DARK MATTER

STRUCTURAL IMPRESSIONISM

By: Jack Winn 

Structural Impressionism is an interpretation of the hypothetical make up of our reality and the grand landscapes containing the mysteries of our cosmos. My work acts as a bridge between science and art. Science, in its quest for knowledge, has moved into abstract mathematics with transcendental numbers and infinities. The strength of my work lies in its ability to convey the reality of our universe – and its decision to hide from us. In an age where large populations never see the stars, never touch the earth, this work demands that you stop and feel.

In the world of astrophysics and the miniature world of quantum chromodynamics many systems are explored, some real some imagined. This work gives a picture of what these theories may look like. I have found with abstraction the freedom to paint the unknowable.

These paintings are not necessarily abstract however, as they represent aspects of our cosmic and quantum models, and the beginnings of our universe. We have a model called The Big Bang, which is a starting point that appears to be about 14 billion years old. It has been determined that after all of the star material has been added together there is not enough weight to produce the gravity necessary for this action to take place. In fact there must be more than 90% more matter. As we search the universe a gravitational signature is observed but not its source. Galaxies appear to be bent by an unseen gravitational pull. Astronomers can now observe large groups of stars in unusual shapes as if a force is acting upon them. The name dark matter has been given to the reason for this unseen force. Therefore no one knows what dark matter may look like or if it even exists.

We have a few pieces of the puzzle. They are what allow us to manipulate energy for nuclear power, lasers, focus microwaves, and construct integrated circuits. Yet, the essence of our existence and the nature of our reality remain mysterious. The Big Bang for example is being treated as fact but the theory has a major flaw. The artist asks, what about before The Bang? This is the question that disturbs me and drives my work. Fourteen billion years is not even a grain of sand compared with infinity. What was before? Can infinity exist? A googol is the number assigned to the total count of every atom in our universe. So start counting. Even if you do, infinity will still be there waiting. How to deal with this? My answer is to paint. These concepts intrigue me. If you add in ‘the problem of time’ the results are so bizarre we cannot comprehend them. The idea of infinity is thrown around in our mathematics in an odd way. Infinities that don’t seem to exist are just canceled out to balance the equations. It is called renormalization. A bit sketchy for me.

A recent and popular theory is called the M-Theory. The M stands for mysterious, or according to some scientists, “murky”. That is the true nature of our cosmos, mysterious. Also there are faster than the speed of light particles being observed. Something unthinkable fifty years ago. Some of these particles, neutrinos, are represented in this work by the Pollock-like drips. Neutrinos which have tachyonic properties are flowing through us constantly by the trillions. Tachyonic properties include an imaginary mass and the ability to go faster than light, but not slower. There may or may not be an interaction between these particles and dark matter, however there is in these paintings. The swirling graceful flow of the automotive paint contrasts with the heavy black oils, showing the dance between neutrinos and the dark matter. Small dots of paint blink in and out like extinguishing and birthing stars.

The paintings are unique in the use of oil, automotive and acrylic paints. These paints with their different solvent bases are applied in specific orders and several layers to create a surface that looks both wet and dry. The paints etch into one another and create a tension that is palpable. This gives the work an experimental look in keeping with the subject matter. They draw the viewer closer to see what is happening on the surface of the canvas. I want it to be difficult not to touch them.

The Formula Paintings or ‘Blackboards’, on paper, are actual mathematical formula concerned with nuclear fission, fusion, Pi, and M-Theory, among others. They are designed to replicate a university blackboard freshly marked by a physics prof. Underlying the formula is a sacred geometric construction in pencil. Then it is over written with chalky white oil paint to look like a palimpsest. They have then been fastened to the highway and run over by traffic for an hour or so. This has given each work a distinctive patina. Some have been set alight to give the feeling that mankind’s most precious knowledge has been ignored and discarded. These show the mathematics that underlie the vast concepts of the large scale paintings. Again there is a tension created in these works that mirrors the angst felt by the artist in grappling with the enormous concept of our creation and the reasons for our consciousness. I love the symbols in theoretical physics: the universe is forcing the left brained scientists to be artists in the very way that they represent the cosmos with numbers and Greek letters and other doo-dads. It makes me smile.

