The biggest and most unusual work of art on display last month at the Agricultural Fair was "The Grim Reaper." Scaring little kids and adults alike with its hollow eye sockets and beckoning bony fingers, this towering wood statue won first prize for sculpture, as well as a Special Award. It's back home now in the Lambert's Cove studio of its creator, carpenter and wood sculptor Simon Hickman.
The Reaper originated as the trunk of a Music Street Elm tree in West Tisbury and evolved over the past year. "You have to hollow out the wood soon after you get it, or it will check, or crack," Mr. Hickman says. Checking occurs when a large piece of wood dries faster on the outside.
The Reaper's skull, skeletal parts, and the blade of the scythe he carries are made of rosewood. The limb of a tulip tree outside Mr. Hickman's workshop proved just the right fit for the Reaper's giant scythe handle. A garment made of hammered copper mail, topped by a short cape, covers the figure's torso. A light bulb gives the creature an eerie glow. To accommodate Mr. Reaper, who reaches 10 feet from his feet to his cowl, Mr. Hickman had to reconfigure his workshop. He installed a carrying beam for a chain hoist so that he could maneuver the tree trunk and "make sure he didn't run out on me."
The Reaper joins many other sculptures in Mr. Hickman's collection, some of which fairgoers may remember from past years. They are the products of a wonderfully perfervid imagination and include Vlad the Impaler, the Tower of Babel, and the Titanic. In addition to the sculptor's stores of wood, objects salvaged from the backyard of his 16-acre former farm make their way into his art. One of his Agricultural Fair entries, a full-sized maple shark, now hangs suspended from airplane wire in the family's pool house.
"If you touch his tail, he'll swim for 45 minutes," Mr. Hickman says, pointing to the surface spalting, patterns caused by a fungus feeding on the sap in the wood."I average about one piece a year," he says. "I only do it when I have a big chunk of time." These products of long, painstaking hours of work have sensuously smooth, highly polished surfaces and all – with the exception, perhaps, of Mr. Reaper – invite touching.
Born in England and raised in Kenya, Mr. Hickman is an inveterate saver and a collector. Arriving on the Vineyard in 1978 to work on an Edgartown restoration project, he never left. He had spent part of his youth hitchhiking in Australia and Indonesia and pursued his artistic bent then by creating oil paintings."I'm kind of saving oil painting for my retirement," he says.
Each of the artist's creations has a story behind it. He bought the rosewood log used in the Reaper 30 years ago. It came from a stack of the tropical wood stored behind the site of the long-gone Nobnocket Garage and former home of the Artworker's Guild, a 70s landmark in Vineyard Haven. A chair in Mr. Hickman's studio is made of native honey locust, and this very hard wood allowed him to incorporate lots of detail while keeping the piece structurally sound. A grimacing head he calls "How Do You Feel" started as an oak burl and has teeth cut from the ivory keys the sculptor rescued off a piano about to be bulldozed at the town dump.
Farm parts from hay wagons, horse buggies, and tools have gone into a throne-like chair, complete with hoofed arms and a tail. Made of chokecherry, a finely hatched lizard has humanoid hands. Pieces of metal Mr. Hickman found in the woods on his property help provide the necessary support for a table fashioned from Linden trees. Serving as a dumping ground for the caretaker of the old Makonikey Hotel, the wetlands at the back of the Hickman property has produced silver forks and spoons, along with many other discards.
Other examples of his skill at rescuing abandoned materials include the concrete balustrade from a French villa on-Island that now rims the family's swimming pool. A massive mantelpiece from the Corbin-Norton mansion in Oak Bluffs graces his living room, and he has fashioned chandeliers from deer antlers. The giant Linden that once shaded Main Street near the Capawock Theatre in Vineyard Haven is now a bar in his pool house. Mr. Hickman volunteered to remove the rotten tree, after the Town advertised to find a home for it. The sculptor discovered the tree was almost entirely hollow, so he made a trapdoor in the oil painting reproduction, lowered himself inside with a chainsaw, and cut it in half to save what had not rotted. When necessary, he makes his own tools, in one case attaching a chisel to a copper pipe so he could work in a narrow cavity.
"As I get older, my sculptures are getting bigger and heavier," Mr. Hickman says. He hasn't exhibited much outside of the Agricultural Fair, although for several years he and his wife Marion, a calligrapher, ran Chickamoo Gallery with the late Richard Lee, in the barn that now houses his Lambert's Cove studio. He suggests the subjects of his often surrealist imagination are no cup of tea for people buying art on the Island.
As “The Da Vinci Code” proved a few years back, people love to uncover the secrets locked away in the masterworks of art history, and though “Tim’s Vermeer” does nothing to interpret Vermeer’s work, it sheds new light on the way he might have gone about it. Technically, the notion that Vermeer might have used a camera obscura as an optical aid has been around for years, backed up by mathematical calculations in Philip Steadman’s book “Vermeer’s Camera.” Jenison proposes an even simpler solution involving a simple hand mirror, enlisting both Steadman and “Secret Knowledge” author — and artist — David Hockney to test his theories as he goes.
