Tag Archives: craft studio gallery

First of 15

Posted on by under Art, Life, Teaching, Writing

2015 is already shaping up to be a year full of potential for Art Stuff!

~ I was part of the jury for the True/False Film Fest exhibition that will take place this month at Imago. Titled The Long Now this exhibition follows the theme of True/False this year. Click the image for more info.

Postcard

~ After the The Long Now exhibition comes down, I’ll be in a show at Imago with Jennifer Ann Wiggs and Chris Fletcher, two local artists I admire and respect. It should be fun – I’ll be exhibiting some of my digitally-based work for the first time!

harris-f_gdetailAnne Harris – figure/ground (detail)

~ A show I’m organizing and curating at Anne Arnudel’s John A. Cade Center for the Arts Gallery in Maryland opens on the 26th. I’ll be giving a talk there on the 28th concerning the topic of “Subject and Subjectivity” in regards to contemporary representational painting. I am pleased to note that two of my artistic heroines – Anne Harris and Catherine Kehoe – have agreed to be in the exhibition. It’s blowing me away to think I’ll be sharing space with these two great painters, not to mention the likes of David Campbell, Erin Raedeke, and the others I’ve invited to this exhibition.

Campbell-Death_TransmissionDavid Campbell – Death Transmission

Exhibition Information:

Title: Subject and subjectivity: a selection of perceptual paintings
Curated by Matt Ballou (University of Missouri). Organized by Matt Ballou and Matt Klos (Anne Arnudel)

Dates:

January 26-February 26, 2015
John A. Cade Gallery at Anne Arundel Community College

January 16-February 27, 2016
WIU Gallery – Western Illinois University

Other venues are also considering this exhibition.

1-img_0774Kat Arft – Mourning the Death

~ In May Kat Arft and I have a show together at the Craft Studio Gallery at the University of Missouri. Entitled Four Large Drawings, the exhibition will feature some pretty massive drawings; heights and widths 6 or 7 or 8 feet. Should be awesome.

~ Finally, my first foray into online teaching took place this past semester, and now work is being done to quantify what really happened. There was some mixed success – and my class has been approved to run again next fall – but I have been collaborating with a PhD candidate, Catherine Friel, who is an Academic Technology Liaison at ET@Mizzou to get some hard data about how the online course worked in comparison to my standard face-to-face classes. Some have wondered – myself included – whether students can learn drawing in an online environment. At some point soon I’ll go over some of what we’ve learned and I’ll share my perspective on delivering fundamental drawing concepts over ye olde interwebz.

videoclassMe, “delivering fundamental drawing concepts over ye olde interwebz” in 2014.

Anyway, here’s to 2015!

The Chrysanthemum Powder (A Portrait of CaiQun)

Posted on by under Art, Life, Teaching

I’ve been working on a portrait of CaiQun for over 6 months now. The resulting image is, perhaps, actually more of a self-portrait-via-still-life. The significance of the chrysanthemum powder is huge: it was CaiQun’s last daily material connection to China for many months after she came home with us. The first two years of her life she drank the warm beverage before mid-morning naps. We quickly learned her routine and, informed by the orphanage, purchased many bags of the powder to bring back to the US with us. I saved the last bag we used. It has, like so many other seemingly inconsequential objects, become a part of my studio environment. As I observed it over the weeks and months after China, it transformed into a kind of icon.

Since I tend to be an observational, perceptual painter, I like to keep items I might paint near me as stimulation and inspiration. I placed the bag into one of my paint boxes. There it sat, situated among paint and brushes and sketches for quite a long time, until one day it grabbed my attention with force. The addition of a few other elements – bottles, a sketchbook I’d used in China, a sketch of festival lanterns – and the stage was set.

Chrysanthemum2014The Chrysanthemum Powder (A Portrait of CaiQun), Oil on panel, 16 by 16 inches. 2014. Click to super-enlarge it.

Anyway, I really love this painting.

It goes up in an exhibition next week. If you’re in the mid Missouri area I hope you’ll stop by to see it, another piece I made, and the work of a number of other artists from Mizzou and China. Here’s some info about the show:

East-West Dialogues: Paintings by Chinese Visiting Scholars & Their Hosting Art Professors

Participating Artists:

Zhonghua Gao, Min Li, Rujing Sun*, Ruiqin Wang, Matt Ballou, William Hawk, Mark Langeneckert, Lampo Leong

Show: August 4-15, 2014
Reception: Tuesday, August 5, 2014, 4-6pm

Craft Studio Gallery, University of Missouri-Columbia
518 Hitt Street, N12 Memorial Union, Columbia, MO 65211, USA
http://craftstudio.missouri.edu/gallery/
573-882-2889
Gallery Hours: Mon-Thurs 9am-6pm, Fri 9am-4pm, Sat 12-5pm

Exhibition organized by the Office of the Vice Provost for International Programs, The MU Confucius Institute, and the MU Department of Art.

*Rujing spent a great deal of time with me in my Color Drawing classes during the Spring of 2014. She’s a wonderful artist and was a pleasure to have in my classrooms.

Craft Studio Gallery Show, Presenting Context

Posted on by under Art, news, Teaching

I’ve got an installation up at the Craft Studio Gallery of the University of Missouri in Columbia.

I proposed the show and brought in the additional artists and their works. See below for more shots of the installations and to read our group statement. Be sure to click on each artist’s name to see more of their excellent work.

The Reception will take place February 19 at 4pm. Hope you can make it. Check back here soon for some details from the installed contexts.

Work and Installation of Context by Nathan Sullivan.

Work and Installation of Context by Derek Frankhouser.

Work and Installation of Context by Sloane Snure Paullus.

Work and Installation of Context by Catherine Armbrust.

Work and Installation of Context by Marcus Miers.

Presenting Context Group Statement

Artworks are almost always presented to viewers far removed from the circumstances of their creation. The inspirations, research, sources, methods, and background information that form the basis for all artworks are usually unavailable to the audience. This amounts to a veil of mystery surrounding the finished work, masking and focusing it. Artworks appear to have simply sprung fully formed into the world, though we know this to be false. This exhibition proposes to change that – at least in some small way – by displaying singular artworks in tandem with the ephemera that lead to their creation. Alongside completed works, artists will show some background to the art: inspiring data, evocative objects, images historical and pop cultural, as well as the more traditional sketches showing trial and error. Taken together, these artifacts will serve to illuminate the experiences artists go through to process their ideas and actions into finalized pieces of art.

Exhibiting Artists

Visiting Assistant Professors Matthew Ballou and Nathan Sullivan
MU Graduate students Catherine Armbrust and Sloane Snure Paullus
MU Undergraduate students Derek Frankhouser and Marcus Miers