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By Shu-Ju Wang
Above, a corner of Susan’s studio with various complete and in-progress work.
Susan Gallacher-Turner is fascinated by shape-shifters. Characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, stories from Native American traditions, or even looking out the car window where faces appear in the distant hills and trees…these are all sources of inspiration for her boxes, repoussé work and aluminum window screening sculptures.
Susan is a bit of a shape-shifter herself…
Wait, did you say aluminum window screening?
***
Yes. Lets talk about that, it is a bit unusual. Although Susan did not start out intending to create sculptures with aluminum window screening, she now does much of her work with that particular material. Previously, she had been working with beadwork and fabric and was trying to create a painted fabric piece that needed to be shaped and formed. After trying various methods, she hit upon the idea of using aluminum screening to shape the fabric and brought it in to consult with her sculpture instructor.
“Why are you bothering with the fabric?” was the instructor’s response.
Once Susan let go of the fabric, it all came together and she started working with the screening material more and more, and she hasn’t looked back.
One might call aluminum screening sculpture X-treme Handiwork. Instead of holding a silk handkerchief and slowly building an image thread by thread, Susan holds a giant piece of aluminum screen in her hands as she slowly and gently pushes into the material to create a form. There are no molds or drawings, she just holds the material in her hands and starts pushing. The nose comes first, but only barely at the beginning. The first round of ‘pushes’ creates the sketch, if you will. Once the sketching is complete, she then goes back and pushes again, to deepen the definition. The process is slow, as once done, it can not be undone; Susan is careful to not over-push it.
As she works, if appropriate, she also starts to shape the entire piece into a form that can stand up by itself. Again, all by pushing and shaping with her fingers. Slowly, the aluminum screening transforms into a human face, an eagle, a lion or a variety of other half animal, half plant creatures. Then Susan paints the sculpture. Coats and coats of paint are needed for the colors to finally built up and be visible on the mesh material. As she paints, she watches for where the material needs more definition and she returns to pushing again.
Back and forth, back and forth, until she’s satisfied with the form, the colors, and the balance. The standalone pieces stand up by themselves indoors; outdoors, they do need some support so that they don’t blow away.
***
Now, where were we? Oh, yes.
Susan is a bit of a shape-shifter herself — she’s a professional writer, and for those long time readers of this blog, you know that she has contributed much to this forum; she’s also a sculptor of many different mediums, including clay, copper repoussé and, of course, aluminum screening.
To see Susan’s larger and smaller sculptures (many are jewelry pieces), visit her studio during Portland Open Studios on Oct 17 and 18, 2009. Susan is artist number 79 on the tour. You can see more of her work at her website at http://www.susangt.com/.
To learn more about Portland Open Studios, visit their website at http://www.portlandopenstudios.com/.
Below, top: Susan’s workbench where she works on her repoussé work. With the copper sheets, she does sketch first and follow the sketch; bottom: The Shape-shifter Polar Bear.
By Susan Gallacher-Turner
Podcast audio interview available at www.voicesoflivingcreatively.com
“I have done a lot of different things, but I think that’s the way my art developed,” says Margie Lee. “It’s not just a straight path, that’s for sure.”
Margie at work in her studio
Margie Lee’s life path has led her across the country and Europe, and across the fields of geology, literature and art. Margie’s interest in art started in second grade when she tagged along to her older brother’s private art lessons, “I was very encouraged by my brother who was a painter. It was a very rich environment, all the teachers were from the college,” Margie explains. Her early schooling in Bellingham, Washington, was at the Campus School, a lab school associated with Western Washington University.
Margie’s interests grew to include math and science in high school and it was there her path took a turn that led her back to art. “I got kicked out of French class, and put in art which was horrible because all the weird kids were in that class,” Margie laughs. “But I started doing my sketching. I liked to draw figures and fashion illustration. The teacher noticed and said I think you should go into this…so I kept that in my mind.”
Fashion illustration was Margie’s first career choice, but with the advice of her mom, and her interest in science, she went to Western Washington University getting a BA in Geology but right after graduation her path took another turn. “I worked for one day, and I got fired,” says Margie. “So that weekend, some friends and I went to Carmel. It was so beautiful, and I wanted to know who lived here, and they said artists.” That’s when Margie realized, “I don’t think Geology is for me. I think I’d better go into art.
So I started that path.”
Seeing her figure drawing and painting as characters, someone suggested she look into working in costume design. Since there were only a few places in San Francisco that hired costume designers, she took another suggestion and headed across the country getting a job working as a wardrobe mistress in New York. It was there, resident playwright Lanford Wilson, asked her to do the graphics for the theater. That’s when Margie started taking classes at The Art Students League.
“I studied printmaking,” says Margie. “Then I met an artist named Ari and he said why don’t you try oil. I was very frightened of oil but I tried it and I just got hooked on oil painting.” Her classes didn’t lead her to graphic design for the theater, but into the fine art world instead. Margie describes her path, “I had a few exhibits in New York, went back to Bellingham and had some more exhibits, then I won a Purchase Prize at the Anacortes Art Festival and I used that to go to Europe.”
Margie went back to New York after Europe and met her husband, a writer. From there, they went to San Diego, where Margie painted and her husband wrote a book. A move to Boston led her back to college, this time to study another love, literature. After getting her masters in English and American Literature from Harvard, Margie started writing. Making art and writing was a balancing act according to Margie, “It’s hard to do both. Because, all this time I’m doing different jobs to make a living, I could not possibly do both. When I say balance, I mean I’ll do writing for 4 years and art for 3 years.”
Margie’s worked at a variety of jobs over the years including UPS loader, telephone survey researcher, fish cleaner, Burger King cashier and bookstore clerk. But it was her last job that finally allowed her to combine her unique skills. Working at the Columbian newspaper in Vancouver, Margie did graphics and art. “I did a lot of charts and maps,” explains Margie. “I mainly wanted to do illustrations for the features section. My art was being used, not in fashion illustration but in this character study way. I did it all from memory and on photo shop. I get them all out of my head, my imagination. You have to have an imagination for that, that’s why they want an artist because the artist can do something they can’t get from a photograph.”
Describing her painting process Margie says, “I start with a blank piece of paper or canvas. I just start putting paint on it, sometimes I have an idea in my mind and sometimes I’m just putting paint on it. I’ll see what’s on the canvas. If I see something exciting, I’ll just go with it.”
It’s her intuition and imagination that fuels her creative process now more than ever. Whether it’s writing poetry, creative non-fiction, painting or her newest passion, video, Margie is involved in characters, words and stories.
This year in addition to being on the Portland Open Studios Tour, Margie is on the board and produced a video about other Portland Open Studios artists. As she learned about how other artists work, she learned more about her own work as well, “It’s just amazing what these artists have in their backgrounds. You’re going into a studio with someone who’s practically spent their whole life on something and what a wealth of information. I was just amazed at the biographies and process.”
While filming artist Bill Park painting, Margie recalls he said, “And now, it’s getting really ugly and that’s just where I want to be.” Margie agrees, “That’s just the perfect point to be in art, to be creative, when you’ve just lost everything and you have nothing more to lose.”
Margie’s never at a loss for work these days, dividing her time between her solo studio work, Five Windows Studio, her poetry and creative non-fiction groups, video work and Portland Open Studios. Margie’s life and art have taken many turns along the way but there is a common thread to her intuitive path, “There are just so many projects that I want to do. As an artist, my number one thing is experimentation and always something new.”
You can visit Margie’s studio and watch her at work next weekend October 17 and 18th during the Portland Open Studios Tour. Tour Guides are available at Art Media, New Seasons, Powell’s and our webiste.
By Shu-Ju Wang
Jason Kappus is full of contradictions. A natural-born story-teller bent on making non-narrative art; a painter who thinks of himself a writer; and a gifted portrait artist who can’t help but create non-objective, abstract work.
Below, Ode, by Jason Kappus
Jason Kappus is a standout in other ways too. As children, almost everyone draws—that’s what we do because we have no other means of visual communication until we learn how to write. And once we acquire the skill of the written language, many give up drawing all together, leaving behind our colorful crayon lines and forms that perhaps only a parent can love.
But Jason wasn’t going to have it that way—before he could write, he dictated children’s action adventure stories to his parents (who wrote them down), and Jason illustrated them. And as a teen, he taught himself how to do portraits using graphite as the drawing medium and fashion magazines as sources . Before long, he was making technically excellent, realistic portraits. But perhaps because he was doing it on his own, without the guidance of a mature artist, he couldn’t take it to the next level. He couldn’t figure out how he could use his technical skills to create expressive work, and without the expressive component, these realistic portraits became an exercise in frustration. Impatient with how-to books and with interest and talent elsewhere, he gave up painting and returned to writing.
After moving to California and enrolling in film school to study screenwriting, he quickly ran out of money and dropped out of school, and found himself working as a lighting technician in the film industry.
