Student Art Exhibit at South Puget Sound Community College

The Weekly Volcano, May 23, 2013

Plaster and pastel sculpture by Caitlin McDonald

Of course there are a few clunkers in the 8^th Annual Student Art Exhibit at South Puget Sound Community College, but there are plenty of impressive works as well. Most impressive of all may be a large cardboard forest against the back wall of the gallery. It’s a collaborative work by students in the 3-D Design class.

Also impressive is a small figure drawing in sharpie and vine charcoal by Colin Johnstone. It’s a reclining nude with a nice blend of expressive and lyrical contour drawing and flat shaded areas. The drawing and the position of the figure suggest exhausted collapse. It reminds me a lot of drawings by Rodin.

And then there is a group of three plaster sculptures by students Melyssa Wilder, Ashley Gunderson and Caitlin McDonald. With realistic heads and rough arms and hands, these figures hang on the wall and each is doing something thoroughly contemporary: talking on a cell phone, playing a Nintendo, napping with head on the keyboard of a netbook — good work both individually and collectively.

Hauntingly mysterious and atmospheric is a black and white digital photograph by Jennifer Watts of a group of figures that appear to be chess pieces, kings and knights and bishops, brought to life to wander zombie-like in a fog-shrouded world. The atmospheric mood is created by the artist’s use of selective focus.

Like some kind of iconic monolith, a cigarette butt stands upright in Brandon A. Cartwright’s digital photograph “Tree Cig.” It takes a strong imagination and artistic vision to create such a monumental image from a piece of trash.

One of the nicest works in the show is Winona So’s ceramic mug called “Graiff Mug.” I don’t know if the odd spelling was intentional or not, but I do know that the excellent graphic image of a giraffe with his neck as the mug handle is clever and enjoyable to look at. Another piece that’s definitely worth mentioning is Patricia McLain’s “Boy With Antlers, Experiments in Relief Printing.” It is a handmade artist book fanned out for display with on each page the same picture of a boy with antlers on his head, each printed in a different color. It’s an attractive piece.

 

You may not go to a student show with high expectations, but this one is certainly worth a trip across town to SPSCC.

[South Puget Sound Community College, Kenneth J Minnaert Center for the Arts Gallery, Monday-Thursday, noon-4 p.m., through June 6, and by appointment, 2011 Mottman Rd. SW. Olympia, 360.596.5527.]

For another student art show visit the gallery at Tacoma Community College and watch for my review of that show to be published in the Volcano May 30th.

Spreading Wall Fodder

 We need to hold back the surging tide of wall fodder.

What is wall fodder? It is art that is safe, bland, perhaps nicely done, but neither challenging nor exciting. Stuff you might hang on your wall if you wanted to be sure not to offend anyone — and match the couch, of course. I first heard the term used by Willie Ray Parish, a sculptor in El Paso, Texas. His wife, Becky Hendrick (a fine painter and art critic), informed me that he got it from her and that she got it from an LA Weekly article by Peter Plagens. I wrote an essay about it titled The Case Against Wall Fodder that is posted on my website and reprinted in my book As If Art Matters</.

"Reversal of Fortune" by Ric Hall is not wall fodder.

Many of the pastels in The Northwest Pastel Society Invitational, which I recently reviewed for the Weekly Volcano, were wall fodder. They were skillfully done and most were attractive, but they were the visual equivalent of cotton candy or bubblegum music. When artists do this kind of work and galleries show it, they promote mediocrity. So why do they do it? Do they believe that a sweet little landscape that is essentially no different than millions of other sweet little landscapes is as artistically worthy as, for instance, a Picasso or a Rembrandt? Probably not, but it is likely that the gallery owners, like their customers, enjoy the sweet little landscapes. They’re comfortable with them. Furthermore, they surely know that such art will sell more readily than, say, an abstract painting by a little-known regional painter. Back to the pastel show, I noticed a lot of red dots indicating paintings that were sold. I also noticed that the listed prices were two-to four-times those of paintings of comparable size by artists of considerable regional repute seen in other area galleries. So maybe it’s a matter of making money. God knows, if they can’t make money we all suffer a lack of art.

I’ve talked to artists who separate art made with the hope of selling from art made for their personal satisfaction. I remember talking to a gallery owner who had works by some pretty gutsy contemporary artists, including the great Richard Diebenkorn, in his personal collection but showed much safer wall fodder in his gallery, knowing the stuff he collected would not sell. So I understand and sympathize, but still, catering to commercial concerns in art aides in the proliferation of bubblegum art. It becomes a never-ending circle: artists and galleries gear their art to the buying public, and young people who want to be artists see this stuff and think it’s what they should be doing.

