Pioneer Square January Art Walk, a few photographs
This is a review of a few artists I was intrigued
with during January's Pioneer Square art walk. I found two landscape painters,
one woodblock print artist, and one glass artist using a new approach, all four
of whose works were quite impressive. In this recounting I describe the
galleries, the artists and some background about them, and why I liked their
work. I also present a few images of some sunsets we've had recently when
Seattle - in the dead of Winter of all times - had a string of five
perfect-blue-sky days in a row. Now, of course, it's back to the usual dreary
rain and gloom.
The January Pioneer Square First Thursday art
walk was less filled with patrons than the previous one I attended. Perhaps
several reasons account for that. The weather wasn't that conducive to being
out - it was somewhat rainy and had been cold for the past several days; folks
seem to still be recovering form the holidays and this is only the first week
after the New Year.
That actually was good for me since I'd decided that the way to actually learn and get into the local arts scene is to talk to the artists, gallery owners and gallery reps. Since there weren't that many folks in any given gallery this would give me an opportunity to do some inquiring. And, the weather was causing me to want to stick to the close-in gallery spaces around Occidental Square and basically confine myself to the core block bounded by Jackson and Main Streets and First and Occidental Avenues.
The first gallery I walked in was the Calix Fine Art Collection <http://www.calixfineart.com>, right on the corner of Jackson and Occidental. It's a nice corner gallery with lots of natural light in the day and lots of hanging spot and flood lights in the dark. There were a couple of hangings which struck my fancy but one artist in particular struck more - his works struck a visual chord in me. Tim Howe <http://www.timhowestudios.com/gallery.html> has been paining landscapes based on personal travels, very much in the manner of Monet or Renoir. He was originally a graphics and design professional who grew up in New Zealand, immigrated to the US and set up a design studio in San Diego, but eventually decided his love of travel and painting was where he wanted to be. I spoke at great length with Ali Valdez, owner and founder of Calix, about Howe. She has been collecting his work for quite a time and had gone through her own metamorphosis from art representative and advocate in Santa Barbara to interior designer and contributor to art publications in New York to moving here and pursuing her own love of contemporary art. She recently acquired Howe as one of her artists-in-residence and had previously hosted a one-artist show of his work, many of which remained on the walls.
Calix has other fine artists but it was Howe's work which struck me and which I'll further describe. Howe paints using oils and acrylics on large (4x3-foot) and extra large (6x5-foot) canvases. His style moves across time as his travels have moved him across landscapes. He's painted in the Mediterranean areas of France, Spain and Italy, on Vancouver Island, here in Seattle, and in the two islands of New Zealand. Each location has called for a special approach to the capture of the landscape and light. His brush strokes are both continuous - for the underlying tone and texture, and broad - for the essential elements of light and color; and fine - for the occasional fine detail which gives his work such a depth. Each landscape area he's captured has a definitive "feel" and light and color. As a designer before being a painter, Howe worked to capture the essential shape and fundamental color of an item. His paintings do the same thing in a manner which is both subtle and which profoundly influence the overall look of the finished art.
And, like both Monet and Renoir, Howe's resulting paintings actually capture the true feeling of the place in a way which is evocative and solicitous. There's hardly a higher compliment to be paid an artist than this. His work is incredibly affordable given what it is and how large most of them are. The prices of the Calix gallery collection of his work ranged from $1700 to $3500. Howe is represented here in the US by these galleries in addition to Calix: F8 Fine Art Gallery, Austin <http://f8fineart.com/timhowe.htm>; Lillian Berkley Gallery, Escondido <http://www.lillianberkley.com/TimHowe_bottom.htm>.
I probably spent 40 minutes in Calix examining and being drawn in by Tim Howe's paintings and talking with Ali. I would spend a few minutes with Ali, go look at another painting of Howe's while she attended to another patron, then return and pick up the conversational thread and go off and look again at another Howe work and return again. She's quite a vivacious person and was very willing to discuss both Tim Howe, his work, and her own interest and commitment to the arts and especially to contemporary art. I put myself on her mailing list and she said she email me some JPEGs of other work of his which appealed to her. I told her I'd be back next month and we both lamented the fact that bills and lack of huge income prevented us from buying more art.
