keep watching movies. Go to your favorite restaurant. Be yourself. There's got to be a balance in things, between your desire to make it and your ability to be yourself. You've got to find your happiness in that balance.

Next week, interview with local printmaker Jeremy Sweet. Until then, enjoy local art and have a great week!

Joel Washington Part I: Movies, Music, and Influences

2011-07-08T14:53:00.000-07:00

But what really kick started me in terms of all of that was the movie Yellow Submarine. I saw it when I was 11 years old. It's funny 'cause a long time ago this friend of mine had given my family these old albums, and there was a soundtrack to Yellow Submarine. I used to look at the album cover, because it had the characters on it, while listening to the music. I never thought that I would ever see the movie, so I used to listen to the record and imagine what scene was what.

One time, when we lived in Indianapolis, on Saturday morning I was looking at TV and on CBS, you know how they always say 'television premiere' or whatever, and there it was, Yellow Submarine. The thing is, my mom and dad were divorced. And when we were young, we lived with my mom and my dad picked us up on Sunday. And the show was coming on CBS on Sunday night. So when our dad came to pick us up, I played sick because I knew if I went with him and my brother and sisters, even if we had the TV on, there was no way to focus and I wouldn't get to watch it. So I played sick and had the little TV all to myself. My mom was at church for evening service, so I had the whole TV to myself and got to watch it uninterrupted, and was just hooked on it. And from that moment on I would just try to draw the characters or come up with my own characters. But I always played with color. That movie is still a textbook for me. I still see stuff in it that I didn't catch the time before, that movie just has a lot in it. A lot of people thought that Peter Max did the artwork for it because his work looks very much like the art in the movie, but it's actually a German artist named Heinz Edelmann who did it, but they both had similar styles. I love that movie badly. Still today, it's my favorite animated film.

So you're a big animation fan. Does a lot of your love of color and painting come from watching animation?

Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to be an animator before a painter, and I just kind of fell into the painting thing. I would still like to finish the animated film I've been working on myself. It's a 5-minute experimental thing that I did just to see if I could animate period. There's no real plot or anything to it, but it's at least 5-minutes long and there are 1400 drawings. I've got to finish coloring them up, but I'd at least like to do a test reel of it. Even though it might not be finished, I'd still like to see how it pans out. Also, with the all the stuff you can do in computers with drawings and animation, I'd like to take it up a notch now. I love animation.

Animation seems to be the thing that inspired you to get into art. What are some of the things that keep you going as an artist now?

Just the whole pop art scene from the sixties. I collect a lot of documentaries on pop art and just art in general. Biopics, movies based on famous artists. Basquiat being one of them. I've got six or seven Warhol documentaries. There's a lot of them out there.

If you could pick five movies for an artist to watch, what would they be?

Five? The first one I would pick would be a documentary from A&E called The Impressionists. It talks about the whole movement, the friendships between the people that started it. The things that led to some of them not being friends. What they went through as a group to be accepted by the art world. It's amazing. That'd be the first one. Second, any Andy Warhol documentary. In particular the one that PBS aired in their American Masters series. The Radiant Child, the new one about Basquiat. Another one would be The Universe of Keith Haring, it's a good one. There's a new one out called Exit through the Gift Shop. That's a pretty heavy one. If there were a sixth, there's one called The Art of Failure: Chuck Connelly Not for Sale. That one is pretty intense. It starts off with him actually being drunk in front of the camera while his wife is filming it, and he's frustrated over his art sales, and he's throwing tantrums. It's kind of a bitter movie, but it's a really good movie. And the documentary probably put his artwork back on the rise finally.

I like documentaries that really show the pains and struggles that an artist goes through. Not all of them go through it as intensely, and you don't want it that way to progress or to make it, but some times that's just the hard life of it. And some still struggle even after they make it. Financially, they might not be struggling, but there's still that matter of acceptance. Sometimes it's like being a musician, where you've made this album that people like, but you don't know what your next move is. Sometimes your next best move is simply being yourself. Don't try to top yourself with something, sometimes you just have to be who you are whether it's accepted or not. The main thing is that it's got to be accepted by you, because it begins with you and ends with you. If other people want to come along for the ride, that's great if they want to enjoy it as much as you enjoy it. You try so hard to do something, you lose sight of the fact that you've got to have a life as well. I'm telling the truth here. One animated film for me that I look at as one of the most important for me as a lesson is a movie called American Pop. It's a movie that clearly says go after your dream, but don't lose yourself along the way. That's what the movie told me. There's going to be struggle, but you don't have to struggle that hard if you don't lose the things that bring you happiness. There's got to be a balance.

What about music influences?

Music follows me through all of this. When I'm painting, it's movies or music on all the time. Whenever I paint with nothing on, it just gets too quiet. Too quiet. One thing I used to do, if I was painting a musical celebrity, I used to play their music so I could try to capture that same essence in color through my own interpretation on canvas. But I found that sometimes I have to mix it up a bit. I can play jazz at one moment, but to get the colors right and the real feel of it, I have to switch to psychedelic music. Not all the time, but a lot of the time. I could be painting Trey Anastasio from Phish, but I'll be listening to Sgt. Pepper.

It sounds like you've got different kinds of music you use for different purposes in your art; to inspired different things, to hit a certain mood?

I do. Absolutely. Jazz, psychedelic, prog rock, all of these get me going in different ways.

In Part II, available here, we discuss his current projects and the public reception of his work, as well as his plans for the future.

Skilled Hands and Minds - Bloomington's Visual Arts Scene

2011-06-30T08:58:00.000-07:00

Welcome to ReFrame's Blog!

Bloomington, Indiana is a vibrant and exciting town with an amazing visual arts scene. Everywhere you go in town, you see evidence of our town's creative hands and minds at work. Step into almost any downtown restaurant or store and you'll see some of the world's finest local arts on display. Very few places in the world can boast the concentration of talent, drive, and skill that Bloomington's visual arts scene exhibits every day of every week.

As a custom picture framer, it is my distinct privilege to know and work with many of the town's best artists. They can be hard to find, though, and getting to know the artists can be a tough task for someone who wants to collect their work. That's why my blog will be devoted to sharing the people, personalities, and events of Bloomington's visual arts scene with everyone. This blog will be the only publication of its kind about the Bloomington arts scene, featuring interviews with a new local artist every week, as well as reviews, news, and happenings around the visual arts.

So stay tuned! Starting next week, I'll be kicking off the blog with an interview with Joel Washington, one of Bloomington's most popular and recognizable painters. Boasting a pop-art, pop-culture style, Joel's work appears all over town. He has exhibited all over the world, and last year even garnered a mention in the Washington Post. In his most in-depth interview ever, Joel talks about his influences, his process, and the great passions of his life.

I'm so excited to share Bloomington's visual arts scene with everyone! Don't forget to follow the blog to receive all the latest updates. Until next time, I wish you all a safe and happy 4th of July.

Karol Stewart
Owner
ReFrame Eco-Friendly Framing
www.reframebloomington.com