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You are here: Home / Archives for Michael Upchurch reviews

Prographica’s “Bleak Beauty” Reviewed in the Seattle Times

February 22, 2013 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Well this is exciting! It is a rare and wonderful thing to have work reviewed in a real live paper newspaper. Check out Michael Upchurch’s piece here. It is good to see Norman Lundin’s Prographica get the appreciation it deserves, and I am pleased to be mentioned. Here are two of the pieces he discusses, from my Construction/Reconstruction series. The show continues through March 9th, open Wednesday – Saturday 11-5.

Construction_Site_With_Baroque_Sky
Brooklyn With Baroque Sky, Digital Mixed Media Collage
The_Blue_Stair_Mixed_Media_Collage
The Blue Stair, Digital Mixed Media Collage, 18″ x 24″

 

Postscript: I had some time today to visit Dianne Kornberg’s work online. Her pieces in “Bleak Beauty” are all gelatin silver print photography, but she has a an entirely different body of work on her website. It is intense, adventurous, and technically brilliant. I love her printmakerly sense of surface and color. Take a look at Dianne Kornberg’s body of work here.

I also am very drawn to Steve Costie’s fine graphite drawings and have been enjoying seeing his work in exhibits around town. His work is very rigorous and at the same time poetic within its constraints. His sensibility and interest in structure feels very congruent with my own. His work inspires me to keep following the architectural muse.

Additional artist website links: Sandow Birk, David Bailin. Both of these artists draw like angels, with a deep and highly skilled apocalyptic vision. Very real, very reflective of the darker sides of the world today.

Filed Under: Art Reviews, Construction/Reconstruction, Iskra Shows, Upcoming and Past Tagged With: Bleak Beauty Reviewed, construction reconstruction, David Bailin, Dianne Korberg, Michael Upchurch reviews, Prographica reviewed, Sandow Birk, Steve Costie

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Subtractive painting study and ground experiment: Subtractive painting study and ground experiment: I added baking soda to my gesso. Pretty wild texture here, not sure yet how stable it is. You can see the test of the edges in the second piece— the rugged edge only works if I get a pristine background and unfortunately the tape I used to mask it did not work consistently. Hello tape, my old friend and nemesis. You work differently on every surface. These little barn structures give me great comfort as the bigger structures of our government and nation seem to be crumbling.
Today’s landscape to quiet the mind. Out in the Today’s landscape to quiet the mind. Out in the fields somewhere, on the road to Edison. Acrylic on prepared ground, sketchbook.
MUST SEE! Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai We MUST SEE! Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei at Seattle Art Museum.
I am thinking this morning about the phrase Americ I am thinking this morning about the phrase American Heartland. Learning to paint a barn means studying the neutrals. Our political discourse has pitted the barn people against the city people and there are no neutrals, just shouting. But if you walk out into the horizon lands, all you hear is the wind and a kestrel. Walk in boots, hard-pressed against your toes, walk on stubble barefoot and get acupuncture for a lifetime. Study the intervals: how the clouds can be in the upper one third neatly or one sixth, precarious, the future disappearing with the sun as it falls making the barn your whole world if you’re three years old and looking up; one big triangle with a square in the center, and so many mysteries inside the square. 

There is also the question of what kind of light seeps between the verticals and is the light coming in the evening or at midday when you can finally begin to make out all the other tiny squares within the big square, which would be called hay. Reach for the rope and swing out over the canyon, that great big canyon from bale to bale.

Collage studies: painting neutrals
A hybrid study, mixed process. Reading the New Yor A hybrid study, mixed process. Reading the New Yorker this morning, about the global population crash. This will upend urbanism, for sure, though it will very good for veterinarians and dog groomers:
“Only two communities appear to be maintaining very high fertility: ultra-Orthodox Jews and some Anabaptist sects. The economist Robin Hanson’s back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that twenty-third-century America will be dominated by three hundred million Amish people. The likeliest version of the Great Replacement will see a countryside dotted everywhere with handsome barns.”
First Thursday. Such a beautiful night. First Thursday. Such a beautiful night.

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