Grace Hessman Pastel Landscape Pastels

Throughout February you have the pleasure of viewing the pastel paintings of landscape artist Grace Hessman in our meeting room, Room L-129. She’s a 'plein air' painter, which means she plunks her easel down in the shifting soils of west Texas or beach Florida or the Oregon forest, with boots on to protect herself from cactus spines and driving heat and morning chills, to see, feel, and smell each nuance of the landscape she’s passionate about capturing on paper. When you see her work, I think you’ll catch that spirit. That’s Room L-129; throughout February.

Discover Pastels!

This post is especially directed to my pastel artist colleagues. If you're looking for pastel paintings with a 'wow' factor to inspire your winter efforts, let me suggest a visit to the website of Zaria Forman. 
http://www.zariaforman.com/ Forman  has a way with water, clouds, and ice that goes straight for the gut--and the heart. I think you'll find her work deeply moving. For her 2012 project Chasing the Light, she sailed up the northwest coast of Greenland, retracing the 1869 journey of American painter William Bradford.She documented the changing arctic landscape and used it as a reference for several large soft pastel drawings of amazing icebergs and icy seas.Her almost photo-realistic works grab the frigid mood of this mighty landscape in flux. Here's the link to those icebergs. http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/01/zaria-forman-pastel-icebergs/ She's also on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/aristZariaForman (Thanks for Zaria for permission to post her image.) 

At the January meeting of the Tomball Art League, Grace Hessman mentioned the Pastel Society of Southeast Texas and its upcoming exhibitions. 

The Pastel Society of Southeast Texas is holding an Open Exhibition "Art of the Pastel 2014" at The Gallery in the Brazosport Center for The Arts and Sciences in Clute, TX February 4 through March 8, 2014.This exhibition promises to present  to the viewing public a fresh awareness of the beauty of pastel artwork.For exhibitors, it will be an open, non-juried show, but artwork is limited to two paintings per artist. Registration for members is $35 and $45 for non-members.

Master Pastelist Allan Flattman will judge the show and will also present a three day workshop about Landscape & Cityscape Painting with Pastels on February 5 through the 7th. For more show information, the prospectus, a registration form, and workshop information, go to the website www.pastelsocietyofsoutheasttexas.org  and look under the 2014 Exhibition tab.

Finally, Gabriel Riquelme's inspiring pastel demonstration at the January meeting introduced many of us to some new-to-us art vocabulary, techniques, and supplies. Gabriel maps his pastels with charcoal pencil instead of pastel pencil--black or white, depending on the color of his support--because he can remove it easily with a white plastic eraser or kneaded eraser. He then uses hard pastels to block in his foundation, since the soft filler pastels he uses later will blend more easily over that foundation. Then he ends with ultra-soft pastels.He uses black charcoal pencil for fine black details because he's found the charcoal pencil gives a darker black than a black pastel pencil; it also sharpens better and tends not to break inside like pastel pencils do. He dusts off his work with a spray of compressed air--the kind people use to clean their computer keyboards.But before does, he sprays a cloth at the bottom of his board with a bit of water so that when the chalk dust floats down it sticks to the wet cloth. Finally, he uses a fixative, and he much prefers the Sennellier brand to any other because it darkens the pastels the least of any brand and doesn't dissolve the soft pastels into the harder ones. I'm thinking this is the product he was talking about:  http://goo.gl/u0TMGf To see more of Gabriel Riquelme's work go to GabrielRequelmeArt.com

Kimbell Art Museum's New Pavilion and Linnie Baird at our Library

The new Piano Pavilion on the left resonates, in a rectangular staccato way,
with the rounded galloping visual rhythms of the original Kahn Building.

Just after I posted my last blog about the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, the Museum started advertising on TV that it has just opened its new building. I've been wondering how any architect's work could sit gracefully beside the beautifully understated grand-ness of Louis Kahn's original building. The Kahn building is one of the greats of 20th century architecture and one of my favorites. Apparently the Kimbell's Board of Directors of the Kimbell felt similarly, because they hired esteemed Italian architect Renzo Piano to build what is now called the Piano Pavillion.

Renzo Piano has designed many art museums, two of which you might know. The Menil Collection building here in Houston is one of them, and the famous Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris is another. But it will be up to you to decide if this building is a worthy addition to the Texas art landscape. 

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Many thanks to all of you who have offered to show your paintings at OUR museum--or at least, our exhibition space--in the library. Room L-129 exhibition space is now booked until June, but we still have room for the paintings in the second half of the year. Linnie Baird hung her paintings today ahead of the Christmas rush; hers will grace the room all through January. 

Linnie works in oils and pen and ink. She's been painting for seven years, keeping up a legacy her father began. Originally from Alabama, she moved to Texas in her twenties and has been here since. You can feel the love in her Texas landscapes! Come and view Linnie's paintings. 

