Arts on the Mountain at Trinity Episcopal Church in Mount Pocono will present a music and art event beginning at 2:30 p.m. Artworks by Susan Lange are on exhibit in the Fellowship Hall, and The Company Libbanbluot will conduct a dance performance.
Libbanbluot is a unique dance company that is entirely self-contained, with members designing and building their own costumes and props, creating their own choreography, and utilizing every style and tradition of dance, from ballet to modern, to jazz and hip-hop.
Rachel Salmon, co-founder, also arranges and records musical selections, and choreography incorporates original free-form poetry written by the dancers. The dancers have more than 40 years combined experience; the oldest member is just 17. They have performed at schools and community arts festival events.
Lange is well known in the Poconos for her multimedia artworks, which have been in many shows and are in private collections. Lange uses carefully placed pieces of objects, photos, papers made from plants, and symbols to create dialogue.
A requested donation of $10 supports the arts program, but any amount is gratefully accepted. Arts on the Mountain has been presenting visual and performing arts events at Trinity Episcopal Church since 1988.
The church is on Trinity Hill Road, one mile south of Mount Pocono. For information, call (570) 839-9376.
During the century that followed Jacques Louis David’s death, three forces struggled for position in French art; classicism, romanticism, and realism. But their initial struggle took place in the art of David. His heroic style, suppressing passion beneath a hard chilly surface, made him the artistic dictator of Europe. Louis XVI, Robespierre, and Bonaparte were united in admiration of David. He emerges from most biographies as one of the least sympathetic personalities in the history of art, an impression not mitigated, for most people, by his painting, which they find as hard and chilling as the man.Such judgment is somewhat superficial, as there is endless fascination under a layer of iciness.
David. Napoleon at the St. Bernard Pass
David may have been the first painter to be considered a legitimate war criminal.He was active in numerous agencies during the reign of terror and was president of the Jacobin club. He developed and refined visual art in the service of state terror and propaganda. However, it was David’s considerable gifts of image and emotionality that gave him credibility with the new revolutionary government, and allowed him to expand his gifts to one of the highest forms of artistic propaganda in the era. It was with David that success in combining art and politics became exceptional, enhanced by his own fanatical devotion and radical implication to the Revolution. While other artists of the time were painting more traditional subjects, landscapes, and the like, David made sure that he did not ignore the substantial politicality of the era.
However, the fact remains that he voted for the execution of Louis XVI and historians have identified more than three hundred victims for whom David signed execution orders.The writings of Marquis de Condorcet, and his drafting of a constitution had eloquently expressed the concept of liberty, but he did not foresee a surfeit of freedom leading to new forms of tyranny and oligarchical rule that lay ahead. Condorcet’s ”Esquisse” embodied the age of enlightenment and rationalism and visioned a just society based on scientific knowledge. David sided with the more reactionary and extreme Montagnards. Yet, by the end of his life in exile in Belgium, David,the former ardent believer completed paintings of a haunting beauty and powerful expression of psychology and emotion; a melting of the glacial sheen. His narrative, both artistic and personal, has many facets.
The age itself, however, must be looked upon as a product of the Enlightenment, in which more and more of both the intellectual and common classes were debating the manner by which people should exist within the world system itself. The Frenchman Rousseau proclaimed that “everything depended fundamentally on politics,” yet failed to consider that before political paradigms could exists, the phenomenology within the social and artistic life of the country must take primacy.
David. Oath of Horatii. 1784. 3m high by 4m wide. One of the last official commissions of the ancien regime and a revolutionary departure in style.
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Though tradition has made him the archetype of the classicist who reduced antiquity to a kind of sterile purity, David is really only a pseudo-classicist whose variation of the formula was dominated by a combination of staggering realism and true romanticism. In his most frigid paintings and obsessive sensuality lies just beneath the surface. His nudes are at once adaptations of the idealized bodies of antique sculpture, carefully analyzed anatomical studies, and declarations of the allure of human nakedness that on occasion can amount to a revelation of concupiscence.
David may have been a lustful man beneath his aesthetic puritanism, but he never thought of his idealized forms as a transmutation of sensual experience, as the original forms were with the Greeks. Only in an occasional portrait of a member of his family or a very close friend does he allow himself even a confession of tenderness. But, his portraits are brilliant renderings of surface that become by second nature revelations of the personality of the sitter.
David’s immaculate surface, the often enamel like finish of his paintings, conceals preliminary stages that were as fresh and sensitive as the best rococo painting that he abominated. David’s last painting, of Mars and Venus, a love scene painted by an old man, is closer in spirit to his first master, Boucher, than to the rationalism into which he forced himself. One portrait of Napoleon on horseback, ”Napoleon Crossing the St. Bernard Pass” is so full of wind and storm, with flying draperies and a rearing, wild eyed steed, that it has become accepted among scholars as a proto-romantic conception.
David. The Lictors Bringing to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons. The painting was exhibited in 1789,after the fall of the Bastille, and the message that it imparted was not lost on its viewers.
David began his career as a protege of the state under Louis XVI, continued it as a powerful figure in the Revolutionary government, went on from there to become the grand old man of French painting as a favorite of Napoleon’s, and in the process redirected the course of French art at just the time when Paris was emerging as the art center of Europe. Something of a political chameleon, he holds a record for adaptive longevity under hazardous circumstances.
In 1774, David won the Prix de Rome, after failing for a number of years and being highly embittered by the process. In 1772, at the low point of his life, David attempted suicide by means appropriate to a painter who was to establish a new stoic style. He locked himself in his room and resolved to starve to death. When he did not appear for several days, his fellow students broke in and rescued him.In Rome, He began immediately by puzzling and disappointing his sponsors back in Paris by sending works that rejected the airiness and freshness of the rococo style, a first declaration of independence from the society that had rejected David for so long.
It was classical Rome that most fascinated him. His rejection of rococo artifice inspired him to a vision of heroic grandeur. This was not the opulent Rome of the Empire but Republican Rome with its severe moral code and its masculinity in utter contrast to the frills and laces of the regime in France. Even the classical revival that was underway at home, with the style now called Louis XVI, could be more appropriately called Marie Antoinette, since it was a style of extreme delicacy in which classical motifs were adapted to the ideals of the boudoir and the drawing room.