The next gallery I went into was Davidson Galleries, also on the Occidental Square portion of the block. It's called Occidental Avenue, but for the two blocks between Washington and Jackson Streets it's a cobblestone-paved pedestrian space more properly called a "square." The portion between Main and Jackson Streets is surrounded on both sides by galleries and one really fine coffee shop - Torrefazione Italia Coffee shop. There are other Terrefazione coffee shops in town, one in downtown, one in Fremont, and probably a few others I haven't run across. Previously, Torrefazione was owned by Seattle's Best Coffee, which roasted its coffees on Vashon Island. Times change, though. First the Vashon roasting plant was moved to a suburb of Tacoma, Fife, and then Starbucks bought out Seattle Coffee Company, the corporate parent of both Seattle's Best and Torrefazione. Not very many people here in Seattle liked this - especially the coffee house owners. But, Starbucks says it will keep the three coffee shop brands, the cofffees which are used by each, and the management separate so, according to them, there should be no noticeable difference.
The Davidson Galleries feature art produced using cut woodblocks. I'd not been in this gallery previously and therefore was unprepared for the true amount of woodblock art which is being contemporarily produced. Astounding would be the word. I am aware, as we all should be, of the former use of woodblock art to illustrate most of the published works during the initial few centuries after Guttenberg's printing press technology made book publishing easy. Perhaps most of us are not familiar with the huge number of woodblock prints from early Japan and Chinese artists, though. Or, the number and proliferation of modern, contemporary, woodblock artists. I was familiar with some of the history but none of the contemporary aspects. Which meant I spent another 40 or so minutes crawling all over Davidson Galleries looking at both historic and contemporary woodblock prints. This gallery was relatively busy and was comprised of many small spaces so there was scant opportunity to talk with any gallery owners or artist representatives, meaning I was pretty much on my own.
One of the artists at Davidson whose art, once more, struck both a content and visual chord in me is Lockwood Dennis <http://www.davidsongalleries.com/artists/dennis%20castles/dennis_castles.html>. He's a Northwest artist using both woodblock cuts and oil-on-canvas. His style is very, very impressionistic and, perhaps because of the imposing restrictions of the woodblock technique, very spare in the application of "strokes" and color. His work is powerful and evocative without being simplistic. His use of color is also spare, typically using a palette of maybe a dozen or dozen-and-a-half colors, most of them relatively unmixed. His work is also done on a small physical scale, with most of the oils and woodblock prints measuring 11x14 inches (or some variation on that size) with landscape and portrait formats. What's impressive is that Dennis' work is on such a small physical scale and yet the subject matter itself is vast and grand in scale. He manages quite well to pull off the illusion in this small canvas or print space of experience of a much vaster landscape or terrain.
Dennis' work is also interesting in that in some of the more recent works which show cities he invokes both the "modernity" of the present-day city and the "nostalgia" of an earlier time. His cityscapes show present-day scenes with the aero-styled car shapes of the '40s. His busses are the same, Art-Deco-'40's styling and yet they're placed in a very contemporary cityscape <http://www.davidsongalleries.com/artists/dennis/dennis.html>. His latest efforts, on display at Davidson, are "Castles and Ruins," which are woodcuts and which are featured along with his oil paintings from Colorado, which inspired the woodcut series. According to Davidson Galleries, Dennis' work is inspired by the expressionist efforts of the German artists <http://www.artcyclopedia.com/history/expressionism.html> in the first couple of decades following the Industrial Revolution. Dennis' work is also inspired by the tradition of Japanese woodblock prints and, as would be obvious when seeing them, the public works projects of the Works Progress Administration during the mid and late 1930's. His work has been available in local galleries since 1985. Dennis appears to be a rather private individual in that I couldn't find a biography or other personal references about him. I'll have to do some digging here since his work is alluring and he seems to be quite prolific with a number of series of oils and woodblock prints spanning the three decades since 1985.
Davidson Galleries itself is in a reasonably-sized space on the inside square and has an extensive print gallery in their upstairs section. They also feature a large selection of prints from contemporary Japanesse woodblock artists and others from Europe and Asia. The woodblock prints themselves seem reasonably priced - in the low hundreds. Complete sets of Lockwood Dennis' work - his "Castle and Ruins," "Automobiles," "Road Machines," and other series - are a few thousand for the entire set of prints unmounted and unframed. Buying a complete series of Dennis' work would be appropriate if one were setting about to provide an art theme for a residence, get-away-lodge, or even restaurant or corporate office. And, in that sense, a complete series set would be inexpensive art.
