Mark Horst ~ Figures & More

Last Saturday, July 5th, was the opening reception for Mark Horst’s Figures & More exhibition at Sumner & Dene Creations in Art. Positive energy filled the gallery as many friends and locals came by to see the latest series in Horst’s signature artwork.

Horst is a figurative expressionist painter with a large following; Many who have become as enamored with his art work as I have. Author, teacher and painter Martin Shaw says, “Mark Horst carries a quiver full of painterly gifts. His startling work reveals wild pinpricks of the eternal, often in the subtlest of images. Make no mistake, the paintings sometimes hold our feet to the flame-a door between a collectively understood image and some new paint-spirit that comes hurtling through. Not always a comfortable experience. Horst is one of the few new painters to hold the paradox of tradition and innovation within him- there is brilliance here.”

SURFACE: Emerging Artists of New Mexico

Last Friday’s ARTScrawl led me to the opening reception of the group show SURFACE and the solo show PARCHED featuring the work of Jane Gordon at the Harwood Art Center.

SURFACE: Emerging Artists of New Mexico is an annual juried exhibition, professional development and endowed cash awards program presented by Harwood Art Center in partnership with Albuquerque Art Business Association. This year’s show includes 13 exceptionally talented, committed artists - each in a different stage of emergence: Isaac Alaridpease, Mia Casesa, Chris Casey, Jessica Chao, Xuan Chen, Christa Dalian, Beverly Fisher, Holly Grimm, Bryce Hample, Dani Jeffries, Georgina Latino, Jamie Porter Lara, and Tera Muskrat. 

Paa-ko Fine Artists

Under the direction of Dave Daniels, eight exceptional fine artists working in a variety of media presented an impressive debut exhibition this past weekend at the Paa-Ko events center in Sandia Park, New Mexico. Featured artists included Gloria Casale, Anita Daniels, Jane Gaines, Rich Irwin, Semiramis, Dorothy McGeorge, Chris and Trish Meyer.

Ceramic sculptor Rick Irwin is a self-taught artist who began to pursue a lifelong interest in ceramics as he phased out his practice of optometry in Austin. From the beginning he gravitated toward hand-building due to the great versatility of form it offers. His work has gradually morphed from functional pieces to more complex sculptural forms, primarily figurative. The very talented Irwin says, “I never tire of the places clay takes you, the satisfaction of watching a piece develop during the forming process, the anticipation of opening the kiln to see the finished piece for the first time, and the warm feeling when someone actually likes a piece enough to take it home.”

Chroma - Etchings by Pamela Wesolek

Green Ocean,
etching and chine colle, 36 x24"

This past weekend, I attended First Friday’s ARTScrawl at New Grounds Print Workshop and Gallery featuring an etching exhibition by Pamela Wesolek. In this new body of work, Wesolek fuses abstract and botanical elements. The colors reference the botanical’s personality and support the energy driving the abstractions. Her intention was to make a gallery space ripe with “Chroma,” or color, and for the viewer to be led by the color into the details of the work. Wesolek says, “I felt strongly about using color as the theme because it seems true to the season of spring when the black and white world of winter dramatically reinvents itself.” 

Horses Tails

The highlight of the evening was an etching demonstration of “Horses Tails” by Wesolek. She began by describing the process of inscribing the copper plates with a variety of techniques, using archaic dental tools. Wesolek then coated the copper plate with a water base Akua lamp black ink and wiped the top surface clean with a starched cheesecloth, leaving ink only in the etched lines. The plate was then laid face up on the press bed, covered with Mitsuyama paper from Japan and Mulberry paper from Thailand. The felt flaps of the press were laid on top of the paper and then hand cranked through the press with enormous pressure transferring the inked areas to the paper.

TEDx ABQ Salon ~ Why Art?

Last week, I attended my first TED event, TEDx ABQ Salon Art, held at the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History to a sold out audience. Speakers from a wide range of backgrounds, education and art experience pondered the question, “Why Art?” They toyed with, tackled and confronted its function, importance, purpose, and place in the world using videos, slides, and performance art.

John Grassham, the Executive Director at Creative ABQ, and Carlos Contreras, an award-winning performance poet, were the event organizers. They set the stage with original artwork created by Cloud Face, one of the original founders of Foundations of Freedom, a collective involving a number of rising stars in the street art, dance and music fields. Together they created an intellectually stimulating evening featuring the following speakers:

SE-OC Right Brain Gallery

The SE-OC Right Brain Gallery is a new gallery located in the showroom of the former Garcia Toyota car dealership, giving it a spacious and less cluttered feeling than other galleries. The focus of this gallery is on art created from optics technology and precision metal working techniques that form the foundation of its parent company, Sandia Electro-Optics Corporation. 

