Printmaking Camp

Day 2.

Days 3, 4

Day 5 
Day 6
Coda: The Pull exhibition in Atlanta
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This week I’m at Connecticut College in New London working on a print project developed by Marcia Wood and Tim McDowell. Marcia owns the Atlanta gallery that bears her name, and Tim, one of her artists, is head of the printmaking department here. There are six of us making the prints, all of us represented by the Marcia Wood Gallery: Kim Anno, San Francisco; Kate Javens, New York City; Don Pollack, Chicago; Katherine Taylor, Atlanta; plus Tim, who lives in Noank near the college; and me..

A view of the printmaking studio at Connecticut College, with Clara Euam, printmaking studio assistant, in the foreground. Background from left: Lucas McDowell, Ellen Barnard and Brown Sanders

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We’ve gathered to produce a portfolio of six prints in an edition of 30. I’m excited about the project because I’ve never done anything like this (and neither have most of my colleagues, painters all). Fortunately we have two master printmakers, Tim and his father-in-law, Brown Sanders) and Tim’s studio assistant, Clara Euam. Filmmaker Ellen Barnard is producing a documentary of the project for Tomorrow Films, her Atlanta-based company, with her cameraman, Lucas McDowell. I’ll have links and info as the project progresses.
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The ‘Print Project”—still unnamed but dubbed "Printmaking Camp" by my buddy Nancy Baker in a Facebook conversation-- had its inception a couple of years ago when Tim suggested to Marcia that his print room was available in the summer. "I thought it would be a great opportunity to bring six strong artists together to do their signature work in a new medium and process," says Marcia. So after about a year of planning, we’ve flown, driven, trained and bused our way here.

Day 1Everyone’s working on their plate, or the drawing or transparency for their plate. There's a lot of consulting with Tim and with one another. We're making color swatches and proofing the plates. Take a look:

 Kate Javens with drawings.

Don Pollack with transparencies he made from paintings and photographs. He's the only one of us who arrived with the requisite images; the rest of us scrambled to produce our images when we arrived.

Kim Anno working her transparency over the light table. Her print will be the first to be editioned tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Katherine Taylor worked on this transparency drawing all day, but she was the first to have completed proof, which you'll see tomorow (I'm writing a bit after the fact because I needed to work on my own transparency and plate.).


I made transparencies from a unique digital print, which is an ink-and-paper variation of an image from my series of Silk Road paintings. All of us had to get over the hump of thinking like painters. "You're making prints," said Tim McDowell. I'm still learning how to do that.

Tim and Clara made Tim's edition of 30 before we arrived, because he's spending all of his time this week helping each of us

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Tim consulting with Kate.


Tim consulting with Katherine.


Don and Katherine talking color and image

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Kate and her ram.

Above, Don's color; below, mine
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Those tins of ink are so dense with pigment (milled with a tiny bit of linseed oil) that each weights about four pounds.

Above, Clara preparing paper for Don's proof

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Below, Tim about to place the plate, as Julia Pollack and Brown Sanders look on

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Our culinary schedule for the week--and Tim's advice on how painters should approach printmaking

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You talkina me?

Marketing Mondays: Who Owns Your Work?

Posted yesterday: Lee Bontecou at MoMA
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In a recent post, The Sofa, in which I talked about options for artists who don’t want to sell their work commercially, reader Mead McLean left a comment that becomes the germ of today’s post:

“Artists really seem to have a strange sense of ownership. I think most of us assume that a piece is always ours, before and after we die, and that anyone else who might 'own' it doesn't really possess it.”

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My Uttar 240, 2006, encaustic on four panels, 48 x 67 inches, acquired by Mark Williams Design, Atlanta
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Owning the Actual Object
When we sell one of our works, we relinquish physical ownership of the object. It is no longer ours. It has gone to (we hope) a good home. New artists have a hard time letting their work go, as if they’ll never make anything as good again. As we continue in our artmaking, we realize that part of our job is to continue to make work at that same level of creativity and achievement, so it’s easier to relinquish it. Besides, if we’re going to continue making art, we have to let some of it out the studio door. And if we hope to earn a living from our work, part of our job is to actively push it out.