It was during this time that Jason started painting again and discovered Elmer Bischoff, an abstract expressionist who returned to figurative work. The trajectory fascinated Jason—he saw in Bischoff’s path a possible way for himself to move forward. That he could use abstraction as a way of learning the painting medium without having to achieve specific goals. That he could return to figurative work with this new skill set.
But that never happened. Jason discovered that he appreciated abstract art, that he enjoyed the ability to express himself with shapes and colors. In abstraction, he finds “…a viewer has no way to judge whether the abstracts are accurate, or even if they are relevant to my initial sketch or thought, that since there is no automatic gauge to judge them by that if someone enjoys them then I have achieved a greater accomplishment.”
And although Jason hadn’t said so, I think that it is not a coincidence that he found success in painting after working first as a lighting technician. After all, the organic, luminous forms in his paintings shimmer like they have been painted with gelled lights. Each scene is orchestrated and colors carefully chosen to pulsate against and melt into each other, creating a beat, a rhythm. Using a time-consuming technique known as glazing, colors and forms are slowly built up with layers and layers of paint until the proper intensity and luminosity are achieved. The images might imply looking up at the sky, peering through the microscope or perhaps looking through dense brush, but glow they always do.
To see more of Jason’s work, visit his website at http://anonymousphenomena.blogspot.com/.
You can visit Jason and 99 other artists during the 2009 Portland Open Studios tour, October 10, 11, 17, and 18, 10am-5pm. To learn more about Portland Open Studios, visit http://www.portlandopenstudios.com. Tour guides are available at New Seasons, Art Media and other retail outlets listed on the website.
Below, a corner of Jason’s studio, with new work in progress and also older, portrait work
By Shu-Ju Wang
Kate Krider had a recurring dream—trapped in a house suspended above a body of water, she was about to fall through the floor into the churning waves below where ‘evil’ lurked. The waves splashed and slapped, and Kate was afraid.
One night, she finally did fall through that floor, and found herself falling upon the ‘waves’ in the raked gravel of a Japanese garden. It was beautiful, peaceful, and delightful.
She knew she had to paint this image, and the dream has never returned.
***
Below, Kate Krider’s first painting, that of her falling through the house into the ‘waves’ below.
As an artist, Kate Krider has always known what interested her. The signs of civilization that give us comfort—whether it’s a house, a cairn, a spirit dwelling or a holy object—form a continuous thread from her days as paper-maker to the mid-career artist of today, working in painting and 3-dimensional collages.
But at the same time, that other sign of civilization, water—both comforting and menacing—is also evident in her work. That water is absolutely necessary in the art of paper-making and paper-casting balanced against her struggles and fears of water in her dreams. Or that she loves to paint cairns of rocks made smooth by water, precariously balanced and reaching up to the sky.
Her travels to Vietnam in 2001 served to heighten her interests when she instantly connected with Vietnamese paintings of houses on water and the ideas of spirit houses. And she has been painting houses on water and making spirit houses elevated on stilts or ball feet ever since.
Although Kate considers herself to be a self-taught painter, she has a formal arts background with an MFA in Mixed Media from JFK University in California. Looking through her portfolio of her paper-casting pieces (her specialization in graduate school), the themes of ‘house’ and ‘water’ were clearly present then. Paper-making and casting eventually gave way to painting and 3-dimensional collages as she found her paper-casting more and more commercialized and less personally and artistically satisfying. But as she switched mediums, the threads of house, home and water continued.
“Family, home, and finding home are the big themes in my work,” Kate says. I also see that looking for that point between comfort and uncertainty being an important aspect of her work. She puts the water above the stilts; she makes the house with an invisible floor, or a floor covered in undecipherable writings; and finally, her anything goes attitude when it comes to making spirit houses. There’s a spirit house for Keith Richards, for example, covered in guitar picks for roofing materials.
In recent months, Kate has focused on making 3-dimensional collages based on cigar boxes. But perhaps you won’t be surprised to find that house, water, and spiritual places play an important role there too!
Below, a recent 3-dimensional collage based on a cigar box.
To see more of Kate Krider’s work, visit her website at http://katekrider.com/. Kate is artist #43 in the 2009 Portland Open Studios tour. To learn more about the tour, visit http://www.portlandopenstudios.com/. Tour Guides are available online through the website, or at New Seasons, Art Media, and other retail outlets listed on the website.
Below, her sculpture Family Arc presents herself as a newborn, coming home from the hospital with her mother, enclosed in a transparent arc on stilts surrounded by water. Only the watery waves are between the arc and the stilts, almost as if she is telling her baby-self to see the water, to be on the water, and to not fear the water.
By Susan Gallacher-Turner
Kitty Wallis
“I’ve spent many, many years waking up in the morning saying what do I feel like doing today? As an artist, do I feel like going into the studio? Do I feel like going out meeting people? Do I feel like getting reference material? I’m very young looking for my age. And I think that’s one of the reasons,” says Kitty Wallis.
From the streets of New York to a California commune, Kitty has always lived an artist’s life. As a child growing up in a small, poor Pennsylvania town, Kitty’s mother was proud of her artistic daughter and encouraged her to draw. Later, it was a high school counselor who, saw Kitty’s talent, took her to New York City to apply for a full-tuition art scholarship at Cooper Union. Only 10% of the applicants to Cooper Union are accepted into this privately funded 150 year old college. After passing the difficult 8 hour entrance exam, Kitty was accepted into the program. Making her first move away from her small town home, in 1956, Kitty describes how it felt in the big city, “Culture shock! The first day was traumatic because I didn’t realize the importance of the fact that no one would know me. Because everybody knew me when I was growing up, there were only 2,500 people in my town. But people helped. By the end of the first day I had a place to live and a job. It’s amazing.”
Although being a student at Cooper Union is an honor and Kitty learned to work in a variety of media, she had her difficulties. The school was embracing abstract impressionism, the new wave of art in the 1950’s and Kitty wanted to do realistic work. Walking from her office job to school one day, Kitty passed by a group of sidewalk artists looking for customers when one of the artists said, “Get your portrait done.” Kitty replied back, “If I wanted a portrait of myself I would do one myself.” He challenged her to do his portrait right there and then. “So I did. And I was so excited by the whole thing because I did a good portrait of him. It was just a little charcoal sketch but it was right on.” The artist was so impressed with her skill, he suggested she set up her own street portrait business. Kitty says, “I was out there the next night with my chairs, easel and art supplies, the whole thing. That was the first move I made to be independent instead of having a job.”
Kitty’s journey began doing portraits on the streets of New York, but has taken her many places along the way. After three years at Cooper Union, Kitty got married and with her husband set up a shop in Philadelphia. He made sandals and she did portraits. Deciding to join a commune, they moved to California and a year or so later, Kitty moved to Santa Cruz. Kitty has traveled the country and the world making art and money, seeing old friends, making new ones and setting up gallery shows featuring work from her travels. Kitty says, “I first wanted to travel around the country so I could learn to be a traveler. So I got a van and some art supplies and started across the country for a year and a half.” Kitty found ways to make money along the way doing portraits, plein air painting and working with a therapy community. This led to a unique opportunity Kitty explains, “I got to a gallery in Dallas that had a few of my pieces. They were excited by what I was doing and said let’s do a show of your work when you get back.”
For a while, Kitty settled back in Santa Cruz, California enjoying the artistic lifestyle there. Then, she moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico where the gallery scene was thriving but after a few years, missed California and moved back to Santa Cruz. It was in Santa Fe, she overheard an art store conversation that led her down another professional road. “I had been using sandpaper and that gave me that painterly quality, rich hard edges color on color. It was sold in art supply stores as pastel paper even though it was disposable paper,” says Kitty. “I heard the art company rep tell the store owner that they weren’t going to supply the sandpaper anymore. I knew I had to have a paper with that texture and a product that wouldn’t fall apart after 50 years. And it had to have the sandpaper surface but smooth.”
It was a personal need that drove Kitty to develop her now famous Wallis Sanded Paper. At first, she made it herself on a Santa Cruz hilltop. With a spray gun in each hand, she sprayed resin on the paper first, then pumice. At the end of the sessions, covered with paint and pumice, Kitty would have enough paper to last her several months. But when her students wanted to know how she achieved her unique pastel effects, she realized she had to share her paper with them. And it was a student with manufacturing experience who helped her find a way to get the paper mass produced. Introduced at the first semi-annual International Association of Pastel Societies in Denver, Colorado in 1995, the paper was a hit and Kitty began receiving a regular salary for the first time in her life. “When I first got into this business I was very excited about finally having an income that didn’t depend on selling paintings. I wanted to see what I would paint if I didn’t have to pay the rent with the sale of my work. So the first thing I found out was, I depended on that need to sell for my painting discipline,” explains Kitty.