The third group of paintings in this exhibition are The Escapes. They are representative of the artists overpowering desire to know some answers to these consuming questions about our existence. They take the viewer to the other side of our known reality. Our cosmos is the yellow cage that we cannot seem to get out of, as if we are trapped by the limitations of our own minds.

I would dearly love for us to look at the wonders everywhere. Everything is a miracle. The purpose of my art is to set the viewer on a course of exploration and a quest for knowledge. The internet has opened up the world’s libraries to us all. We already have so many thought provoking concepts to think about. I view my art as a window to this other world.

When words fall short we must look for other means to understand our lives, and the mysteries of our reality. That is the purpose of art, music, imagination, the smell of freshly baked bread, or tea on the breath of your grandmother when she kissed you goodnight. In these paintings I offer intense emotions about time and existence, in the framework of current scientific knowledge.

Exhibition at Gallery Stratford open to July 12, 2015.
Join us June 18:  JOINT ARTIST TALK & DINNER @ MERCER HALL

Open Studio: Poses Inspired by the Golden Age of Children’s Illustration

Edmund Dulac, Cover for “My Day WIth the Fairies” 1913.

Tales of enchantment seem to well up from some source beyond time and space. However, the Wonder Tale as a literary form has concrete historic origins. Many of the fairy tales that still charm today have come to us through the writings of Charles Perrault from the seventeenth century.

No less enduring, but often more disturbing, are tales from German oral culture documented by the brothers Grimm at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Grimms’ systematic recording of stories from the oral tradition marks one of the first instances of the energizing of high, or at least middle-class culture, through the injection of primal folk material.

The beginning of the Golden Age of children’s illustration coincides with the translation of Grimm’s two volumes of German Popular Stories into English in 1823 and 1826. By the end of the nineteenth century, the celebration of the folk cultures of the world had become a popular passion. Turning folk culture into art seemed the only hope for the preservation of myth and tradition as societies everywhere succumbed to the homogenizing effects of industrialization. Ironically, the same industrial processes that were destroying the countryside and its traditions made it possible to widely distribute the art made in celebration of those same traditions.

The Golden Age of children’s illustration reached its apex with the production of lavish gift books made for the Christmas market. Incorporating every advance in printing technology, these books featured tipped-in colour plates, lavish endpapers and embossed, gold-stamped covers. The books gave artists an ideal forum in which they could bring art created on an intimate scale, most often in watercolour, to a wide public.

Gift books were at their most lavish between the years 1905 and 1914. After the end of World War I, the books, as objects, were never to regain their prewar richness. However the skills artist had developed during the glory days of the gift book remained undiminished. A great deal of fine illustration continued to be produced, until the death of most of the original artists and the coming of the Second World War, brought the Golden Age to an end.

Charles Robinson, The Frog Fetches the Golden Ball, watercolour,
from The Big Book of Fairy Tales, 1911.

W. Heath Robinson, “And make him with fair aegle break his faith.”
from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 1914.

Charles Robinson, “Playing in the wanton air”, watercolour,
fromThe Songs and Sonnets of William Shakespeare, 1915.

Charles and Heath Robinson, above, were brothers. Between them they they created many of the best-loved images of the Golden Age. In later years their style diverged. While Charles never abandoned his Art Nouveau inspired sleepy children and drooping poppies, Heath became a satirist of the contemporary scene in a manner that anticipated the absurdities of Monty Python.

Howard Pyle, The Mermaid, oil on canvas, not published, 1910.

The majority of the illustrators of the Golden Age were British, or lived in Britain. American Howard Pyle was a notable exception. Because his fame came from illustrating Arthurian tales, as well as the definitive retelling of the story of Robin Hood, he was at the centre of the revival of the European folk tale. It was not till the near the end of his life, however, that he actually made a trip to England.

