My Turn

I am busy getting ready for my next two events. First up is the Tucson Open Studio Tour, this weekend. From 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. both Saturday and Sunday, 167 artists all over Tucson will open their studios to the public. You can download a combination calendar and map guide showing the locations of all the studios at the Tucson Pima Arts Council site or pick one up at various locations around town, such as libraries and galleries. I am taking a short stack to Flux Gallery tomorrow (actually later today), when I staff the gallery. Five of the Flux artists will be opening their studios: me, Maurice Sevigny, and, at the same shared studio, Bryan Crow, Steven Derks, and Peter Eisner.

If you want more info, the Arizona Daily Star had an article about the tour in its Sunday paper. If you forgot to get the paper or already recycled it, and you’re willing to register and login, you can read it online at azstarnet.com.

The studio tour gives you a chance to see how (or at least, where) your favorite artists work. My studio will, of course, be a lot cleaner than it usually is (although I can never entirely get rid of the sawdust), but you can see my equipment and my wood and learn about my process. You can also see my work, of course, including some in progress, especially pieces I am trying to finish before the following weekend, when . . .

. . . the Tucson Museum of Art holds its annual Holiday Artisans’ Market at the museum (140 N. Main Ave.). The show is open from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m., Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. You can find me in my usual spot, Booth 105, on the east side of the museum, catercorner from Old Town Artisans. This will be my last show of 2009, so after Thanksgiving I will finally get to finish laying the new floors in my house.

I just got a call from Phoenix Home and Garden magazine. It seems they like my work and are naming me one of their four Emerging Artists for 2010. This means a story and photos in their March issue. I will keep you posted.

As I get ready for the Big Brothers Big Sisters Southwest Flair A-Fair starting this Friday, I have been enjoying having a few days in the studio to make new vessels. Knowing my time was limited, I have focused on small vessels, which I always love. There is real sweetness in making things that just fit in a cupped hand. At the same time, I have been trying to finish a slightly more ambitious piece, a mesquite jar inspired by a revisiting of the classic book How to Wrap Five Eggs, about Japanese packaging. I am making a lid of shaped and dyed half-inch oak boards. As soon as the finish cures (which seems to be taking longer than expected—perhaps because of the dye I used—namely, Fiebing’s black leather dye), I will glue the handles to the lid and the vessel will be ready to go. The body of the jar is simple but handsome. I wirebrushed the exterior of the mesquite to give it an almost clay feel.

Ben McNitt of the Tucson Citizen just posted a piece on his “Artistic Tucson” blog about me. Please feel free to comment on the blog post—comments boosts readership, apparently. The item even appeared briefly on the msnbc.com Local News feed.

Whoa. Our opening at Flux Gallery on Friday night was overwhelming. We had hundreds of people come out, a constant crowd from 5 o’clock on. The crowd didn’t begin to thin until around 8:30, after the lovely string quartet had packed up and the food was down to crumbs. (Did people not realize we still had wine left?) No doubt the article that ran in the Arizona Daily Star Friday morning helped draw folks beyond our combined mailing lists.

People seemed enthusiastic about the artwork. We were certainly proud. If I can brag a little, the space looked great. Steven did a great job of hanging and displaying the work in a way that let each work both be its best self and complement the pieces surrounding it.
I didn’t take photographs, but you can see some of Karen’s shots here.

I just finished the three-day Patagonia Fall Festival and am proud to say that I won the Jury Award for the “best example of artistry or craftsmanship.” The show is in a pleasant venue and is well organized, with wonderful administrators and staff and good support for exhibitors, and I recommend it for artists and crafters with a lot of work under, say, $100. Unfortunately for me and others—and this may well just reflect the times we’re in—there didn’t seem to be a lot of high-end buyers in attendance. Even so, doing shows like this one is affirming. I received two of the highest compliments I have ever received for my work: One customer confessed to wanting to cry seeing my work; another said that being in my booth felt “like home.” Touching people in this way through my art is why I do this. Namaste.

