My three latest butterfly works, After Thistles, Fluttering Cosmopolitan, and Cynthesis will be on display this Saturday, October 19th from 8pm to 2am at Oranje, a contemporary art & music event. Wug Laku of Wug Laku’s Studio and Garage is representing my work at booth 17.

Wug will be displaying his drawings, digital art prints, light boxes, and furniture along with the jewelry of Nancy Lee (I’m sure she’ll be there, too!) and the mixed media of Cagney King –among others. They will be recreating the feel of his gallery in their 22′ x 24′ mega-booth for an intimate discussion with the artists. This past weekend, they were practically living there getting the space ready.

Tickets to the event are $20 and is only open to 21 and older.

Oranje
Wug Laku / Booth 17
2323 North Illinois
Indianapolis, IN 46208

I have three of my butterfly paintings in the 2009 IndyFringe Festival. Thistles, Fluttering Cosmopolitan, and Cynthesis were mentioned in my prior post, Trio of Painted Lady Butterflies. You can see thumbnails in that post. These works can be seen at Henry’s on East, 627 East Street, Friday, August 7, 5 – 9 pm.  Cafes, theaters and spaces along Mass Ave. have been transformed into art galleries for the IndyFringe Festival. Add it to your usual IDADA First Friday Art Walk on August 7th. I hope to see you there, but if you can’t make that Friday, then the work will be on display until August 30th.

You can vote

Make sure to stop by the temporary galleries to vote for your favorite piece of art to become one of those “Be Indypendent” stickers you have seen on your neighbors’ cars. Complimentary Barefoot Bubbly champagne cocktails will be served at each Fringe gallery, too.

The 2009 VisualFringe galleries are: Mass Ave Wine Shoppe, Theatre on the Square, Franklin Barry Gallery, Henry’s on East, Hoaglin To Go Café, Herron School of Art and Design at The Earth House, and the Fringe Gallery. Visit IndyFringe for more info and full gallery addresses.

Opening Quick Facts

August 7, 5 – 9 pm
Henry’s on East
627 East Street

These three paintings are inspired by the painted lady butterfly.  I have entitled them temporarily (left to right): After Thistles, Fluttering Cosmopolitan, and Cynthesis.  These titles have their roots in scientific classification, common association, and/or metaphors.  Ideas and intellectual direction for the entire butterfly series are still taking shape.

What do you think? Please offer me feedback and take a look at the first three paintings in this series.  At present their potential titles are Flight of the Painted Lady, Vanessa Made Up, and Seeing Past by Present.

I was introduced to the work of Caroline Mecklin two years ago when I visited the Stutz Artist Open House for the first time.  I have not forgotten  her work, and was looking forward to seeing her studio again this year.  Her dynamic figures are rich with the life she sees in her live models.

Derek Powell has a studio tucked away at the end of the third floor.  His work mostly consists of soft, misty landscapes painted with limited palates.  There were also three black and white ink drawings that were reminiscent of Rouault without the color.  Their titles, The Last Supper I, II, and III also added to their connection with Rouault.

This past spring I have been drawing on Friday mornings with a group of other artists.  One of the artists is Vicky Shaffer White.  Vicky presented a slue of nice flower pieces from the past few years; however, I preferred her calm, elegant, clothed figures that she had placed outside her studio.

Mark Pack is one of the artists in residence this year at the Stutz.  I have seen his work before and due to my love of the natural world, am fascinated by the intricate designs in his carved acrylic paintings.

Three diverse artists share studio B240.  Kate Oberreich had a series of small paintings entitled “A Happy Home”.  I met Kate last summer when she was a part of Elegant Funk.  Her work is a collage of words and images that provoke thought.  She uses realistic images in an abstract manner.  Ginny Taylor Rosner photographs empty interiors giving insight into what contemporary man abandons and leaves behind.  Carol L. Myers is a print maker who is newly exploring watercolor as a way to express her visual ideas.  Themes of snail shells and trees run through her present work.

It was a great night at the Stutz and that is just a taste of what I saw.

*I am using the word authentic and not the word accurate.

There was a series of paintings that Rembrandt van Rijn did concerning the life of Christ in the Alte Pinakothek Museum in Munich, Germany.  I may mention the series later, but one in the series was of the crucifixion.  This painting is interesting because it captures the moment when the cross is hoisted into an upright position.  While two thugs push and pull it into place,  there is a third figure bracing the cross.  The third figure is a self-portrait of Rembrandt.  He is placing himself among the others who are crucifying Christ.  He is saying that he, like them, is a sinner.