David, Oath of the Tennis Court.1789. David's painting was never completed. A wildly romanticized drawing with Robespierre, not known to be demonstrative,striking a dramatic attitude with two hands on his breast as if he had two hearts beating for liberty.
When David returned to Paris, he had not yet achieved the style of heroic severity that was to set him in opposition to the Academy’s standards. His classicism was closely relatable to that of Poussin, an Academy god, and David also proved himself a supreme draftsman in the Academy’s tradition of the studio nude. There was as yet no indication that the Academy was nurturing a murderous rebel. In his personal life, David was also following the normal course proper for an ambitious young man, by marrying, in 1782, Marguerite Charlotte Pecoul, the daughter of a wealthy contractor. By 1784 David was well set. He had a rich wife and a brilliant success in the Salon with a picture called ”Andromarche by the Body of Hector”, which brough him election to the Academy.
Comte d’Angiviller commissioned David for a painting that would raise the artist from the position of successful artist to that of sensational innovator. D’Angiviller wanted a painting of the Oath of the Horatii, based on a sketch David had done while watching a performance of Corneille’s Horace. As David developed the idea however, he worked out a composition that was not taken from any of the play’s tableaux. Helped by his father-in-law providing money, David returned to Rome to work on the painting, not as an aging student, but as an established painter. He returned as the leader of a revolution in painting and was also declared a prophet of a revolution in government.
”The Oath of the Horatii” fulfilled David’s classical ideal. The elements of the picture had been stripped down to the minimum; the brush was kept under rigid control and there was not a flourish, not a squiggle of paint to mar the icy impersonality of its execution. The drawing was hard as stone. All fluidity, all spontaneity, all feminine elegance, had given way to a determined philosophical masculinity. The grieving women, who see their sons or husbands perhaps going to their deaths, are given a secondary place, subjugated to the tableau of father and sons dedicated to the honor of country.
It was the style of the painting that created the sensation. In comparison with the sweet graces of the current fashion it was as revolutionary as cubism would be in the twentieth century. The Oath of the Horatii was exhibited in the Salon of 1785, and was interpreted not as a mere retelling of Corneille’s theme but as an allegorical comment on the turmoil that was building up to revolution. It was time, the picture seemed to say, that France save herself from the degeneracy of the old regime by returning to the ideals of firm republicanism, no matter what sacrifices might be entailed. The picture had been given an unfavorable position in the Salon, no doubt because it challenged the accepted style of the Academy, but the furor was so great that it was rehung as the center of the show.
The Revolution finally broke in 1789, as David was working on another exhibition picture illustrating a classical subject. Again, David was credited with Revolutionary sentiments in disguise, this time making Brutus the symbol of all Frenchmen who will make any personal sacrifice to protect French liberty. The particular targets were supposed to be the emigres who had fled France in the crisis, with as much of their property as possible.
Self Portrait.1794.Under house arrest after the Fall of Robespierre:''On the moral plane, we can read the painter's character in his own rendition: willful, reserved, passionate, and agitated. We need only to look at him to understand why he threw himself into the Revolution with such fervor; above all, we understand--and this may be the most interesting psychological aspect of the work--how David was simultaneously a portraitist and a history painter. His scrutinizing gaze flashes with both acumen and eagerness. He had the gift of seeing more intensely than other people; he has an inquisitive air about him. He tried to make his rendering more forceful--his fingers tightly clasped around the brush and palette are an involuntary admission. Finally, an almost fierce passion can be seen in his gaze, the passion to penetrate reality, to discover its meaning and purpose. The portraitist wanted to grasp the core of human nature, the history painter wanted to give it an ideal form.''
Early in the Revolution David supported Robespierre and the Jacobins and for the next five years he was not only ”the” artist of the Revolution, but a political figure as well. In 1792, he was elected a deputy in the convention and a member of the art commission, which made him the virtual art dictator of France. Drastic reforms were made.David abolished the Academy, along with all the secondary organizations that had trained craftsmen throughout the provinces. Whatever else the Academy had done, it had always preserved the technical traditions inherited from the old masters, and this mass abolition was a blow that affected French art from that time on. Similar to the Russian reforms after their revolution, the function of art would be to glorify the new ideals of the state and to record its triumphs, and the state would purchase these patriotic pictures from open competitions.
This new Commune of the Arts reigned for not quite two months. It took only that long for it to fall under the same accusations of favoritism and dictatorship that had been leveled against the Academy. It was replaced by a smaller replica of itself which in 1795 gave way to the Letters and Fine Arts division of the Institute of France which became simply the old Royal Academy with a new name. He was a busy man. In addition to his administrative functions he was in charge of commemorative monuments as well as popular celebrations and state funerals, which could be elaborate affairs involving, according to some of David’s plans, virtually the entire population of Paris. And meanwhile he was still the state painter. There were plenty of martyrs and something had to be done about them. David’s possible masterpiece, ”Marat Assasinated” commemorated the colleague’s murder in 1793 by Charlotte Corday.
David, Marat Assassinated
”Marat is dying: his eyelids droop, his head weighs heavily on his shoulder, his right arm slides to the ground. His body, as painted by David, is that of a healthy man, still young. The scene inevitably calls to mind a rendering of the “Descent from the Cross.” The face is marked by suffering, but is also gentle and suffused by a growing peacefulness as the pangs of death loosen their grip. David has surrounded Marat with a number of details borrowed from his subject’s world, including the knife and Charlotte Corday’s petition, attempting to suggest through these objects both the victim’s simplicity and grandeur, and the perfidy of the assassin. The petition (”My great unhappiness gives me a right to your kindness”), the assignat Marat was preparing for some poor unfortunate (”you will give this assignat to that mother of five children whose husband died in the defense of his country”), the makeshift writing-table and the mended sheet are the means by which David discreetly bears witness to his admiration and indignation.The face, the body, and the objects are suffused with a clear light, which is softer as it falls on the victim’s features and harsher as it illuminates the assassin’s petition. David leaves the rest of his model in shadow. In this sober and subtle interplay of elements can be seen, in perfect harmony with the drawing, the blend of compassion and outrage David felt at the sight of the victim.