My final gallery of the evening was the First Avenue showcase - Global Art Venue <http://www.artvenue.net/index.html>. This gallery has both a main lobby area broken into about five discrete viewing areas including a "salon" set up with leather sofa, lamps and side tables to display how art might work in one's home. There's an upstairs and an extensive downstairs area as well. The downstairs area features their collection of glass artists with upstairs being taken by the painters and sculptures they represent.
Global Art was entrancing because I found two new artists whose work I really like - one a painter of landscapes - and the other a glass artist who is experimenting with a new medium. I was also delighted to see the work of Jim Stoccardo being displayed in its own gallery upstairs. Stoccardo is one of the artists I had spoken directly with in his studio in Building "C" <http://www.jimstoccardo.com/gallery.php> during last month's Ballard art walk. Stoccardo's work is surreal done both in a very simplistic and sparse pen-and-ink manner and in a slightly more elaborate but still simple cartoon-esque manner. Staccardo also uses multiple planes for his work - meaning he paints on thin sections of wood which are cut out with windows, doorways, and other structure features and then these are placed on another plane of thin wood which features the "insides" behind these doors and windows. His work is both "simple" and complex. It's simple because upon first viewing one sees a very minimalist set of themes, but upon closer inspection one finds that Stoccardo has hidden within these simple themes a more complex situation. Behind the doors and windows of his cartoon are complex daily activities unfolding - many in some instances. One of his pieces is a view into an apartment building with nearly two dozen different lives being exposed behind the windows and doors.
His work ranges from the minute - small 2x6 inch pen-and-ink or pencil drawings which show simple themes with elaborate lines comprising the simple shapes he is using - to the moderate. His apartment wood plane painting is roughly 4x5 feet. I had seen the rough sketches and some of the individual pieces for the apartment painting when I was at his Ballard studio last month. The finished artwork is much more satisfying even though the rough sketches themselves were quite intriguing and interesting in their own right.
On Global Art Venue's main floor I saw a very wide range of artist Liang Wei's work <http://www.artvenue.net/scgi-bin/artists.pl?aid=35>. He is a Chinese landscape painter who was born in Sichuan Province, China, worked on a farm, learned painting and moved to Seattle in 1989 as an artist-in-residence at the University of Washington. His work is also physically small, on the same scale as that of Lockwood Dennis' work - roughly a foot square. Wei uses equally simple colors and few strokes to evoke the landscapes he paints. His featured work at Global covers a variety of landscapes here in America, including Washington State. Again, like Dennis' work, Wei is able to convey the immensity of a huge wheat field or river basin with a few strokes and colors on a physically small canvas. Wei works in oil on canvas and has his own series of paintings he's accomplished since moving to Seattle, including a series featuring Pioneer Square. His style is impressionist, with some of his works containing subtle humor embedded in the landscape. His work was priced in the several hundreds and he will continue to reside here in the city although he remains a Chinese citizen.
The Global Art Venue representative I had snagged told me that Global is working to arrange an exchange of resident Asian artists from the Northwest for a joint exhibit with an art organization in China, which would feature the Asian artists resident in America, while Global would feature native Asian artists. This exchange is being worked now with the exhibits expected to occur sometime this coming Fall. The works would be "contemporary" efforts of the Asian art community in both East and West venues.
Downstairs at Global Art I discovered the work of an artist which really drew me into it. Tim Chilina began his career as a chemist, and then using those skills and knowledge, became a well-known Northwest glass artist <http://www.shafferfineart.com/The_Art_of_Tim_Chilina.htm>. His home is in the Portland area <http://www.artvenue.net/scgi-bin/artists.pl?bib=49;source=bio>. But, it wasn't the glass art of Chilina's which caught my attention. It was his recent experimentations with encaustic. Global Art Venue's web presentation of Chilina's new work <http://www.artvenue.net/scgi-bin/artists.pl?aid=49> is, sadly, pathetic in contrast to what these pieces are like in person. Chilina uses a base of plate glass and layers on this pigmented beeswax, sculpting and weaving a pattern almost like one would do with pebbles in a Japanese garden. On top of this layer Chilina places a smaller and thinner piece of glass, while the wax is still malleable on the first layer. On the second glass layer he repeats his layering with a differently-pigmented wax which is smoothed or sculpted in a contrasting manner to the first layer. On top of this he either places yet another layer of glass or simply sculpts using warm pigmented wax a different shape with a contrasting color.
