by Alec Clayton
for the Weekly Volcano's blog Spew
April 8, 2013
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| Small Raised Circles, © 2011 by Eric Carle. Photograph, 8 x 10 inches. Collection of Eric and Barbara Carle, courtesy of The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Amherst, Massachusetts. This exhibition was organized by The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Amherst, MA. |
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| Large Circles, © 2007 by Eric Carle. Photograph, 8 x 10 inches. Collection of Eric and Barbara Carle, courtesy of The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Amherst, Massachusetts. This exhibition was organized by The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Amherst, MA. |
Note: this was published the day before the lecture but is still pertinent as long as the show is up.
Tacoma
Art Museum Director Stephanie Stebich will lecture on the
personal and private art of children’s book artist Eric Carle Wednesday, April
10 at 10:30 a.m. The lecture is free with museum admission, and it should be as
special as is the exhibition because she is a personal friend of the artist and
knows him well.
I was fortunate enough to attend a press
preview of the exhibition at which Stebich toured the show with us and talked
about Carle’s art. My review will appear in this week’s Volcano. But there’s
much more to the show than I can say in one review, so I’ll try to cover a
little more here.
Carle is famous for his
colorful book art. His most famous book here in the United States is The Very Hungry Caterpillar, but
Stebich says Brown Bear — Brown Bear, What Do You See? is more popular in
Europe. What very few people know is
that throughout his entire life he has made art that was never intended for
public display, which he calls his “ArtArt.” It is this private and personal
work that makes up the bulk of the exhibit. It is mostly abstract paintings and
collages using acrylic paint and colorful tissue paper.
Among
the more interesting things to be seen is his “Name” art. When he writes to
close friends he often likes to embellish his notes with original art, and
often the way he does that is to write their names in colorful collage art.
There are quite a few of these in the show and they strike a balance visually
between his purely abstract work and his delightful children’s book
illustrations.
In
2001 he designed costumes and set designs for The Springfield Symphony’s
performance of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.” You can see some of the actual
costumes in this show along with sketches for his designs. In the process of
working on these he discovered a material called Tyvek, and he began making mural
size paintings on Tyvek using a broom and large paint brushes. Two of these
murals are on display at TAM, one of which he created especially for this show.
Early
in his career Carle experimented with combining linocuts and photography.
“Combining these two elements was an interesting graphic exercise for me,” he
says.
This
earlier experimentation with photography led to more recent photographic work
in which he zooms in on textures and details on streets.
There
are also some colorful little photographs that remind me a lot of Larry Poons’
optical paintings of circles and ellipses from the 1960s. (Does anybody
remember Poons? He’s a fascinating painter whose work deserves more attention
than it gets. But that’s another story.)
For
a radical departure from his brightly colored abstract works there are a lot of
linoleum block prints of animals and tea pots and a Conestoga wagon. These
prints are dark and simple and have an early Americana look. They were all done
in 1965 and are perhaps the most distinctive pieces among a number that
illustrate Carle’s wide range of style, media and ideas.
The
works I have mentioned here are but a few of the works to be seen in this
wonderful show that spans two of the museum’s large galleries.
My review of the Eric Carle exhibition will be published in the Weekly Volcano on Thursday, April 11.
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