After Robespierre’s fall, the painting was returned to David and was rescued from obscurity only after his death. Misunderstood by the Romantics, who saw in it only a cold classicism, it was restored to a place of honor by Baudelaire, who wrote in 1846: “The drama is here, vivid in its pitiful horror. This painting is David’s masterpiece and one of the great curiosities of modern art because, by a strange feat, it has nothing trivial or vile. What is most surprising in this very unusual visual poem is that it was painted very quickly. When one thinks of the beauty of the lines, this quickness is bewildering. This is food for the strong, the triumph of spiritualism. This painting is as cruel as nature but it has the fragrance of ideals. Where is the ugliness that hallowed Death erased so quickly with the tip of his wing? Now Marat can challenge Apollo. He has been kissed by the loving lips of Death and he rests in the peace of his metamorphosis. This work contains something both poignant and tender; a soul is flying in the cold air of this room, on these cold walls, aropund this cold funerary tub.”
A TESTAMENT TO PROGRESS >> Austrian photographer Ernst Haas remarked that the “limitations of photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.” “Onward,” the annual juried exhibition currently on view at Project Basho, is evidence that the limitations suggested by Haas are expanding rapidly as more and more artists find themselves drawn to the camera.
David Lambert, 1/27/08 4:39 pm
Dedicated to providing exposure to new and emerging photographers without current gallery affiliation, the third run of “Onward” is a testament to the progress made in widening the medium’s scope in recent decades and a continued affirmation of the importance of its more traditional aesthetic qualities for artistic production and expression.
Rafael Soldi, Bajo Tu Manto
In large part, the show is a small portal into emerging American photography, and it displays much promise. For a town like Philadelphia, whose artistic identity of late is strongly tied to photography, the show is a great resource: The local art community can look critically at a small sampling of emerging photographic practice from around the country. Plus, “Onward” suggests who — and what — is inspiring new photographers today, and I like what I see: sophisticated, up-to-date photographic vocabulary, high standards of technical execution, and (with a few exceptions) professional presentation.
This year’s juror for “Onward” is Debbie Fleming Caffery, a documentary photographer whose evocative black-and-white images have captured the culture of her native Louisiana, as well as Portugal and Mexico, with a unique and carefully located artistic vision. Caffery is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, and her work resides in the collections of many well-known institutions, including MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Judging by the variety of work in the show, she was a very good choice — the judicious balancing act of her selections illustrates a respect for the diversity of photography as it is practiced today. This year’s call produced 1,666 entries by 418 artists, and the selection process yielded 73 works by 40 artists, with all but one hailing from the United States (one entry was from Dubai).
If there is one noticeable consistency in the selections this year, it’s that they all appear very reserved; there is nothing in the show that might qualify as “transgressive” or “radical” in portrayal or conceptual message. Whether this is the result of the submissions themselves or the choices of the juror, an introspective and restrained presence pervades much of the work in the show.
Inka Resch, Anonymous Specs 1744
One of the strengths of the exhibition is the choice to include two or more works of each selected artist, even at the expense of less overall exposure for those who entered work this year. Being able to absorb more than one work by each artist provides a sense that there is a real “group” on view, as opposed to a sweeping display of single works that can often end up lessening the impact of the exhibition’s artistic voices.
Curating an open-call show is no easy feat, especially when a juror’s selections are negotiated into an existing and finite space, and this task was left to the staff at Project Basho. Overall they have done excellent work; the work flows well, with only one or two pieces placed awkwardly at a particular location because of a need for them to read well from a certain distance or because of issues of scale.
Aside from a small cluster of works at the entrance to the darkroom/project space, the work is arranged within two distinct areas: the long hallway and the open back room that houses most of the larger works in the exhibition. Interestingly, the effect of moving through the space at Project Basho is akin to traveling through two distinct modes of photographic practice — what might be described as image “takers” and image “makers” (to use the title of a recent book by Anne Celine Jaeger).
Lou Outlaw, Jubilation! (As Obama takes Oath of Office)
The images in the hallway focus largely on the capture of the visible through photographic “seeing,” and almost all are in black-and-white. They range from documentary-style images, such as Lou Outlaw’s moving shot of a woman’s emotional response at President Obama’s inauguration, portraits that play with the language of light, focus, framing and depth of field and the “decisive moment,” to images that locate photographic artistry in the quotidian world of urban and rural life. Almost all of these artists seem to share an interest in preserving the merits of photography’s traditional aesthetics, and by the standards one expects from new and emerging photography they do it well. (An unintended, but serendipitous, effect is that you pass by trays of darkroom chemicals before entering the hallway, the olfactory trace lingering as you move down the passage).
Viktoria Sorochinski, Untitled 14 from “Land of No Return”
Entering the back room is largely a move from “taking” to “making,” and you can feel the shift not only in the emergence of bold color but also in the diversity of easily recognizable contemporary photographic trends. Deadpan portraits, digitally manipulated landscapes, extreme close-ups and tableaux-style work are clustered together on all four walls. A number of notable standouts in the show exhibit artistic maturity and a sense of resolution between inspiration, intention and product. David Lambert’s vistas come to life from a beautiful marriage of miniature landscapes fabricated from hobby materials and an adroit use of lighting, and he succeeds in conjuring up believable, yet fantastic, realities through photographic transformation. Alison Slein’s juxtapositions of carnivalesque silhouettes against sunsets and sunrises are richly colorful, yet spooky, experiences of crepuscular dreams; her process plays with tensions between dimensions and vision in photography. Portraits by Katrina D’Autremont and Viktoria Sorochinski force compelling formal and subjective relationships between the ages, poses and gazes of their sitters. The subtle visions of the overlooked moments of life by Jennifer Wilkey and Gwen Johnson hold up very well, even next to their more active neighbors in the room, and transport the viewer vicariously into their individual and contemplative lives and worlds.
