My Turn

The spring Tucson Artists’ Open Studio Tour is coming up again next weekend, March 13 and 14. I will be here from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., so please come by and see what I’ve been up to (and get first dibs!). I may even have some work in progress on the lathe, as I’m busy getting ready for the Spring Artisans’ Market at the Tucson Museum of Art at the end of March. I’m especially trying to finish some mesquite vessels with stone inlay.

You can find all the details about the tour, including a complete list of participating artists and maps of the studio locations, online at the tour’s website or in the current issue of Zócalo magazine. (This “Tucson Urban Scene Magazine” is worth hunting down; read it online or find it at various locations around town.) Fellow Flux artists Steven Derks, Peter Eisner, and Maurice Sevigny will also be opening their studios.

My fellow gallery collective member Bryan Crow is on television! Arizona Public Media has made a short video about Bryan, his art and his backstory. Check it out online, and share it with your friends.

Nine of us Tucson artists have responded to the current economy by banding together and starting a gallery of our own. We’re calling the gallery Flux, to emphasize its changeable, fluctuating, fluid nature, and we have acquired space in Plaza Palomino, at the southeast corner of Swan and Fort Lowell Roads. We have our first show pretty much installed, though we’re still tweaking which pieces are placed where, and we’re preparing for our grand opening on Friday, October 16, 5–9 p.m. There’s a wonderful of variety of work to be seen, and we’re hoping to have a big crowd to help us celebrate. In addition to the art, we’ll have wine, water, appetizers, and music from a string quartet, so please mark your calendars and join us.

We’re a diverse and talented group that includes painters, sculptors, photographers, mixed media artists, and me! Here is who we are:

Carol Ann: After eight years of painting semirealistic expressive watercolors, Carol began to experiment with collage, acrylic, and a more abstract style. This new nonobjective evocative approach anchors her work and has become her passion. Worldwide travel and the American Southwest, where she lives, continue to be her primary influences and inspiration. She loves the labor-intensive layering of paint and paper as she mines and refines her work to represent the concepts and the heart of the places her paintings represent.

Lee Roy Beach: Throughout his forty years as a research psychologist, Lee studied, among other things, the neurological and experiential aspects of visual perception: how the mind creates visual representations of environmental events from partial and unreliable sense data. He found that this act of creation makes the representation both meaningful and compelling to the observer. As a result, he strives to avoid dictating the observer’s experience, providing only enough visual data for the observer to create his or her own artistic experience, thereby inviting participation in the creation of the work itself. The goal is for the observer to have an artistic experience that is both intellectually and emotionally stimulating and that is unique to him or her. He has been painting since the late 1950s but began his art career in the mid-1990s and has exhibited work in numerous shows and galleries.

Bryan Crow: Bryan says this about his work: “I feel compelled to draw or paint every day. I try not to judge or filter what comes out; instead, I try to learn what I am going through, by letting go. Oftentimes I paint patterns and designs to get the creative process started. I enjoy making something concrete and meaningful out of the random mix of words and pictures that come to mind. When I watch my thoughts and pick out spiritual, psychological, meaningful, and arbitrary words, phrases, and ideas, I begin to put the puzzle together that results in the final image. When I put meaning to all that runs through my mind, I put meaning to my life.”

 
Steven Derks: Finding and collecting curiosities in thrift stores and junkyards is a lifelong preoccupation and a passionate experience for Steven, rather like going to church. Three or four times a month, he visits one of Tucson’s four junkyards. Steven walks around alone, looking at the forlorn piles of bent, twisted and rusted metal lying all over the place. Now things start to happen very fast; everywhere he looks he begins to see metal transformed into finished sculptures. Most of his sculptures are conceived right there in the scrap metal yards, where he finds both the vision and the ingredients for his work. Most of the time, during one visit, he is able to locate all of the actual metal parts that will be necessary to complete many sculptures, but occasionally an exciting piece of rusted metal will languish in his studio yard for months, waiting for the day he will find the piece or pieces that are missing.

Karen A. Dombrowski-Sobel: After a 15-year career as a designer in large New York City architectural firms, Karen turned her lifelong hobby of fine art photography into a new profession. That was twenty years ago. Having developed and printed her own black-and-white work for many years, she started selling her work in galleries in New York, the Hamptons, Sag Harbor, and Carmel. In addition, she created fine art portraits for many NYC and Long Island clients. Being a painter early in life, she used those skills first in her hand-painted black-and-white photos and, more recently, in the digital work she creates with Photoshop. She moved to Tucson in 2005, after traveling around the country for a year. She is concerned with environmental issues, and her recent work centers on the landscape, and trees, in particular. Her wish is to create with her work an intimate relationship between the viewer and the subject, to inspire more thought and care for our wildlife and natural habitat.