About that time, Kitty moved to Portland from Santa Cruz, bringing with her the studio tour idea that she’d been involved with there. “When I moved to Portland, my heart was so much involved in the open studios idea that I felt that Portland needs this,” she says. “But I didn’t want to come busting up here with, “In California this is how they do this.” So, she waited 3 years, meeting artists and collecting the names of artists whose work she liked. Kitty explains, “I got eight people to come to a meeting in August of 1998. We put up our own fees for the first year, $80 dollars a piece, enough money to print applications and send them out. And when we got applications back and juried, we had 49 people in the first tour.”
Ten years later, the Portland Open Studios Tour has grown to feature 100 artists at work in their studios all around the Portland Metro area. Kitty has watched Portland Open Studios grow with pride. Although she’s not as actively involved, she still enjoys participating in the tour every year. Kitty says, “I am so proud of how people took the ball and ran with it because you don’t want your baby to die. And to have such strong legs on your baby is a very nice thing. Because it’s growing in strength, vitality and popularity every year.”
In addition to Portland Open Studios, gallery shows, Wallis Paper company, teaching around the country and doing her own studio work, Kitty, at 71, is busier than she’s ever been. Retirement is not in her future, says Kitty, “I have never been so busy in my whole life. I’m 71 and I’m far from retiring. “I never thought of it as a goal. I would brag to people I’m so glad I belong to a profession that I don’t have to retire from.”
All those years ago as a young Cooper Union student, Kitty says she wanted to develop the chops of a master. As an internationally known, award-winning artist, teacher and entrepreneur, she’s done all that and more. Now as she works in her studio, she’s painting not just what she sees around her but what she feels within. “I finally allowed myself to understand that I was bored with realism,” she explains. She wants the colors and shapes to come from her gut, and her work continues to grow and evolve. “Now I seem to have found a new challenge. I’m doing something new and I don’t know how to do it. It’s a good thing. I want to learn how to create an expression that is mine,” Kitty says. “This is who I am.”
New work by Kitty Wallis
You can visit Kitty’s studio during the Portland Open Studios Tour, October 10, 11 and 17, 18 from 10 am to 5pm. Tour Guides are for sale at New Seasons, Art Media, Powell’s and on our website at Portland Open Studios.
Hear the podcast about Kitty Wallis at Voices of Living Creatively website.
By Shu-Ju Wang
Below, Thirteen Sisters Approach the Fantasy Planet by Kamala Dolphin-Kingsley, in watercolor, acrylic, and glitter.
Not so long ago, there lived a princess in a beautiful meadow full of wondrous creatures. Chameleons, dodos, caterpillars and pugs with wings kept her company as she spun elaborate tales and staged magical plays that charmed the denizens of her kingdom.
Then one day, she packed up her bags, and moved to Portland.
Really. Only now, in Portland, she creates her fantastic theater on paper, using watercolors, acrylics, and glitter. And she really likes glitter.
•••
Welcome to the world of Kamala Dolphin-Kingsley—a world where family pets, exotic flowers, fantastical creatures, pirates and screen legends from years past mix happily with men playing golf and elderly gardeners tending to their roses. Her art lives at the junction of the probable and improbable, kitsch and class, tacky and humorous.
To stand in front of one of her pieces is very much like walking into a grand opera, an opera elaborately staged but has no libretto nor music. Imagine a silent opera that is a visual mashup of Mozart’s Magic Flute with Puccini’s Turandot, where all manors of creatures plot, conspire, and run amok among the lotus ponds and pagodas.
Kamala Dolphin-Kingsley is a creator of tall tales, fables, and myths, very much the product of a childhood spent as the only child of back-to-the-land parents who met at UC Berkeley. She spent her early years under giant Redwoods taking goats on walks, sitting with a rooster on her lap, creating communal banana slug, newt and centipede farms, and dressing up her pet rats and making them ride the dog. And of course, she read a lot. In other words, she kept herself entertained, relied on her own inventiveness, and was immersed in nature.
From there, she went on to receive a BFA in Photography from California College of Arts & Crafts. Although, she almost immediately moved on from photography upon graduation to doing illustrations professionally and to fine art. It is perhaps inevitable that she would find photography constraining, to be limited by what is available out there in the 3D world, when she can paint and draw unfettered by such constraints.
Unlike many artists who see art as a way to investigate the self or the community they live within (the larger ’self’), Kamala sees art as an escape from the self. Starting with what she knows so intimately well even as a child—the natural world—she mixes in her love for art of the Victorian era, Art Nouveauu, Art Deco, religious art, Japanese prints, stained glass and costume jewelry to arrive at her unique way of story telling, of escape from the ordinary. In this bizarre and beautiful world, the family dog takes his leashed human on a walk, the dodo bird lives in an ice cave, the puppy rides a caterpillar, and the hedgehog has tiny wings. And you, the viewer, are invited to create you own stories from the lush landscapes of Kamala’s imagination.
***
PS. Even her name hints at what you might find during a studio visit and in her art: Kamala, the Hindi word for lotus; Dolphin, one of the most storied and beloved creatures on earth; and Kingsley, from the king’s meadow.
To see more of Kamala Dolphin-Kingsley’s art, visit her website at http://www.kamaladolphinkingsley.com/. To really enter her bizarre and beautiful world, visit her studio during Portland Open Studios; she is artist number 45.
For more information about Portland Open Studios, visit http://www.portlandopenstudios.com/.
Below, a corner of Kamala’s studio with her graphics table and her collection of sketches and found objects.
By Susan Gallacher-Turner
“I’ve painted and drawn ever since I can remember,” says Kelly Neidig. Now, when I think of my memories a lot of the details are lost, but I can remember the colors and how I felt.”
Below, Kelly Neidig at work in her studio.
Kelly Neidig remembers drawing birds in kindergarten, and they were so good, even her mother didn’t believe she’d drawn them. After winning an art contest in first grade, Kelly devoted most of her time to art. Growing up in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania, a small town west of Pittsburg, Kelly went to schools that didn’t have any art programs, but she didn’t let that stop her. “I would just stay home and draw all the time,” says Kelly. “One year, my dad got me a big box of Prisma colored pencils, which are really expensive. So I was so afraid to use them that for three years, they sat in my room on my dresser. I still have them.”
All that drawing led Kelly to a major in landscape architecture at Penn State where teachers took notice of her natural talents and skill in art. For the first two years, the majority of the work focused on things Kelly loves like drawing, perspective, and working with color but then things changed. “Then it got into computers,” Kelly says. “For the next three years, you had to be on the computer and I didn’t want to be on the computer. I wanted to work with my hands. So I switched my major to art.”
On her first day in the art department, Kelly knew she was in the right place. “Walking around the art department, I felt so happy,” explains Kelly. “I actually wanted to apply for an art major but you needed a portfolio and I didn’t know what that was. But after two years, I realized I could just transfer because I was doing an integrated degree, I was just able to play and take whatever classes I wanted. It was awesome to be taking art classes.” Kelly took a variety of art classes including figure drawing, sculpture, ceramics and book making. Even though she did take a painting class, she found the teacher too structured for her and learned best when the class was more flexible. These classes taught her more about being open to the flow of the process than trying to control the product. “I’d rather just do it and see what happens,” says Kelly. “I do that with my paintings. I don’t ever try to have a complete idea. I like to go with the things that naturally occur.”
Letting things happen naturally is a reoccurring theme in Kelly’s art and life. From college at Penn State, Kelly moved to Arizona while her boyfriend went to school, she learned about the desert landscape all around her. “I only lived there for a short time, but coming from Pennsylvania and going to this landscape that was so alien,” explains Kelly. “It was like living on the moon, you can really see how the land is formed. I love the desert. I can’t get it out of my head.” While she was there, driving around the desert seeing the clashes between farmland and urban landscapes, taught her much about the importance of having natural places left undisturbed by man.
This sense of honoring the natural sense of place stayed with her when she moved to Portland. A choice Kelly says was driven by her art, “One of the reasons we chose Portland, was because I knew there was a big art scene here. And if I’m gonna be an artist I should be somewhere where people embrace art.” Her art career started on the street where she lived, selling small paintings on Alberta Street during the Last Thursday art openings.
It grew from there one step at a time from Last Thursday street sales, to coffee shops, wine bars and ultimately a gallery show at Guardino Gallery on Alberta Street. “I just started taking all the little shows on and started selling my art, and was able to work less and less at a job and work more on my art,” says Kelly. “Finally I quit my job and I’ve been a full-time artist for two years.”
In the last two years, Kelly’s been busy painting and getting her work out to the public. “I just say yes to everything, and figure the more places my art is the more chances it’s gonna be seen by somebody so I get it out there as much as I can,” Kelly says. Her goal – to make her work accessible to everyone at every price range – has led to some very interesting opportunities. Kelly now has paintings hanging in a Westin Hotel in Cincinnati and the U. S. Embassy in Doha, Qatar, as well as an upcoming show in La Conner Washington at the Museum of Northwest Art from October 10, 2009 to January 10, 2010.
