Cassie Stover and Sarah Atlee at 611 Creative, 11.21.2008
November 17, 2008
Flyer design by Dylan Bradway.
611 Creative is a sometimes-art space at 611 N Broadway in Oklahoma City. My friends Amanda and Dylan Bradway curate a show every month, with a one-night-only opening. Come visit us this Friday!
Red Shows Saturday 11.15.2008 in OKC
November 15, 2008
This’n: Red Dot Show, an annual fundraiser for the Individual Artists of Oklahoma Gallery (IAO). 811 N Broadway Ave, Oklahoma City. Saturday November 15th, 7-11 pm. Click here for ticket information.
At the Red Dot Show, in addition to auctioning artists’ works, IAO does something different. A group of artists (myself included) [scratch that, I wasn't included] has agreed to auction “blank canvases” — that is, they are selling commissions. When a buyer purchases a blank canvas from me, the artist agrees to paint them a commissioned work.
And That’n: The Red Show: What Makes You See Red? An annual fundraiser for the Red Line Foundation, a local organization promoting education and awareness about HIV/AIDS. AKA Gallery, 3001 Paseo, Oklahoma City. Saturday November 15th, 8 pm to midnight. Tickets available at Moda Salon, The Velvet Monkey Salons, the 42nd Street Candy Company, or at the gallery door.
My friend and colleage Ashley Griffith is a cofounder of Red Line, and is lending us her Paseo gallery space for this exhibit of red art. (The show guidelines stipulate that works must be at least fifty percent red.) Below are the three paintings I made for this show. I have included in-progress shots to give an idea of how I build layers in a painting. (Secretly I hope that in five years I look back at these and think, “Gracious Aunt Betsy, what was I thinking? I am SO much better at layering now.”)
I began with photos of my subjects, which I doctored in PhotoShop to shift the color balance toward the red end of the spectrum. I drew very basic pencil outlines on my blank canvases. The underpaintings are thin layers of red (cadmium and napthol), yellow (cadmium and naples), and sienna.
This is one of my palettes at the beginning of a painting session. I use styrofoam takeout trays. When they get full of paint, I let them dry and then apply a thin coat of gesso.
Top row: burnt sienna, cadmium red light, cadmium red dark, napthol pink (mixture).
Second row: burnt sienna (liquid acrylic), Golden glaze in rust, Golden glaze in yellow ochre, Liquitex portrait pink (mixture).
Third row: burnt umber (liquid acrylic), van dyke brown, unbleached titanium (mixture), cadmium yellow.
Bottom row: payne’s gray (liquid acrylic), neutral gray, titanium white.
Not pictured: alizarin crimson.
This is a different palette, after a painting session.
Recently I am taking a more painterly approach to my work. Looking back at the last couple of years I have felt like a drafstman who uses paint. I’ve missed the tactile and aesthetic pleasures of pushing paint around, building layers of color, and laying down single, decisive brush strokes.
The Dave painting was not fit to be photographed at this point. In the final piece, you will see that I changed direction somewhat. As a professor of mine says, every painting goes through an ugly stage.
Charlie: Stripes, acrylic on canvas, 2008 by Sarah Atlee
Dave: Red, acrylic on canvas, 2008 by Sarah Atlee
Trent: Halvsies, acrylic on canvas, 2008 by Sarah Atlee
A warm thank-you to my sitters, including Mr. Trent Lawson.
Stephen Harper Portrait Contest
November 12, 2008
From Art Threat, via Drawn!
Framing Harper: A National Portrait Contest
Since Stephen Harper cancelled the National Portrait Gallery, we decided to create our own in his honour. We’re inviting artists to submit their portrait of Canada’s Prime Minister for inclusion in the Stephen Harper Portrait Gallery, and their chance to win (minor) fame and riches!
The Conservative Party has made many, many cuts to the arts, so our jury will be looking for portraits that best embody Stephen Harper’s “commitment” to the arts and culture in Canada.