Peter Eisner: Peter currently has his studio at 801 North Main in Tucson. His work includes both freestanding metal sculpture and woven metal wall pieces. Peter’s work is currently being shown in Tucson at Gallery 801, the gallery at the restaurant Elle, Flux Gallery, and Art Marketplace.

 
 
Maurice Sevigny: Maurice is originally from Massachusetts, where he majored in art education, ceramics, printmaking and painting at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the Ohio State University. He taught studio art and arts education at Western Kentucky University, then served as the director of the School of Art at Bowling Green University (1977–1986). He was department chair and Marguerite Fairchild Centennial Professor of Art at the University of Texas at Austin (1986–1991). Since 1991, he has lived in Tucson, where he served as dean of the College of Fine Arts at the University of Arizona for 18 years. He did postgraduate studies at Harvard University and completed a summer residency internship in figurative realism and painting at the La Napoulle Foundation, in the south of France. In 1998, he completed a sabbatical teaching and studio art research residency at the Rohampton Institute, London, England. He has exhibited frequently and his paintings are in many private and corporate collections.

Shirley Wagner: Born in Youngstown, Ohio, Shirley obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Youngstown State University and lived in New York City before moving to Tucson in 1983. She now resides with her husband and three sons in the Tucson desert, about which she says, “What appears at first to be harsh and desolate terrain carefully reveals a partnership of dynamic forces working together to survive. I am inspired to create a living plane to chronicle the harmony of these extremes.” She was a visual arts specialist in Tucson’s public schools before dedicating herself full-time to her wood assemblage work. Shirley was nominated for the Arizona Governor’s Art Award in 2006, in recognition of her contribution to the arts. She has been featured in various local publications, including the Arizona Daily Star and Tucson Lifestyle, and her work is in various private collections throughout the United States and Germany.

 
Lynne Yamaguchi (me!—pardon the third person . . .): Seven years ago, acting on a gut feeling, Lynne quit her career as an editor and book designer to become a woodturner—giving notice at her job before she even knew how to turn. Now an internationally known turner, Lynne uses traditional lathe techniques to create nonutilitarian, sculptural vessels that are deeply informed by her Japanese heritage. In 2007, she was a fellow in the International Turning Exchange, an annual eight-week residency sponsored by the Wood Turning Center in Philadelphia. She has demonstrated and taught woodturning techniques across the country and sells her work through galleries and art shows, and online.

The Collectors of Wood Art (CWA) held their annual forum in Scottsdale this weekend, and I was able to drive up for some of the Saturday sessions.

I first got to see a panel discussion chaired by sculptor Connie Mississippi, with sculptor-carver Susan Hagen, turner Merryll Saylan, turner Virginia Dotson, and furniture maker and artist Wendy Maruyama. The theme was place, and each artist presented images of places and work inspired or informed by those places.

Susan Hagen focused on a series of ten dioramas (Recollection Tableaux) she created for the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, depicting aspects of life in the prison throughout its history.

Merryll Saylan talked about home and community as place. Some of her pieces had domestic themes; some were more broadly influenced by her environment (e.g., changing color palettes), neighborhood (urban, industrial), and community (family, friends).

Virginia Dotson focused on the geology and cultures of the American Southwest, showing images primarily from Canyon de Chelly. As a desert dweller myself, I have always loved her geologic layered work, and I was interested to see that her new work incorporates painted petroglyph and petrograph motifs.

Wendy Maruyama touched on the World War II Japanese-American internment camps in the United States but focused mainly on inspirations from visits to Japan and China. Her incorporations of hentai images from Japanese pornographic comics and iconic images of Godzilla were particularly amusing. She has also begun using digital video in her work, such as a video of an Asian woman (her sister) applying “dragon lady” makeup, seen through a two-way mirror in a piece.

After a break, the forum continued with digital-image or slide presentations by various artists, emphasizing future work.

I first discovered the exquisite naturalistic carvings of Janel Jacobson this summer in the collection of Fleur Bresler. Janel showed the progression of her work from relief carving in clay to the fully dimensional wood carvings she now does, and she shared some of her specific techniques. The detail in her work is astonishing.

Turner Dewey Garrett’s work always interests me. He is always exploring fresh ideas, informed by his background as an engineer. He has now built himself an ornamental-turning system, but he’s not content to stick with traditional rose engine patterns; he has written software for himself that enables him to create patterns on the fly.

Sculptor Michael Peterson is continuing to explore organic shapes and textures in his work. I find his work irresistible.

Sculptor Jack Slentz is playing with Swiss cross and gear and star shapes, and complementary pieces combining positive and negative shapes. He is also using new materials: stitched rubber and street signs.

