Innholdsfortegnelse for July - August 2016 i Artists Magazine

THERE’S NO ARTIST better than Edgar Degas and there are few writers equal to the task of reading his work. In this issue, Jerry N. Weiss takes a characteristically brilliant look at “Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty,” now on view at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). It’s thrilling to learn of Degas’s experiments and to see the artist’s actual fingerprints, evidence of his ardor and the allure of what was for him a new process (“Painterly Prints,” page 58). Degas’s love of dancers on stage and in the rehearsal studio is shared by Sharon Knettell, whose pictures we first noticed when she was one of the winners of our Over 60 Competition (“Fashioned by Fancy,” page 50). Also in this issue: A former art director, Marcus Ratliff, devises…

“I believe the history of fashion is something that unites us all; it’s a language. When we use words, we don’t think about their origin, and the same goes for fashion,” says Asya Kozina. Her interests span history and countries, shaping her projects on wedding dresses, primitive shamanism, folk costumes and baroque wigs. Kozina grew up in the Ukraine and was influenced by that country’s paper cutting art, vytynanky, as well as her artist mother who encouraged her love for paper. “When I was 10, I became very ill and had to comply with bed rest,” says Kozina. “My mother showed me the techniques of cutting, and I cut a whole album of characters and creatures that my younger brother and I played with. We invented fairy stories about them.…

It’s been a peculiar mash up of Hellenistic busts and African wax cloth my whole life. I was drawn to mythology and symbolism from the very beginning. I ended up studying art history and biology and later did my graduate work in gastronomy. To do justice to a topic like food, you have to look at culture, economics, religion, identity and art. I gravitated to art and culture and concentrated on the visual expressions of food. My new blog is where I explore the iconographic language of food. I’m curious about what people see. Symbolism in art requires you to tap into the collective consciousness of a culture. In graduate school I became fascinated with the depictions of hot chocolate in 18th-century French court art. That’s when everything was neoclassical…

WHEN I’M ON THE ROAD, I like to keep my drawing and painting skills up to snuff by sketching, but sometimes it’s just not practical to drag along everything I might need. When I sketch with pencil and paper, I sometimes want to add a little color—especially if the sketch would make a good reference for a studio painting later—or I might want to skip the pencil and use pen and ink, but I don’t always have extra sketching tools with me, and they may be too messy to use in a particular situation anyway. Using the right tablet with the right software solves these problems. I can carry a larger variety of virtual tools—pen nibs, pencils, brushes, colors and more—than I could possibly carry in my little sketch bag.…

LETTERING IN A PAINTING can be used to many effects. In representational cityscapes, the names of stores and the words on street signs and vehicles can provide context for a specific place as opposed to a generic urban scene. In abstract painting or collage, text can be used as a compositional element that provides graphic variety and adds interest. Lettering also has a place in still lifes. My work over the past several years has centered on images of packaging and consumer goods found in popular culture. Brand names, logos and other texts are an integral part of the compositions that I find compelling, and painting these elements has given me many insights. Here are some tips that I can offer for painting lettering: 1 Make the lettering conform to…

1. SELECTING THE PROPS AND TRANSFERRING THE DRAWING: During a studio photo session with models, I choose the clothing and the table settings. On location, I take photos of the landscape that will become the background. Then I make a detailed sketch with graphite pencil on paper. I project this drawing onto primed canvas with the use of an inexpensive projector. This step ensures that the drawiing is transferred both accurately and quickly. Minor details, however, are left out. The purpose of this step is to establish the contours of the main shapes—to make sure that they’re accurately proportioned in their newly enlarged state. 2 A AND B. PAINTING THE UNDERCOLOR: Once the rough transfer is complete, I start working with paintbrush and acrylic paint. The canvas is first toned…