The contest is open to Canadians and non-Canadians alike. Let’s help our northern neighbors out. (Heck, we know what it’s like to be underappreciated by our government, don’t we?)
Refreshing the Palate: Titus
November 7, 2008
On Sunday, November 9, 2008, the Metro Wine Bar in Oklahoma City is hosting their second annual wine tasting and art exhibit, Refreshing the Palate. The Metro has commissioned twenty local artists to reinterpret the labels of their featured holiday wines. I was offered the 2006 Cabernet Franc from Titus Vineyards. How could I not riff on the deliciously gory Shakespeare tragedy of that same name?
Titus, collage and acrylic on Rives BFK, 2008. Click image to enlarge.
The artists’ labels will be sold by silent auction; proceeds will benefit the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition.
TAMORA
Know, thou sad man, I am not Tamora;
She is thy enemy, and I thy friend:
I am Revenge: sent from the infernal kingdom,
To ease the gnawing vulture of thy mind,
By working wreakful vengeance on thy foes.
Come down, and welcome me to this world’s light;
Confer with me of murder and of death:
There’s not a hollow cave or lurking-place,
No vast obscurity or misty vale,
Where bloody murder or detested rape
Can couch for fear, but I will find them out;
And in their ears tell them my dreadful name,
Revenge, which makes the foul offender quake.
TITUS ANDRONICUS
Art thou Revenge? and art thou sent to me,
To be a torment to mine enemies?
TAMORA
I am; therefore come down, and welcome me.
(Thanks to William Shakespeare Info. And thanks to Julie Taymor for making the colorful film version of Titus Andronicus.)
Afterthought: The body and limbs of this character were collaged from a copy of Woman Stabbing Herself (or Woman Next to Water) by Urs Graf. If you like this style, you might also like Durer, Cranach the Elder, and Goltzius.
Paho Mann and Dylan Bradway, My Famous Friends
October 9, 2008
Untitled (Re-inhabited Circle-K Store, Albuquerque), photograph by Paho Mann. Click image to visit the artist’s website.
Two things happened on the internet this week. (That’s right, just two. This blog post makes three.) Two of my artist friends, Dylan Bradway and Paho Mann, have been recognized on blogs with startlingly high readerships.
Dylan Bradway is an up-and-comer here in Oklahoma City. In addition to quality graphic design (such as the catalog for Art 365), he creates evocative paintings incorporating stylized characters and street-influenced calligraphic line. He and his partner-in-life Amanda Weathers-Bradway recently set up shop in OKC’s Plaza District.
This morning I got a text from Dylan instructing me to “check out Juxtapoz.com.” Sure enough, the Juxtapoz blog is featuring a group show of train car designs that includes a piece by Dylan. (That guy in the green hoodie on the red car? That’s Dylan’s.) The Train Car Project will be on display at Papa B Studios in Brooklyn, October 10-22.
Paho Mann is an old friend and colleague from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. A precise formalist photographer, Paho has long been interested in typologies — objects that are of a category and also have unique characteristics. My favorite series of his is the re-inhabited Circle K stores, a staple of Albuquerque’s accidental non-architecture.
This week Paho’s Junk Drawer series was discovered by a New York Times blog called The Moment, a kind of digital-state-of-the-union roundup, followed by Kottke.org. Here is a transcript of the email I sent him upon learning this news:
YOU HAVE BEEN DISCOVERED BY THE NYTIMES BLOG AND [redacted] JASON
KOTTKE DUUUUUUUDE THE ENTIRE INTERNET KNOWS YOU NOW OMFG YOU ARE
FAMOUS
Splendid job, guys. Keep it up.
Normal, OK Characters Appear In Nimrod
October 3, 2008
Two characters from my series Normal, OK appear in the Fall 2008 issue of the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry. To purchase a copy, follow this link.
Normal, OK: Peoria Jenks. Mixed media, 2007.