Edmond Dulac, “Full fathom five”, watercolour, from Shakespeare’s Tempest, 1908.

Edmund Dulac was born in Toulouse, France, but spent most of his life in England. Although he was very much a part of the cultural fabric of his adopted country, even designing the stamp to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, something of the romanticism of Charles Perrault comes through in many of his illustrations.

Edmund Dulac, “Al Aaraaf” from The Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, 1912.

Arthur Rackham, A Sudden Swarm of Creatures, ink and watercolour,
from A Wonder Book, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1922.

More Teutonic is the best known and most prolific artist of the Golden Age, Arthur Rackham. In his autobiography, the famed art critic Sir Kenneth Clark writes that Rackham’s illustrations introduced him to the world of art, but he also remembers the pictures as being too intense for his young senses, causing him many sleepless nights.

Arthur Rackham,The Shipwrecked Man and the Sea, ink and watercolour,
from Aesop’s Fables, 1912.

For this Wednesday’s session of the Open Studio, our model will be taking poses inspired by the illustrations of the Golden Age. We will have a series of gestures in the first hour, two medium-length poses in the second and a single long pose in hour three.

As always, you are welcome to attend for whatever combination of times suits your schedule.

The fee for two hours is $10; for three, $15.

Hope to see you there!

~ Ken Nutt, Open Studio

Visit the Open Studio Website

Open Studio: The Poses of Gaston Lachaise

Right from its beginnings, Modern Art seems to have had a bad case of anorexia. Perhaps the artists involved felt an emaciated body better conveyed the emotional tenor of contemporary life.

Gaston Lachaise in his studio.

Not so for Parisian-born sculptor Gaston Lachaise (1882-1935). After having successfully finished his art education at the Écoles des Beaux Arts, the young artist was staring absently across the Seine when his attention was seized by a woman strolling, along with so many others, through the gardens lining the Champs-Élysées. He wrote later that he knew at that moment he had found his muse. He followed her, begged her to allow him to draw her portrait. A love affair that would last a lifetime had begun. The figure Lachaise had viewed from afar turned out to be an American woman of French Canadian origins. Her name was Isabel Dutaud Nagle. There were more than a few obstacles to her fulfilling the roll of the artist’s muse. Besides being a total stranger, she was ten years his senior and married. She was on vacation, soon to return home. And home was Boston.

Walking Woman, bronze, 1922.

However, whether through persistence or charm, or both, the young artist’s love was returned, so none of these impediments seemed insurmountable to the smitten Lachaise. To earn passage to Mrs. Nagel’s home city, Lachaise took a job with Rene Lalique designing Art Nouveau jewelry. Once in America, the penniless but skilled artist became an assistant to a sculptor of war monuments. He learned English. He absorbed the idiom of an emerging American Modernism. But mostly he revelled in the fulsome beauty of his beloved ‘Belle’. He wrote, “Through her, the splendour of life was uncovered for me”. Soon an inconvenient husband was dispensed with and conservative Boston was abandoned for woodland frolics in Maine.

Isabel in Maine, 1913; Standing Woman (1932) in the Milwaukee Museum of Art.

Standing Nude with Drapery, n.d.; Back of a Nude Woman, pen on paper, 1929.

Later came marriage, New York and fame. In New York, Lachaise refined the vision of ‘eternity and serenity’ his partnership with Isabel Dutaud Nagel had brought him. By enlivening the cool sleekness of Art Deco with the robustness of a particular living lady, Lachaise’s art caught the attention of American critics and delighted the public.

Elevation, bronze, cast 1927

In 1935 the Museum of Modern Art honoured Lachaise with its first retrospective awarded to a living sculptor. By this time the former Frenchman had come to be seen as one of the chief innovators of American Modernism. And all this without producing a single undernourished waif in bronze or plaster.