Incredible Self Portraits by a 14 year old boy

Here's the talent of the youngest generation. This just showed up on my Facebook page so I'm sending it along to you: http://www.demilked.com/surreal-self-portraits-14-year-old-fiddle-oak/

Peihong Endris

Tomball Art League's Bob Trivers recently sent out an email about an upcoming Chinese Brush Painting workshop by Peihong Endris that the Northwest Art League is sponsoring September 6h and 7th. (By the way, she goes by two names: Peihong Endris and Peihong Dong.)
If you'd like to see more of her technique and her work, here are a couple of links. First, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston posted a series of YouTube videos of her work. You'll find them here: http://bit.ly/1196zgy

Second, here's the link to her own website: http://www.peihongdong.com/

And now, this is a re-issue of the Northwest Art League flyer:

Northwest Art League  Chinese Brush Painting Workshop
Peihong Endris, Instructor
September  6th & 7th , 2013 from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM 

Cost $110.00

Please join the Northwest Art League to learn Chinese Brush Painting from an expert Chinese Painter & Calligrapher. Peihoung  graduated from China’s Central Academy of Fine Arts. She is a member of many Chinese Art Organizations and her vigorous style of paintings are rooted in Chinese traditions. She will teach us how to do strokes to make a  Bamboo Painting in the Chinese style on Rice Paper. Peihoung will bring all of the supplies needed for you to try the beautiful art of Chinese brush painting. All you need to bring is a pallet, paper towels, paper weights (stones or rocks), and water container.

Learn many  beautiful strokes for Chinese Brush painting.
Call Mary Friday at 713-443-2675 or (mcfriday@sbcglobal.net)for more information.
Class will be held at The Pearl Fincher Art Museum  at : 6815 Cypresswood Drive, Spring TX.
To reserve your space in class, send a $50.00 non-refundable check to Mary Friday at: 10710 Bowden Chase, Drive Spring, TX 77379

Marketing Your Art

Everyone tells us that if we want to sell our art we have to get out there and market it. Most artists I know would rather clean bathrooms than market themselves. Others of us, however, are doing an extraordinary job of it. I happened to bump into a YouTube video of just such an artist, a man with an amazing imagination for marketing. 

Matt LeBlanc is an abstract artist from Dieppe, New Brunswick, Canada. He has a background in advertising and talent and imagination for using social networking--Facebook and Twitter--for marketing himself.

He has made several YouTube videos but this one he made especially to compete for an Excellence Award in Marketing offered by the Moncton, NB Chamber of Commerce.

Here's the link to his video.

And here's his website!

And of course, the library has art marketing books for you. Here are a couple of our more recently published ones:

How to Make Money as an Artist: The 7 Winning Strategies of Successful Fine Artists by Sean Moor

Selling Art without Galleries: Toward Making a Living from your Art by Daniel Grant

Leaving an Artistic Mark on Her City

Diana Kersey is a potter in San Antonio who, in 2009, was awarded a Public Art Commission in the City of San Antonio to design, build, and install ceramic panels for the Mulberry Avenue and Millrace Bridges as part of a drainage project at Brackenridge Park.

The city wanted her to depict the health of waterways. When the public were consulted about the Mulberry Bridge, they wanted a landmark, something distinctive. Diana took both those requests, linked water health with the health of amphibians, chose the local Gulf Coast Toad, and created 24 hand-crafted ceramic panels — most of them 2 feet by 6 feet, about 208 square feet of fired clay in all — on both sides of the bridge's two guardrails, telling the toad's life story.

Image above: Diana Kersey drew from the connections among the bridge, water and animal life for her first public art project, the Mulberry Avenue Bridge. STEVE BENNETT / EXPRESS-NEWS

See images of this project.

Read Steve Bennett's article in the San Antonio Express from June 23, 2011.

Installation Art at Rice University

Houston’s famous Rice University has an extensive art department and an art gallery as well. The gallery is "The only university art museum in the nation dedicated to site-specific installation art[.] Rice Gallery presents temporary, large-scale environments that visitors can enter and explore. Artists typically use inexpensive materials to create stunning works of art."

The next exhibition, by Mexican-American Ana Serrano, will open on September 29th. You are invited. The opening is free (parking, however is not!); it's from 5-7 p.m. on Thursday, September 29th, and the artist will be there to give a talk and mingle with visitors. The gallery is located at 6100 Main Street, in 352 Sewall Hall. Here's a phone number: 713-348-6069.

Ana Serrano "Notices the parts of the urban landscape that most of us ignore...She creates small sculptures of buildings that cull together what might catch her eye on a morning walk: the hand-painted signage and illustrations on a local business, the blue and turquoise colors of a house with the cord of a satellite dish snaking down the side, or an auto parts shop adjoining a pink and yellow piñata store.

In Salon of Beauty, Ana Serrano will enlarge these details in a cityscape of buildings that playfully mix together her observations of the unexpected and ephemeral nature of a city constantly being made and unmade by its residents." 

See more of her work at http://www.ricegallery.org/new/exhibition/serrano.html

Nature as Medium: Eco-Art: Environmental Art: Land Art

Since the 1980's various artists, sculptors and painters mostly, have been communing with the land. Many use elements of nature such as stone, sticks, leaves, and flowers as their medium and regard the ephemeral nature of such art as part of its integrity. Others engage in architectural dialogs with the land, some with environmental issues in mind. Here are some resources for your creative dalliance...