When I was a child, I spake as a child ..but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

I suspect that my development as an artist in some ways mirrored the development of Western art through history, as did the development of many of my contemporaries. As a small child I fell in love with painting and drawing and tried to make pictures like the ones I had seen in books. Through childhood, high school and college I worked at perfecting my ability to make a picture of a house or a man or a tree look like a house or a man or a tree. I never perfected it to the degree of a Vermeer or even a Phillip Pearlstein or Chuck Close, but I got pretty good at it. And I noticed artists such as van Gogh and Matisse and Picasso who didn’t try to make an image of a man look so much like a man, but changed and distorted images to answer other kinds of realities; and I studied what they did in an attempt to understand it, and making a house look like a house was no longer good enough for me. I was compelled to make art that did more than imitate nature; I was compelled to find my own voice. I imagine that every artist goes through something like that, but those who make wall fodder are satisfied with imitating nature (and by-the-way, abstract art can also be wall fodder). If art is to be something more than a hobby, then — with apologies to Henri Matisse who said he wanted his art to be something like a comfortable chair — I declare that artists must strive for something beyond making nice pictures. That so many of them don’t is something I attribute, at least in part, to the screwed-up nature of the art market.

Regional galleries cater to mediocrity. They pretty much have to if they’re going to stay in business. Risky, experimental and challenging art does not sell outside of major art centers. And trendy big-city galleries are sometimes just as bad, or they artificially inflate the value of their artists, making it almost impossible for artists, dealers and collectors to know what is good and what’s not. Ah ha! Maybe that’s where critics come in. Are you kidding? Have you read most of what passes for criticism these days? The reviews seem to be PR for the galleries that advertise in the magazines.

Even works by truly great artists are artificially inflated as collectors try to outdo each other by owning the most expensive baubles. The New York Times recently reported that one of Jackson Pollock’s classic drip paintings — “No. 19, 1948” — sold for a record $58.3 million, and it was reported on the CBS morning show that a Barnett Newman painting sold for more than $43 million. Charlie Rose and Gayle King made snide comments about the Newman, which showed just how stupid and arrogant they are. Despite Rose and King’s stupidity, these are great paintings, but the prices are absurd. No art should be worth that kind of money.

The problem with paintings selling for such inflated prices — other than the absolute absurdity of it — is that it takes the Pollocks and Newmans out of the museums and into private collections where only a few outlandishly rich people can see them. Already the public is limited in what they can see. There’s only so much in museums and many people can never afford to go to Italy to see Michelangelo’s “David” or to France to see the “Mona Lisa.” The only art the public in most places gets to see is what shows up in local galleries and reproductions in books where they can’t see the scale or surface quality or true colors. So the circle of mediocrity keeps spinning.

The Mechanics of Memory

The Mechanics of Memory by Becky Hendrick, acrylic and alkyd on canvas; 45” x 45”

Artist and writer Becky Hendrick painted a series on the Holocaust which she later wrote about in a book called Mechanics of Memory. Becky is a fine artist and a fine writer and, coincidentally, related to me. Here's the opening of her essay on the Holocaust paintings:

"During the 1980s, the art world boomed. It was Big Business, painting was hot, and we painters got spoiled by attention and sales. So when a collector asked to meet me and see my paintings, I was ready and eager to discuss the work: its intentions, the formal choices, the imagery and, most important to me, the content; relationships – causal, oppositional, complementary, paradoxical; that sort of thing. The themes I was dealing with were complex and consuming: choice, chance and consequence; the physics of change.
           'When the potential patron walked into the gallery, she was a living, breathing cliché; holding a fabric swatch, she wanted a painting to ‘match.’ I was probably polite and I probably did whatever was necessary to make a sale; my art may be oh-so-serious, but I am human. Privately, though, I still had enough liberal zeal to take offense at the contradiction between the content of my paintings and the spirit in which they were being bought and sold.
         " For a few years I had been considering the nature of pictures: whether, in an image-saturated culture, pictures still had the power to “work,” and if so, how. I began a series of Living Room Paintings in response to those people who shopped the contemporary galleries for their interior decoration needs. These paintings combined images of families displaced from their homes by war, poverty, or climate --- people with no living room --- with borders of decorative fabrics. My thinking was that if one has several thousand dollars to spend on something to hang over a sofa, that thing should be a constant reminder that owning it is a privilege!"

Please click on The Mechanics of Memory to read the complete essay and see more of her paintings.

The pastel invitational

"Reversal of Roles," pastel by Ric Hall

 The Northwest Pastel Society's 27th Annual International Open Exhibition at American Art Company features works from 58 artists from across the United States and Canada. Almost half the gallery is taken up with nice little landscapes that are amazingly similar to one another, and about a quarter of the gallery is filled with portraits and other figurative works that are also a lot alike, but not as much so as the landscapes. 

 

There is one nude by Paul Barton of Olympia that is nice in that the figure is not idealized and there is some dramatic play of light and dark. There are a couple of Pop/photo-realist images by Kari Tirrell of Gig Harbor that are technically amazing. Tirrell’s “Train Wreck” is the juror’s pick for Best in Show. There’s a painting of race horses by Joe Mac Kechnie that looks like a Leroy Neiman sports illustration (Director’s Award); one purely abstract painting by Barbara Noonan of Seattle that is atmospheric and nicely executed; and a clever painting by Cinda Sue Dow of Friday Harbor of two zebras standing in the middle of a landscape that is an amalgamation of van Gogh’s “Starry Night” and “Wheat Fields” (without the crows).