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Unless you or your dealer has a client sign a contract to stipulate how the artwork must be maintained and the circumstance under which it may be sold—and how many artists and dealers have this kind of power?—I suppose the new owner could do whatever s/he wanted. You hope they won’t let it disintegrate in storage out in the garage, or use it for target practice, or trade it for a horse, but you never know.

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Postcard for my show at the Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta, 2006.

.Copyright issue: Marcia asked if I was OK with putting type on the image; I was, because doing so allowed the image to bleed to the edges. A sensitive and respectful dealer, she asked because the image was of my work, even though she was having the card made

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Owning Copyright
While new owners may physically possess the work, artists retain copyright to the image. I’m not a lawyer, but I do know that I own the image of each piece of my work. That’s why a hotel corporation can’t, for instance, buy one of my paintings and then have thousands of giclees made to put into each room of its chain of hotels without my express permission. I could sell them the rights to reproduce a specific number, or I could license a particular image that would become part of the hotel’s visual identity (imagine images of your painting on the hotel’s stationary, advertising, and gift shop items; eek), or I could sell it outright (graphic designers get paid to do exactly this).

Relatedly, in a good way, last year four paintings of mine were acquired for a hospital collection. Some months later, after I’d received payment for the work, I signed a contract that allowed the corporation to use images of my work in two specific ways: to include it in the catalog it was producing of its collection, and to permit my paintings to be included in shots of the hospital walls, whether for the catalog or for publicity. The contract further stipulated that any image of my work would not be altered by cropping or Photoshopping, that the work would be identified, and I would be acknowledged as its maker. It seemed like a reasonable thing to do—good for me and for the gallery that brokered the sale.

On the flip side, even though the hospital corporation owns those four paintings, I can use images of those works on a postcard, on my website, or let them be used in a book. It’s nice to credit the owners of the work, or the collection, but I don’t believe it’s necessary.
Two resources here:
. Wikipedia for basic information on copyright
. Jackie Battenfield’s The Artist’s Guide for examples specific to the artist

Owning the Work Emotionally
My paintings remain “my” paintings no matter who owns them. I have the kinesthetic memory of making each work and, usually, an emotional attachment to it. Even years after the fact, I can remember making the painting, or have some memory of the process leading up to the act of paintings—stretching that particular canvas, or the particular brush I used to achieve a particular swath of color—even my emotional state the day I made it.

But I know from having my own collection of work by other artists, that I have a personal bond with those works, too. They belong to me as much as they belong to the artist who made each work. So I guess that here, we’re talking joint custody.

Over to You
How do you feel about the issue of ownership? Can you let the work go, no strings attached? Or to you retain a lifelong "possession" of the work? Stories, thoughts and emotional stream of consciousness welcome.

Motherlode: Lee Bontecou at MoMA

Overview here

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View of the exhibition, All Freedom in Every Sense, when you round the corner from the elevator

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I’ve always found Lee Bontecou’s work kind of scary, especially the gaping maws, all black and mysterious. But from the moment I saw those wall-mounted works several decades back, I respected them for their power and originality. And the Frankensteinian construction—a canvas skin stitched to an armature with wire—suggests that the sculptor virtually willed these monstrous things to life. There is nothing else like them. Name your association: cavernous, predatory, volcanic, cosmic or extraterrestrial. I still don’t stand with my back to them; you never know.

Bontecou had given up an active exhibition schedule by the time I learned of her in the Seventies. Feminist artists and art historians then were producing surveys of women artists for exhibition and publication, and that’s where I first saw her work, so this retrospective is a welcome opportunity to see more by a major sculptor who has had a fairly under-the-radar career.