Figuring out the nuts-and-bolts of operating the gallery is a process, for sure. After a couple of weeks of being open a few evenings per week, to try to catch dinner customers from the two restaurants at Plaza Palomino (Luna Bella and La Placita), we have decided to shift to days, in conformance with the majority of the other businesses in the plaza. We are having to adjust our individual schedules to accommodate the change, so we may be a bit irregular for a little while, but we are trying to have the gallery open now Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Every Saturday there is a farmers’ market at the plaza (with an increasing emphasis on art), so we want to be open then, as well as during special events, such as the upcoming Southwest Flair A-Fair, a three-day art and crafts festival sponsored by Big Brothers Big Sisters of Tucson. That will be October 30 through November 1. More on that as we get closer to it.

The official e-vite. Please join us for art, music, and goodies!

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.

It wouldn’t be a world without beauty, because—face it—we’re surrounded by more beauty in nature than we mortals could ever create.

And it wouldn’t be a world without creativity, because humans survive by solving problems, and solving problems requires creativity.

And we would still express ourselves, still communicate with one another, because that’s what humans do; it’s who we are.

So what would be missing?

Artists. The impulse to make art. The impulse to express . . . what?

Art is expression. Art is a particular and peculiar kind of communication. Through it, we express feelings and ideas, pose questions, articulate meaning. So how is art distinct from language?

Before language, before expression, art is a response. Art is a particular way of responding to the world, different from thought but partaking of thought, different from feeling but partaking of feeling. Art is a way to process and understand information coming to us from outside and inside of us, a means to connect perception and thought and feeling, to discern relationships hidden in the clutter of the mundane.

Art is how we interpret the world.

And art making begins the moment we clutch our first crayon.

Would we even know beauty without art? Imagine color as a mere signifier of information: this yellow fruit is ripe; those green berries will make you sick; snakes with red stripes kill. Imagine form determined solely by function or ease of production. Imagine being unmoved by color, impartial to shape.

Imagine indifference to proportion, balance, symmetry, line. Imagine rhythm doesn’t matter and melody as simply sound. Imagine your life without narrative. Try to understand anything without metaphor. Imagine yourself unadorned, your home undecorated. Imagine nothing inspiring you to song.

Imagining is an act of art.

Responding to beauty, to symmetry, to rhythm is in our DNA, and making art is a primal response to beauty. We collectively make art because we must. We don’t all agree on what art is, but we all are drawn to whatever we define it to be. I believe we all enter life with the impulse—and the capacity—to make art. If we are able to follow that impulse, we make art for ourselves; if that impulse is thwarted, we find art nonetheless. Artists or nonartists, we gather it and surround ourselves with it.

Art is so much a part of our daily scenery that we sometimes forget how much we value it.

We value it because it gives us pleasure. We value it because it brings beauty to our personal spaces—indeed, it makes personal the spaces we inhabit.

But beauty isn’t the only reason we make art. Art is how we make sense of ugliness, how we find meaning in loss, how we understand pain. Art is how we make sense of life.

And so we also value art because it enables us to see the world and ourselves differently. We value it because it lifts us out of our everyday struggle for survival. We value it because it seems to speak directly to us, reminding us of truths we otherwise tend to forget. We value it because it connects us, and reconnects us, to ourselves and to each other and to the world and to something bigger than the world.

Art is how we talk back to life.

For some of us, art is how we speak with the divine.

Art is the language of the soul. Art is the voice—no, the breath—of spirit.

Spirit is what we express through art.

And spirit is what we need more than ever in these dim, uncertain days.

So take a moment today to experience the art around you, in all its forms—painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, writing, music, dance, drama, film, video, architecture, furniture, craft, fashion, food, graphics, tattoos—however you define it for yourself. Take it in; receive its gifts; know its wealth.

Imagine a world without it.