Chilina's material is glass. Previously it was his medium and it has become his canvas with this new approach. The wax hardens to a fired-clay-like consistency and the final work is incredible to behold. The light comes through the glass and wax, lighting the whole composition from behind as well as from the front. The various layers and sculpted wax patterns give the finished art the same manner of "lit from within" expression as does his glass sculpture. Chilina has only been using this technique for a few months now and yet his work is stunning - original, illuminating, pleasing to the eye, and addictive in the way which only glass art can be.
I'd run across some artwork using encaustic at the Center on Contemporary Arts (COCA <http://cocaseattle.org/>) this past week while attending a screening of kinetic art. My impression at that time was this was a fantastic medium but I had no idea what it was. Encaustic is one of the earliest mediums used and is thought to have been originated by the Greeks and used later by the Romans <http://www.thegutsygourmet.net/enc-hist.html>. There is a revival of this medium going on presently with a number of organizations providing background and classes. Online there are a couple of sources for supplies, classes or other learning material (<http://www.encaustic.com/> and <http://www.dickblick.com/zz011/01/products.asp?param=0&ig_id=6095>). From my very limited experience with this ancient-now-revived medium, I'd say that Tim Chilina's approach to using the pigmented wax with glass has taken this art form to new arenas. The other works I saw at COCA simply used the pigmented wax in a fashion as if it were oil or acrylic being used in a impasto-styled painting. It's one thing to use a medium to create filler and sculpt a piece of art, it's an entirely different thing to use that medium as a basis for a new and illuminating (literally) approach to "glass art."
Because the web images really fail to capture the light and contrast of Chilina's encaustic work, I'd encourage anyone in the Seatte area to get down in person to Global Art Venue. Chilina's work is in the front section of the lower-level gallery and there are half-a-dozen very large pieces featured.
Well, that was a pretty satisfying art walk giving me impetus to continue this approach. My first venture out for the Pioneer Square art walk had me simply walking from gallery to gallery as if I were in a museum. That was sufficient to get my imagination going. By the time I went to my first Ballard art walk I was ready to start talking to the artists themselves. This past Pioneer Square art walk didn't have any artists around so instead I talked to artist representatives and gallery owners. That was much more satisfying and gave me a much greater understanding of both the art and the artist's work. This is the approach I'll continue with - talking to the artists, gallery owners, artist representatives. I'll continue to explore the local art scene - continuing tonight with the Second Saturday Ballard art walk. I'll be exploring a different area of the Ballard art scene from what I explored last month. I'll have something to say about this, too.
It's hard to say why there seem to be so many good artists here. There are in Santa Fe, too. It's entirely probably that the environment gives forth a solicitation to the artist. The Northwest certainly has a huge landscape, skyscape, cityscape, and all manner of flora and fauna to "draw" from. The Southwest has its incredible and expansive skies and the unbelievable richness of the sand, amber and pinks of the land with the occasional coursing of a dark blue or dark green river through it with the more common slicing of the view by huge and deep escarpments or rising geological entities of any and all weird shape. New York and Tokyo have the electricity of people in motion pursuing ten-million simultaneous and diverse activities. For artists there must be inspiration. It can come from within and it can come from without. It's clear to me that the environment and weather of the Northwest perform a huge function in motivating a great many of the artists whose work I've both seen and been drawn to. Beyond the environment there are the cultural elements of an area which can solicit an artist's inspiration. The Southwest has a myriad of native histories, each with a unique and provocative world view. The Northwest has a deep and rich tradition of native culture and lore as well. These also inspire and provoke the artist.
More on art and artists as I continue with my explorations. In the meantime I've continued work on the two acrylic canvases I started and have finished half-a-dozen pastel drawings and will work on even more. Pastel to me is a wonderful medium because it is easy, fast, nearly as expressive as oil or acrylic paints and vastly cheaper. I'll work on putting some of my art up on a set of web pages whenever we get some decent daylight again and I can photograph them appropriately.
Scene from the west-facing back window in my studio on a recent evening. The light
pours into the studio and reflects on one of the corner window panes - giving me
sunlight in my face even when I've facing northwest and the sun is in the southwest.
Mount Rainier at the same time as the image above was taken - glowing with the late-day sun and rising
majestically from the 6,000-foot Cascade Range it's part of. The nearby hills of West Seattle are a modest
350-to-450 feet high by comparison.