Floating Figure, bronze, 1927.

For this Wednesday’s extended session of the Open Studio, our model will be taking poses inspired by the artwork of Gaston Lachaise. The evening will start at 7pm and run until 10pm. We will have a series of gestures in the first hour, two medium length poses in hour two and a single long pose in the final hour. As always, you are welcome to attend for whatever combination of times suits your schedule. The fee for two hours is $10; for three $15. Hope to see you there!

~ Ken Nutt, Open Studio

Visit the Open Studio Website

Gathering Light with Janice Mason Steeves

I started planning my exhibition, Gathering Light, when I realized that it would take place during the darkest months of the year. I began to do some research to see if there were any myths or fables about gathering light in the summer and saving that light to give away in the darkest months.

Last fall I had the opportunity to go on a pilgrimage retreat on the island of Iona in Scotland.  It was on this island that St. Columba landed in 563 bringing Celtic Christianity into Scotland. The island they say is blessed.  On one hillock, legend has it that when Columba prayed each evening, angels were seen to come down to bless him. It’s called the Hill of the Angels. The Book of Kells was begun here but moved to Ireland when the island was invaded by Vikings. This luminous book is now on display at Trinity College in Dublin.

On the hill called Dun I, above the Abbey on Iona.

From Iona I went on to the Isle of Lewis to see the Callanish Standing Stones, a circle of stones,  that are oriented to a lunar cycle called the Lunar Standstill. It is hard to imagine that this stone circle was built 5000 years ago, over several hundred years, and that the builders oriented it to a lunar event that happened only once every 18 years.

The Callanish Standing Stones, Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides, Scotland.

The ancients knew about light. Light was sacred to them. Their stone circles and passage graves were oriented to the light—at solstices and equinoxes and Lunar Standstills. I decided to metaphorically gather some of that light—from Iona and from the Callanish Standing Stones—and bring it home to translate into paintings.

I’ve always had a fascination for light.  It’s what brought me to painting in the first place, when I started to paint in watercolour over thirty years ago. My work gradually moved from watercolour into oils. I continue to work in oil and I mix the oil with cold wax medium which gives some body and transparency.

I begin a painting not knowing where it will go, letting my intuition lead me. I apply oil paint in extremely thin, translucent layers that overlap each other like delicate panes of glass. I approach painting in a way that reflects my practice of meditation, where the mind becomes quiet. The surface is gradually built up layer by layer creating luminous colour fields that appear to vibrate. They are experiential surfaces that shift in different environments as lighting conditions and the viewer’s perspectives change.

Gathering Light 14 (1444) 60×60” Oil on canvas

Aquorthies Stone Circle, Aberdeenshire Scotland

Gathering Light 30 (1460) 60×144” Oil on Canvas

The Abbey on Iona.

I have been, in a sense, gathering light for years from sacred sites I have visited, passage graves I have sat inside and stone circles I have walked. As I prepared for this exhibition at Gallery Stratford, I couldn’t find any myths about gathering light to give away in the dark winter months. So I created this series of paintings as a visual myth.

Lough Crew Passage Grave, Ireland

The paintings are about the light I have collected from places of light.  And they are about giving that light away in the darkest months.

~ Janice Mason Steeves

Website: www.janicemasonsteeves.com
Exhibition at Gallery Stratford: to April 05, 2015

Open Studio: Life Drawing Inspired by the Art of Egon Schiele

For this week’s extended session of the Open Studio we will be having poses inspired by the life drawings of the Austrian artist Egon Schiele.

Schiele – Self Portrait with Striped Shirt (1910)

Born into a working class family in Lower Austria, Schiele was a shy child who drew constantly. Schiele did not do well at school. After losing his father at the age of fifteen, Schiele’s education was guided by an uncle, who, noticing the boy’s talent for art, allowed him a drawing tutor.

