This weekend Pratt Fine Art Center holds its annual gala fund raiser at Bell Harbor Conference Center. If you would like to preview the art and find out who won the awards come to the (free) opening at Pratt Exposed this Friday from 6-9 PM at Bell Harbor. And if you plan to come to the auction but haven’t gotten a ticket it’s not too late! You will get to see art and artists all dressed up and biting their nails (the artists, that is.) I have contributed a print from a series called Werkspace, inspired by the printmaking studio at Pratt.
Studio Visit with Fred Lisaius at Inscape
I visited Fred Lisaius at his studio in the Inscape Building on a bitterly cold day in early spring. As I drove into the parking lot off of Airport Way hail clattered on my windshield and dark clouds billowed to the west. I stood and looked up at the building and felt a chill not just of temperature but of the building’s history as the Immigration and Naturalization Service, a holding tank for immigrants, an outscape at the edge of America’s by-invitation-only hearth. Even as it transforms into a new magnet for the arts, with studios for eventually up to 100 artists, the building retains a sense of its former purpose. It exudes a seriousness and a darkness and graphic remnants of its history remain, like the graffiti written in tar by inmates gathered on the roof under hot summer sun.
I had always admired Lisaius’ tapestry-like paintings of flowers and birds set against old-world skies. He is a master of detail and surface and his color harmonies give the viewer a sense of peace and elation. But what provoked me to call him up was his new series of sculptural works a the SAM Rental/Sales Gallery. These mysterious cast resin pieces are a modern re-creation of amber. In travels to Lithuania Lisaius discovered entire towns devoted to this ancient precious stone.
He became fascinated with it, and especially by the inclusions: insects, plant forms, wood and other fragments of life frozen in pine resin from 50 million years ago. As he traveled through Europe he collected found objects and scraps of printed material that captured his attention, stashed them in his pockets, and brought them home. Now they emerge in collaged assemblage, frozen in resin, insects of his own creation.
In the amber world there is much discussion of what is fake. How do you know if it is bakelite? Or worse yet, imitation bakelite? Have you immersed it in water, and does it sink or float? Is it unnaturally clear? How do you know if it was in fact the result of the romance between the mortal fisherman Kastytis and the sea goddess Jurate whose undersea amber castle was destroyed by the Thunder God–? Are the beads in the market fragments from this castle, washed up on the shore? Or merely factory simulations?
Lisaius’ pieces are great fakes, because they make you stop and consider what is real. We live in a time when impending global extinction makes everything more precious, and simultaneously worthless: how can we afford to mourn each leaf, each butterfly, each minnow, or even every human life lost in today’s 40+ wars? “Real” amber entraps the fly-wing and the spider of prehistoric eras for eternal retrospection. Lisaius’ entraps one person’s memories of time and place in poured resin. If humans are still here to put things in museums thousands of years from now the chance ephemera of this day may seem as rare as the ancient Baltic termites in Palanga‘s amber museum.
At a certain point in our conversation the rain and wind briefly lulled, the sky threatened sun, and I looked up from my cup of instant coffee to throw out the word “souvenir.” “Non, non” Fred protested, “not that at all.” But I love this word. From the original French it means “remembrance or memory.” We tend to translate souvenir into “cheap trinket:” something sold to us by a multinational corporation made in a country continents away from the one in which we are standing to make us remember somebody else’s idea of what we have experienced. Here is your trophy of the Eiffel tower. Here is your velvet-flocked buffalo from the badlands of Dakota. At least it’s small, cheap, and ownable, unlike the actual thing. In an era of upheaval and extinctions the souvenir of memory itself becomes perhaps more precious than anything else. Here we suspend our experience in time as our possession, to share with others as stories, to build our pictures from.
As our time came to an end I asked Fred how his sculptural work has influenced his painting. He said that the suspended insect inclusions in his amber pieces had led him to consider “suspending” an object in a painting. So I leave you with this haunting last image, the immigrant duck floating towards what she knows not.
Phoebe Snow: Talk to Me Some More
Oh, Phoebe, talk to me some more, you don’t have to go…..
So many years and moments of my life were lived to the sound of your soaring voice. I made this image in memory of you last night, while listening to The Poetry Man. You will be missed.
Pastel and photographic collage transfer print on Arches 88.
On Reading the News: Living with Images
Today I am holding a New York Times in my hands. My fingers have a faint imprint of ink on them; I can smell the pulp, slightly dampened by rain even through the blue plastic sleeve that encased it this morning. I read the text, but mostly I look at the pictures. I relish the signs of reproduction: the irregular halo around a dancer’s silhouette, the soft blur on a soldier’s boot, granulated dots across the Japanese grandmother who cradles a child, her expression unreadable behind a white dust mask.
