State of the Arts Category Archive: Painting

Fighting graffiti with murals

Posted at 3:33 PM on September 28, 2009 by Marianne Combs (4 Comments)
Filed under: Painting, Public Art

In a wide alley of the Powderhorn Park neighborhood, artist Richard Barlow is almost finished painting a mural. It's not your typical brightly colored neighborhood pride statement. This mural is silver and white, and depicts the negative - and positive - of a photograph of trees on water. Barlow says he's been fascinated with how early photographers sought to be "painterly" in their images. Now Barlow's creating paintings inspired by those photographs.

This is Barlow's first attempt at a mural, and he's learned about some of the unique challenges painting outside can present (such as ants and other insects getting caught in your paint while it's still wet, or the risk of going snowblind working on a white wall all day).

Richard Barlow's particular type of art wasn't as easy to convert to a mural as he had originally imagined. Due to the particular types of chemicals in the paints he used, he had to apply the silver to the wall first, and then add the white afterward. He ended up projecting his original onto the building at night, to guide him in his painting.

Photograph by Jenny Jenkins

Ted Spears is the owner of Acme Awning, the building whose back wall is serving as Barlow's canvas.

"If I could afford to do it, I'd do it to the whole building," says Spears. Spears says he's had a huge problem with graffiti for a long time now, and he's hopeful the mural will deter would-be taggers.

The mural was the idea of Jenny Jenkins, Spears' back alley neighbor, and, conveniently, Richard Barlow's girlfriend. She didn't like seeing graffiti out her back window, and thought a mural might help the neighborhood. She managed to cobble together some funding with the local neighborhood association and a Minneapolis graffiti abatement grant.

Kari Neathery, executive director of the Powderhorn Park Neighborhood Association, says her neighborhood has installed a few of these murals over the past couple of years with great success. Sometimes the projects involve working with neighborhood kids, so that they take ownership of the mural and are less likely to deface it.

Ted Spears says what he likes about Barlow's work is it's not attempting to make a social statement - something he doesn't feel would be appropriate for his business. He says it's just good art, and he's pleased.

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Embrace Failare! (sic)

Posted at 2:32 PM on August 26, 2009 by Marianne Combs (0 Comments)
Filed under: Painting, Video

Watching one of John Kilduff's episodes of "Let's Paint TV" is like trying to watch three different episodes of "24" at the same time. He manages to keep a frenetic pace going as he simultaneously runs on a treadmill, paints, and talks about the process of painting. In addition each episode throws in a bonus activity; cutting his hair, making bizarre mixed drinks, or as in the above clip, eating a watermelon while painting a watermelon.

At first Kilduff's clips are annoying - it's hard to follow him, and he himself is distracted by all he's trying to do. Then it just seems absurd, and the humor begins to seep in through the manic urgency. Watch even further, and what you have is pretty brilliant. Kilduff manages to strip away any pretension around art and reduce it to its most primal creative essence. Don't worry about what you're doing - just do it! Take your mind off the importance of the work at hand, and make it an almost subconscious process. Ridiculous as it may first appear, what he's doing is performance art.

Kilduff is actually a trained painter, and curators are dubbing his work "action painting," a sort of plein air painting on speed. You can see the results of his painting-while-jogging here.

Now Kilduff is taking his show on tour (he's dubbed it the "Embrace Failare" tour) and his next stop is - you guessed it - right here in the Twin Cities. Let's Paint TV will tape an episode tomorrow night at Northwestern College at 6:30pm in St. Paul. In addition an exhibition of his work will be on display through October 3.

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Painting with sand

Posted at 4:01 PM on August 19, 2009 by Marianne Combs (0 Comments)
Filed under: Culture, Painting, People

Red Wing native Michael Augustin has been practicing the art of sand painting for nearly thirty years. While Augustin himself is not Native American he studied with Hopi and Navajo medicine men for five years.