A portion of the work at Basho suggests photographic pastiche. Names such as Andreas Gursky, Anna Gaskell, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Gregory Crewdson, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Sally Mann, Jessica Todd Harper, Imogen Cunningham, etc., all easily leap to mind before a number of the works in the show. But that itself isn’t all bad in the context of an exhibition like “Onward” (and they are good names). In fact, it is inspiring to observe emerging artists conceptualizing photographic ideas and attempting to break new visual ground with both the most up-to-date and time-tested of sources. As emerging photography, it is expected that a number of inclusions might evidence an ongoing intense engagement and dialogue with existing photographic examples as part of a process of finding artistic self-definition. All of these examples in the show are, nevertheless, already on very solid artistic ground.
Finding a niche where a hitherto unseen photographic “look” or a clever strategy of negotiation yields provocative and unexpected results has been a common practice within photography in recent decades, and it has led to the commercial success of many photographers. Perhaps we will see more and more emerging photographers look to individualized modes of production and imagery within the range of recent practice as a point of departure, rather than feel the anxiety and pressures of marching to the beat of “new and different.” If so, there may be a growing need to revise and reconsider how we judge artistic identity and merit with regard to the aesthetics of photography as we move forward from the new, wide base of contemporary practice.
Jennifer Wilkey, Day 47
In general, we are just now starting to confront the effects of artistic production that has been reared in a fully conceived postmodern program. This place of no supposed styles, no schools (unless self-defined), and no particular way art is supposed to look — what Arthur Danto refers to as “aesthetic entropy” (and he is receiving significant heat for his idea of Post-Historical art in recent issues of The New Yorker) — may suggest a new developmental pattern based on photographic “older siblings.” Looking to postmodern photographers’ individual artistic characteristics in order to focus one’s approach toward self-definition within an open and under-defined artistic culture makes sense as a strategy and might become more common.
If thought of this way, it certainly explains the visible presence of such strong specific influences in a good deal of the imagery in “Onward.” This portion of work in the show holds up well despite its referential qualities, and it also exhibits something else present in much of the work in the back room: a noticeable balance of form and concept. That’s a good sign for photography’s future, and perhaps the scales are tipping back a bit from a heavy-handed conceptual base now that high-quality printing and cameras are becoming more accessible to the larger community of emerging photographers (possibly due in part to innovative photography centers around the country like Project Basho and PPAC in Philadelphia).
Sarah Marie Land, Lilley
One of the laudable aspects of Project Basho’s annual exhibition is that it reveals a churning engine of creativity at work outside of commercial art galleries and other institutional venues, and functions as a single, small piece of evidence that there is a bottleneck between a surplus of artistic production and the very narrow and selective world of those able to gain commercial representation.
Juried shows like these offer exposure to hard-working and creative individuals with talent and potential, while also providing an opportunity to evaluate the standards of a juror or jury that has experience in the current culture of art. Both can be enlightening, for the artists who receive criticism and the viewers who can view their work and observe, reconsider and critique the nature and future directions of one segment of the art world. Shows like “Onward” provide an important bridge between two artistic precincts normally separated by a series of complicated factors. Whether these types of exhibitions result in fulfilling, inspiring, troubling, enlightening or disappointing shows should not be the only gauge of their success. We need shows like these.
This year “Onward” set out to jury the work of emerging photographers and succeeded in its task. And with a new juror each year, the ongoing endeavor by Project Basho maintains a necessary variable in the selection process. The work in “Onward” 2010 made me curious to see and know more about many of the emerging photographers in the show, which compelled me to locate and navigate through their individual Web sites. I am sure others will, too. Isn’t that the point?
Charles Z. Lawrence points to his studio copy of “The Raising of Lazarus,” one of five windows he made for the National Cathedral in Washington. The original contains an unusual ingredient (see story). (Photo by Richard S. Lee)
After a Depression-affected childhood in Newton, New Jersey (“about as far up into New Jersey as you can get”), Mt. Airy’s Charles Z. Lawrence, one of the country’s most gifted stained glass makers, worked at several non-career jobs after high school. These even included a brief stint at the Brooklyn girdle factory that employed his mother. In an essay he wrote for The Stained Glass Quarterly magazine, Charles, now 74, described his introduction to the world of stained glass this way:
“I started to become interested in painting … In my senior year of high school, the school had an art show in a park … I sold all my watercolors. I made $15. I was hooked; I was going to become an artist if it killed me.
“[The German master craftsman and World War II refugee] Rudolf H. Buenz saw some of my paintings and offered me an apprenticeship. So in 1960 when I left the North Jersey woods, I left as a journeyman-craftsman to spend the next four years in New York City and to work at the [stained glass] craft while continuing my studies as a fine arts student.” (He studied at the Pratt School of Design in Brooklyn.)
The apprenticeship stretched to seven years, while Lawrence learned every part of the ancient art of stained glass. He said, “I’m just about the last of the traditional stained glass apprentices — and one day, I’ll write a book about it.” Even now, 50 years later, he still calls Rudolf Buenz “Maestro.”
Lawrence attributes his “chameleon” stained glass style — any treatment, from Medieval to abstract — to his extensive training with different glass designers and his work in several studios. He, his wife, Jonelle Shilito, and baby daughter lived in Greenwich Village during the mid-’60s.
As such things have a way of happening, Lawrence’s New York-based work dried up in 1966. The promise of a job with Willet Studios, then in Chestnut Hill, brought the Lawrences to Philadelphia. After renting a house for a year, Charles bought the vintage property on Allens Lane where he still lives. It is both a charming residence and a complete stained glass studio with adjoining workroom. Much of the house’s glass has been replaced with Lawrence designs — a constant pleasure to its creator and to anyone visiting this attractive home.
Created by West Mt. Airy resident Charles Z. Lawrence is this stunning Reformation window in the west clerestory of the south transept, National Cathedral, Mount St. Alban in Washington, D.C.
Lawrence worked as Willet’s designer from 1967 until 1982, when he opened the C.Z. Lawrence Stained Glass Studios, although “I still design for Willet.” (The company has moved from Chestnut Hill to the Juniata section of the city.) Since going entirely freelance in 1982, Lawrence has done it all: concept, design, glass specifying and cutting, painting, puttying, assembly and installation. He hires helpers as needed, and a daughter, Tracy Bailey, is a frequent co-worker.