1. CREATE COMPOSITIONAL DRAWING: With a preliminary pastel drawing on paper, I established the design and placed the figure. This drawing is 36x18, about half the size of what my finished painting would be. 2. TRANSFER DRAWING TO CANVAS: At a photocopy shop I had a tracing of the drawing enlarged on a sheet of translucent vellum to the intended size of the painting. I then attached the enlarged copy to the canvas so I could transfer the image. The backdrop to the mannequin is a large colorized photoprint of Satyr Sitting Under an Old Oak (Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Mass.) by Karl Wilhelm Kolbe (1759–1835). The mannequin, raised to the height of my model, indicates my intended placement of the model. My easel is set up next to the model…

STRATHMORE Strathmore proudly introduces new 400 Series Marker paper for fine artists who create finished art using a variety of marker types. Markers glide easily over the silky smooth surface. The heavyweight paper is bleed- and feather-resistant so artists can apply layer after layer of color. The bright white sheet allows for easy blending and makes colors look vibrant and crisp. Acid free and proudly made in the USA. For more information, visit StrathmoreArtist. com . JACK RICHESON & CO., INC. Richeson1/8" gessoed hardboard has beautifully beveled edges, a delightfully toothy surface and a perfect price tag. These toned boards were developed upon request from numerous professionals in the art materials industry. Because most instructors advise students to tone their surfaces with either Umber Wash…

Q Please give me an update on orphan works legislation in the United States and Europe. A Orphan works are creative materials that are protected by copyright, but the copyright owner either is unknown or cannot be located. Those who would like to license the right to use those works, such as cultural institutions or publishers, are faced with a dilemma: Because they cannot locate the owner to request permission, they must either risk a copyright infringement lawsuit or choose not to use the work. This problem has plagued the copyright community throughout the world. While the United States attempted to adopt an orphan works law, it has still not done so. The European Union (EU) and United Kingdom (UK) have led the world in dealing with this thorny dilemma…

MCKENZIE GRAHAM: Explain the most notable differences between traditional and modern marketing. ELIZABETH ST. HILAIRE: Traditional marketing makes use of printed materials: postcards, brochures, business cards, posters and flyers. Printing these materials is costly and often, in order to keep to a budget, artists use design templates. Templates are cost effective but are often used by many others, resulting in materials that may not stand out in a sea of advertising. Vistaprint’s online templates provide a good example; the designs are professional and varied, but you’ll find repetition in the art market. Online marketing is making use of social media, such as Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, blogging platforms and more. These are all free to use in their most basic forms and have a wide reach, as they not only…

Editor’s note: We received so many letters in response to two readers’ complaints (March) about our featuring nonobjective art in the January/February 2016 issue that we cannot print them all; however, you can read those letters at artistsmagazine. com/learnmore2016. We thank our readers, expressing interest in learning about all types of art, for taking the time to affirm the value of diversity, the importance of free speech, and the freedom of the artist to pursue his/her own truth.…

“A series of happy accidents” is the way Marcus Ratliff describes putting together a collage. His studio, connected to his house, is another kind of accident: It was designed as a consulting room by the previous owner, a therapist whose patients worked with sand, water, molds and miniature objects. In sandplay the patient creates scenes that the therapist can guide and/or interpret. Of this therapeutic exercise, Carl Jung wrote: “Often the hands know how to solve a riddle with which the intellect has wrestled in vain.” In other words, the revelation of what is unconscious can fall into place by chance—one way to describe, as well, inspiration. Transferring his studio into the former consulting room, Ratliff pulled down the shallow shelves that held the molds and tiny figures and installed…

“What an agonizing moment! Let it roll! Let it roll!” According to his friend Pierre-Georges Jeanniot, it was with those words of anticipation that Edgar Degas prepared to run a freshly painted plate and paper through a press. Painted with ink or oil on metal plates, then transferred to paper, Degas’s monotypes are among his most fluid and spontaneous works. He produced more than 300 such prints of subjects that included café performers, the ballet, brothels, bathers and landscapes—in short, the same themes that he studied in pencil, pastels, oils and sculpture. A current exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, “Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty,” displays the full range of Degas’s monotype subjects and techniques, as well as additional related drawings and paintings.…