"It was so fascinating to me and I saw a means of perhaps to dabble in it myself not as they do but as an expression of art. So I lifted it out of their tradition - any spiritual attachment I may make to it is my own. My purpose has never been to do an expose on sand painting and Native Americans. I look at the art as something that is mine."

Augustin grinds the sand himself, and uses very simple tools to execute his paintings. "Your hands are your paintbrush," he said in a recent phone conversation.

Augustin's usually asked to do a sand painting in conjunction with an event such as a seminar or conference. Once the work is done, he dismantles it. But in an unusual turn, Augustin has created a series of paintings which are on display at River Falls Public Library through September 4th.

While Augustin describes himself as a lover of computers and technology, you will have a hard time finding much information about him on the web. In fact, the images on this blog may be the only ones you find. He has purposely avoided creating a website, because, he says, his work is more about a certain time and place than about a lasting image.

In fact Augustin complains that people have become too dependent on technology as a sort of external memory storage, so that they don't take the time to truly study what's in front of them. He says if you find something beautiful, "Use your mind - hold it for a while."

Michael Augustin will give a free formal presentation, with a demonstration and talk on the spiritual significance of his paintings tomorrow (Thursday, August 20) at 7 p.m. in the River Falls Public Library's lower level community room.

Images courtesy of River Falls Public Library

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Opening Tonight: The Beautifully Grotesque

Posted at 12:14 PM on August 14, 2009 by Marianne Combs (1 Comments)
Filed under: Painting

Sylvia Ortiz explores the strange duality that many women endure, which is to say feeling simultaneously beautiful and ugly.

Ortiz' women often have missing limbs, or their arms and legs are twisted and contorted in uncomfortable positions. And yet they have pretty faces, are delicate and feminine, and for all their distortion, are still quite alluring.

Usually in the art world the beautiful and the grotesque are juxtaposed against one another for effect (think "Beauty and the Beast," the "Hunchback of Notre Dame," etc). But Ortiz mixes the two inseperably in the same image.

The result is an image which at first draws us in with its bright colors and seductive eyes, only to then make us question why we'd be drawn to something so disturbing.

An exhibition of Sylvia Ortiz' work opens tonight at Rogue Buddha in Minneapolis.

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Layers of meaning

Posted at 8:00 AM on August 14, 2009 by Marianne Combs (0 Comments)
Filed under: Painting, Public Art

Alexandre Farto paints on walls and then carves into them, turning them into three dimensional compositions. The exposed brickwork gives them an aged feeling. While watching the video of him working I found myself wincing as he chipped away at surfaces that he'd already beautifully painted. Why destroy something perfect? But what we might think of as finished is sometimes just a stopping point on a longer artistic journey.

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For your viewing pleasure: Women in Art

Posted at 1:00 PM on July 14, 2009 by Marianne Combs (1 Comments)
Filed under: Animation, Painting

This is not a new upload to YouTube, but still one I find captivating. Take a tour through 500 years of portraits of women, and notice the themes that emerge. There's the importance of the gaze, the only ever-so-slight smile, and the tilting of the head. Looks like those painters liked their women as elusive as they were beautiful...

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Celebrating Hmong artists

Posted at 8:41 AM on July 11, 2009 by Marianne Combs (0 Comments)
Filed under: Culture, Painting, Photography, Printmaking

Photographs by Pao Houa Her

Last night I attended the opening of a group show by Hmong artists at Homewood Gallery in North Minneapolis. The show has become an annual event, organized by the Hmong Arts Connection (HArc). It includes photographs, prints, paintings and drawings. Dyane Garvey is with HArc; she said HArc is trying to encourage artistic expression amongst Hmong people. In traditional Hmong culture art is incorporated into everday life, but is not necessarily respected as a career in its own right, she said.