After passing through a couple of very strict art schools, Schiele sought out famous artist Gustave Klimt, a leader of the Viennese avant-garde. In Klimt, Schiele found a true mentor. The established Klimt encouraged the young artist, buying his work and arranging for exhibitions.

It would have been an unusual person who would have been able to get along with the odd and tempestuous Schiele, but Klimt was that person. The work of both the younger and older artist grew through their contact with each other.

Scheile’s portrait of his teacher Gustave Klimt, 1913.

Schiele was one of only a handful of artists to have elevated life drawing from a form of study to an art in and of itself. He did this through a precocious ability to juggle elements of rendering, design and expression simultaneously.

Usually when drawing from the living figure, an artist is so focused on ‘getting it right’ that the design of the sheet, the relationship of marks and paper to each other, go unconsidered.

But not with Schiele. For him placement was primary. Moving with ease between observation and abstraction, Schiele was able to take his teacher Klimt’s decorative innovations in composition and invest them with psychological depth.

Allied to his attention to the position of the figure on the paper, was Schiele’s interest in pose. Although Picasso, working in the advanced artistic milieu of Paris, was more radical in his re-ordering of the figure as he drew, Picasso did not come near to Schiele in exploring the expressive power of pose itself.

Schiele’s innovative exploration of the model’s pose highlights the great contribution made by models in the creation of art. The inward-looking Schiele did not arrive at the distinctive poses characteristic of his art on his own. Rather, it was his friendship with the dance team of Erwin Osen and Moa Mandu that awakened Schiele to the expressiveness of movement.

Schiele found the extravagant duo entrancing. Although he was primarily a linear artist, Schiele was inspired by Moa Mandu’s daring sense of style to create some of his most painterly work.

Moa’s dance partner and life-mate Erwin Osen was a mime. When the outrageous, out-going cabaret performer posed for Schiele, it  must have seemed to the artist as if his intense, suppressed emotions  had found their external form. He was to use the vocabulary of movement he picked up from the mine in most of his later works, many of them self-portraits.

Self Portrait Squatting (1916) Self Portrait (1917) The Dancer (1915)

Schiele’s life was as short as it was tumultuous. By 1918, he had been celebrated, reviled, jailed, conscripted, and survived a world war. He was newly married and about to be a father when the deadly Spanish flu swept through Europe. Klimt succumbed first. Then Schiele’s wife, Emily. Schiele died three days later. He was twenty-eight.

But he left a great legacy. In his few short years Schiele brought the decorative style of artwork from the late nineteenth century into the twentieth, laying the groundwork for Expressionism. His  public display of the personal, the painful and sometime juvenile, has become the norm in the twenty-first.

---

For this week’s extended drawing session our model will be taking poses inspired by Schiele’s drawings.

This Wednesday’s session will run from 7-10pm with a series of short poses in the first hour, two medium-length poses in the second, and a single, long pose in hour three.

As always, you are welcome to attend for whatever combination of times works for your schedule.

The fee for two hours is $10; for three, $15.

Hope to see you there!

~ Ken Nutt, Open Studio

CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE OPEN STUDIO WEBSITE

A Conversation of a Continuously Arriving Present Moment

Time. It is measured by a clock and calendar. It represents all instants, manifests all moments. It is the thing by which we measure our lives. We both remember past time and hope for future time. Yet we can only be present in present time. The true power of existence is in each moment arriving, each instant renewing, each second of potential activation, intervention, and choice that is embedded in each ‘now’. It is the eternal union between ghosted past and mystic future – the hot and potent seed of human action, volatility, hope, reticence, and delivery.

It is a ‘conversation across a dark ground’.