MOST COLORISTS AGREE that grey enhances the color in paintings and, to paraphrase John Ruskin, True art happens with the marriage of head, heart and hand. Enter the Jack Richeson & Co. new brush line, Grey Matters, which can join your painter’s hand with your head and heart in a harmonic long-term romance. Along with the Grey Matters brushes, I tried the Grey Matters Palette Pads, which consist of sheets of a neutral grey. Let’s quote Stephen Quiller: “The warm (color temperature) disposable palette shows the actual paint color to its advantage.” Mixing colors on the Grey Matters palette allows you to see the actual colors of the pigments without the distraction of a white palette, which will naturally cast a slight white sheen on the paint, or a colored…

I GRADUATED FROM ART SCHOOL IN POLAND, but colored pencils came much later in my career. I learned techniques from step-by-step books, eventually finding my own way with the medium. I created Beautiful Mind using Prismacolor pencils on Arches hot-pressed board, which allows for numerous layers of color and for scratchings into the surface—I scratched the graffiti on the edge of the wall. My palette was mostly warm grays, ranging from 10 to 90 percent in color saturation. The most challenging aspect was the background. I often apply underlayers in watercolor, but I couldn’t do so with this piece because I was submitting it to a Colored Pencil Society of America show, which restricts the medium to colored pencil. Beautiful Mind is about a young girl struggling with self-identity in…

MCKENZIE GRAHAM: What’s your history in art and commerce? AMANDA WACHOB: I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to make a living with a fine art photography degree, and I felt a bit lost until I fell into tattooing. Everything clicked. MG: Can you explain the connection between this kind of work and your art background? AW: Experimenting with designs, using the tools in unconventional ways, tattooing surfaces other than skin — it feels good to be mischievous in these ways. I enjoy challenging the norm. Photography is still often the vehicle for my work. So much of it is photo-based, even though it’s still ultimately about tattooing. MG: You have a series of tattooed lemons. How did that begin? AW: When I was first learning how to tattoo,…

U. S. Thread Company Mills, Willimantic, Connecticut is included in the exhibition “A Good Summer’s Work: J. Alden Weir, Connecticut Impressionist,” at the Lyman Allyn Museum in New London, Conn., until September 11. JULIAN ALDEN WEIR WAS AN ACCOMPLISHED FIGURE PAINTER studying in Paris when he first encountered French Impressionism. “I never in my life,” he wrote, “saw more horrible things.” The vehemence of his reaction should have come as no surprise—his father and older brother both painted in the traditional manner of the Hudson River School. In due time Weir got over the initial abhorrence, lightened his palette, adopted broken brushstrokes and became one of the most prominent impressionist painters in this country. Although he sometimes returned to a more academic approach, especially when painting portraits, his…

Of her long career as a fine artist, interrupted for a couple of decades by work as a commercial illustrator and designer, Sharon Knettell says, “I never felt as if I wasn’t doing real art.” Long before Andy Warhol blurred the line between commercial imagery and high art with his Pop Art portraits of Brillo pads and cans of Campbell’s soup, Knettell had created her first recognizable picture, at age 4, of “a Coke not being drunk,” according to family lore. Her current work reveals and incorporates the diverse styles and elements from ornamental, cultural and art historical sources she has studied and assimilated over the course of her creative life. In one area of her work, however, she is steadfast; she always works from life. COMMERCIAL BEGINNINGS Knettell’s art…

A monotype is a one-of-a-kind piece of work. The artist creates the design by applying ink, paint or some other medium to a plate. The plate is then pressed onto a sheet of paper or other surface, creating the monotype. Even if a second impression is made, it will be distinct from the first because much of the medium will already have been lifted from the plate. A monoprint is one of a series of impressions that are basically the same. The artist establishes the design by etching, carving or masking a plate or by creating a relief block. The medium is then applied to the plate or block, which is then pressed onto the print surface. Medium can be reapplied to the plate or block so that nearly identical…