Working on the paintings for that show and others, Kelly finds her process evolves naturally, “I start with a lot of layers of drippy acrylic and see something in it. Then I go into it with thin layers of oils and then thicker layers.” As Kelly adds layer and layer of color, the feeling of landscape emerges for her connecting her memories to a sense of place. “I’m more creating a feeling of a place on the canvas using color, rather than creating a specific place or statement,” explains Kelly. “I omit a lot of detail and let the viewer put in their own ideas. I try to help people connect to their memories using color. I use color to create a feeling that helps people connect with a place through color.”
Helping people connect with the landscape or each other is another important part of Kelly’s life and art. It was a neighbor’s suggestion that helped Kelly become part of Portland Open Studios. In 2006, Kelly says, “I got accepted, went to the first workshop and didn’t know anybody. But after the event, talking about my art for two days straight to perfect strangers, I had a better understanding of what I was doing.”
Kelly enjoyed the experience so much she re-applied in 2007, got more involved working on the publicity committee with Bonnie Meltzer and at Bonnie’s suggestion became a board member and president the next year. Kelly is amazed at how much she has learned as a Portland Open Studios artist and president, yet in the three years it’s the connections and community she values the most. “Meeting all the artists in Portland open studios is definitely my favorite part,” says Kelly. “I have a really good community of other artists. And the artists who do open studios are the type of artists who are open to sharing what they do with other people.”
Kelly wants to encourage artists and art lovers to come on the tour and get more familiar with Portland Open Studios. When she first took the tour, before her first open studios weekend, she learned so much. “It was a bit overwhelming at first,” Kelly says. “But all the artists that I saw were just great. I loved seeing everybody’s art work and going into people’s spaces. As an artist, just seeing the way other people do their artwork, it always reflects their environment.”
Kelly Neidig may be president of Portland Open Studios, but she welcomes anyone’s questions about art or the tour. Kelly says, “I’ve gotten so much help from other great artists and people in my life, I just love helping other people as well.”
You can visit Kelly Neidig’s studio during Portland Open Studios Tour as well as 99 other artists all around the Portland Metro area. Tour dates are October 10, 11 and 17, 18 from 10am to 5pm. To find out when your favorite artists studio is open, buy your Tour Guide at New Seasons, Art Media and other outlets listed on the website www.portlandopenstudios.com
Listen to a podcast interview with Kelly at www.voicesoflivingcreatively.com.
Visit Kelly’s website at www.kellyneidig.com.
By Shu-Ju Wang
Below, Sabina Haque with one of her lightbox pieces One Nation Under God.
Dominating, subversive, motherhood, submissive, breast—these were but a few of the words Sabina Haque received in response to her question “what comes to your mind when you hear the word ‘woman?’“
For the word American, the responses—superpower, righteous.
For Muslim—brown, religious, militant, and exotic.
Three words, three starkly different reactions.
These questions were a part of an installation/experiential exhibit Sabina produced in 2003 that also included portraits and interviews she created of 25 Pakistanis and 25 Americans. In the center of the installation were large posters of Muslim American women.
Sabina Haque is a Muslim American Woman.
***
Born in the US and moved to Pakistan with her family when she was 15 months old, Sabina grew up where people never questioned her identity–she was assumed to be Pakistani though she’s Scandinavian on her mother’s side.
After coming back to the US to go to school in Massachusetts for her BA and MFA, she found herself needing to define herself in a country obsessed with questions such as “where are you from?” and “what are you?“
And so Sabina found herself in the “category” of Muslim American Woman. Soon, she started to move away from her previous work of representational paintings and started to use mythology, politics, religion, social, and regional concerns to address the issue of identity, and creating work for exhibits titled “Who Are You?” and “Home? Crosscurrents in Contemporary South Asian/American Art.“
In these shows, Sabina engaged the public by finding the thread that binds us all, the thread that tells the story that we all share despite our seemingly disparate backgrounds. She created work based on 14th century Italian frescoes of Christ, and combined them with images of lotus blossom, the dagger of Kali, and verses from the Quran. Using the pages from a Bible and a Quran, she created a 12 foot woven tapestry. From this tapestry, she constructed a pillar, a pillar of the Bible and of the Quran. A pillar about the One Story, about commonality.
With her American citizenship, she’s able to delve into that space that’s in between two cultures, to cross borders, to define that space in between on her terms. She can see things from both sides. There are few people who have that biological and cultural advantage, to create work that sheds light on what it means to be American–and really, to be human–to close the gaps between us, to tell these personal psychological dramas that we can all understand.
Sabina continues to shed light on that commonality in her current work. She has started to talk about motherhood and family by exploring the myths around virginity and the cycle of birth and death—a topic without borders, if there ever was one.
Below, a self-portrait in Indian Madonna and Child.
Sabina Haque is artist number 58 in the 2009 Portland Open Studios tour. To see more of her work, visit her website at http://www.sabinahaque.com/.
By Susan Gallacher-Turner
Above, Nicky with one of her recent sculptures.
“About three years ago, I was diagnosed with cancer,” says Nicky. “During chemo, my dream was to build the studio.”
Three years later, Nicky is putting in the electrical outlets, painting and plumbing to make her dream come true. As a metal sculptor, Nicky needed a safe place to weld, grind and patina her large metal sculptures as well as showcase her knitted wire jewelry. Now, all she has to do is walk out her door, along a covered walkway and into her studio to work.
She’s worked in many different places and spaces over the years. Born in Florida where her father was a fighter pilot, Nicky is an American citizen with an international life. After her family left the U.S., Nicky lived in Holland and Switzerland. In addition to art, she loved sports and was a Physical Education teacher for 20 years. After moving back to the U.S., and finding out that her Swiss teaching experience couldn’t get her a job, she decided it was time to explore her other love, art. “If I have to go back to school,” says Nicky. “I’ll go to art school. So that’s what I did, I went to the Oregon College of Arts & Crafts and started with the basics and then just start doing it.”
Her first studio was the kitchen table where she did her wearable art coats. Then she moved to the attic which was so hot in the summer, she had to start her work day at 8 pm and sleep during the day. After that, her studio was in a basement in Corvallis until she became pregnant with her first child, Hans. Even though her wearable art was being sold in over 40 galleries across the country, she knew she had to quit. The dyes involved in her work were toxic and she didn’t want to take any chances during pregnancy. “I didn’t even clean up my studio,” says Nicky. “I just locked it and that was it. Then I decided this was the time to change.”
Nicky’s art moved from sewing wearable art to crocheting metal wire breasts. “My best friend in Switzerland had breast cancer,” she explains. “When she had mastectomy, I wanted to do something for her, just for a joke, I was going to make her a metal bra, I couldn’t weld, so I got some metal wire and started crocheting.” That experiment led her to a whole new way to create work, support her far away friend while being a mom at the same time. “Everytime she had chemo, I would knit her a breast,” says Nicky. “I had a backpack with a roll of wire in it and my crochet hook and Hans would play on the playground and I would sit and crochet.”
Nicky created a line of jewelry next, these delicate knitted earrings, bracelets and pendants still sell well at various shows and galleries around the country and allow her to work while her son is doing his homework. A memorial to her grandmother, her first crocheted sculpture, holds gold and silver beads that represent all the stories her grandmother used to tell about her life. After that, Nicky realized that to give her sculpture stability, she’d have to learn to weld. Taking classes at PNCA and PCC, she says, “I fell in love with welding. Just the smell of molten metal is like a drug. It’s the immediacy of it, it’s really amazing.”
Her goal now is to do larger public sculptures. And even though she has no experience in public art, she’s not letting that stop her any more than she let her own cancer stop her from building her dream studio at home. “Slowly I’m starting to make it a really good studio. It started after I was done with chemo and it took a while,” Nicky says. “It went way over budget, so I had to stop in the middle.”
Using skills she learned doing home remodeling, Nicky’s studio is finally taking shape. Doing some of the work herself saved Nicky enough money to have a bigger studio. “My idea was to build the biggest studio possible,” she explains. “And it’s kind of fun to be part of it and you feel proud when it’s done.”
Some people might give up on their dreams when facing breast cancer but not Nicky. It made her even more determined to have her dream studio, her art and her life. “It woke me up. It’s like, you know girl, you better live now, because now is what’s happening. Dream your dreams. Don’t put them in the future. Put them right here, where you are now, because nobody knows how long you’re going to live. I don’t think anymore that I ever had cancer, but I’m going to live now no matter what.”
This year, she’s finishing her studio, selling her jewelry at a show in Bellevue, Washington, doing an artist residency in Calgary, Canada, a large scale commission and showing public art in Grand Junction and Lake Oswego. In addition to being part of the Portland Open Studios Tour for the second year, Nicky loves the connections she makes with visitors to her studio.