Currently the gallery is showcasing the talents of a variety of artists who demonstrate their right brain talents with the technologies of solar energy, fiber optics, lasers, glass, photography or metal. Featured artists include Pea Garvanian, Jeff Laird, Tom Spross, Flo Stein, Marian Berg, Robert Crespin, Cindy and Joe McDonnell and Tom Roche.

Donatella Davanzo: Venice and its Carnival

First Friday’s ARTScrawl led me to The Artistic Image gallery for the opening reception of a new photographic exhibition by Donatella Davanzo. This exceptional show allows the viewer to experience the beauty and history of Venice while understanding the work of celebrated photographer Donatella Davanzo.

An anthropologist and documentarist photographer, Davanzo has specialized in the study of North American Southwestern Natives’ spatiality. Since her field researches, begun in 1997, she has been documenting settlements and ceremonial spaces, with particular attention to the relationship between traditional organizations and issues of the surrounding environment already dealt with in the first photographic exhibitions held by the Italo-American Association in Trieste, Looking around Arizona (1997) and View of Life from the Southwest (2000), and in the following lectures and publications, both in Italy and at the University of New Mexico. Today, Davanzo is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at UNM. 

Finding Finished ~ paintings by Janet Bothne

First Friday’s ARTScrawl led me to Palette Contemporary Art & Craft in Albuquerque’s Northeast Heights. Janet Bothne, the featured artist for November, opened last Friday with her exhibition Finding Finished. Bothne says, “One of the hardest parts of the painting process is knowing when a painting is truly finished.” She has sometimes hung and shown a work only to get it back into the studio and give it one final stroke or "punctuation" before being fully satisfied. Over time, Bothne has learned that there is a critical point in a painting’s “life cycle” where one must stop before "killing" some of its most compelling elements. She looks very carefully at each painting to examine what’s working and what isn’t, before painting its final 10%. Sometimes, she'll ponder a piece for months before her eye provides answers as to what is required for its completion.

UNM Art Museum - 50th Anniversary Exhibitions

Recently, I attended the opening reception for UNM Art Museum’s 50th Anniversary. In the early years following the opening of the museum in 1963, significant exhibitions were held of Georgia O’Keeffe, Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt, Cady Wells, Andrew Dasburg, John Marin, and other Modernists. Van Deren Coke was the founding director of the museum. For this anniversary event, the museum curated three concurrent exhibitions from it’s impressive permanent collection of over 30,000 works of art:

From Raymond Jonson to Kiki Smith, curated by Lisa Tamiris Becker and Robert Ware

This exhibition, on view in the Main Gallery, features many noted artists including Ansel Adams, Alexander Archipenko, Larry Bell, Ernest Blumenschein, Bruce Conner, Juan Correa, David Hare, Raymond Jonson, Donald Judd, Bridget Riley, Julius Rolshoven, Robert Ryman, Alison Saar, Fritz Scholder, Kiki Smith, and Luis Tapia. It encompasses major works of modern and contemporary painting, sculpture, and works on paper, European and Spanish Colonial paintings and sculpture, as well as selections of Retablos, African sculpture, and Mata Ortiz Pottery. Particularly noteworthy is the oil painting, Grand Canyon Trilogy - First Movement, by former UNM art professor Raymond Jonson who bequeath more than 1,300 of his own paintings to the museum. 

Raymond Jonson (American, 1891 - 1982); Grand Canyon Trilogy - First Movement, 1927; Oil on canvas; 45 x 56 inches; Bequest of Raymond Jonson, The Raymond Jonson Collection, University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque; copyright The Raymond Jonson Collection, UNM Art Museum; Photo by Robert Reck

Circle of Friends ~ monotypes by Sarah Anderson

Last Friday, I took a friend with me to view the exhibition of Sarah Anderson’s newest work - Circle of Friends currently showing at New Grounds print workshop. The gallery was filled with excitement and energy among those that attended. Anderson’s work is much admired for both its emotional expression and its bold simplification in hues of red, orange and purple.

The evening included a live monotype demonstration by Anderson. She explained that monotyping is a type of printmaking made by drawing or painting on a smooth, nonabsorbent surface such as glass. Using nontoxic ink, Anderson inked the entire surface and then, using brushes and Q-tips, she removed some ink to create a subtractive background and added other ink to create her subject. She then positioned the glass on a printing press and transferred the image onto a sheet of paper by pressing the two together. Monotyping produces a unique one-of-kind print, or monotype; most of the ink is removed during the initial pressing. Although subsequent reprintings are sometimes possible, they differ greatly from the first print and are generally considered inferior. These prints from the original plate are called "ghost prints."