The absolute best thing in the show is Ric Hall’s “Reversal of Roles,” a picture of a family seemingly huddled together in fear in a claustrophobic room with an open door. A kid with a head that is weirdly disjointed from his body clings to his father; the mother, dressed in a blue knit suit with matching handbag, seems anxious to go shopping, and there are strange colors and eerie triple shadows. It reminds me of Max Beckman and Emil Nolde. If only there were more works of this caliber in this show.

Tacoma art lovers will, of course, recognize Hall as half of the duo Hall and Schmidt who normally collaborate of their eerily surrealist pastels.

Another of my favorites is Janie Hutchinson’s “Frosty,” an attractive winter landscape of orange trees in snow-covered fields.

Almost every work in the show is beautifully done with either a softly layered surface quality or admirable realism, but the imagery is far too common. The show sorely lacks creativity. The President’s Award, Laurie Potter’s “Facing the Day,” has to be the worst award choice I’ve ever seen.

 [American Art Company, Northwest Pastel Society’s 27th Annual International Open Exhibition, Tuesday-Friday 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Saturday 10 am. to 5p.m., Third Thursday until 8 p.m., through June 15, 1126 Broadway Plaza, Tacoma, 253.272.4327]

Rock and Soul at Centerstage

Front: Jesse Smith, back: DuWayne Andrews, Jr., Zack Wheeler,
Bobby Barnts. Photo by Michele Smith Lewis

What do you call eight men and women with impressive training and experience in musical theater, solo performance, and even opera, singing and dancing their hearts out for two-and-a-half hours? You call it rock and soul — a soul-stirring evening of some of the best of the music that defined an era.

It’s Only Rock and Soul at Centerstage Theatre in Federal Way brings is an evening of favorite hits of the ’60s and ’70s that is well worth a drive. We drove up from Olympia and it was a late night for us, but if it had gone on for another hour that would have been just fine with me.

All but two of the cast are Seattle and South Sound favorites. Those two, Trista Duval and Zack Wheeler are newcomers to the area with strong professional backgrounds in other parts of the country. Duval has performed professionally in Massachusetts, Florida and Texas. Wheeler has performed in film and on stage in New York. He even performed in benefits for Bill and Hillary Clinton and for Al Sharpton.

DuWayne Andrews, Jr. was in Seattle Opera’s Porgy and Bess and has been seen at Tacoma Musical Playhouse in The Color Purple and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. He sings and dances with power and energy. He’s mesmerizing on “War,” the powerful anti-war anthem written by Edwin Strong and first recorded by the Temptations.

Stacie Calkins, queen of soul in the South Sound, starred in Dream Girls, The Color Purple, Tommy, and many of the Purple Phoenix Productions including The Lena Horne Songbook and Aretha at the Apollo. In this show she does a great medley of Aretha Franklin songs and a stunning rendition of “Stairway to Heaven” in duet with Jesse Smith.

Bobby Barnts is making his Centerstage debut in It’s Only Rock and Soul. He’s an opera singer, having performed with both Seattle Opera and Tacoma Opera, but he proves in this performance that he can belt out rock and roll and tender ballads with the best of them. His amazing call-and-response duo with Wheeler on “Hello It’s Me” and “Desperado” leaves the audience breathless.

Centerstage audiences know Smith from his lead role in Tommy and Ain’t Misbehavin’ and their previous summer rock extravaganza, I’m Into Something Good. His acting, his joyful smile, his energy and his smooth voice draw the audience in and make them feel like they’re a part of the songs.

Ashanti Mangum’s previous outing at Centerstage was in Ain’t Misbehavin.’ In Seattle she’s performed at Intiman, the 5^th Avenue and Seattle Opera. She is absolutely spellbinding in that great heart-tugger from Hair, “Easy to Be Hard” and in the haunting “Whiter Shade of Pale.”

Meg McLynn. Photo by Michele Smith Lewis

Meg McLynn starred in Purple Phoenix Productions Patsy Cline tribute and Tommy and the English Panto Pinocchio. She does a knockout “Angel in the Morning” that segues into Janice Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart,” and her rendition of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” complete with psychedelic lighting is one of the highest of highlights in a show filled with highlights.

Rather than doing the songs chronologically, they are grouped by theme and style, with a “chemical sequence” (recalling the ‘60s drug culture), boy-group and girl-group medleys, and songs of war and peace. The five-piece band led by David Duvall is outstanding as always, and Duvall’s arrangements are masterful, especially on some of the chemical sequence numbers and the Beatles medley and a rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine” that’s unlike any I’ve ever heard.
Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m.; Sundays at 2 p.m. through May 26, 3200 SW Dash Point Road,
http://www.centerstagetheatre.com/