For Nicky Falkenhayn, building a studio, creating her art, are her dreams come true. “I’ve always had something to look forward to and this drive to get it. If I have to learn something new, then I go for it. I live my life the best I can, I don’t take it for granted anymore, I just cherish every day.”
You can visit Nicky’s studio along with 100 other artists during Portland Open Studios Tour. For more information or to buy a Tour Guide, click portlandopenstudios.com.
To hear a podcast of Nicky’s interview, go to voicesoflivingcreatively.com.
To see more of Nicky’s work, visit her website at nickyfalkenhayn.com/.
Below, Nicky putting in an electrical outlet in her new studio.
By Shu-Ju Wang
Below, Laura Russell at 23 Sandy Gallery during The Quiet Fire, an exhibit of Stewart Harvey’s photographs of Burning Man.
After hearing through the grapevine that Laura Russell, artist and gallery owner, had been singing the praises of Portland Open Studios, I talked to Laura to find out more.
LR: Portland Open Studios is one of the best things I ever did for my gallery and for my career.
SJW: In what ways?
LR: I was new to Portland, had been here 6 months, maybe 9 months. I didn’t know anyone, didn’t have any contacts. When I participated in Portland Open Studios, 250 people came through my studio in one weekend. Not only did they purchase my artist’s books and photographs, they also signed up for my mailing list, and they’ve been following my career ever since. When the gallery opened, they were also the first people to come to the gallery, and they’ve been coming every month.”
SJW: That’s very organized, to have created a mailing list from your first Portland Open Studios weekend.
LR: Organized to a fault, but it works and I won’t be here today without it. Artists have to find a way to do the business side.
SJW: When did you decide to open a gallery?
LR: I’ve wanted to do it for 10 years. I was inspired by a couple in Denver who owned side-by-side businesses in a cute commercial duplex — Fred’s Barbershop on one side and Ethel’s Beauty Shop on the other. Steve (Laura’s husband) and I were going to be Fred & Ethel, too, with Steve’s commercial real estate business on one side and my art gallery on the other side. Whenever we saw a cute little space, we talked about it. Over the years, it evolved into a dream of a live and work place. After we had been in Portland for 2 years, we started looking around for a potential space, and within a week we found the right place.
SJW: Did you always know it would be a photography gallery because you’re photographer?
LR: I always knew it’d be a combination of photography & bookarts, the two mediums work together really well and I want to go with what I know. The third thing I show twice a year is graphic arts.
SJW: You were featured in the Oregonian A&E section as one of the movers & shakers (“the power 9″) of the Portland photography scene. How do you feel about that? And since you’re relatively new to Portland and the gallery is new, how do you go from being new to being “the power 9″?
LR: That is all about business. I knew I had to work really hard because I’m in an odd location, so PR is important. I’ve spent a huge amount of time on PR for the gallery which has really paid off. DK Row has written about the gallery
several times. A lot of the success is due to a professional approach to PR — be consistent with press releases, make contact with local publications, find out how they like their press releases, find out what types of information they need, and follow through. I worked really hard to establish an identity and to get press for every show; I target marketing efforts carefully and send them to the people who are interested in that particular medium or subject.
SJW: Do you feel more pressure, now that you’ve been named a mover & shaker?
LR: It did make me think a bit more about what I’d do for 2009.
SJW: Given that in a relatively short time in Portland, you’ve achieved an enviable amount of success, do you have any advice to other artists?
LR: They have to realize that they’re in business and treat it as a business to make a living. I took what came out of Portland Open Studios and used it in a lot of different ways. I have a mission to promote book arts, and events like Portland Open Studios really introduce people to book arts. It’s great to sell my own work, to build a customer base in Portland, and to promote book arts. The better people are educated about it, the better the market place will be.
SJW: Anything else?
LR: I’d tell every artist to do Portland Open Studios — it’s good for business and it’s good for ’stroking’, and all artists need both. I’d tell them to get involved, the more involved you are, the more you get out of it. You never know when the contacts you make will come back and help you. Portland Open Studios is one of the best things I’ve done, and one of my favorite events to go to; I try to visit as many artists as I can every year.
To learn more about Laura’s gallery, 23 Sandy, please go to http://23sandy.com/. To see Laura’s artwork, visit her website http://www.laurarussell.net/.
To read DK Row’s piece about the key players in the Portland photography scene, please go to Oregonian’s Visual Arts Blog.
To apply to the 2009 Portland Open Studios, please go to http://www.portlandopenstudios.com/apply.html.
Below, 23 Sandy Gallery, located at 623 NE 23rd Avenue, Portland, Oregon.
By Susan Gallacher-Turner
Above, Martha, an artist’s book by Shu-Ju Wang
It all started simply enough. Shu-Ju Wang wanted to find a way to connect with her American mother who suffers from memory loss. As a painter and book artist, she came up with the idea to make art prints with her mother and create a book that connected images and people from the past to the present.
“I used my mom as a model—we would spend two weeks together and make prints, then I would come home and make the book,” Shu-Ju said.
But it didn’t turn out exactly that way. With a grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council and a little help from friends, Shu-Ju was connected with four elder residents from Rose Schnitzer Manor. Together, they would create the prints, then she would create an artist book for each resident. But when Shu-Ju met the first resident, she realized that the concept for the project and the reality of the process were two very different things.
Shu-Ju describes, “At the beginning, I had a very specific idea. I would explain the project to them and we’d go from there. I really had this backwards.” What Shu-Ju realized was that she had to find out what each resident wanted to do, and let the project go from there. But finding each woman’s specific interest was a bit tricky.
“It’s completely different working with someone you don’t know and trust is a real issue when your memory is failing. You spend a lot of time just trying to establish a relationship with them before you can really get any work done. These are women at all different levels of memory loss. The less they’re able to remember, the harder it is to establish a relationship with them.”
But Shu-Ju persisted and, with patience, a little luck, and help from some relatives, she was able to build trust and find out what each woman really wanted to do. The result was four very different, creative and beautiful art books that relate to personal experiences from each of the women’s lives.
Below, the installation at John Wilson Special Collections, with Shu-Ju behind the glass case.
Marion loved watercolors. Every day, Marion walked down to the arts and crafts room to admire a particular watercolor hanging on the wall. Observing this, Shu-Ju suggested doing watercolors. Together, they created Marion’s accordion style artist book, with reproductions of her favorite watercolor landscape scene. “I encouraged her to work on something a little different. She would start but as we worked they morphed into the hills, meadow, trees and sunset sky.” Marion would often talk about the big family picnics from her past. This was a clue to Shu-Ju. “So, one day I asked her if the image she was painting was about the family picnics and she said, ‘oh, maybe it is’. That was really an ‘ah ha’ moment.”
Another resident, Martha, loved bright colors, flowers and writing notes to her family and friends. Shu-Ju designed her book to look like envelopes. “All her prints are inserted in the envelopes. She had her fingernails painted in this bright magenta color so her book cover is printed in that color. Her book is very colorful, with lots of flower images, and words that I found so inspiring about her.”
Esther’s book came closest to Shu-Ju’s original concept for the project. “It was a collection of documents and photographs from her life. Her daughter was really interested in this project, too, so each time they would pick and choose what they wanted to include in her book.” Esther also loved playing mahjong. Shu-Ju designed her book to look like a collection of mahjong tiles featuring a winning hand on one side and Esther’s prints on the other side, all tied together with a blue ribbon and ivory mahjong tile beads.
Sheila was a professional printmaker, in her lifetime, using an etching press to create intaglio prints. For her book, Shu-Ju created a cover in a very soft blue-gray color to mirror the look of a used intaglio print plate to hold her portfolio of handmade prints. Shu-Ju says, “She was far along in her memory loss and quite often I had trouble understanding what she was trying to tell me. But in her printmaking and her artwork, she made complete sense. She could talk about value, color, and composition.”
Today, Sheila is still a dedicated art maker. According to Shu-Ju, “Every time I go there, she’s doing collage or sculptures from whatever she can get her hands on. Candy wrappers. Blister packs. Bubble wrap. She built these wonderful sculptures from Styrofoam blocks.”
Four different women in four different stages of memory loss found that their creativity connects them to their family, their favorite pastimes, and their lives both then and now.
This connection of past to present was what Shu-Ju had in mind with project title, “Relay/Replay”. “It was an opportunity for the seniors to ‘relay’ or talk about those moments in their life and ‘replay’ was the opportunity for them to go through their lives again.”
Does relaying their memories into art books help them replay and remember events and people? Shu-Ju doesn’t know but she says, “There’s still a great deal of capacity in people to create.” She also knows they had fun and some, like Marion, got a chance to learn something new.
In addition to producing 20 artist books for each senior, they were given 7 and 13 are part of a rotating exhibit, Shu-Ju had a wooden screen made to hold prints and printing plates from each book. The screens are installed at the manor giving the seniors another way to remember their experience.