But Teller’s inventor/subject goes one step further than the scholars did, attempting to reproduce Vermeer’s “The Music Lesson” himself — and this is where the film crosses over into a fascinating tale of obsession, as Jenison uses his primary expertise (as founder of NewTek, he revolutionized the fields of computer graphics and digital video) to re-create the artist’s studio in a San Antonio warehouse. Using rendering tools to calculate the exact dimensions of every object seen in the original painting, from stained-glass windows to the models’ costumes, Jenison then constructs everything by hand and positions it just right in the room — a 213-day job, short by comparison with the actual task of painting.
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2013年9月2日星期一
Baltimore Woods exhibit features
Skaneateles Lake and the surrounding region have inspired both artists in their creative process, and the show reflects each artist’s interpretation. The exhibit includes drawings and paintings in oil, acrylic, pastel and watercolor and is open to the public with no admission or parking fee.Harms describes her work as becoming more organic in nature since moving away from cities to a rural area, and her artwork leans toward the abstract.
“The mood and nature of Skaneateles Lake, whether driving by, walking by or swimming in, is reflected in my recent drawings and paintings,” Harms said. “I am influenced by place, by color, by light. Not in a direct landscape sense but as memory and sense.” Delmonico’s work has a realistic quality, often depicting local landscapes. Much of her work has an impressionistic feel.
“Painting, for me, is an honor, a privilege, a struggle, and most often, pure joy," Delmonico said. "To attempt to capture a scene or the essence of nature and create something interesting and exciting with light, texture and color is what motivates and defines this ongoing journey for me."Harms earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the Parsons School of Design in New York City and a Master of Fine Arts in painting from the Chelsea School of Art in London.
An English-born artist, Harms has exhibited throughout the United Kingdom and the United States, including London and New York City and recently in Syracuse, Aurora and Skaneateles. Delmonico received her Bachelor of Arts from Boston College, majoring in studio art and elementary education, and a Master of Science in elementary education from Syracuse University.
Delmonico has exhibited widely in central New York and nationally, in venues such as the Everson Museum, Cazenovia College Art Gallery, the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Museum and the Pastel Society of America’s Annual Exhibition.
But the erased workers seem stereotyped and taken advantage of as their identities are elided. Labor can be depersonalizing and demoralizing, but it isn't by default so. These images deny the workers any chance to take pride in their labor or to own it as a personal accomplishment. Like a few other pieces in the show, these worker images need some subsequent thought.
“Worker Skins” is comparable to the white-out works, but it’s the best piece in the show. Hakanson-Stacy cut coveralls into hand-sized human outlines and dragged them through cement. Then she pinned them to the wall in a tight cluster. The more heavily caked ones clump and curl, oil painting reproduction, expressing the physical toll of manual labor. The others give the feeling of staring back at you with a posture of exhausted witness. The overall shape of their cluster is ambiguous—it could be the continental United States or it could be nothing intentional at all.
For the piece “One Minute,” Hakanson-Stacy cites Bureau of Labor statistics to compare a minute’s earnings, represented in pennies, for the average CEO ($116.66) to those of a minimum-wage worker (12 cents). The CEO’s pennies overflow a large glass bowl to scatter on the floor around its pedestal. The minimum-wage worker’s pennies are barely visible at the bottom of the kind of glass ramekin that servers bring your ranch dressing in.
“One Minute” could have been put to better use in WRK, Inc. Rather than locating the pedestals against a wall in the last corner of the gallery that you visit, they could have been placed in the middle of the gallery so that walking the show would redistribute the fallen pennies throughout the whole space, unifying its message.
Instead, a poorly executed video work entitled "Success" dominates the show, taking the front half of the gallery and suffering almost total illegibility from sunlight during the daylight hours. You can’t escape the audio drone of William Penn Patrick—a John Birch Californian who ran for Governor against Ronald Reagan (and lost for being further to the right of the Gipper)—reading his essay "Happiness and Success through Principle." The monologue is perforated occasionally by the pop of a balloon, which is shown onscreen. Hakanson-Stacy very effectively conveys the boom-and-bust economic reality beneath Patrick’s theocratic rhetoric with “Success” but, at almost 30 minutes, the audio loop is too long and a television would have been a better choice than a large video projection screen. One could easily assume that the video was turned off, it’s so washed out by the sun.
More disappointing was "Dreams," an audio piece that you listen to with headphones while staring at red threads pinned to a wall that a fan blows upon. The recording sounds as if it was made in the same bar all on the same night. A succession of young, white-sounding twenty-something voices basically state that, if they could do anything, it would be to travel, drink, and eat, in that order. Unselfish aspirations rarely appear. These narrators fall heavily on the lazy, “I don’t wanna work” end of the labor struggle, and the recording is embarrassing for the unnamed people who lent it their voices.
Frankly, “Dreams” pissed me off. It’s tantamount to middle-class whining, turning an overeducated, underemployed and disenfranchised generation into slackers complaining that their entitlements aren’t being recognized. Meanwhile you can hear the bartenders and dishwashers clinking craft beer glasses in the background, earning their wages. This piece takes a tipsy swing at class struggle.