A 120-degree panorama of the east-to-southeast showing the subtle sky shades and Rainier and the Cascades
as the sun was setting.
A 120-degree panorama of the west-to-southwest showing, again, the subtle sky shades with the Olympic
Chain, Puget Sound, and the sun actually setting.
Have I said I love my view lately?
That actually was good for me since I'd decided that the way to actually learn and get into the local arts scene is to talk to the artists, gallery owners and gallery reps. Since there weren't that many folks in any given gallery this would give me an opportunity to do some inquiring. And, the weather was causing me to want to stick to the close-in gallery spaces around Occidental Square and basically confine myself to the core block bounded by Jackson and Main Streets and First and Occidental Avenues.
The first gallery I walked in was the Calix Fine Art Collection <http://www.calixfineart.com>, right on the corner of Jackson and Occidental. It's a nice corner gallery with lots of natural light in the day and lots of hanging spot and flood lights in the dark. There were a couple of hangings which struck my fancy but one artist in particular struck more - his works struck a visual chord in me. Tim Howe <http://www.timhowestudios.com/gallery.html> has been paining landscapes based on personal travels, very much in the manner of Monet or Renoir. He was originally a graphics and design professional who grew up in New Zealand, immigrated to the US and set up a design studio in San Diego, but eventually decided his love of travel and painting was where he wanted to be. I spoke at great length with Ali Valdez, owner and founder of Calix, about Howe. She has been collecting his work for quite a time and had gone through her own metamorphosis from art representative and advocate in Santa Barbara to interior designer and contributor to art publications in New York to moving here and pursuing her own love of contemporary art. She recently acquired Howe as one of her artists-in-residence and had previously hosted a one-artist show of his work, many of which remained on the walls.
Calix has other fine artists but it was Howe's work which struck me and which I'll further describe. Howe paints using oils and acrylics on large (4x3-foot) and extra large (6x5-foot) canvases. His style moves across time as his travels have moved him across landscapes. He's painted in the Mediterranean areas of France, Spain and Italy, on Vancouver Island, here in Seattle, and in the two islands of New Zealand. Each location has called for a special approach to the capture of the landscape and light. His brush strokes are both continuous - for the underlying tone and texture, and broad - for the essential elements of light and color; and fine - for the occasional fine detail which gives his work such a depth. Each landscape area he's captured has a definitive "feel" and light and color. As a designer before being a painter, Howe worked to capture the essential shape and fundamental color of an item. His paintings do the same thing in a manner which is both subtle and which profoundly influence the overall look of the finished art.
And, like both Monet and Renoir, Howe's resulting paintings actually capture the true feeling of the place in a way which is evocative and solicitous. There's hardly a higher compliment to be paid an artist than this. His work is incredibly affordable given what it is and how large most of them are. The prices of the Calix gallery collection of his work ranged from $1700 to $3500. Howe is represented here in the US by these galleries in addition to Calix: F8 Fine Art Gallery, Austin <http://f8fineart.com/timhowe.htm>; Lillian Berkley Gallery, Escondido <http://www.lillianberkley.com/TimHowe_bottom.htm>.
I probably spent 40 minutes in Calix examining and being drawn in by Tim Howe's paintings and talking with Ali. I would spend a few minutes with Ali, go look at another painting of Howe's while she attended to another patron, then return and pick up the conversational thread and go off and look again at another Howe work and return again. She's quite a vivacious person and was very willing to discuss both Tim Howe, his work, and her own interest and commitment to the arts and especially to contemporary art. I put myself on her mailing list and she said she email me some JPEGs of other work of his which appealed to her. I told her I'd be back next month and we both lamented the fact that bills and lack of huge income prevented us from buying more art.
The next gallery I went into was Davidson Galleries, also on the Occidental Square portion of the block. It's called Occidental Avenue, but for the two blocks between Washington and Jackson Streets it's a cobblestone-paved pedestrian space more properly called a "square." The portion between Main and Jackson Streets is surrounded on both sides by galleries and one really fine coffee shop - Torrefazione Italia Coffee shop. There are other Terrefazione coffee shops in town, one in downtown, one in Fremont, and probably a few others I haven't run across. Previously, Torrefazione was owned by Seattle's Best Coffee, which roasted its coffees on Vashon Island. Times change, though. First the Vashon roasting plant was moved to a suburb of Tacoma, Fife, and then Starbucks bought out Seattle Coffee Company, the corporate parent of both Seattle's Best and Torrefazione. Not very many people here in Seattle liked this - especially the coffee house owners. But, Starbucks says it will keep the three coffee shop brands, the cofffees which are used by each, and the management separate so, according to them, there should be no noticeable difference.
