February | 2011 | Painting OWU

Opportunity for Students

February 28, 2011 § Leave a comment

Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati

7th Annual
RITES OF PASSAGE

JUNIORS, SENIORS, and GRADUATES ONE-YEAR OUT

$300 BEST OF SHOW AWARD

Postmark Deadline for Entry: April 13, 2011

From Manifest Gallery’s website:

Every year Manifest seeks to energize students and recent graduates of art and design programs towards higher goals, professionalism, and public-mindedness. Therefore, for a seventh year in a row, we offer this challenge to students and their professors in regional and national college programs to show us what you’ve got, bring it off campus, and share it with the everyday viewing public.

We believe there exists tremendous unexposed quality amongst people pursuing degrees in art and design. Revealing new artists is part of our mission!

NOW OPEN TO JUNIORS AND RECENT GRADUATES!

Manifest’s is now seeking submissions for the Rites of Passage 2011 exhibit. All submissions must be postmarked or emailed no later than April 13, 2011.

One exhibit will feature the best work from artists about to receive or recently awarded an undergraduate degree from a regional, national, or international college art or design program. All entrants must have received or be scheduled to receive a college degree in 2010, 2011, or 2012, and provide an academic reference’s contact info.

For details go to:

http://www.manifestgallery.org/rites11/index.html

Rembrandt Laughing

February 18, 2011 § Leave a comment

A small painting, on copper, of a young man laughing, has recently been authenticated as one by the young Rembrandt who was in his twenties when he painted it. The work is on loan to the Toledo Museum and will be on display in Gallery 24 until May 1, 2011. Ernst van de Wetering, Chair of the Rembrandt Research Project in Amsterdam will give a talk at the Toledo Museum on Thursday, March 3 at 7 p.m.

Fredrik Marsh, 2008 Guggenheim Fellow

February 15, 2011 § Leave a comment

Exhibition and Gallery Talk at Ohio Wesleyan University

Fred Marsh, winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008 for his photographic work, is exhibiting 8 of his large photographs from his series TRANSITIONS: THE DRESDEN PROJECT at Gallery 2001 in Beeghley Library of Ohio Wesleyan University. The artist will give a gallery talk on Wednesday, February 16, at 4:15.

Artist’s Statement

TRANSITIONS: THE DRESDEN PROJECT

During a three-month artist residency in Dresden, Germany in 2002 and over the next 4 subsequent summers, I explored the city and its outskirts, finding myself increasingly drawn towards photographing empty structures overlooked in the rebuilding, reconstruction, and renewal process still underway. Encountered during these many extended walks throughout the now familiar city, my efforts concentrated on photographing the detritus of human culture discovered in the decaying interior spaces of vacant factories, abandoned apartments, and hotel rooms. The Dresden Project demonstrates the juxtapositions and ironies still abundant in the post-Socialist world, showing the old and the new as well as the grandeur and the decay of these once-majestic buildings.

Concerned with cross-disciplinary issues of aesthetics, contemporary history, cultural & political geography, this long-term photographic project is my most mature and overarching. Combining a sense of Post-romanticism with traces of the remains of the Russians, the East German military-industrial complex in the uninhabited Wilhelminian buildings left behind, the Dresden photographs convey a mixture of melancholy and beauty, even tenderness, without sentimentality. I felt on the front edge of recording history as I documented these scenes of anonymous human stories.

The scope of this extended series, photographing a city steeped in tragic history, required significant leaps in my creative practice to depict the core focus––the human condition. Contrasted with panoramic photographs of both sweeping grandness and of industry in decline––the Baroque to the Postmodern––the later work concentrates on interiors made first in black & white, then exclusively in color. Not focusing on people directly, but upon their artifacts, on structures and objects bearing their imprint, the photographs I created within these vacant, unassuming factory and apartment building interiors transcend the intimate traces of unknown inhabitants whose individual work and lives were subject to a broken system of regiment and surveillance.

The grim mental picture of the former East Germany we imagined––a place gray and oppressive, a society thought to have no state sanctioned religion and little color––was not simply a product of Western Cold War propaganda of the period. However, what I discovered within these apartment interiors was not at all what I expected. Once the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and people, with a new freedom to move about, appeared to have simply walked away. Vacant apartment buildings are clear magnets for vandalism and graffiti. Dresden is no exception. I attempted, especially in the last chapters of interior work in 2005 and 2006, to reference the color aesthetic of these phenomena, the inevitable patina created through the passage and blurring of time notwithstanding. What was of keen interest to me was the pure medium of color––in terms of the evident personal use of color, of painting and its application by anonymous individuals in the private spaces I encountered.

German art historian & curator Susanne Altmann stated in a recent essay “… with the move from black and white to color, his compositions gained significantly in both three-dimensional depth and authenticity. Instead of coming across as historical evidence of a distant age, they now appeared as stages with close links to life, the protagonists having just shut the door for the last time or taken a last look in the already crooked mailbox.”

Two decades since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, life in the former German Democratic Republic remains largely unfamiliar to the West and the American experience. Many of the buildings I have photographed in Dresden will likely be rebuilt, transformed, or reduced to parking lots in the months and years ahead, devoid of any real, discernable past. Concerned with transitions of the physical as well as the psychological, my intention is to provide a visual record of this historic period before its traces––and cultural memory––disappear.

http://www.fredrikmarsh.com/index.cfm

http://www.photoeye.com/gallery/forms2/index.cfm?image=1&id=25174&imagePosition=1&Door=2YPortfolio=Portfolio1&Portfolio=Portfolio3&Gallery=2&Page=

“Le Petit Tache:” Divisionist Technique and Optical Mixing

February 7, 2011 § 5 Comments

Impressionist & Divisionist Technique

Landscape was the genre in which divisionist techniques were born and most developed, beginning with Turner and Delacroix who began to exploit the observations and theories of Chevreul and Goethe on the optical mixing of color by painting with distinct touches of unblended paint, side by side, allowing the color to “mix” in the eye.

The work of Turner and Delacroix, as well as that of Goethe and Chevreul in the early 19th century, had a profound impact on Monet, Pissaro, Sisley, Renoir, and others of the group that later became known as “Impressionists.” As students, their academic training taught them to shade forms off into brown and black in the shadows. These young painters could see that shadows were actually colored, and that, in fact, the whole visual field was shimmering with color sensation. Local color, the notion that things have a distinct, unchanging color, was shattered in the new awareness of how color, light, and context influence the perception of color. Their dissatisfaction with the limitations of academic teaching led them out of the studios into nature to work out a new way of painting based on the broken touch.

The technique itself was not new but its application was. The Impressionists built on an academic method widely taught in the ateliers of Paris known as the “petit-tache,” or little touch, a technique of applying unblended touches of color which later would be blended with a soft, badger-hair brush to disguise the effect and create a smoother, more refined look. The Impressionists were reviled, not only for their subject matter, which confronted every day realities of contemporary life as opposed to the classicizing conceits of academic painting, but also for exhibiting finished works with this broken touch, a direct confrontation to the tastes of the day. Seurat, and Signac developed the divisionist technique into the style known as Pointillism, based on their growing interest in the scientific application of color physics to painting.

Painters like Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Serusier, Bonnard, and many others, were less interested in the science of color than they were in its emotional impact, and pushed color saturation into new subjective realms, developing very personal styles that derived from the use of the “petit-tache.”