Happy by Galea Vajxyooj

While at the opening I talked to John Kong, one of the artists. Kong is particularly skilled in animation, and used to dream of working for Disney. He said it took a long time to convince his parents that being an artist was worthwhile, but after he won several art competitions they changed their mind. Ultimately their support became extremely important in getting him through art school, Kong said.

Gao Zoua Pang by Kao Lee Thao

According to Dyane Garvey part of the goal of the HArc exhibition is to boost the work of Hmong artists within their own community. Last year she went door to door in the neighborhood, inviting families to attend the show. John Vang responded to the invite, and left a note saying how much the exhibition meant to him as an art student. This year, his work is on the walls.

White Trees in Autumn by Mai C. Vang

The exhibition also serves as a window into Hmong American culture and identity. In "White Trees in Autumn" by Mai C. Vang (seen above), Vang adds the following text to her painting:

Sometimes when snow covers everything in Minnesota I stare out my bedroom window and sigh. Childhood passes us so swiftly, fall becomes winter when we blink, oh I wish that I could always have white trees in autumn.

"New Directions in Hmong Art" will be on display at Homewood Gallery in North Minneapolis through July 31st.

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Icons for the Modern Age

Posted at 2:15 PM on June 25, 2009 by Marianne Combs (4 Comments)
Filed under: Painting

Painter Jessie DeCorsey has been fascinated with religious icons ever since she traveled to Greece and saw them everywhere, integrated into everday life. She says she wishes American culture had an equivalent source of inspiration that was as everpresent. So she created her own religious icons for today's youth. She says her goal is to make the actions of the saints seem more attainable by everyday people, no matter what their religion.

DeCorsey's paintings are currently on display at the Dunn Bros coffee shop next to Loring Park in Minneapolis.

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Your personal tour of a Pre-Raphaelite painting

Posted at 10:37 AM on June 10, 2009 by Marianne Combs (2 Comments)
Filed under: Museums, Painting

The Minneapolis Insitute of Arts new exhibition "Sin and Salvation: William Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision" opens this Sunday. While many people are drawn to pre-raphaelite paintings for their fair skinned beauties and Shakespearean settings, at the heart of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood was a moral narrative. According to MIA curator Patrick Noon, who was kind enough to give me a sneak peek of the exhibition, it was William Holman Hunt who stayed true to that moral vision more than any other of his peers.

Let's take Holman Hunt's classic work "The Awakening Conscience" (shown above). What's your first impression? We see a woman who's stood up from the lap of her suitor, and is looking out an open window - we can see the window in the reflection of the mirror behind her. But what else can we figure out about this story by looking closely at the image?

The biggest clue comes from looking at her hands. You'll notice that the young lady has rings on all of her fingers except one - her RING finger. That's right - she's single, and sitting in the lap of a young gentleman! Not only that, but the garment she's wearing is a sleeping gown. So we now know that this young woman is actually the man's mistress, not a young maiden he's courting for marriage.

Secondly, we're given some symbolism in the painting as well. Note the cat that's toying with a little bird. The cat's been distracted by something (probably the young woman standing up so abruptly), and the bird has a chance to escape. The position of the bird and the cat mirrors the position of the young man and his mistress. In essence, he's a cat toying with his prey, but she may have some hope of escaping him.

Finally, what's at the center of this painting? It's not the young woman's face, it's the view out the window - a view of natural beauty that makes the small apartment feel claustrophobic in comparison. In Pre-Raphaelite paintings, nature was often seen as a symbol of morality and truth. The natural world, in all its splendor, is calling to the young woman with an offer of redemption. Thus, the title: The Awakening Conscience.

There are plenty more symbols throughout the piece underscoring the main theme. And just as interesting as what's on the canvas is the story behind the painting. The model for the image of the young lady was actually Holman Hunt's own mistress, Annie Miller. Holman Hunt was hoping to convince Miller to leave behind her life as a mistress, and reform herself into a good woman of society he could marry with dignity. She didn't take to his idea of a good wife however, and they eventually broke up.

Image courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts

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