A stained glass craftsman is, of course, defined by his body of work, and Lawrence’s work is as varied as it is prestigious. His stained glass windows impart beauty to religious and secular buildings alike. One assignment — of towering height — was the 43-foot-tall commission for the Washington (DC) Temple of Latter Day Saints. (“You know, the one that looks like the Emerald City in a different color as you drive toward it on the Washington Beltway.”) He even has a copy of the Book of Mormon inscribed with thanks for the beauty of the windows.
“My best paintings are the five windows I designed for the National Cathedral in Washington,” he replied when asked to name a favorite commission. As for an unusual assignment, he named “The 10,000 times magnification of the molecule that makes Gore-Tex [fabric] work,” the window he designed for the fabric manufacturer’s Cherry Hill, MD headquarters.
Charles Z. Lawrence is as masterful a storyteller as he is a craftsman. To appreciate two such tales, you should understand that stained glass is assembled with lead channels separating the individual pieces of glass. This sealant should stay pliable; if it performs as it should, the stained glass window will flex noticeably under windy conditions but will resist blowing out of its frame; the sealant cushions the glass throughout the window’s lifetime.
In the winter of 1956 and 1957, Charles was part of the team installing 15 large windows in St. Henry’s Roman Catholic Church near Nashville. “Don’t ever think the South doesn’t get cold!” he said of this adventure. “One day [as we were installing], the wind blew so hard the boss on the job tied down his little Porsche to keep it from blowing over. One window was flexing as we put it in place — rippling, almost — but it didn’t break. That was more than 50 years ago. Those windows are still there.”
Charles Lawrence lives with his wonderful dog, Buddah, a refugee from the mean streets. “I cleaned the living room to prepare for this interview,” he said. “I even cleaned my dog’s teeth for you.” And this led him to another story.
In years past, Lawrence also had a dog, Angus, a beloved black Labrador. Dog and master were inseparable, going for walks in Fairmount Park at workday’s end, and even out for occasional beers. When Angus died, a saddened Lawrence had him cremated but did not bury the ashes. At the time, he was also facing what every creative person must from time to time: a supposedly completed job needing revision. (We know!)
In this case, it was for the Raising of Lazarus window at the National Cathedral. Out it came, and back to Charles’ Mt. Airy workshop for the re-do. Away went the rejected glass segments; in went the new. But not without re-puttying. In his 1991 Stained Glass Quarterly essay, Lawrence wrote: “There was one last thing to do, puttying. I don’t bother much with either making or applying the putty, but this time was special … I wanted one more thing for the putty. I found it! The last thing that went into that window was a handful of Angus’ ashes [in the putty], and then the window went back to the National Cathedral. The window was accepted … with acclaim.
“The Cathedral is done, and Angus is in a safe place for the coming millennium, and after that we will be together again.”
To reach CZ Lawrence Stained Glass, call 215-247-3985 or e-mail czlg@earthlink.net. To view his work online, Google his name.
Stefan Strumbel is an artist from Germany, whose creations are well known national-wide. He combines a strong details in his works, coming up with items that make a statements. Most of the elements used are German images with great meaning for the citizens. His style was also connected to pop art, a current which challenges tradition and emphasizes mass production. Here is a better interpretation of Stefan’s work from Wicked Halo: “Although his work includes cultural artifacts such as cuckoo clocks or the traditional costume of the Black Forest, he isolates and recontextualises using everyday objects such as tree-shaped air fresheners and shopping carts and giving pieces of his work titles such as “What the fuck is Heimat”? Heimat is a quintessentially German concept, which roughly means homeland. “There is no English word for Heimat,” Strumbel explains. “Some people link Heimat to a place, for others it is a feeling.”
Ants Invade Colombian Congress in Unique Art Display
Hundreds of large black- and brown-colored fiberglass ants covered the facade, columns and windows of the Colombian Congress building in an unusual sculpture by artist Rafael Gomezbarros, who told Efe that the work symbolizes human migration.
With his work depicting an invasion of the ants, which “represent immigration, globalization and displacement, I’m trying to force a reflection on what we experience and see on a daily basis, and also to raise awareness about our monuments,” Gomezbarros said.
A total of 1,300 ants, each measuring 95 centimeters (just over three feet) in length, were mounted on the facade of the legislative headquarters.
Gomezbarros made the figures using a special resin and fiberglass and has dubbed his creation “Casatomada” (House Occupied).
The sculptor explained that the work is not political in nature, since the exhibit “does not go beyond artistic expression, and in a sense is more social than political because it seeks to call attention to monuments.”
The unique work will be mounted at the Congress building through March 26 and then two days later will be installed at the Los Heroes (Heroes) monument, located at a major intersection on the north side of the Colombian capital.
The 37-year-old Gomezbarros, who studied plastic arts in Bogota, said that in June “Casatomada” will be taken out of the country and be exhibited in Argentina, Mexico, Chile, the United States, Canada, Spain and Germany.
The sculptor told Efe that one of his dreams is for his work to “invade” Madrid’s Puerta de Alcala and other monuments in the Spanish capital.
He added, however, that before he can export his creation he will need to find one or more international firms to help him transport the fiberglass insects and display them at monuments in different parts of the world.
IN THE REALM of dance music with an electronic bent, a dexterous band that can channel the genre’s energy and aural acrobatics with live instrumentation has a rare gift. Lemonade, a Brooklyn-based trio, accomplishes this by melding an ever-shifting array of tropical beats and rave sensibilities with punk tactics into a smooth sound that’s packed clubs on both coasts.
Though Callan Clendenin, Alex Pasternak and Ben Steidel met in high school playing in scream-y San Francisco punk bands, they eventually transferred their efforts from the political angst of punk to complex musical experiments, uniting under the influences of Liquid Liquid’s post-disco, A Certain Ratio’s punk-funk and a load of dub reggae.
“Ben was the only other guy we knew who… was into dance music, and knew more about it than Alex and I did, and also knew experimental noise,” says singer Clendenin at the Williamsburg loft apartment that doubles as Pasternak’s home and Lemonade’s production studio. “That was what we were listening to simultaneously. He was literally the only other person in the Bay Area that was a musician that had those exact tastes at the exact same time. So it was fateful, I suppose.”