Shu-Ju explains, “It’s very rare in an exhibit situation that you get to interact with artist books. I wanted the books to be shown in a way that the seniors could see them easily. I had the idea to make room dividers, like shoji screens. I put the prints from the books in the screens but not in consecutive order. I wanted it to be like a treasure hunt for them. They are installed here at the manor.”
Shu-Ju wants to send collections of the books to medical research libraries specializing in memory loss. Her hope is they will help researchers understand, while memory may be lost, creativity isn’t. She also plans to continue working with seniors producing artist books with her Relay Replay Press.
Below, Shu-Ju and one of the room divider screens installed at Rose Schnitzer Manor.
To see more of Shu-Ju’s work, go to www.fingerstothebone.com.
To hear a podcast of this interview, go to www.infopods.org.
By Morgan Madison
Below, Recording Memory, painted found object on wood, by Bonnie Meltzer.
At the outset of our interview Bonnie warns that she has had a few cups of coffee and might be a little scattered, but to be honest it is quite remarkable that she keeps everything together with all she has going on. Self-described “Portland Open Studios yenta,” Bonnie fulfills a nurturing role as board member and the public relations coordinator. She also designs websites, writes and lectures on art and technology and the use of recycled materials in art and keeps a large garden. Somehow, in the midst of all this she has managed to become an accomplished “very mixed media artist” known for her social commentary and distinct use of recycled materials.
Bonnie was born in New Jersey “with a crochet hook in her hand” and her interest in textiles has remained a constant. It certainly reflects in the way she has woven her passions for art, technology and recycling throughout her life. A visit to her studio quickly reveals this. The large well-lit space just outside the garden in her backyard looks at first like a repository for old hardware that has been cast aside by the march of technology. There are rows of jars with nuts and bolts and snips of things, cans of paint and glue and stacks of keyboards and circuit boards. Immediately one can see her zest for recovering artifacts that would be bound for oblivion. But this is only the beginning.
From these disparate materials Bonnie creates colorful and wonderfully textured compositions. An ordinary bundle of computer wire in her hands becomes a dynamic crocheted textile. Found objects and paint give new life to old books. Maps and globes are layered with metal objects and photographs. More than just beautiful to look at though, the juxtaposition of different elements in Bonnie’s work creates a dialog about current social issues. And this is magnified by the rich irony that she uses the outdated detritus of technology to speak so loudly about timely topics.
Below, Workshirt.
In Workshirt, for example, she has created the classic form of a blue-collar uniform shirt out of wood and maps and covered it with the digital portraits of North Portland residents. The result is a wonderfully layered exploration of the working class past and changing present nature of her own neighborhood. It is, along with much of Bonnie’s work, a foundation for thinking about and exploring community, relationships and even politics.
With a visit to Bonnie Meltzer’s studio one can see first hand the intersection of art and life. Her dynamic and nurturing personality shines through her work. And the value that she places on social awareness and community involvement is apparent in her passion and the subject matter of her art work.
In addition to participating in Portland Open Studios 2008, Bonnie is showing The Altered Book Project, at Albina Community Bank in St. Johns through October 16th.
You can see more of Bonnie’s work at her website http://www.bonniemeltzer.com/.
To learn more about Portland Open Studios, please see http://www.portlandopenstudios.com/.
By Bonnie Meltzer
Several Portland Open Studios artists visited some of the other studios on the tour to document what artists do. Lisa Parsons, a painter and photographer took pictures of the art process. Allen Schmertzler and Deborah Marble drew the artists at work. Here is a small sampling of all the drawings and photos.
Allen Schmertzler is a master craftsman. Whether he uses chalk and conte crayon for quick drawings or acrylic paint for his people filled paintings, he is able to make the people come alive. They aren’t frozen in stop motion, they are still dancing across the page.
Deborah Marble is one of those artists who makes drawing seem easy. With just a few lines she gets everything just right, from body language to the motion of a scene.
Gene Phillips builds sculptural vessels out of flat slabs of clay that are joined together. The result is a happy marriage between rectangular and curvy shapes that are inspired by the human form and plants. He carves the clay before it is fired to create highly textured repeating patterns.
Wendy Dunder creates lighted sculptures that are made with a process akin to paper mache. The shapes have their roots in nature, resembling giant blooms or pods.
Lisa Parsons, who photographed Allen and Gene is a painter who uses bold sharp shapes as a metaphor for the conflicts in the Middle East.
Each of the individual artists has a unique way of working. The beauty of Portland Open Studios is that you can see a pantheon of art diversity in just two weekends.
Below, Allen Schmertzler drawing Gene Phillips at work (photographed by Lisa Parsons):
And the result:
Below, Lisa Parsons’s photograph of Gene at work:
Below, Debbie Marble’s drawing of Wendy Dunder at work:
To find out how to visit 98 artists’ studios over the weekends of Oct 11, 12, 18, and 19, visit www.portlandopenstudios.com.
By Susan Gallacher-Turner
Entering Teresa’s living room, it was easy to see her inspiration starts at home. Bookshelves lined the walls filled with an eclectic collection of books on music and musicians like Radio Birdman, Nico, The Velvet Underground and Ramones, comic books and graphic novels as well as science fiction authors like Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard. The other walls held CD’s and DVD’s, two guitars, band posters and, of course, beads. There were beads in tubes, tubs and tins in all colors of the rainbow on shelves, the floor and hanging on the walls. Teresa also collects antique beads and African beaded jewelry from estate and garage sales.
Below, Teresa working in her studio.
Although Teresa didn’t get into beads until her mid-twenties, her interest in comic book super heroines and graphic novels goes back to childhood. As a kid, she loved to read Richie Rich and Mad Magazines. According to Teresa, she drew all the time, making her own paper doll clothes and comics, “I was even doing my own graphic novels before I even knew what a graphic novel was and doing my own cartoons.“
So it’s no surprise that her seed bead sculptures depict super heroines. And although her current work is comic book inspired, it was her job at a tile factory that got her started in beadwork. She said, “I took home some clay and started making my own ceramic beads and around the same time I finally got my ears pierced so I made my own little earrings.” After that, Teresa was hooked on beads.
At first, she was only interested in chunky, trade beads which she felt had more history and cultural significance. “In the same way we wear a wedding ring to tell that we’re married, there are people who wear beaded adornment that tells others that, I’m ready to marry or I am married and have a son that’s a warrior.” And even in recent times, Teresa sees beads as a way to make a statement, “When Nelson Mandela showed up for his trial wearing western clothes and traditional bead work. It can have a non verbal impact. You wear it and the message gets through. It’s interesting that way.”
While working in clay beads, Teresa joined the Portland Bead Society and took a class from Baltimore artist, Joyce Scott. It was in that class Teresa found a way to use beads to tell her own unique stories. Teresa explained, “When I saw Joyces’ work, I instantly saw a connection to the comic book style, the graphic representation that you could do and also the narrative aspect of it. Beads have always been a method for storytelling, so that really grabbed me. And with a two day class from her, you could stay busy for the next ten years with all the information and inspiration. So that got me going in a very fun way. And I guess I took it from there.”
There are times when Teresa has a specific concept or character in mind when she starts sculpting one of her unique beaded art pieces. Other times, it’s the process itself that leads her. “Sometimes, I don’t start to get ideas for the piece itself that work until I just start working without specific goals in mind. So it does help to just dive in and let myself get a little bored and try something else, something new.”
Teresa’s very first sculpture was a seed bead eyeball complete with optic nerve. Since then, she’s done super women sculptures and seed bead paintings inspired by 60’s comic books as well as jewelry. A recent jewelry piece includes a cryptic note she found at an estate sale. Teresa said, “There’s a story there, so I can laminate and incorporate it in a necklace and you can read it.”
Sculpting figures and tapestry-like pictures out of seed beads is an exacting and detailed sewing process. According to Teresa, “You put three beads on, skip three beads and sew through the next three beads about twenty thousand times.”
Now her beadwork keeps her so busy with new projects, teaching classes from Seattle, San Luis Obispo to Detroit, she sometimes forgets to water her plants. But it wasn’t always this way. While working at the tile factory, Teresa began exploring how she could make her art, her full-time work. She got books out of the library and took more classes. It was one of those classes that led her closer to her path, “While taking a year long beadwork class that was about the creative process, a bead store owner told me that she was going to expand her business, and I started working for her and was around beads a lot.”
That led to working in several bead stores around town, teaching more classes for bead societies and guilds across the country, and showing her work here in town at Beet Gallery as well as in New York and Tokyo. And her exploration of beadwork as an art form just keeps expanding because she believes, “As artists, we push the notions of what is real. We’re making tangible objects, but they come out of our imagination.”