If this critique is harsh then it’s because Hakanson-Stacy is obviously sincere and passionate about the issues she’s concerned with in this show, namely that a corporate ideology has been so driven into us—governmentally, societally and personally—that we can hardly get outside of it enough to think and talk about it. Her expression embodies that position at the expense of her sincerity and passion at times.
Read the full products at http://artsunlight.com/!
“The mood and nature of Skaneateles Lake, whether driving by, walking by or swimming in, is reflected in my recent drawings and paintings,” Harms said. “I am influenced by place, by color, by light. Not in a direct landscape sense but as memory and sense.” Delmonico’s work has a realistic quality, often depicting local landscapes. Much of her work has an impressionistic feel.
“Painting, for me, is an honor, a privilege, a struggle, and most often, pure joy," Delmonico said. "To attempt to capture a scene or the essence of nature and create something interesting and exciting with light, texture and color is what motivates and defines this ongoing journey for me."Harms earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the Parsons School of Design in New York City and a Master of Fine Arts in painting from the Chelsea School of Art in London.
An English-born artist, Harms has exhibited throughout the United Kingdom and the United States, including London and New York City and recently in Syracuse, Aurora and Skaneateles. Delmonico received her Bachelor of Arts from Boston College, majoring in studio art and elementary education, and a Master of Science in elementary education from Syracuse University.
Delmonico has exhibited widely in central New York and nationally, in venues such as the Everson Museum, Cazenovia College Art Gallery, the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Museum and the Pastel Society of America’s Annual Exhibition.
But the erased workers seem stereotyped and taken advantage of as their identities are elided. Labor can be depersonalizing and demoralizing, but it isn't by default so. These images deny the workers any chance to take pride in their labor or to own it as a personal accomplishment. Like a few other pieces in the show, these worker images need some subsequent thought.
“Worker Skins” is comparable to the white-out works, but it’s the best piece in the show. Hakanson-Stacy cut coveralls into hand-sized human outlines and dragged them through cement. Then she pinned them to the wall in a tight cluster. The more heavily caked ones clump and curl, oil painting reproduction, expressing the physical toll of manual labor. The others give the feeling of staring back at you with a posture of exhausted witness. The overall shape of their cluster is ambiguous—it could be the continental United States or it could be nothing intentional at all.
For the piece “One Minute,” Hakanson-Stacy cites Bureau of Labor statistics to compare a minute’s earnings, represented in pennies, for the average CEO ($116.66) to those of a minimum-wage worker (12 cents). The CEO’s pennies overflow a large glass bowl to scatter on the floor around its pedestal. The minimum-wage worker’s pennies are barely visible at the bottom of the kind of glass ramekin that servers bring your ranch dressing in.
“One Minute” could have been put to better use in WRK, Inc. Rather than locating the pedestals against a wall in the last corner of the gallery that you visit, they could have been placed in the middle of the gallery so that walking the show would redistribute the fallen pennies throughout the whole space, unifying its message.
Instead, a poorly executed video work entitled "Success" dominates the show, taking the front half of the gallery and suffering almost total illegibility from sunlight during the daylight hours. You can’t escape the audio drone of William Penn Patrick—a John Birch Californian who ran for Governor against Ronald Reagan (and lost for being further to the right of the Gipper)—reading his essay "Happiness and Success through Principle." The monologue is perforated occasionally by the pop of a balloon, which is shown onscreen. Hakanson-Stacy very effectively conveys the boom-and-bust economic reality beneath Patrick’s theocratic rhetoric with “Success” but, at almost 30 minutes, the audio loop is too long and a television would have been a better choice than a large video projection screen. One could easily assume that the video was turned off, it’s so washed out by the sun.
More disappointing was "Dreams," an audio piece that you listen to with headphones while staring at red threads pinned to a wall that a fan blows upon. The recording sounds as if it was made in the same bar all on the same night. A succession of young, white-sounding twenty-something voices basically state that, if they could do anything, it would be to travel, drink, and eat, in that order. Unselfish aspirations rarely appear. These narrators fall heavily on the lazy, “I don’t wanna work” end of the labor struggle, and the recording is embarrassing for the unnamed people who lent it their voices.
Frankly, “Dreams” pissed me off. It’s tantamount to middle-class whining, turning an overeducated, underemployed and disenfranchised generation into slackers complaining that their entitlements aren’t being recognized. Meanwhile you can hear the bartenders and dishwashers clinking craft beer glasses in the background, earning their wages. This piece takes a tipsy swing at class struggle.
If this critique is harsh then it’s because Hakanson-Stacy is obviously sincere and passionate about the issues she’s concerned with in this show, namely that a corporate ideology has been so driven into us—governmentally, societally and personally—that we can hardly get outside of it enough to think and talk about it. Her expression embodies that position at the expense of her sincerity and passion at times.
Read the full products at http://artsunlight.com/!
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