When the trio formed in 2005, the Bay Area was filled with harsh, moody No Wavecentric guitar bands, Clendenin explains, and Lemonade’s “rave-y elements” were not in line with that aesthetic.
“The total enemy of the punk scene and the hip sort of art scene was a rave or techno sound, especially in San Francisco,” he adds. “That was by far, at the time, the most taboo sound to use.”
But Lemonade’s ecstatic fusion of samples, tweaked synth noises, heavy bass and throbbing beats transcended boundaries, and soon the three were performing at events across the underground music scene, from world music nights to hipster dance parties to techno warehouse throwdowns.
Three successful years into what Steidel (Lemonade’s bassist) describes as an attempt to incorporate dance music into San Francisco’s noise scene, the group packed up and moved to New York. Lemonade released its exuberant self-titled debut last summer, and a slew of accolades, as well as remixes from Delorean and C.L.A.W.S., among others, ensued.
But while the record’s rapid-fire beats sound perfectly suited to a club, its follow-up, the forthcoming Pure Moods EP (due out Mar. 9), comes off like a rowdy street carnival, its tropical polyrhythms defining what Lemonade calls its “Caribbean record.” Cheekily named after the series of ambient, world music-influenced “New Age” compilations released in the 1990s with tracks from Deep Forest and The Orb (both of which Lemonade readily admits are influences), the EP begins with “Banana Republic,” a bouncy, steel drum-punctuated anthem about living in a loft (much like Lemonade’s production studio) whose main portal to the outside world is a skylight.The first single from the EP, “Lifted,” follows, and it too is peppered with sweet steel drums intermingled with a sample of a girl’s echoing laughter and Clendenin’s warm, at times breathy, croon. The only steel drum-less song on the new EP, “Underwater Sonics,” includes drum and bass elements and tinges of chiptune (Clendenin references Sonic the Hedgehog as an inspiration for the track). Inspired by everything from Soca to R&B to Balearic beat, Lemonade defies easy categorization, which suits the band just fine, even though it means Lemonade has few comrades in its style of cross-pollination.
“We’re creating from so many different influences… it’s really hard to fit into some scene,” says Pasternak, the band’s percussionist. “People don’t recognize a lot of the places we’re getting our ideas from.”
Though they reference their compatriots in Tanlines and These Are Powers, two Brooklyn bands with post-punk tendencies and constantly morphing approaches to dance music, as sharing some of their musical interests, ultimately, the three prefer the open-endedness of a singular vision that they can reconfigure as the mood strikes them.
“Every time there’s any sort of scene that might make sense to be a part of, we kind of push.We don’t push the scene away, we just push away from that, because our influences keep changing,” Clendenin says. “We’re still doing exactly what we want, which just so happens to be not what people would expect from us.”
> Lemonade
Feb. 18, Glasslands, 289 Kent Ave. (at S. 2nd St.), Brooklyn, 718-599-1450; 9, $10.
Mr. Brainwash's designed a record cover for Madonna's greatest hits album last year.
French artist and filmmaker Thierry Guetta has developed a devoted street art following under the name Mr. Brainwash. But is he serious?
“I’m like a machine, I create and create and create,” Guetta explains, standing in the center of the Meatpacking District event space he rented for a new exhibition of his art made under his unsettlingly blunt moniker. The show was set to open in a few days. Paint was splattered across his pants; canvases, many wrapped in plastic, sat around him, waiting to be hung on the walls; and at least a dozen assistants, many smoking cigarettes, scurried about, finishing pieces.
“It has been two years since my last show because when I do a show, I really do a show,” said Guetta, who looks like a scruffier, skinnier John Belushi, as he walked us through the cavernous space. He’s also been busy, designing an album cover for Madonna’s Celebration release last year (which features the singer in a paint-splattered portrait that is an unapologetic copy of Andy Warhol’s iconic Marilyn Monroe work), following street artist Bansky for the unusual street-art documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, and periodically stenciling his own pieces around Los Angeles. His origins are largely unknown. Some have speculated that in fact he is the street artist Banksy, who masks his identity even throughout the documentary, while others say he comes from a wealthy French family. (He and his representatives, on the other hand, maintain that he “mortgaged his home” and sold his belongings to pay for the current exhibition.)
Mr. Brainwash, Yves Saint Laurent, 2010
“The definition of art is: no limits,’” Guetta said proudly as he showed the dozens of square, silkscreen portraits he has had printed with the faces of celebrities. There was a series of fashion designers printed in silver and another series of technology entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg printed in gold. “That’s the guy who founded Twitter!” said Guetta, excitedly singling out one of the works. As we walked around, a man followed us with a video camera, recording the entire interview.
The exhibition spills across the two floors of the warehouse-like gallery. One whole wall is devoted to prints of Kate Moss, which have been splashed lightly with neon paint. They are near-identical copies of Andy Warhol’s silkscreens, but Guetta acts offended at that suggestion. “Andy Warhol didn’t do a portrait of Kate Moss!” he said. “If I wait until Andy Warhol does it, I’m never going to see it. Just because Andy Warhol painted portraits, does that mean I can’t do it?”
There are also huge mock spray cans, some as big as ten feet tall, scattered about, bearing labels for Hershey’s chocolate, Pepto-Bismol, and Campbell’s Soup. “These things bring you memories,” he said of the brands. “They touch your heart.” Elsewhere, a taxi cab was parked inside gigantic plastic toy packaging, like a Matchbox car. Other work in the show was even more remorselessly banal. There was a portrait of Benjamin Franklin wearing large headphones and a vest emblazoned with Louis Vuitton buttons — “I just try to be kind of funny, with no limits,” Guetta said — and a portrait of the band Kiss made out of broken shards of vinyl records. Guetta does not hide the fact that most of his work is fabricated by his assistants, with his role limited to occasionally doing quality-control touchups, for instance adding an extra bit of vinyl for a Kiss member’s eye. However, he declines to go into detail about his operation. “I don’t want to explain it,” Guetta says. “It’s like cooking. If you go to a famous chef, he might let you taste his famous sauce, but he will not tell you how he made it.”