(Rembrandt is in the center near Christ’s feet)

Time was running short and I went to the Harrison Center for the Arts as my last stop in the First Friday Hop.  Here I met up with fellow Yarn Burners to play Bingo and create a square for our group project.  Then I hurried up to see the show in the gallery.

Susan Hodgin has her new work entitled “Cairns”  in the Harrison Center Gallery.  I began and completed the night with artwork that progressed through careful exploration of ideas.  Susan Hodgin’s paintings are created with oil paint and charcoal.  Sometimes the charcoal showed through layers of paint, and at other times, the charcoal was applied on top of the paint.  There are many layers in the paintings, and one can see a swirl pattern of uplifted surface that lies underneath the paint and charcoal.  The oil paint is unmixed and yet this variant of color and tone is not used to increase a three dimensional look of the painting, but rather emphasizes the graphic quality and two-dimensional nature of the painting.  Susan uses geometric shapes, but instead of the shapes appearing mechanical, they appear organic.  Most of the backgrounds, although they have color and light fading softly in and out, are somewhat flat, which counterparts nicely with the foreground.  Helium, on the other hand, is a painting that jumped out to me because the background seems more alive with light.  The background of Helium interacts more completely with the foreground “circles” of color.  It is a pleasing body of work.

I continued the First Friday art hop by traveling down Mass Ave to the McFee Gallery and Studio.  The main artist shown this month is Kelly Gentry.  Her work falls easy on the eye.  There seems to be three related series of works.  One has a silhouette of a single person, usually walking away from the viewer, holding a colorful umbrella.  The backgrounds of these paintings are mostly blotches of bright colored paint creating the look of a mist.  The paintings would  seem lonely, perhaps, if not for the brightness of the background.  Something draws me whimsically toward these.  The second series has a similar misty background with calligraphic lines of thick acrylic paint on top.  The third is a series of tree silhouettes on colorful skies.  The trees are simple with enough branches to be used as design elements.
Art Bank.  My first venture into the Art Bank brought me in contact with a melding of different styles and types of art.  Gina Soo Golden’s realistic figurative work (paintings that also seem to have feeling and purpose) shares a room with Dale Kercheud’s post-impressionist type paintings.  Rosanna Hall’s realistic landscapes are around the bend from a simplified abstract landscape by Steve Woerner.

This month had a pleasing array of good art shows in the downtown gallery scene of Indianapolis, Indiana.  I started off my evening by visiting wUG LAKU’s STUDIO & gARAGE.  The current show is a representation from Wug’s earlier work, and is entitled “Raw.”  The developments of his ideas concerning his investigation into nature and language are shown through several unfinished sketches and early paintings. The early paintings are different from the digitally manipulated photographs of his more recent work, and yet somehow they seemed the same.  Unfortunately (or fortunately) a First Friday is also a time of socialization, and I did not delve into the art show as much as it deserved.  There are deep questions, thoughts, and art making going on in the garage.

From there I ran into a show by another artist I know, Dave Voelpel.  Dave does abstract landscape paintings and had his show in the Five Seasons Studio Gallery.  Lately he has incorporated the palate knife into his work giving long soft strokes in his thick paint.  I have seen paintings of his where he has used a variety of things to thicken the paint…even coffee grinds!  Dave Voelpel also had a few collages on display.  It was interesting to see the designs he made with his patchwork of recognizable images.

The final stop in the circle city complex was at Matthew Davey’s new studio.  The studio was sparse, but had a few nice figurative works in it.  There were two drawings of female nudes on one wall, a huge (10 feet? by 6 feet?) painting against one wall, another drawing on a third wall and a medium sized sculpture set up in an adjoining room.  This little adjoining room was set up reminiscent to me, as a shrine.  The sculpture (Lily, Lily, Rose) was sharply lit from the front (which was disappointing to someone who wanted to study it from all angles, but provided excellent, sharp lighting for the front of the sculpture), and there was soft music playing in the background.  It was a wonderful, detailed bronze sculpture of a nude woman with her arms above her head and her face cast upward.  It was set upon a pedestal that is reminiscent of a nail.  Around the foot of the pedestal was a pile of smooth rocks.  It was beautiful.