Ann Beam, Conversation Across a Dark Ground

Ann Beam’s exhibition Continuously Arriving Present Moment alludes to themes of eternalism and inhabits a realm of inherent optimism. Her ruggedly constructed monumentally scaled works with draped, stapled, and falling bark on torn, tattered, painted, decorated, stacked, and smudged cardboard layers are anything but less than extraordinary in their spiritual hopefulness and astonishing in their insubordination to conventional art media. They are seductively constructed paradoxes of nature and man – self and universe – time past and present. Remarkably, the works transfix in the moment of arriving, unchained from their own material incarnations, transcendent of their own proportionality, despondent to their fixed essential properties. As such, you are invited to experience the exhibition in this indeterminate and delirious flux of each arriving new present moment.

In this ‘conversation across a dark ground’, “Imagination is More Important Than Knowledge”, “New Vision Equals New World”, and “Connection is the Reason for Confidence.” This conversation takes place in writing and hand signs around a deep blue arc of the world that scintillates on a dark plane of these poetic words arriving against cardboard interruptions that bear advertising for a battery powered vehicle, recycling, or Made in Canada items. It’s a prolific moment at each encounter in the conversation as a tense and exciting relationship between the elevated universal and the base rudimentary unfolds and harmonizes, contrasts and collaborates.

Ann Beam, Universal/Transversal

 

Mystery Into the Light and Universal Transversal show vigour and movement. Horses running, paint splattering off their painted legs. Hand prints suggesting human traces, a Hershey ChipIt ad appearing to offer some kind of sweet sustenance, and words that read “your gear has arrived.” You feel that indeed perhaps your gear has arrived with all the tantalizing bits you’re offered on inspection. The momentum of the horses running is powerful and you can see that they’re running directly towards our ‘conversation across a dark ground.’ Continually propelling towards it, moving in with their caravans of soul-clad symbolism laid out in patterns in their atmospheric and elusive landscapes.

Anchoring the other side of this conversation is Earth Incorporated. It looms and swirls with sensual typhoons of cast-off matter against a beautiful, painterly world globe. Glad, Harley Davidson, Ritz, McCain, Dare, Canada Dry, Hudson Bay, Tim Horton’s, and Chapmans all appear within the turning, elegant gyrations of paint. They are not necessarily mere malicious remnants of waste however; in fact they are probably more like outposts in the conversation about the present moment. They represent the turning of times, cultural accumulations, visions that created a new world of incorporation – one that will be disenfranchised and created new again. Anchored at the bottom of Earth Incorporated is a wristwatch with its face painted over with white. You can’t tell the time or know when time stopped. In fact time has perhaps been deleted. It’s been removed from our repertoire. We are left at sea in our own existence, running like the horses wildly towards a deeper understanding of the conversation of the present moment.

Conversation in front of Earth Incorporated (Ann Beam)

The image of the horse appears again in Hokusai Watching and most significantly in her iconic work At the Horse Washing Waterfall where long strands of birch bark fall in place of water and curl into swirls and waves at the bottom of which appears an image of the horse being washed by the artist. This is perhaps a symbol of artistic and spiritual renewal as the ever-arriving water falls and flows and they wash themselves in each new moment of its advent.

Gareth Lichty, Patrick Cull, Ann Beam, Aidan Ware in front of At the Horsewashing Waterfall

The waterfall provides a powerful anchor for the exhibition, for thinking about time. The title piece Continuously Arriving Present Moment is a graphic stylization of the waterfall that contains thoughts written out in poetic stanzas.

“Moving

Repleneshing
Blance_ing
What ever

Is
Without Asking

Freely

Given
You
Brought

Your

Self

Here”

Ann Beam, Continuously Arriving Present Moment

 

Next to this is the most recent work completed by Ann Beam titled Time Traveller 2, another monumental work of corrugated boxes. In this piece you experience three different versions of a figure rising out of a mystic white landscape, each at different stages of materialization and arrival. The arrows below each figure point upward and the third, most realized figure, stands over arrows that both point up and point down, alluding to the cycles of time and restitution. The figure is a self-portrait of Ann – a beautiful homage to her own continuous invention of herself as an artist.

It is perhaps then that we realize that we did bring ourselves here. That like Ann, like the horses, like the waterfall, we are constantly in a conversation of a continuously arriving present moment where each encounter is new and new again.