Articles
"Earth Artists: Using Nature in Art to Raise Environmental Awareness". Eco Hearth: Come Home to the Earth



Art Nature Dialogues: Interviews with Environmental Artists by John K. Grande, 2004. State University of New York. (This book is in the Tomball Library collection.)


Wikipedia article on Land Art (This has the names of a number of other artists as well as a discussion of the philosophy behind the art)


Artists
Alfio Bonanno (Don't be deterred by the Finnish--just click on his projects!)
Gilles Bruni and Marc Babarit (Click on their 'catalogue' to see artworks)

Patrick Dougherty (Click on the link below his book to enter the site)
Andy Goldsworthy
Tomball Library has a copy of his DVD Rivers and Tides: Working with Time. The camera follows this gentle Scottish sculptor as he discusses his creative process. His rock walls that wind through the landscape, leaf chains that float on meandering waters, and ice sculptures that glow in the sunlight are but a few of the natural media he has used.
David Nash
Michael Singer
Nils-Udo
Bob Verschueren

Humor in Art

I love humor in art. The blog of Malaysian tee shirt designer Chow Hon Lam certainly qualifies. He's a terrific graphic artist with a fantastic sense of humor. If you need a dose of silliness, here's a place to get it...  Here's the link.

Cody Hooper: Abstract artist

When I viewed the website gallery of San Antonio abstract artist Cody Hooper, I found myself thinking of him as a southwestern Piet Mondrian. This talented emerging artist experiments with the glowing effects of layers of glazes. He also exhibits a brilliant sense of proportion. Lovely, evocative, beautifully composed abstract compositions. Just wanted to share him with you...

"What We See Changes Who We Are"

I'd like you to meet JR. JR is a semi-anonymous French photographer and artist whose work lives in the tradition of England's Banksy. JR's art, while not intentionally political, is deeply political. And social, and provocative.

JR embeds himself in neighborhoods, favelas, and villages around the world, learns the stories of the people who live there, and photographs them. Then he pastes their massive images onto local canvases like buildings, buses, trains, and bridges.

His latest global art project is called Women are Heroes. The images above are from that project. He has gone into poor villages where the women, the mothers, are the only stability in the family, and honored them in this images.

In the next set of images JR has photographed Palestinians and Jews who do the same job--taxi drivers, dentists, writers, etc.--and placed them side by side. He asks the viewer: "Can you tell who is who?"

JR believes that "guerrilla art is about provocation and pushing limits to start dialogue. It has the capacity to engage and break down barriers in ways art in galleries or museums does not. The audience is often those who are least likely to be exposed to art." http://blog.tec/com/2010/10/20/meet-jr/

JR recently gave a talk at the annual TED conference. (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and is about "ideas worth knowing".) Conference organizers invite interesting people to give an 18-minute talk about their work. JR's talk won the 2011 TED Prize: $100,000 and an invitation to make one wish to change the world. JR's wish? "I wish for you to stand up for what you care about by participating in a global art project, and together we'll turn the world...INSIDE OUT."

Here's the link to JR's amazing TED video.

Literary Love: 12 Books of Art and Architecture

Here's a website with images of art and architecture created with books as the medium. A perfect match, says this librarian...

To the left is the art of Mike Smiley, shown on the website.

MARSHALL HARRIS: Welcome to my Sight

When my husband introduced me to his old classmate from Southwest High in Fort Worth, I had no doubt that he'd gone on to become a professional football player. Marshall Harris stands somewhere midway between six and seven feet tall and has the physique of a linebacker.

His art is equally distinctive. He creates architectural welded sculptures, installations, and amazing drawings. Marshall just finished his MFA and also just returned to living in Fort Worth. His drawings include nudes, but I think you'll find them unusual, in that Marshall "seeks the deeper underlying sub-context of people, places, and situations." Not too many artists draw middle-aged men...Here's a link to his website

Woody Gwyn

Woody Gwyn, southwestern landscape and figure painter par excellence, believes that landscape painting is a figment of its time. His contemporary paintings often contain highways because that's how we moderns get out into the countryside to see the landscape. Born in San Antonio, raised in west Texas; he used to teach at Texas Tech. I believe he now lives in Alburquerque. Here's his website (from which the image left, an oil on linen called "Road Cut", is copied): www.woodygwyn.com/ Peter Sacks wrote a book about him called Woody Gwyn; I'd be happy to order it for you by interlibrary loan. If you go to http://www.hcpl.net/and click on the Books tab, you'll see the Interlibrary Loan page on the drop-down menu.

New Zealand Artists

New Zealand artists have a wonderful website for the viewing and sale of their artwork. Here's the url: http//www.artfind.co.nz

This oil painting, taken from the site, is by Allan Batts. It's called Flowers of Harakeke. Harakeke is Maori name for New Zealand flax (Formium tenax), a plant sacred to them, from which they made rope, medicine, clothing, and more. We can now buy that plant here to grow in our own gardens.