The artist motioned to a large, wooden paint can, perhaps ten feet in diameter. “When I build installations, why do I do it?” he asked. “It’s not going to make me money.” Is it for sale? “It’s not for sale, but if someone wants to buy it, why not?” Asked to pick his favorite piece in the show, Guetta demurred. “Each one is my favorite when I’m working on it,” he said, before finally settling on a larger portrait of Charlie Chaplin, emblazoned with a pink heart. “I want positivity in everything I do,” he said. He noted that his proudest work was an earlier painting that featured Einstein holding a sign that read “Love is the answer.” Says Guetta: “I think that was a big statement for me.”
Much of Guetta’s work is so unredeemably shallow that it has led some to suggest that the Mr. Brainwash persona is part of an elaborate performance art project, a cynical conceptual experiment to see if, with the right friends (Shepard Fairey has provided a guarded endorsement: “Not all the work was magnificent, but it improved steadily…”) and the right marketing (the Brainwash show is being promoted by Nadine Johnson Inc., one of New York’s most formidable public relations companies) it is possible to sell anything.
At the packed opening a few days later, with a crowd that was more fashion than art-heavy (and which featured a bevy of strikingly tall, afro-bewigged models dispensing vodka drinks), that question seemed to have been answered. Red dots popping up next to works in the show suggested people were buying. According to Clemence, Guetta’s young, omnipresent assistant — “She’s like my mother,” he said during the interview, “she wakes me up and tells me to do more interviews” — the portraits were priced from ten to forty thousand dollars, and rumors abounded that some of the largest installations had sold for as much as $120,000.
Mr. Brainwash represents, in a sense, an art critic’s worst nightmare: a complete leveling of culture, with every exhibition celebrated with a round of cheap applause and a fresh infusion of cash — the more derivative the work, the better. His art embodies the old fear that Duchamp’s readymade will be read not an aesthetic challenge — to make meaningful art when all things are suddenly allowed — but a license for complete triviality: it’s art because someone says it is, and it’s all equally wonderful.
These are not concerns for Mr. Brainwash, though. “Art is not something difficult to do,” he explained nonchalantly, when asked why he did his work. “You just need to pick up a brush and do it.”
Whether it is an illusionist or sideshow freak, a rock band in an art gallery or a matinee performance of folk music at one of the cafes along the street, the Parkdale Village Business Improvement Area (PVBIA) has amassed quite a schedule of funky and fun west-end talent to draw you out to Fireside Culture Week.
The second annual Fireside Culture Week starts Feb. 22. It’s a weeklong celebration of art, fashion, food, music and theatre that features the best of best of this artistic nook of Toronto.
Artists bring their unique styles to Fireside Culture Week.
This series of live performance will take place at a number of venues along Queen Street West between Dufferin Street and Roncesvalles Avenue.
The BIA has partnered with Heart and Stroke Foundation as part of their Heart Month events. During Fireside 2010, the PVBIA will be fundraising for Heart and Stroke Foundation by asking attendees at the shows to make a donation as they enter.
There are any number of events planned for each day and evening of Fireside culture week. Visit www.firesidecultureweek.com for an updated schedule.
Here are some highlights:
Nymphetamine – The Sideshow Performer
A falling ovation, as it is called when someone passes out during a performance, is the highest form of praise for a sideshow performer, according to Jennifer Booth.
Booth, who goes by the stage name Nymphetamine, is a circus sideshow performer, a dominatrix by day and self-described freak.
“I always joke that I was always called a freak in high school and now I get paid for it,” said the 31-year-old performer.
A sideshow performer for six years, Nymphetamine performs an intense combination of classic stunts such as cinder block breaks, laying on a bed of nails and walking on broken glass as well as modern stunts such as flesh-hook suspensions and lifting objects with her piercing.
Nymphetamine, who also has a degree in philosophy and training as a paramedic, said she has always had some unusual tastes.
Born and raised in Toronto, Nymphetamine was introduced to the art of sideshow performing by a friend from New York City.
“When I saw him do it I immediately went from ‘You’re absolutely crazy,’ to ‘Hey, that looks like a lot of fun’,” she said.
So she started to explore the art form, which she said was relatively easy to learn.
Now a resident of the Dundas Street and Dufferin Street area, Nymphetamine performs all over the city, usually at night clubs.
“You always get the young guys right up at the front of the stage screaming and wanting to see blood and wanting to see something go wrong,” she said. “And then there are the people who are absolutely fascinated, but happy to stand a ways back from the stage.”
The details around Nymphetamine’s Fireside Culture week performance are yet to be announced.
Jef Kearn, 33, takes band geek and turns it urban chic with the soulful sounds of his solo flute songs.
“I started playing about 20 years ago,” he said. “I started taking lessons and I just stuck with it. I kind of felt drawn to it.”
He went to school at Humber College and then York University to study music, but his brand of music isn’t what one would traditionally expect from the flute.
Kearns, who now lives in Mimico, grew up in Chatham listening to broadcasts of urban music radio stations out of Detroit. Before he was a teenager, he was transposing hip-hop lines and verse into the rhythms of his flute.
Now he has crafted a unique style of flute-focused R’n'B that cross genres from modern soul to hip-hop to classic Motown.
His CD of original tracks, On The Level, features nine tracks including I Wanna Be the One (Savage Groove Mix), which spent five weeks in the Top 10 of the Canada National House Music Charts.
Kearns is slated to perform on Friday, Feb. 25 at the Local Kitchen from 8 to 9 p.m.
You may recognize Brian Byrne’s name as the lead singer of I Mother Earth, but since the band took a hiatus, Byrne has released two solo albums, opened a tattoo shop in Parkdale and performs regularly with his hobby band, The Flaming Hoops.
“The thing we do with the Flaming Hoops is just totally silly fun,” he said. “It is all covers and we cover a bunch of old country classics and on the flip side we cover classic rock, but done country.”
“I just wanted to be part of it,” he said of the Fireside Culture Week. “Anything that is going to help bring people around, because I do love this area… it is so eclectic and crazy.”
Byrne, 35, was chosen as the new lead singer of the Canadian alternative rock band I Mother Earth after singer Edwin left the band in 1997.