~ Aidan Ware, Director & Curator

Open Studio: West Meets East Meets West

“Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”
-The Ballad of East and West by Rudyard Kipling, 1889.

This statement wasn’t true when Kipling wrote it in 1889, and it certainly isn’t true today. In fact, he penned his somewhat jingoistic statement so that he could refute it in the seldom quoted final two lines of the stanza – “But there is neither East nor West, Borders, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!”

The cultures of East and West have been influencing each other as long as people have been able to walk out their front doors, and sometimes with quite notable results. While doing commerce with the Roman Middle East in the 2nd to 6th century C.E., South Asian traders from the Upper Indus river area and Kabul acquired a taste for Hellenistic art. They were Buddhists, but when it came to decorating their temples, they hired sculptors from the Roman Empire, creating the Gandhara style that was to influence the rest of Asia. In the hands of these sculptors, the Buddha took on the classical beauty and buff physique of the Greek gods. Putti and acanthus leaves abounded. In some sculptural groupings, the gentle Buddha was protected by an accompanying Hercules.

Top: Head of Artemis, 2nd cent. CE, Monumental Head of Buddha, stucco, 1-5 c. CE, Head of Buddha, limestone, 4-5th c. CE. Bottom: Apollo Belvedere, marble, c. 120 – 140 CE, After Leochares, copy of bronze original, Gandhara Bodhisattva, schist, 2nd-3rd cent.

 

Album Cover, Axis: Bold as Love, 1967. photographer Kal Ferris, artist, Roger Law

As beautiful as these statues are in monochrome, it is important to remember that, when they were new, all of them, including the examples from Greece and Rome, would have been brightly coloured. In the West, for many of us of a certain age, first contact with the art of South Asia came in the form of a record cover for the LP Axis: Bold as Love by The Jimi Hendrix Experience. When this record was released in 1967, the Beatles were studying with the Maharishi in India, George Harrison had taken up the sitar, and all things Indian were considered hip.

It was the record executives, not Hendrix, who commissioned the cover. In it, a western artist has superimposed the faces of the members of the band over a mass-produced poster of a popular Indian painting, the Viraat Purushan-Vishnuroopam: Viraat Purushan – Vishnuroopam, print after painting. Hendrix was not particularly happy with the cover, because his music had nothing to do with the music of India. He would have preferred cover art that reflected his own Native American and African heritage. It remains, however, the image most often associated with him.

The use of the Viraat Purushan-Vishnuroopam for an rock cover may seem like cross-cultural plundering, but the kind of religious chromolithograph, often displayed on calendars, on which the cover image was based had its origins in the West.

The tradition of hanging paintings, prints and calendars on the wall was not indigenous to India. It was introduced by the British during their occupation of the sub-continent. The first artist to adapt Indian motifs to the popular print was Ravi Varma (1848-1906), painter to the royal household of the Travancore state of Kerala. After mastering the western technique of painting in oils, he set up one of the first lithographic presses in India. He was then able to produce domestically the calendars that previously had of necessity been printed in Germany.

Top: Vishnu, calendar print, Suryaand Devi, calendar print. Bottom: Film Still, The Bollywood Spongebob Extravaganza, 2009.

The most recent form of cultural hybridization to gain wide popular attention are the films of Bollywood. In its films, the Mumbai based Hindi cinema has been able to keep alive the light-hearted spirit and zany singing and dancing of the American musicals of the 1930s and 40s.

For this week’s extended session of the Open Studio, our model will be taking poses inspired by the art of India.

The evening will run from 7pm to 10pm. We will have short poses in the first hour, two medium-length poses in the second hour and a single long pose in hour three.

The fee for two hours is $10; for three, $15.

As always, you are welcome to attend for whatever combination of times works for you.

Hope to see you there!

~ Ken Nutt, Artist

Visit the Open Studio website – Click Here.