Kerry Vesper, furniture maker and sculptor, is carving wave or flying-banner forms and blossom forms in plywood. He is also playing with collaborations with glass artist Alisha Volotzky.

Todd Hoyer and Hayley Smith say they haven’t been making a lot of art recently, because for the last three years they have been engaged in building their studios and a house. Their joint presentation was about just that process. It was particularly interesting to see how the process reflects their approach as artists; for example, the floor of Hayley’s studio is essentially a sample board of colors and textures they were testing for use in floors in their house.

After the presentations, I spent a couple of hours savoring the del Mano Gallery exhibition set up in the conference center. They had multiple pieces from some four or five dozen artists. I haven’t taken so many photos since the ITE. I would share some with you, but I think del Mano would prefer that I not. You can see a lot of work at their web site, however, so check it out.

Going to the forum also gave me the chance to say hello to some friendly faces I met through the ITE this summer: Elisabeth Agro, Albert and Tina LeCoff, Steve Keeble and Karen Depew, Arthur Mason, Joe Seltzer. Brief though my visit to the forum was, it really makes me want to get back to the work I’ve been distracted from by moving and shows and holidays and new toys. I have so many pieces just begun or even just sketched out that draw and build on my ITE experience. That’s the work that excites me most, but, alas, it must yet wait for another few weeks, until after my next show. It must wait because it requires space, psychic space, birthing space. In the meantime, I think about it, dream about it, plan it, work out the details. It gestates in me.

On the way back from the Esherick Museum, we stopped by the studio of a furniture maker that Peter knows, Brad Smith, of Bradford Woodworking. He makes furniture from turned axe handles, croquet mallet handles, pitchforks, and more, and he has two 100-year-old-plus lathes to do his turning.

This belt-driven lathe duplicates the form installed in the foreground. By using a set of dado blades as the cutter, Brad gets the ridge pattern characteristic of the axe handles he uses in his furniture.

As we were preparing to leave Brad’s place, Jean-François noticed the red dirt bared by an excavator and collected some to try in a finish.

Text to come.

Mark has a Oneway with two bed extensions, allowing him to turn pieces up to 13 feet long. The farthest extension runs under the table in the background.

Mark does a lot of off-center and inside-out turning. Here is a sample he has turned with the two halves still joined. For those who don’t know, inside-out turning involves joining two pieces of wood, turning them, separating them, reversing them by putting the two outside faces together, rejoining the pieces, and turning them again. Mark further complicates the shape by offsetting the centers he uses to turn each face.

Mark is also well known for turning pieces that appear to be bent. This is an example of the blank he uses to turn such shapes, next to the kind of shape it will yield. The trick is to cut the blank and mount it as shown in the second photo below.

Mark keeps on hand a lot of samples to help him recreate forms.

Mark showed us how he uses a mirror to simulate the absent opposite leg of a model for a piece of furniture.

Mark has many beautiful turned and other wood art works in his home, some his own work, others by fellow turners and furniture makers.

The highlight of our visit was a fruit salad Mark made for us, a creation for which he seems to be known. He told us that one year he had a card made with a photo of such a salad (but even more elaborate), clearly identified as a “kitchen creation,” and sent it out. The first five or so recipients called him asking him about the availability of the piece, assuming it was wood! He says he wishes he could create a piece that looked so realistic!

The salad was very refreshing, perfect for a steamy summer day. Peter, of course, couldn’t resist playing with his plate.

Today, we visited the studio of famed furniture maker George Nakashima in New Hope, PA, where his daughter, Mira, continues to make furniture in the same tradition. Mira began our tour by telling us about her father’s life and work.

The first building we visited was the wood barn, filled with enormous slabs of wood cut from whole trees and stacked together for drying in the sequence in which they were cut from the log. Mira explained the challenges of storing, keeping track of, and accessing the wood, much of which is stored for many years.

Many slabs were marked in chalk with customer names, measurements, cut lines, and other information.

This dining set was in a residence built by Nakashima in the early 1970s.

What is known as the art building is also the home of the Nakashima Foundation for Peace.

The silver appearance of the table edges in this photograph is caused by the camera flash. The edges are actually the dark, barkless natural surface of the trunk.

Notice how the concrete wall at the top of the stairs follows the same line as the right edge of the stairs.

I liked the way the stairs looked viewed sideways just as well.

The loft in the art building held samples of many types of chairs.

Jean-François enjoyed speaking French with Kevin Nakashima, who learned it in high school from a native French speaker.

The pond outside the showroom had very vocal frogs among the water lilies. I thought their croaking was some sort of squawk from a walkie-talkie until I squatted down and looked.