The open gallery on the second floor of MoMA is an odd place for any show. It’s a bit like the kids’ table at Thanksgiving dinner, not quite as important (as the other galleries in the museum). On the other hand, its openness offers an immediacy that few other MoMA spaces have. I think it just might be the best place for Bontecou’s show, which remains up through August 30

The central space is dominated by a shimmery, pointy, light-in-weight sculpture that is suspended over a white plinth on the floor. It appears to float, and the movement of visitors makes the sculpture dance. Certainly the plinth was set up to catch its constantly changing shadow. It seems—how do I say this?—too lightweight to have been made by the same sculptor who created those imposing beasts that protrude from the surrounding walls. But there is a sense of ominousness about it, like a poison blowfish or a galaxy out of control, and the more I look at it, the less I don’t like it. How’s that for backhanded praise?

Facing back to the open entrance: Untitled, 1980-98; welded steel, porcelain, wire mesh, canvas, wire and grommets
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Continuing clockwise from above: the hanging sculpture, with a wall-mounted Untitled and drawings on the far wall
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Walking around the perimeter, you see the heart-stopping big works—which Bontecou made when she was in her late 20s to early 30s—as well as several groups of precursor drawings with the same central mouth/eye/volcanic crater. Bontecou learned that if she cut the amount of oxygen in her oxy/acetylene torch, she’d be able to produce a sooty black, the result of unburned fuel, which she scraped and smudged. I loved knowing that she painted with her torch, and that she made her sculptures sort of in the same way basketmakers made baskets, placing material over an armature and then twisting it together with bits of stuff, in this case copper or (maybe) zinc wire.
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Untitled, 1959; welded steel, canvas, black fabric, soot, wire; app 58 x 58 x 17 inches (The out-of-true proportion is not the camera; it's the work)
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Details, above and below, of Untitled, 1959

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Installation showing a selecton of drawings
See them up close, and with information, on the MoMA website
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Continuing clockwise around the gallery, we come to the back wall (the light seeping from behind the wall is coming from the windows that face the courtyard)

Both images shown in full below:
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Another Untitled, c. 1958, soot on paperboard, 30 x 40 inches

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Here's the info from the MoMA website:

In 1958, after discovering that her welding torch expelled soot when she turned its oxygen levels down, Bontecou set out to "harness the black," as she put it. Here she scraped off areas of soot with a razor blade, creating a labyrinth of narrow rectangles and tunnel-like corridors. She used her fingers to soften edges in some areas and applied tape to create crisp curves in others. The small, soot-filled ovals that punctuate the drawing are precursors to the gaping black cavities that dominate the steel-and-canvas sculptures Bontecou began making roughly a year later in New York
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And another Untitled, this from 1963: soot and aniline dye on muslin
Given the date, this drawing was created after Bontecou had begun the sculptures
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The sculpture you were waiting for: Untitled, 1961, welded steel, canvas, black fabric, rawhide, copper wire, soot; 6' 8.25" x 7' 5" x 34.75"
If you'e visited MoMA you've seen this work in the collection

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Above and below: side and frontal views

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Here's the info from the MoMA website:

When Bontecou first exhibited her steel-and-canvas sculptures, many praised their aggressive, ominous qualities. Fellow artist Joseph Cornell described their gaping black cavities as summoning "the terror of the yawning mouths of cannons, of violent craters, of windows opened to receive your flight without return, and the jaws of the great beasts."

The year Bontecou made this work was marked by intense anxiety: the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba failed, the U.S. committed its first troops to Vietnam, and the construction of the Berlin Wall began. Although Bontecou rarely comments on her art, in a statement that accompanied a 1963 MoMA exhibition featuring this work, she wrote, "My concern is to build things that express our relation to this country—to other countries—to this world—to other worlds—to glimpse some of the fear, hope, ugliness, beauty and mystery that exists in us all and which hangs over all the young people today."
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Construction details above and below

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Bontecou is a contemporary of Jackie Winsor, who also made intensively hands-on, almost craft-based sculptures, though very different in concept; and of Frank Stella, who took years to catch up to her quirky construction; and I see her influence in contemporary sculptors like Anish Kapoor, especially the infinte void.

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This strong show is where legend comes smack up against reality. Go see it. And look closely at everything. You won’t be disappointed.