 

Open Studio: Dressing & Undressing

Berthe Morisot, The Bath (Girl Arranging Her Hair), 1885-86.

Wednesday, April 9, we will be having a second evening of poses inspired by the intimate art of the Impressionists.

The evening will start at 7:00 and run until 10:00. Our model will be taking short poses in the first hour, medium poses in hour two and a single, long pose in hour three.

As always you are welcome to attend for whatever combination of times suits your schedule. The fee for two hours is $10; for three, $15.

Hope to see you there!

~ Ken Nutt, Artist

Click here to visit the Open Studio website.

 

Open Studio Drawing: Poses from Pinups

Artwork by: Alfred Leslie Buell (1910–1996)

This Wednesday, April 2, we will be having an extended evening of life drawing, with our model Caitlin taking poses inspired by the pinup artists of the 40s, 50s and 60s. ‘Pinup Art’ gets its name from its usual mode of display – not as framed original paintings, but as prints, often clipped from magazines, pinned to walls in military barracks, high school student bedrooms, or on garage office calendars.

As with many forms of art, the Pinup was seen as beneath serious consideration until changes in society and technology made it an artifact of the past. In what Marshal McLuhan called ‘the rear window effect’ Pinup Art is now mined for its cultural significance; original paintings and drawings are avidly collected.

Alfred Leslie Buell (1910–1996) was born in Hiawatha, Kansas and attended the Art Institute of Chicago. Barred by the draft from entering active service in World War II, he spent the 40s painting popular and patriotic pinups for the calendar company Brown & Bigelow. In the post-war period, he worked for Esquire Magazine.

This extended session of the Open Studio will run from 7:00 to 10:00 pm. We will have short poses in the first hour, medium poses in hour two, and a single long pose in the final hour. As always, you are welcome to attend for whatever combination of times suits your schedule.

The fee for two hours is $10; for three, $15. Hope to see you there!

~Ken Nutt, Artist

Visit the Open Studio webpage here.

 

Time, Memory, Place, Journey

The image starts as one. A flame dances, a shuffling beat rises. There’s a door and through it emerges a smoky train driving, evaporating into a mythic light. A soundtrack of unknown yet familiar sonancy plays, chugging like the heart of the train towards some equally unknown yet familiar destination. The screens multiply to a three-way and we are on that journey, captivated by a narrative that hints and dives, reveals and dissolves, mirrors, plays at shadows. A man pushes a test button, children smile, birds fly, soldiers march, drips of water fall shattering silence in a time-forgotten train shop, and a monumental black locomotive devours the screen in a dramatic eclipses of pure white daylight. The soundscape becomes a riot and then runs softly delirious as the scenes flip and shift, becoming contained by digitally sculpted wheels and then pushed beyond visual limits. You are on the train moving, you are off the train watching, you are on the tracks walking, you are alone in the warehouse waiting…

This exhibition, Train Dreams, not only evokes a certain vulnerability related to our human existence, it also offers up a challenging visual expression of memory through film.

Sometimes concurrent exhibitions are extremely divergent in their curatorial premise, but our spring exhibitions actually choreograph a larger whole. Carolyn Riddell’s exhibition Raw Footage pushes “past the boat of time” towards a similar distillation of the ephemeral. Riddell’s exhibition is composed of physical things – fabrics and threads and paint and nail polish – and yet they are intangible as metaphors, allusions to time, memory, and place. “Past the boat of time”  we stand beyond all worldly trappings, beyond endemic borders, transported through intense iterations of colour into the depth, within the pulsing oceanic wake, of utterly spiritual transmissions.

Two completely different visual installations, two completely different mediums, yet these exhibitions offer a beautifully serendipitous holistic harmony.

Time, memory, place, journey.

Resonance.

~ Aidan Ware, Director & Curator

Train Dreams and Raw Footage open at Gallery Stratford on Sunday, April 13 from 1pm to 3pm (free to join). The exhibitions run until July 6, 2014.