The Flaming Hoops is comprised Christian Tanna from I Mother Earth, Gerry Finn from David Usher and Chuck Dailey from The Salads.
“I have always been a massive country fan because that is kind of what I grew up on,” said the Newfoundland native. “All the people in the band have been road dogs forever so this was an opportunity to go play for the weekend without any pressure and not be out on the road promoting your next great project that ultimately leaves you broke and wondering why you do it anyway.”
The shows, he said, are simply fun. The Flamming Hoops cover songs like The Trouper by Iron Maiden, Crazy Train by Ozzy Osborne in a country fashion. They also cover songs by the usual country suspects like Hank Williams, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson.
“We even do Footloose by Kenny Loggins,” he said with a laugh.
Byrne, who lives in Kingsway Village in the city’s west end, is scheduled to perform on Saturday, Feb. 26. The location is yet to be announced.
Winston Spear loves to dance and apparently people love to watch him do it. The comedian has a video of a Bollywood-inspired dance, which has gotten more than a million hits.
He’ll be bringing his trademark dance moves as well as a few jokes to Parkdale for the Fireside Culture Week.
Spear, 45, is a Canadian standup comedian and actor from the Bloor West and Dundas area.
A working comedian for more than 20 years, Spear was a member of the cast of the popular CTV sketch comedy show Comedy Inc.
“I’m a pretty clean act,” Spear said. “I only have a few dirty jokes.”
Spear is scheduled to perform on Thursday, Feb. 24 during a comedy night, also featuring Jamie Rallison and Parker Seville, at the Snowball Gallery, 1690 Queen St. W., from 7 to 11 p.m.
At its most creative and inspired, philanthropy can alter lives, or even a society. That is the message of “A Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund,” a thoughtful show at the Montclair Art Museum.
“Harriet Tubman,” a 1931 oil painting by Aaron Douglas.
The Rosenwald Fund was a philanthropic organization created in 1917 by the Chicago businessman Julius Rosenwald (1862-1932), who made a fortune as the part owner, president and chief executive of Sears, Roebuck & Company. His philanthropy supported the building of more than 5,000 schools for black students in the South and gave stipends to hundreds of black artists, writers, teachers and scholars.
The current exhibition, which originated last year at the Spertus Museum in Chicago, presents around 60 paintings, sculptures, photographs and works on paper by 22 Rosenwald fellows, who included such notable artists as Gordon Parks, Jacob Lawrence and Elizabeth Catlett. Most, but not all, of the artists are black; the program also offered fellowships to white Southerners with an interest in and concern for race relations.
“I Have Special Reservations,” a linoleum cut from the Negro Woman series done in 1946 and 1947 by Elizabeth Catlett.
The art on view dates from roughly the late 1920s to the late 1940s, a period when the fund was active as a grant-making body under the leadership of Edwin Rogers Embree. Mr. Rosenwald, whose philanthropy was influenced by Emil G. Hirsch, a Chicago rabbi, and Booker T. Washington, believed that charities should devote their entire resources to addressing an immediate cause. The fund was devised to spend itself out of existence within 25 years of his death, and it officially closed in 1948.
The show is arranged mostly according to the order in which artists received fellowships, beginning with Augusta Savage, a talented but not particularly well known sculptor, teacher and activist associated with the Harlem Renaissance. She was the first visual artist to get a fellowship, which enabled her to study in Europe. “Gamin” (circa 1929), a realistic, painted plaster portrait of a black street child, was produced shortly before she left for France.
“Slow Down Freight Train,” which Rose Piper completed in 1947 while on a Julius Rosenwald Fund fellowship in 1946.
Many of the artists in this show broach social themes in their work. Charles Alston made evocative pictures of farm life and poverty in the South, like “Farm Boy,” showing here, an affecting portrait done in 1941, during his fellowship. It is painted in a realistic style that owes much to the work of the regionalist artists John Steuart Curry and Thomas Hart Benton.
“Farm Boy” won a purchase prize at the first annual Exhibition of Paintings, Sculptures and Prints by Negro Artists of America at Atlanta University in 1942. It is one of the better paintings in the show, along with “Harriet Tubman” (1931), an expansive, sensual mural painted in a flat, simplified style by Aaron Douglas, who got a fellowship in 1937 to travel in the South and in Haiti. The work shows Tubman, the antislavery activist, breaking the shackles of bondage.
Though “Harriet Tubman” predates the fellowship period, it was commissioned by Mr. Rosenwald’s son-in-law, Alfred K. Stern, according to the exhibition catalog, which cites an article in the N.A.A.C.P. magazine The Crisis. Insofar as the mural emphasizes heroes and heroines of black history, it is also typical of a lot of work in this exhibition. Several linoleum cuts from the Negro Woman series by Ms. Catlett depict extraordinary women like Tubman and Phillis Wheatley, one of the first black poets to be published in America.
“The Drapemaker,” which Haywood Bill Rivers painted in 1947 during his fellowship.
Lamar Baker and Robert Gwathmey were two Southern white artists who received fellowships, in 1942 and 1944, respectively. Though neither was very talented, in my opinion, they shared an awareness of and sensitivity toward the cultural and historical roots of the black experience in America; Mr. Gwathmey painted images of black musicians in a style borrowed from Picasso, while Mr. Baker, a painter and printmaker, often dealt with the legacy of slavery.
Three early photographs by Mr. Parks, including perhaps his most famous image, “American Gothic, Washington D.C.” (1942), produced during the year of his fellowship, attest to the importance of Mr. Rosenwald’s bold and creative philanthropy. Produced when the artist was unknown, it shows a black cleaning woman posed before an American flag with a broom and a mop.
There are other interesting things here worth lingering over, including half a dozen Jacob Lawrence prints and some modernist works by Ronald Joseph and Charles Sebree.
Not all these artists went on to have successful careers, but that seems beside the point. Their work promoted new images of black Americans and challenged accepted, often racist notions of black creativity.
“A Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund,” Montclair Art Museum, 3 South Mountain Avenue, Montclair, through July 25. Information: (973) 746-5555 or montclairartmuseum.org.