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See exhibition information on the MoMA website, including images of her works on paper, which I couldn't shoot because of the glass.

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Marketing Mondays: Two Nasty Flavors

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“Taste” is a word used to describe one’s esthetic preferences. Art and the people who make, show, curate, sell or acquire it have many degrees and levels of taste. But today I want to talk about flavors.

Two flavors that artists deal with are sour and bitter: We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t taste them sometimes, but you don’t want to get to the point where you find them poisoning your practice and overtaking your life.

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These flavors have many subtleties
. The juror/curator/dealer is an idiot, because they didn’t select you or your work
. Who cares if you didn’t get in; it wasn’t worth much anyway
. If you did get in, it can’t be that great an opportunity
. Someone else got the show/award/grant because they are white /black/some other color in between; male/female; younger/older. In other words, whatever you’re not. There’s no denying the isms in the art world, but sometimes it really is "all about the work"

. You believe it's never what you do and always who you know—but you're convinced that networking is a waste of time

. You're convinced you lost out on yet another opportunity because someone didn’t like you (probably not true, unless you’re a blowhard jerkoff)
. The art world sucks
. You take pleasure in another’s failure—the artist who gets dropped from a gallery or loses out on the grant for which they were shortlisted, the gallery that closes its doors, and so on

“Compare and despair,” says my friend Jackie Battenfield who knows art careers like nobody’s business. Her advice: There’s always someone who has more, so respect and appreciate what you have achieved.

How do you deal/have you dealt with those nasty flavors in your own art life? (If you post anonymously you can share every last detail . . . )

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Images from the Internet, here and here

Motherlode: Mary Frank at Skoto

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Overview here
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Woman in the Present, 2008, oil and encaustic on wood, 14 x 18 inches; image from the gallery website

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Mary Frank is represented by D.C. Moore Gallery in Midtown, but this solo exhibition, As Time Goes By: Encaustics, Works on Paper, Photographs, 1960-2010, is at Skoto Gallery in Chelsea.

Frank is an artist who draws from the wellspring nature—figures, plant life and animals—rendering them fluidly in an earthy palette in a range of materials (ink, graphic, encaustic, clay) and techniques (painting, drawing, collage, printmaking, sculpture). I am not intimately familiar with Frank’s work, but I have seen enough over the years to know that she has developed a personal mythology and symbology: “To comfort the dead, awaken the living, to know the migration seasons of birds and fish, to know the human immigrations of the past and right now.”

Who is this lion-headed woman? Do these walls close one out or offer safety and enclosure? And what of these floating and falling figures? I see solitude, but not loneliness. I see a personal world of transcendence. In more physical terms, I see a life that has been immersed in artmaking for 50 years.

The keystone of the exhibition is an installation in the corner of the gallery, with paintings and cutout figures and a piece of Manhattan schist set onto the floor, against an orange-painted wall. Here a Frank painting becomes not so much sculpture as a dimensional painting. You can’t enter it physically, but you can travel through and around it with your eyes. And that chunk of bedrock is both a physical presence and a metaphorical anchor, the perfect counterpoint to the passing of time.

I would have shown you more installation images, but the gallery does not allow photography (except for the few I was able to take surreptitiously). You can see the show for yourself, though. It runs through June 19.

View from the entry

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Below, and below that, images of the two works just to the right of the corner

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Possibility, 2007, oil and encaustic on board, 22 x 19 inches

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Below, Hill with Willow, 2008, oil and encaustic on board, 20 x 26 inches; both images from the gallery website


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Installation, no title provided, with detail of the handwritten wall text below

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Marketing Mondays: It's All in the Timing

So there I was with just over 20 days to the deadline for the annual painting conference I run. I’m up to my eyeballs in chores and responsibility, working through the world’s largest to-do list. A proposal for next year arrives in my email queue.

It took everything I had not to delete it, so overworked was I at that point, but I emailed the sender to say, “Wait until the Call for Proposals comes out in the fall; I’ll then be able to give it my full attention.”