The Davidson Galleries feature art produced using cut woodblocks. I'd not been in this gallery previously and therefore was unprepared for the true amount of woodblock art which is being contemporarily produced. Astounding would be the word. I am aware, as we all should be, of the former use of woodblock art to illustrate most of the published works during the initial few centuries after Guttenberg's printing press technology made book publishing easy. Perhaps most of us are not familiar with the huge number of woodblock prints from early Japan and Chinese artists, though. Or, the number and proliferation of modern, contemporary, woodblock artists. I was familiar with some of the history but none of the contemporary aspects. Which meant I spent another 40 or so minutes crawling all over Davidson Galleries looking at both historic and contemporary woodblock prints. This gallery was relatively busy and was comprised of many small spaces so there was scant opportunity to talk with any gallery owners or artist representatives, meaning I was pretty much on my own.
One of the artists at Davidson whose art, once more, struck both a content and visual chord in me is Lockwood Dennis <http://www.davidsongalleries.com/artists/dennis%20castles/dennis_castles.html>. He's a Northwest artist using both woodblock cuts and oil-on-canvas. His style is very, very impressionistic and, perhaps because of the imposing restrictions of the woodblock technique, very spare in the application of "strokes" and color. His work is powerful and evocative without being simplistic. His use of color is also spare, typically using a palette of maybe a dozen or dozen-and-a-half colors, most of them relatively unmixed. His work is also done on a small physical scale, with most of the oils and woodblock prints measuring 11x14 inches (or some variation on that size) with landscape and portrait formats. What's impressive is that Dennis' work is on such a small physical scale and yet the subject matter itself is vast and grand in scale. He manages quite well to pull off the illusion in this small canvas or print space of experience of a much vaster landscape or terrain.
Dennis' work is also interesting in that in some of the more recent works which show cities he invokes both the "modernity" of the present-day city and the "nostalgia" of an earlier time. His cityscapes show present-day scenes with the aero-styled car shapes of the '40s. His busses are the same, Art-Deco-'40's styling and yet they're placed in a very contemporary cityscape <http://www.davidsongalleries.com/artists/dennis/dennis.html>. His latest efforts, on display at Davidson, are "Castles and Ruins," which are woodcuts and which are featured along with his oil paintings from Colorado, which inspired the woodcut series. According to Davidson Galleries, Dennis' work is inspired by the expressionist efforts of the German artists <http://www.artcyclopedia.com/history/expressionism.html> in the first couple of decades following the Industrial Revolution. Dennis' work is also inspired by the tradition of Japanese woodblock prints and, as would be obvious when seeing them, the public works projects of the Works Progress Administration during the mid and late 1930's. His work has been available in local galleries since 1985. Dennis appears to be a rather private individual in that I couldn't find a biography or other personal references about him. I'll have to do some digging here since his work is alluring and he seems to be quite prolific with a number of series of oils and woodblock prints spanning the three decades since 1985.
Davidson Galleries itself is in a reasonably-sized space on the inside square and has an extensive print gallery in their upstairs section. They also feature a large selection of prints from contemporary Japanesse woodblock artists and others from Europe and Asia. The woodblock prints themselves seem reasonably priced - in the low hundreds. Complete sets of Lockwood Dennis' work - his "Castle and Ruins," "Automobiles," "Road Machines," and other series - are a few thousand for the entire set of prints unmounted and unframed. Buying a complete series of Dennis' work would be appropriate if one were setting about to provide an art theme for a residence, get-away-lodge, or even restaurant or corporate office. And, in that sense, a complete series set would be inexpensive art.
My final gallery of the evening was the First Avenue showcase - Global Art Venue <http://www.artvenue.net/index.html>. This gallery has both a main lobby area broken into about five discrete viewing areas including a "salon" set up with leather sofa, lamps and side tables to display how art might work in one's home. There's an upstairs and an extensive downstairs area as well. The downstairs area features their collection of glass artists with upstairs being taken by the painters and sculptures they represent.