When you enter the world of Teresa Sullivan’s imagination, you see real objects sewn seed bead by seed bead representing the power, strength and beauty of women. It is a powerful message for the maker as well as the viewer, and new territory that breaks the old cultural stereotype of beadwork. And Teresa’s glad to be a part of it, “The whole modern bead work genre is so new it’s kind of like the Wild West, unexplored territory, and that’s one thing that I really like about it. There aren’t a whole lot of people representing this science fiction, comics, rock n roll, crazy wild stuff in beads, I’m happy to fill it.”
You can watch Teresa sewing seed beads into sculptural superwomen during Portland Open Studios Tour, October 18-19th.
Buy your tour guide from the Portland Open Studios web site or at any Art Media or New Seasons near you.
You can see more of Teresa’s work on her website at http://www.teresasullivanstudio.com, and listen to a podcast interview with Teresa here.
Above, Teresa in her bead filled studio.
By Shu-Ju Wang
Below, panel 4 in the Affirmative Isolation mural from Proto Illuminations series, by Shelley Hershberger.
A self-described depressed-optimist, Shelley Hershberger is analytical, thoughtful, realistic, and yet always passionate and hopeful. You see this in how she lives, what she’s trying to achieve in her life, and in what she paints.
In order to spend more of her time making art, she recently moved into a smaller house with a detached studio. The studio’s uncontaminated gray water goes directly into the garden, and her plants are thriving. As the Portland Open Studios Board Administrator, she actively—and proactively—ensures that we are on the right track to put together successful events for this year and for years to come.
Always concerned about environmental, social, and political issues, she engages the art-loving public through the subject matters that she chooses, but she never hits you over the head with it. You can walk away satisfied at having seen the beautiful imagery and iconography, or you can delve deeper to decipher the mysteries behind the beauty.
While completing her post-bac degree in Fine Art at PSU, Shelley became fascinated by how subtle shifts in line weight, composition or palette can alter the connotations of universal symbols and ancient iconography. She drew upon local historical references and contemporary news images from Iraq to create a series of mixed media works regarding the impact of war on women and children, incorporating visual influences from two contemporary female artists—Shirin Neshat of Iran and Shahzia Sikander of Pakistan. But when the pieces were finished, she started questioning, “Who am I to work with Middle Eastern imagery? What of my own visual heritage; how might I incorporate the iconography of my Northern European ancestry into a contemporary context. But what would that be?”
Answer came in the form of an old journal she inherited from her great-great-grandfather, an English physician who, in 1820, had traveled through Wales and written down his observations of that early industrialization period. When Shelley transcribed the journal, she was inspired to connect our individual and shared flickering ancestral memories to the present, through iconography. She studied Northern European artifacts from the first millennium, illuminated manuscripts, and medieval floor tiles for inspiration.
She states, “At first, no matter how I worked with the imagery, the result reminded me of the Crusades. I was disgusted, apologetic. But I was also fascinated and supremely conscious of the connections between the fundamentalist, top-down behavior of those darkened ages with what’s happening in the world today.“
Since then, she has been on a gallop, creating work that she’s passionate about; that references our past with our present; that asks, ”How do we illuminate our lives today“, and “Are we making any progress?“
Using traditional and her own newly invented icons, she paints, layers, takes away, and layers again, to juxtapose masculine and feminine, ancient and contemporary, rigid and loose, degradation and recovery. Always searching for balance; always looking for ways to counter division with unification, and war with peace.
Starting with simple patterns, her paintings are thought provoking and anything but simple. Just ask her about them when you visit her during Portland Open Studios, and you will see this artist animated and energized by her concerns.
Shelley is also an accomplished printmaker, bringing her painting skills to the printing press in creating monoprints that result from a combination of relief, collographic, non-toxic intaglio and monotype techniques. You can see Shelley’s paintings and prints, and her wonderful studio environment, during both weekends of Portland Open Studios, on October 11, 12, 18, and 19.
To see more of Shelley’s work, go to her web site at http://web.pdx.edu/~hershber/.
Above, a “working” wall in Shelley’s studio.
By Susan Gallacher-Turner
Brenda has been on both sides of Portland Open Studios Tour. First, she was a visitor on the tour, watching artists’ demonstrations in their studios. Now, she’s teaching other artists on the tour how to demonstrate their work to tour visitors.
Below, Brenda doing her “how to demo demo” during a workshop.
For those of you who go on Portland Open Studios Tour, you may not realize all that goes into making it work every year. There are meetings, committees, and assignments that cover legal issues, signage, publicity, website information, graphic art for the tour guide and map, tour guide sales, studio safety, artwork exhibition, and demonstration techniques. Portland Open Studios Tours have been running for a decade, thanks to the expertise and dedication of artists like Brenda.
As part of my cluster group, I met Brenda at the very first meeting. Her calm professional attitude mixed with her contagious enthusiasm, really got me excited about being part of 2008 Portland Open Studios Tour. I got the chance to ask Brenda how she went from visitor to tutor and here are her answers.
Q. Why did you decide to go on the studio tour the first time?
A. I heard about Portland Open Studios from a friend who told me that all the artists are working in their studios. I was very curious to see how other artists’ created their own work and how they worked in their studios. I was also interested in seeing what caliber of art we had in Portland. It was the connection that I needed because I am so isolated in my own workspace/studio.
Q. When was that?
A. I believe my first trip out to Portland Open Studios was in 1999 or 2000.
Q. Can you remember specific artists/studios that you visited that inspired you?
A. I heard about Kitty Wallis, so she was a definite stop. Her workspace and intimate studio setting as well as her love of teaching while she was demonstrating her work was very inspiring. I loved the colors of her work and wild mark-making! She had a sign-up sheet for those who were interested in taking a workshop from her, so I signed up!
I also remember visiting Kimberly Gales, Gene Gill, Pam Green, Dawn Phelps McConnell as well as a few ceramicists, glass blowers and collage artists. Sometimes I’d make it to a studio that was just a few doors down from one I had visited and found something that was truly unique. Each artist was very unique from the other. All inspiring!
Q. Over the years, what volunteer jobs have you done for Portland Open Studios and what, if anything, have they taught you?
A. I’ve held many volunteer jobs with Portland Open Studios. My first was Volunteer Tracking. I was asked to talk to the artists in the workshop about volunteering, and I didn’t know what to say. I’ve also sold Tour Guides at events, and done the Demo on how to demo for the August workshops. I’ve also been doing the pre-press sales and I get a kick out of that job. I learned that I’m good with sales. It’s fun to call and talk to the patrons, especially after a few years, now they know my voice and my name.
Q. Tell me about the benefits of Portland Open Studio for the artist before and after the event.
A. A huge benefit to Portland Open Studios is the networking with other artists and getting inside the art community. One of the biggest benefits I’ve had is through the pre-press sales. Through that, I’ve met and spoken with art gallery owners and art organization leaders educating them on the event. From this, my name is recognized or at least they’ve heard of me. As an artist, this is a big part of marketing my own work.
I’ve formed friendships with other artists through this organization that have lasted over the years. These artists also know other artists, and before you know it, you have networked with dozens of artists in very little time. Because of the friendships I’ve made, I’ve gotten many other opportunities. We’ve hung our shows together, shared information about the community, helped each other when in need, creating critique groups, gathering for paint-outs, the list goes on.
Q. You’ve gone from tour visitor to tutoring artists who are new to the tour…how did you get from there to here?
A. I guess I’ve gone from being a visitor to tutor pretty quickly, but it didn’t happen overnight! This only happened because I said yes to the opportunity. Over the course of my 4 previous Open Studios, I’ve shared how I paint to the visiting public. This easily transitions to teaching artists on how to demonstrate their work. I’ve tried out a few different ways on how to demonstrate, as well as viewing the artists in the tour who are demonstrating, and learning what worked and, what doesn’t! There are some truly exciting demonstrating artists out there.
Q. What advice would you give artists who are considering applying to Portland Open Studios for next year?
A. If you’re considering being an Open Studio artist, ask yourself these questions: What can you give back? Do you consider yourself to be a professional artist, or want to be? What makes your work special and can you share that with others?
You can see Brenda at work in her studio during the Portland Open Studios Tour this year October 11, 12 or 18 and 19 by picking up a Tour Guide at many retail locations around the Portland metro area and any Art Media or New Seasons. See Portland Open Studios for a complete list of retail locations.
Visit Brenda Boylan’s website at www.brendaboylan.com.
Above, Brenda doing a demo for visitors in her studio.
By Morgan Madison
Below, Green Apple on Yellow, oil on wood box by Suzy Kitman.
North Portland artist Suzy Kitman has a New York flair and speaks candidly about her passion and process. In order to be successful, she says: “You have to find the medium that engages your brain and your heart.” Through a winding career that has taken her from New York to Montana and ultimately Portland she has found her medium to be painting. Her portraits, in particular, readily show the connection between logic and emotion by being technically sound and layered with nuance and feeling. The results are revealing about human nature and offer an engaging glimpse into the unique personalities of her subjects.