I’m guessing gallerists and curators deal with ill-timed material all the time. So today’s post is about coordinating your effort with their interest. Ask yourself: Is this the best time for the recipient? As artists, we typically have a to-do list, and getting a project finished and crossed off the list means there’s now one less thing for us to do. But since we want something from another person—attention, an exhibition opportunity—we would be smart to tailor our schedule to theirs.

Synchronize Your Information with a Dealer’s Interest
. The best time to send a business email is on Tuesday at 9:00 am. Why? The person you’re sending it to has gotten through last week’s pending chores, and she’s got four full work days in the week. On this day she’s likely to be more receptive to what comes in. (If Monday is a holiday, then Wednesday is the best day.)

. As artists, we might want to tweak that timing. Most galleries start their work week on Tuesday, so Wednesday may be the better day. But . . .
. Consider the dealer’s or curator’s schedule. Is there an opening that week? Thursday night? Friday night? Saturday afternoon? Is the dealer preparing for a pending art fair? Then that Wednesday may not be the best Wednesday in the month to send an email. (Postcards can sit in a stack until the person gets to them, so they’re perhaps not quite so time sensitive.)
. At the other end, is the dealer just returning from an art fair? If so, there will be a ton of paperwork and follow-up to do. That Wednesday may not be the best day either.
. How do you know a dealer’s schedule? Do your research. When does the gallery open a show? Are the upcoming openings posted? Is the dealer participating in an art fair? Websites usually post that information. If you visit the gallery regularly, you’ll be more familiar with both the dealer and her schedule. This familiarity also puts you at a distinct advantage, at least in terms of receiving an initial response to pursue a conversation.
. Is the gallery closed for August? Hard-copy packages will likely sit in a box over the summer, then. But it’s a rare dealer or curator who doesn’t check email. (And some dealers go into the gallery when it’s closed specifically to plow through the paperwork and electronic material.)
. By the way, sending a jpeg attachment with no text, no info, no nothing in the body of the email is not likely to entice anyone to take extra time to open an unknown item from a stranger. I know this because I get a lot of emails just like this. My response? Delete. I’ll bet you do the same thing. And we’re not dealers. Instead, insert a small-pixel jpeg into the body of the email, along with a live link to a blog or website—or even a blog specially set up for the dealer. Since you want something from them, make it easy for them.

Sensitivity to Timing is Required in Real Time, Too

When a dealer is on a ladder installing a show is not the time to introduce yourself. I mentioned this before, but I was in conversation with a dealer one time when an artist, carrying a portfolio, walked in, stood there for a few minutes, hovering thisfaraway from us, and finally blurted out, “Excuuuuse me!” Crazy, yes, but sometimes an irrational need takes over.

So if a dealer says to you, ‘This is not a good time. Get back in touch with me next week,” it’s not a good time and you should get back in touch with them next week. If it’s never going to be a good time, they’ll let you know that too. .

Dealers and Curators Do Look

I don’t want to make is sound as if the time is never right. Dealers and curators are visual people. Their job is to be aware of what’s going on, to seek out what’s new and interesting, to look. But timing makes the different between, “Yes, let’s see what you have,” and “Uh, sorry, no.”
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Motherlode: Kiki Smith at Pace

Overview here
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View from the entry, a pregnant woman is depicted seated on a chair, left, and giving birth, center

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I have to admit that I’m not a fan of Kiki Smith’s work. While I like her ideas, I’ve always found her abilities wanting. Her craft is sloppy, and her drawing makes me cringe. I can’t believe she hasn’t gotten better at it after all this time; alternatively, I’m surprised she has intentionally stuck with such a crummy style. But famous artists, especially famous children of famous artists, are different from you and me.

While that feeling hasn’t changed on my part, I’m happy to report that her show of numerous large stained-glass panels, installed in Pace's 22nd Street space, is a poignant journey through life. Lodestar is the title of the show; Pilgrim, the name of the series of works, “nearly 30,” according to the Pace press release. (I should have counted them myself.) We enter to the image of a gravid woman seated in a chair whose curve-armed form becomes a leitmotif; in the next panel we see the woman giving birth. Through a series of panels of figures on almost opalescent glass, we see the girl child grow into adolescence and adulthood, becoming middle-aged, then elderly. Finally we see her at rest in her coffin, a fine-lined wraith.

