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." 

Angus Macpherson ~ Milestone: Celebrating 30 Years in the Art Business

Last Friday’s ARTScrawl at Sumner & Dene gallery was the opening art reception and book signing of Angus Macpherson’s new book “Paintings ~ Quotes ~ Artist’s Notes.” The entire second floor of the gallery was filled with Macpherson’s images, acrylic paintings of dramatic skies, often in radiant translucent layers of twilight and dawn hues with fluid compositions of the grand and intimate simultaneously. Well-known for his ability to juxtapose the chaos and absolute serenity of nature in his dramatic landscapes, many of which are derived from the balance of ever-changing skies to earth over his native New Mexico. Macpherson’s paintings reveal explosions of color in which the results are not necessarily predictable yet create breathtaking beauty in all directions.

Paula Manning-Lewis - All About Love

Last Friday, I visited High Desert Art and Frame for the All About Love exhibition by Paula Manning-Lewis. Her art is all about emotions, energy, light and love. Manning-Lewis says her purpose as an artist is to share a feeling, an emotion, an energy of love. She believes, “Love is the most important feeling we as humans can experience. It’s the one emotion that stays behind when we leave this life. Love is what we are here for. Love grounds us and makes us soar!”

A body of work

Manning-Lewis has been a professional artist for twenty years. Her body of work includes coloring book designs which are manufactured and sold by Desert Sage Graphics. In addition, she has created a landscape and rock series consisting of pastel on suede board and watercolor on paper. She has also done a series of acrylics on recycled guitars, complete with beaded strings.

First Friday Fractals

Last Friday, I visited the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science to take in one of three live fractal shows produced and narrated by Jonathan Wolfe. Friday's show included the world premier of two new spectacular fractal animations. Each fractal was a collaboration between Wolfe and Dylan Larson, a student at Sandia Prep who did an internship at the Fractal Foundation for his senior project. Both animations were dynamic hybrid 3D fractals that combined the Mandelbulb, the Mandelbox and the Menger Sponge fractal. 

Eyes of the Beholder - The Gallery ABQ

As many of you of know, I was diagnosed with breast cancer last November followed by surgery and chemotherapy. My surgery went well but, as you can imagine, my chemotherapy treatments were a roller coaster ride. I experienced the usual hair loss and neuropathy, however, it was the severe nausea that caused me to lose twenty pounds. Thankfully, with the love and support of so many friends, I was able to pull through. You may read my art reviews for Q CLAPS following the First Friday ARTScrawl of each month.

To get my feet wet again, I visited The Gallery ABQ last Friday, May 3rd, for their “Eyes of the Beholder” artists’ reception from 12 - 8 pm. What a treat! This gallery is beautifully appointed and the reception was well attended. The featured artists for this show were Sandra Baca, Fran Ryan and Patricia Klomborowski Williams.

Joe Coventry & Linda Logan-Condon

Two weeks ago, I attended the opening reception for Joe Coventry and Linda Logan-Condon at The Watermelon Gallery located in the East Mountains. I had already fallen hard for Coventry’s paintings a few months ago while visiting the gallery for another art opening. However, on this evening I had the pleasure of meeting Logan-Condon for the first time and admiring the breathtaking photography of her travels around the globe.

East mountain resident and professional travel photographer Linda Logan-Condon says, “After a long and successful corporate career as a trainer, executive coach, facilitator and organizational development consultant, I am having a love affair with travel photography. I’m an idea woman, a pioneer, a woman on the edge, a women filled with wonder and discovery. I have traveled to many parts of the world and have learned to marvel at the "firsts" in my life...the first time I saw my child's face, the first time waking up in a new country, the first time hearing an unfamiliar language, the smell of a new destination. What a gift it is to view the world anew with each turn of the head and touch of the hand.” Logan-Condon has exhibited her award winning photography both state wide and nationally since 2008.

Art & the Female Breast, part two

First, I would like to thank the readers who sent me well wishes, support, and comments on the first article in my discussion of Art and the Female Breast. I would also like to thank the many friends and colleagues who sent me books, articles, clothing, food and the others who shared with me their personal journey through cancer. The surgery is now behind me and I’m awaiting the pathology report on the mass and lymph nodes that were removed last Thursday. In the meantime, I wanted to continue my discussion and share with you one particular email that I received from Nina Baldwin, an artist from Rio Rancho.

In the email, Baldwin draws a connection to the Madonna and Child paintings by William Adolphe Bouguereau, the prolific French painter from the nineteenth century who was a mainstay of the Realism art movement, when she writes, his “Madonna paintings portray the female, fully clothed . . . all full of fabulous beauty . . . full of allurement, mystery, life, power, nurturing . . . full of spirit . . . truly beautiful!” According to Wikipedia, Bouguereau was a staunch traditionalist whose genre paintings and mythological themes were modern interpretations of Classical subjects, both pagan and Christian, with a concentration on the female human body. He employed traditional methods of working up a painting, including detailed pencil studies and oil sketches, and his careful method resulted in a pleasing and accurate rendering of the human form. His painting of skin, hands, and feet was particularly admired. The idealized world of his paintings, brought to life goddesses, nymphs, bathers, shepherdesses, and madonnas. Bouguereau painted plenty of naked women, but it was the ones he painted of them clothed which were particularly striking and inspirational. 

Baldwin also shared her mother’s story of a mastectomy at 48 years old and how she survived and went on to live a full life only to pass away in her 70’s from heart disease. Baldwin writes, “It is the spirit of the woman which far surpasses all beauty and goodness found in any part of the body . . . truly, it is your spirit which is beautiful, sparkly, fun, wise, miraculous, alluring, mystifying, nurturing and powerful . . . your spirit is the source of all that good.” Baldwin’s email truly touched me and uplifted me. Can you find the beauty and allure in these Madonna and Child paintings?

Gale O’Brien lives in New Mexico surrounded by the love and support of her friends. Follow her blog Passione Per L’Arte at www.passionateforart.blogspot.com.

Photo credits: Barbara Longhi, google.com; William-Adolphe Bouguereau, wikipedia.com and google.com; Trent Burleson, http://burlesonart.blogspot.com