Though Suzy has grown into an accomplished portrait painter, she is as surprised as anyone that this is the case. Born to creative parents, she grew up in the New York area and was focused on the arts from an early age, but came to painting a bit later. She went to Kenyon College in Ohio where she received a BA in art, studying drawing, print and photography. From there she returned to New York and experimented with a variety of careers including; graphic design, catering and illustration. One of her most formative endeavors, though, was working at the Met as a patina artist.
Being in the presence of master work and a museum environment stoked her interest in realism, and the careful eye she had to develop in order to re-create patinas was a natural catalyst for this burgeoning interest. Around this time Suzy also began to re-consider her use of materials. She experimented with painting and developed a passion for its hands on nature and a slow deliberate process. Further refinement of her approach occurred during her pursuit of an MFA at the University of Montana which culminated in her thesis exhibit: Night Flying Babies, an ethereal series of paintings that explore themes of power and freedom.
Below, Night Flying 4 Ellie, oil on canvas by Suzy Kitman.
Suzy is currently pursuing a number of different series which include: blushing and voluptuous fruits, doll still lifes and non-traditional portraits that convey personality in unexpected ways. Suzy has come to approach painting as a “meditation of seeing” and emphasizes the need to be wholly present and observant. This conscious decision has formed the core of her artistic personality, and it is readily apparent in the way her work honors its subjects.
Suzy’s work can be seen at The White Bird Gallery in Cannon Beach and through September 15th at the Albina Community Bank in St. Johns. She also shares her passion as an artist through teaching classes at the Multnomah Arts Center and the Portland Art Museum. It is an incomparable experience though to visit the artist at her studio in North Portland and actually see her works in progress and witness first-hand the passion she brings to the creation of her sensitive and insightful living images.
To see more of Suzy’s work, visit her web site at http://www.suzykitman.com/.
By Susan Gallacher-Turner
Below, Nanette Davis working on a basket; on the wall is a sculpture by Nanette.
When Nanette was a young girl, she loved making things from unusual materials. At her granny’s, she used crayons on old matchbook covers to create mini scratchboard pictures. At home, she stitched doll clothes with green thread and left-over orange fabric.
Today, she weaves together hand dyed silk fabric with aluminum foil and acetate or screening to create her unique sculptural baskets and wall hangings. Her journey and her process have been full of experimentation and surprises.
An important part of Nanette’s process involves shibori, a Japanese term for many different tie-dying techniques. Nanette explains, “Every time the process is different. That’s the fun thing about shibori. Sometimes you get surprises and you’ll go, oh, I wasn’t expecting that.“
Out on her porch, she wraps white silk fabric around large plastic tubes securing it with string; then she paints on the colored dyes and lets it dry. She explains, “Where the string is wrapped, it will be white, but most of the time, I paint that too.” Another method she uses involves stitching rows and rows of thread by hand, then pulling it together, like smocking, before applying the dye. According to Nanette, it’s important to do this by hand, “You have to do it by hand to really get the effect of the wood grain, when I finally finish, I’ll pull it all together and have this narrow piece of fabric.“
Below, Nanette demonstrating the shibori process.
Once the fabric is ready, Nanette bonds it to a base to give it the support needed to shape into one of her unique three dimensional forms.
She explains, “If I want to make a wall hanging, then I bond the silk to wire screen. Then I turn the ends under and pleat them, and form them. After I get a whole bunch made, I start clipping them together to make my design. Then I stitch them together. At the very end, I sometimes add paint to the ridges, or raw screen like pleated step.“
If Nanette’s making one of her newer basket forms, she bonds the silk to aluminum foil or clear acetate and then cuts it up with her rotary cutter into long, thin strips. The bonding materials add another layer of texture to her sculpture, she says, “The nice thing about the foil is that the silk has a translucent quality to it and you can see the shine from the foil come through the silk. I only bond the acetate on one side. It looks kind of like glass.“
No matter which technique she uses, there is always that element of the unexpected. Nanette explains, “When I discovered that I could make my work three dimensional with plaiting…so I really think of them as sculptures, but I’ve really gone back to my baskets. But I’m always pushing the edge.“
Putting these materials together took a lot of experimentation on Nanette’s part, but that’s always been important part of her life as an artist. After graduating from San Diego State University, she studied basketry on a Navajo reservation and then decided to go back for a graduate degree in three dimensional forms using the loom, basketry, wire and paper. After graduate school, she drove across country to New York and created one of her first wall pieces as a tribute to the Niagara River.
“I did an art residency in Art Park by the Niagara River. When I was there it was very polluted. I did a very large piece, I infused it with healing energy and the whole idea was that not only would it be healing for the person who bought it but for the river too, sending healing energy,” says Nannette.
Making art for Nanette is like meditation. The repetitive nature of plaiting baskets helps her weave her art and life together through all the changes that time brings.
“After I make it I’ll sit down with it and let it talk to me. Things don’t always turn out the way you plan, so sometimes your materials take you for a trip, and you’re just following and doing what it tells you to do, and if you’re lucky, it’ll tell you what’s on its mind.” Nannette adds, “Shifting corners, making changes in your life is always hard and it’s hard in basketry, too.“
You can watch Nanette work, tour her studio and sign up for her studio workshops October 11 and 12 as part of the Portland Open Studios Tour. You can buy Tour Guides at New Seasons, Art Media or here online.
Listen to a podcast of the interview with Portland Open Studios artist Brenda Boylan at Mike Turner’s Infopod website.
Brenda is a pastel artist and has participated in Portland Open Studios for many years. Read her blog on pastel work at Dusty Fingers.
Below, Lopez Evening, by Brenda Boylan.
By Susan Gallacher-Turner
Jan’s interest in art started in her childhood at the family dinner table where ethnic dishes were served up with side discussions of the culture, textiles and art from around the world. She remembers delicious curry dishes, her mother’s beautiful sari, and a home filled with exotic smells, artifacts and furniture. These early influences are the building blocks for her kimono inspired prints and organic ceramic vessels that you can see as part of Portland Open Studios Tour.
Jan explains, “It was all based on food, their way of showing us the culture was through the food, beautiful fabrics, clothing, some of the customs. They would make these curry dinners and that’s how we celebrated these cultures. And my parents would go to auction houses and they collected a lot of their furniture, some of it was Asian table fabrics and kimonos. And my grandparents house, too, was filled with antiques.”
It was her artistic grandmother who fueled Jan’s early art training teaching her to sew, knit, paint and make wreaths. From there Jan took Saturday art classes at Marylhurst and the Portland Art Museum, moving on to college at the Museum Art School, where she majored in ceramic sculpture and minored in printmaking. These two diverse media are still a major focus for her today.
Whether it’s one of Jan’s Asian-inspired kimono prints or her organic, ceramic vessels, there’s always a combination of line, color, texture and form. According to Jan, “Along with my training as a sculptor, I was also a calligrapher. Calligraphy, sculpture, and printmaking, those three are my favorite things.” And although these might seem like very different media, to Jan, they both involve building.
Says Jan, “To me they’re very close. Printmaking is more immediate, you have an idea and try it. With ceramics, you throw it, bisque it, glaze, fire it so I’ve got two weeks before I can see it. So it’s not as immediate but I do love making it.”
With the vessels, Jan starts with a formal shape adding calligraphic marks in the clay, much like printing, then makes tiny, organic, sculptural shapes to form the lids.
To build a print, Jan might start by taking a picture of a swirl image in the road. Using that as a base to make a copper plate, she adds bits of her hand-painted Sumi papers, stamps from garage sale envelopes or ethnic ceremonial papers piecing together her image. Then, she might cut the plate into smaller, more abstract shapes before she runs it through her printing press.
Jan explains, “I like that building. I can take the plate and cut it up, glue stuff down, add whatever and build this thing. Then I ink it and it has all this texture.”
While the mediums might be very different, the connections in Jan’s art and life are easy to see when you tour her home with its multi-ethnic furniture, sculpture and garden tea-house. Sitting in the tea house, Jan reflected on how her passion for art led her to teaching which in turn, taught her even more.
Below, the tea house.
“Teaching those students was where my learning began, because they taught me so much. They taught me patience. How to really think about what I’m really doing because I had to verbalize it for them. And they would share an idea and I would think, gosh, I never would have thought about it that way. It’s another point of view and another vision that you get in that time and space to be part of…I can’t think of any other profession that you get to do that in, to join that young person in that part of their creativity,” Jan said.
As a Fulbright scholar, Jan went to Japan five years ago and taught lessons in Italic calligraphy, bookbinding and drawing. Now retired, she was a beloved art teacher for many years at Arts & Communication and Southridge High School in Beaverton.
You can visit Jan and see her at work in her studio October 11 & 12 as part of the Portland Open Studios Tour. You can also listen to a podcast of this interview with Jan (and others) at www.infopods.org.
Portland Open Studios Tour Guides with tickets are available at Art Media, New Seasons and other outlets listed on the Portland Open Studios website.