Global Art was entrancing because I found two new artists whose work I really like - one a painter of landscapes - and the other a glass artist who is experimenting with a new medium. I was also delighted to see the work of Jim Stoccardo being displayed in its own gallery upstairs. Stoccardo is one of the artists I had spoken directly with in his studio in Building "C" <http://www.jimstoccardo.com/gallery.php> during last month's Ballard art walk. Stoccardo's work is surreal done both in a very simplistic and sparse pen-and-ink manner and in a slightly more elaborate but still simple cartoon-esque manner. Staccardo also uses multiple planes for his work - meaning he paints on thin sections of wood which are cut out with windows, doorways, and other structure features and then these are placed on another plane of thin wood which features the "insides" behind these doors and windows. His work is both "simple" and complex. It's simple because upon first viewing one sees a very minimalist set of themes, but upon closer inspection one finds that Stoccardo has hidden within these simple themes a more complex situation. Behind the doors and windows of his cartoon are complex daily activities unfolding - many in some instances. One of his pieces is a view into an apartment building with nearly two dozen different lives being exposed behind the windows and doors.
His work ranges from the minute - small 2x6 inch pen-and-ink or pencil drawings which show simple themes with elaborate lines comprising the simple shapes he is using - to the moderate. His apartment wood plane painting is roughly 4x5 feet. I had seen the rough sketches and some of the individual pieces for the apartment painting when I was at his Ballard studio last month. The finished artwork is much more satisfying even though the rough sketches themselves were quite intriguing and interesting in their own right.
On Global Art Venue's main floor I saw a very wide range of artist Liang Wei's work <http://www.artvenue.net/scgi-bin/artists.pl?aid=35>. He is a Chinese landscape painter who was born in Sichuan Province, China, worked on a farm, learned painting and moved to Seattle in 1989 as an artist-in-residence at the University of Washington. His work is also physically small, on the same scale as that of Lockwood Dennis' work - roughly a foot square. Wei uses equally simple colors and few strokes to evoke the landscapes he paints. His featured work at Global covers a variety of landscapes here in America, including Washington State. Again, like Dennis' work, Wei is able to convey the immensity of a huge wheat field or river basin with a few strokes and colors on a physically small canvas. Wei works in oil on canvas and has his own series of paintings he's accomplished since moving to Seattle, including a series featuring Pioneer Square. His style is impressionist, with some of his works containing subtle humor embedded in the landscape. His work was priced in the several hundreds and he will continue to reside here in the city although he remains a Chinese citizen.
The Global Art Venue representative I had snagged told me that Global is working to arrange an exchange of resident Asian artists from the Northwest for a joint exhibit with an art organization in China, which would feature the Asian artists resident in America, while Global would feature native Asian artists. This exchange is being worked now with the exhibits expected to occur sometime this coming Fall. The works would be "contemporary" efforts of the Asian art community in both East and West venues.
Downstairs at Global Art I discovered the work of an artist which really drew me into it. Tim Chilina began his career as a chemist, and then using those skills and knowledge, became a well-known Northwest glass artist <http://www.shafferfineart.com/The_Art_of_Tim_Chilina.htm>. His home is in the Portland area <http://www.artvenue.net/scgi-bin/artists.pl?bib=49;source=bio>. But, it wasn't the glass art of Chilina's which caught my attention. It was his recent experimentations with encaustic. Global Art Venue's web presentation of Chilina's new work <http://www.artvenue.net/scgi-bin/artists.pl?aid=49> is, sadly, pathetic in contrast to what these pieces are like in person. Chilina uses a base of plate glass and layers on this pigmented beeswax, sculpting and weaving a pattern almost like one would do with pebbles in a Japanese garden. On top of this layer Chilina places a smaller and thinner piece of glass, while the wax is still malleable on the first layer. On the second glass layer he repeats his layering with a differently-pigmented wax which is smoothed or sculpted in a contrasting manner to the first layer. On top of this he either places yet another layer of glass or simply sculpts using warm pigmented wax a different shape with a contrasting color.
Chilina's material is glass. Previously it was his medium and it has become his canvas with this new approach. The wax hardens to a fired-clay-like consistency and the final work is incredible to behold. The light comes through the glass and wax, lighting the whole composition from behind as well as from the front. The various layers and sculpted wax patterns give the finished art the same manner of "lit from within" expression as does his glass sculpture. Chilina has only been using this technique for a few months now and yet his work is stunning - original, illuminating, pleasing to the eye, and addictive in the way which only glass art can be.