Every few weeks I sort the collected papers and cut out images. Some I put in folders which I label and promptly miss-file: “hands,” “people with hats,” “bank criminals and football coaches,” “people shouting.” Where do you file “tribal man holding a translucent scarf against his body”? Or “boy sweeping the sky?” Some clippings I put on my bulletin board until they become so yellow I have to hide them. One particular photograph teeters on the edge of archival viability now; I never get tired of (or less disturbed by) the man in a turban praying in a bombed out mosque. The walls are the palest aureolin and blue, and the blue of the sky now blends with the walls. He keeps praying; he was praying seven years ago and the bombs keep falling, shifted a few miles to the north.
In contrast to this, this living with fragments of newsprint tucked in drawers and pinned to the wall, there is TV. I walk on the treadmill at the gym and a newscaster pans excitedly to a video from Sendai. The video has been shot by a man in his car as his car is engulfed by the tsunami. Water spatters on the window. The announcer exclaims again and again, “These are stunning images!!” The man in the car is having an experience. We, as we exercise, are having stunning images. The newscaster bounces on his toes, practically panting in anticipation of the next new video. The man in the car is a true “content provider” offering up his suffering, turned into a marvelous adventure. I can see the same thing on my phone if I like, while preparing to drift off to sleep. I can play the tsunami, and then set my alarm.
This is what the human condition, ie. “news” has become. It is everywhere all the time, in our eyes and ears instantly, real time or instant replay, on demand, however we prefer, no matter how close or far from us it is happening. The way I receive the news affects how I absorb it. Although I was riveted for thirty seconds watching CNN how long will I remember the man who’s car is going down under the tsunami? When will it begin to blur with that fantastic viral U-tube of the guy in the carwash?
A few days ago I opened the Times to a black and white image of a bowl of ink on a table. Beneath the bowl inkspatters and scribbles mingled, and in my mind I added thumbprints, although the thumbprint is far too precious to toss away on a table, as it was the vote of the Egyptian people. I lost the clipping, and rediscovered it online in color. Now I see that the ink is a brilliant fuschia, and the photograph, by the astonishing Ed Ou gathers a whole new poetry in color. But part of the impact of this picture is that I first saw it in black and white and held it with my own hands, and touched it. It acquired a talismanic quality in memory and as I tried to recover it, and interestingly, no amount of keyword searches unearthed it in my quest; I had to go through the archives of the New York Times online.
I went to a talk by a meditation teacher last week. Serene, unassuming, and smiling like someone who might be selling you yarn at the knitting store, she delivered a powerful talk on holding the suffering of the world. At the end of a lengthy discourse filled with Buddhist terms like sila, punya and mudita she said almost offhandedly, “I hold my laptop, and there they are, the tiny people on the screen, running from the ocean, lying on the battlefield, cowering in front of a tank. Don’t you just want to pick them all up in your arms and keep them safe?” Beautifully posing one of the most troubling questions of our day: how do we live with the news, keep some margin of psychic immunity and yet retain enough porosity in our boundaries to feel compassion?
I created this collage at the onset of the second Gulf War. I am afraid it can be repurposed indefinitely and will never go out of date. I showed it to some friends and one said, “Oh, the vase is our denial, our domestic delusion that everything is all right if it’s all right here.” And then someone said, “No, it is the table and the vase that are real. They are our sanity. They hold up the world.”
The blue vase, I am sorry to say, broke several years ago.
Artists For Japan Seattle Show and Fundraiser at Kobo
I will be participating this weekend in an art sale to benefit relief efforts in Japan. Artists For Japan has been organized by a number of Seattle artists with connections to Japan. All artwork, paintings, drawings, calligraphy, sumi-e, ceramics, jewelry, sculpture, prints and more has been donated. No commissions are being paid, and all the hard costs for the event have been donated. All proceeds will go to the Red Cross.
The sale is being held at Kobo at Higo, a remarkable and historic gallery space in Seattle’s International District. You can read about the history of Higo and why it is such an important part of the community here.
The piece I am donating is from Drawings in Dust II, and is created with powdered pigment and water on paper. You can see more in the series in the post below.
Hope to see you this weekend!
Saturday March 26, 12pm – 8pm
Sunday, March 27, 12pm – 5 pm
KOBO at HIGO
604 South Jackson Street
Seattle, WA 98104
(206) 381-3000
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