Peoria Jenks, 72, carries on the family tradition of bootlegging. (Opteemah County is dry.) She does not sell to “drunkards.” One day, while having her hair set, she overheard a call on the salon’s police scanner noting suspicious activity at the Slim Pickens Mo-tel. On a hunch, she went over. Onlookers say she got a shotgun from the trunk of her Dart and walked purposefully past Sherrif Ardmore into room 112. No shots were fired. Ms. Jenks reportedly walked out shaking her head and saying, “Not in my town. Not in my town.” The headline in that week’s Porcupine read “Meth Lab Seized With Help From Locals.”
You can learn more about the people of Normal by reading the book.
My series of works titled Normal, OK was part of the Art 365 exhibition sponsored by the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition. Art 365 travels to Legion Arts in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to open on October 15.
National Endowment for the Arts Announces New Artists In The Workforce Study
September 30, 2008
Sarah Atlee working in the studio, 2007. Photo by David L. Gray. (Click image to see full size.)
The National Endowment for the Arts has just released a comprehensive new study examining the role of artists in the American economy. In a nutshell: We’re more important than we thought. From the NEA’s website:
“Artists now play a huge but mostly unrecognized role in the new American economy of the 21st century,” said NEA Chairman Dana Gioia. “This report shows how important American artists are to both our nation’s cultural vitality and economic prosperity of our communities.”
Numbering almost two million, artists are one of the largest classes of workers in the nation, only slightly smaller than the U.S. military’s active-duty and reserve personnel (2.2 million). Artists now represent 1.4 percent of the U.S. labor force.
Here are some other factoids (that I kinda already knew, and that the NEA has kindly confirmed):
* Artists are entrepreneurial – 3.5 times more likely to be self-employed.
* Artists are underemployed – one-third of artists work for only part of the year.
* Artists generally earn less than workers with similar education levels. The median income from all sources in 2005 was $34,800 for artists, higher than the $30,100 median for the total labor force, and lower than the $43,200 for all professionals.
You can download the entire study in PDF format from the NEA website.
This came to me via the OVAC Blog, a great resource for Oklahoma artists.
“Know Thyself” Reviewed in Daily Oklahoman
September 30, 2008
Know Thyself, a show of self portraits by Oklahoma artists, is showing at the IAO Gallery in OKC through October 10. Here is a review by John Brandenberg for the Daily Oklahoman. Snip:
Sarah Atlee pokes fun at herself by exaggerating her laughing teeth to the point viewers may think she’s going to come out of the picture plane and bite them in her acrylic “Self Portrait: For the Record.”
rraarrr.
Special thanks to Romy Owens for inviting me to participate in this show.
RAINN Benefit Show Tonight at IAO in OKC
September 29, 2008
The IAO Gallery in OKC is hosting a one-night-only event of art and music to benefit RAINN, The Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network. This effort is headed up by the marvellous DJ Ostara and includes an auction, poetry reading, DJ sets, and more. Tickets are $10.
Here are just a few reasons to support RAINN through events like this.
Betty Louise, mixed media on masonite, 2007.
Betty here will be a part of the show tonight. There’s a secret little connection here that I’m going to go ahead and release. In 1994, musician Tori Amos* cofounded RAINN as a means to overcome the experience of her own sexual assault and to help others through that process. It happens that Betty Louise here is based on two themes: the suffragist Amelia Jenks Bloomer, and the lyrics of a Tori Amos b-side called Humpty Dumpty. There, it’s been said.
*Yeah, Tori and me used to be real tight. We grew apart over the years. I haven’t heard her latest album yet, so maybe a spark or two could be rekindled. Never say never…
Art 365 Documentary Preview Online
June 16, 2008
As part of the year-long Art 365 process, filmmakers Melissa Scaramucci and Cacky Poarch produced a documentary film about the seven artists. You can see a 15-minute preview online at Google Video. If you’re new to Art 365, this is a great introduction.
The film premiered in its entirety at the Art 365 opening in Tulsa last month. There will also be a screening in Oklahoma City on July 3rd.
Click here to read more about Normal, OK, my series for Art 365.
Related: Sonarta also has footage of the Art 365 process. Part 1 is below; here are parts two, three, and four.