This is Medieval territory, the allegory of life. But the images are of contemporary people—reportedly the sitters were friends of the artist—and the issue, as old as time, remains as fresh as new life tomorrow..

We pause at childhood and adolescence, above, making our way to youth giving way to middle age, below
I'm not sure a younger artist (Smith was born in 1954) could have handled these passages with such tenderness
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A metaphorical journey from cradle to grave ends . . .
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The skylights in the gallery’s 22nd Street enhance the into-the-light feeling, as you perambulate the panels on your tour of the exhibition. One lovely aspect of Smith’s work is that in the course of taking in the installation, you not only confront death, you get to turn around and walk out—instant reincarnation. Another chance. Who wouldn’t want that?
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. . . and then gives us the chance to return to the beginning (entryway at the far end of the image)

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Smith has been working in stained glass for two decades. Each panel, set into a steel frame designed by the architect Bill Katz, began life as a drawing or collage, some of which are on view at Smith’s concurrent solo show at The Brooklyn Museum through September 12. I find the frames too heavy for the visual lightness of the glass panels, but you wouldn’t want them toppling over and creating more than an allegory of death.

According to the Pace press release, “It is Smith’s vision that this work will be presented as a permanent piece in a pavilion designed specifically for the work.” Like I say, famous artists are different from you and me. But go see the show and come to your own conclusions. It’s up through June 19.

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Smith at work on Pilgrim in the glass atelier of Mayer'sche Hofkunstanstalt Gmb-Mayer, Munich. These two photographs by Barbel Miebach, courtesy of Pace Gallery
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Other photographs, as always, taken by me. (Pace seems to have relaxed its no-photos policy).

Motherlode: Betty Woodman at Max Protetch

Overview here
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In a long career of working with clay, Betty Woodman has taken the vessel and enlarged it, flattened it, cut it up, and reconstructed it. She has put it on the wall, on a pedestal and, now, placed it onto the picture plane. Form most definitely does not follow function.
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From the street, a hard-to-see peek into the Project Room
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This show, Paintings, up through June 5, consists of three paintings and a sculpture in the Project Room, which is visible from the street, and a large painting-and-sculpture installation in the gallery’s back viewing room.

Installation view, with images of the individual paintings, each with detail, below
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Matisse is clearly the influence here, but Woodman is exploring ambiguous form and space. Flat, patterned plaques are set into a depiction of interior space; loose-limbed “vessels” allude to the human figure, their sinuous lines suggestive of movement. Visually sublime, they tell us flat out that the space is an illusion, but they invite us to enter all the same.

The Polka Dot Man, 2010, glazed earthenware, acrylic and canvas, 82.5 x 38 x 1.5 inches
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Detail below

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The Polka Dot Lady, 2010, glazed earthenware, acrylic and canvas, 83 x 47.75 x 1.5 inches
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Detail below

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Lattice Lady, 2010, glazed earthenware, acrylic and canvas, 86 x 45.25 x 1.5 inches
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Detail below

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The installation in the back viewing room does allow us to enter, if only the space between the sculpture and the painting. Woodman's sculptures are a kind of handmade post-modern cubism, vessels spliced with vessel-like forms. A large recombinant sculpture converses with a large painting nearby as you enter the space between them, while a small earthenware vessels stands sentinel at the visual portal to the painting. Just as you are about to visually enter the two-dimensional work, a "falling" figure bars your path.

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I love how this ebulliantly decorative and spatially ambiguous work is so different from Anne Truitt's solid and rational formality--and that I can respond wholeheartedly to both.

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Falling Man, 2010, glazed earthenware, acrylic and canvas, 93.5 x 86 x 11 inches; foreground, Aztec Vase #10, 2010, glazed earthenware, epoxy resin, lacquer and paint
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