I'd run across some artwork using encaustic at the Center on Contemporary Arts (COCA <http://cocaseattle.org/>) this past week while attending a screening of kinetic art. My impression at that time was this was a fantastic medium but I had no idea what it was. Encaustic is one of the earliest mediums used and is thought to have been originated by the Greeks and used later by the Romans <http://www.thegutsygourmet.net/enc-hist.html>. There is a revival of this medium going on presently with a number of organizations providing background and classes. Online there are a couple of sources for supplies, classes or other learning material (<http://www.encaustic.com/> and <http://www.dickblick.com/zz011/01/products.asp?param=0&ig_id=6095>). From my very limited experience with this ancient-now-revived medium, I'd say that Tim Chilina's approach to using the pigmented wax with glass has taken this art form to new arenas. The other works I saw at COCA simply used the pigmented wax in a fashion as if it were oil or acrylic being used in a impasto-styled painting. It's one thing to use a medium to create filler and sculpt a piece of art, it's an entirely different thing to use that medium as a basis for a new and illuminating (literally) approach to "glass art."
Because the web images really fail to capture the light and contrast of Chilina's encaustic work, I'd encourage anyone in the Seatte area to get down in person to Global Art Venue. Chilina's work is in the front section of the lower-level gallery and there are half-a-dozen very large pieces featured.
Well, that was a pretty satisfying art walk giving me impetus to continue this approach. My first venture out for the Pioneer Square art walk had me simply walking from gallery to gallery as if I were in a museum. That was sufficient to get my imagination going. By the time I went to my first Ballard art walk I was ready to start talking to the artists themselves. This past Pioneer Square art walk didn't have any artists around so instead I talked to artist representatives and gallery owners. That was much more satisfying and gave me a much greater understanding of both the art and the artist's work. This is the approach I'll continue with - talking to the artists, gallery owners, artist representatives. I'll continue to explore the local art scene - continuing tonight with the Second Saturday Ballard art walk. I'll be exploring a different area of the Ballard art scene from what I explored last month. I'll have something to say about this, too.
It's hard to say why there seem to be so many good artists here. There are in Santa Fe, too. It's entirely probably that the environment gives forth a solicitation to the artist. The Northwest certainly has a huge landscape, skyscape, cityscape, and all manner of flora and fauna to "draw" from. The Southwest has its incredible and expansive skies and the unbelievable richness of the sand, amber and pinks of the land with the occasional coursing of a dark blue or dark green river through it with the more common slicing of the view by huge and deep escarpments or rising geological entities of any and all weird shape. New York and Tokyo have the electricity of people in motion pursuing ten-million simultaneous and diverse activities. For artists there must be inspiration. It can come from within and it can come from without. It's clear to me that the environment and weather of the Northwest perform a huge function in motivating a great many of the artists whose work I've both seen and been drawn to. Beyond the environment there are the cultural elements of an area which can solicit an artist's inspiration. The Southwest has a myriad of native histories, each with a unique and provocative world view. The Northwest has a deep and rich tradition of native culture and lore as well. These also inspire and provoke the artist.
More on art and artists as I continue with my explorations. In the meantime I've continued work on the two acrylic canvases I started and have finished half-a-dozen pastel drawings and will work on even more. Pastel to me is a wonderful medium because it is easy, fast, nearly as expressive as oil or acrylic paints and vastly cheaper. I'll work on putting some of my art up on a set of web pages whenever we get some decent daylight again and I can photograph them appropriately.
Scene from the west-facing back window in my studio on a recent evening. The light
pours into the studio and reflects on one of the corner window panes - giving me
sunlight in my face even when I've facing northwest and the sun is in the southwest.
Mount Rainier at the same time as the image above was taken - glowing with the late-day sun and rising
majestically from the 6,000-foot Cascade Range it's part of. The nearby hills of West Seattle are a modest
350-to-450 feet high by comparison.
A 120-degree panorama of the east-to-southeast showing the subtle sky shades and Rainier and the Cascades
as the sun was setting.
A 120-degree panorama of the west-to-southwest showing, again, the subtle sky shades with the Olympic
Chain, Puget Sound, and the sun actually setting.
Have I said I love my view lately?
Posted: Sat - January 8, 2005 at 01:17 PM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM