Spotlight: Tamar Mogendorff

Hello!!! I'm back!!!  I know you're all as excited as I am, and I have to say first and foremost that I am sorry to have been gone for so long!  I have been such a slacker blog-wise, but only because I have been such a workaholic otherwise.  I am happy to report that I am enjoying my new job at Whole Foods very much, and am feeling pretty settled in at this point.

On another blog post related note, for the second (or third?) time now I am going to alter my posting schedule.  In the beginning, I was so psyched and energized about this blog, and had very lofty goals and ambitions for it.  I set my sights very high in terms of what I would be able to do, mainly the amount of time I would be able to devote to posting.  While I am still very psyched and energized about blogging here on The Art Caravan, and very devoted to bringing you all awesome art and art history posts, I am forced to admit that even my scaled-back goal of one post a day every weekday has become very difficult, given that I am working 7+ hour days 6-7 days a week.  I do not want writing this blog to become a burden, a source of stress, or an obligation for me- and that is what will happen if I keep trying to meet overly ambitious goals!  It is no fun to have to scale back- it is always better to start with modest posting goals and then increase the amount you post over time.  However, my schedule has worked in the opposite direction- I have gone from having too much free time to too little!

Soooo....my point is that from now on I will have no posting goal.  I will post when I can, whenever I can, and will always post enthusiastic and exciting posts that will make you forget I am not posting more!  However, that being said, I will always make an effort to post as much as I possibly can. :)

Now, moving on...to artist Tamar Mogendorff!  I "discovered" Tamar's work on artist Lena Corwin's blog.  It is so precious!  Everything she does is like a magical little dream, sweet and childlike but also mature and intricate.  Her wondrous creations make me smile.  On her website, this quote is posted from Milk Book (Hors-serie Deco | October 2008):
"Using thousand and thousand of fabrics and threads to create her ideas in her Brooklyn workshop, Tamar Mogendorff's world is populated with swans, bears and mushrooms carefully made by her fairy fingers.  The originality of her creations is in the choice and assembly of the fabrics from gaudy to the precious, the subtle or solid."

I just can't get over how lovely and special all her pieces are.  They are like little treasures, worthy of being coveted and held on to.  Some artists just speak to you, just make you so happy (and sort of jealous at the same time- I would love to make work like Tamar's!), and I like her work more than many other artists' work that I've seen lately.  She makes me feel inspired to learn to sew, and do cool things with fabric.

You can check out Tamar's work on her website, www.tmogy.com

Spotlight: Eleanor Farley

Hello!  It's Tuesday night, and I'm super tired, but I'm trying to keep up with my schedule and write a new post every weekday!  Therefore, I bring you a Spotlight on the work of my friend Eleanor Farley.  Eleanor is currently a senior at the Maryland Institute College of Art.  The image above is of a brand-new piece of hers, in her studio.  Eleanor and I talked last year about her work for a blog I had to write for my Contemporary Art class.  Eleanor told me that her work is about "personalization of mass produced objects, making a home, what we need v.s. what we think we need, and inside/outside."

And these concepts are what I got from her work just by looking at it- the idea of building a home, the idea of home and how can you mass produce a home when the notion of home is such a weighted, nostalgic, complicated, symbolic thing- how can you really define "home," what things make up or consist of "home"- you can define "house" as a building where people live, but the notion of "home" is an altogether different thing.  What's great about Eleanor's work is that "home" is not one thing or one phrase or even a phrase at all, but a litany of experiences, memories, tender moments, "domestic affections," structures and material culture, which culminate over time and take on this word "home" which resides in a very special place in our heart, whether we are conflicted about our home or not.

You can check out more of Eleanor's work on her blog, egfarley.blogspot.com!

Spotlight: Kali Ciesemier

Good Wednesday, everybody!  It's a grey day in Baltimore, but as I went for a little run and had some coffee, I am all awake and happy.  As I don't have the post schedule nailed down quite yet, I figured I would post a Spotlight today, because I feel like I haven't posted one in awhile!

Today's Spotlight is on local Baltimore artist and illustrator Kali Ciesemier.  Kali is a friend and former roommate of mine, and I love her illustrations- they always make me happy, especially the above illustration of cakes!  Kali is primarily a freelance illustrator, but she is also currently teaching illustration at MICA, where she graduated from in 2008.  Kali puts a lot of heart & soul into her work, and it shows!  When I was living with her, she was always working- she really cares about what she does and is extremely talented.  I think my favorite two things about Kali's work are her colors- usually a limited color palette, but full of nuance and great shades- and her subjects, always playful and smart.  Even with the various jobs she gets- she has illustrated for Air Tran's GO! Magazine, Baltimore Magazine, Pagepath Technologies, Los Angeles Confidential Magazine, Time Out NY Magazine, and many others- her style is always recognizable and her work is always wonderful!

(Illustration for Time Out NY Magazine)

(Illustration for "Vs." Exhibition at The Wind-Up Space)

To check out more of Kali's work, you can go to her website, www.ciesemier.com or check out her blog at Kalidraws.blogspot.com!

Spotlight: Molly Colleen O'Connell

Hello! I have been a little under the weather (flu shot side effects?), and am in the process of trying to get a job at the Mt. Washington Whole Foods.  Busy, busy, busy!  So today I bring you a Spotlight on the work of Molly Colleen O'Connell, whose work I own in my personal collection.  Molly is one of my favorite artists.  She graduated a year ahead of me from MICA with a Printmaking degree, and is a member of the comic book collective Closed Caption Comics.  She also is one of the organizers of the new art gallery and music venue Open Space in Remington.

I am a fan of her print work as well as her comic books, which she prints and binds herself.  Molly draws and prints images of intricate other worlds that she creates.  In these worlds, she tells the stories of the creatures that inhabit them, and the various things they do and adventures they go on.  Sometimes the narrative is strong and easy to follow, and other times the story is hard to follow but the pictures are all you need anyway.  Her creatures and her line-heavy, incredibly creative drawings are enchanting and unreal.  I particularly love (and hope to purchase one day) a print of a little girl milking (?) a huge moose (?).  Sometimes it's hard to tell what's actually happening, but that's what I enjoy about Molly's work: She is asking your to use your imagination, to enter her amazingly imaginative world, and see where it takes you.

Spotlight: Alice Neel

Hello and Happy Tuesday! It is intermittently sunny and quite chilly here in Baltimore, and I am enjoying the energy that I get from this sort of weather.  For today's Spotlight, I thought I'd go with the painter Alice Neel.  Alice Neel's paintings are super-fun.  Born in 1900 near Philadelphia, she doesn't fit in any one painting category and her style is all her own.  According to her website, she "Was one of the great American painters of the twentieth century" and was also "A pioneer among women artists."  I would agree with both statements.  Neel primarily painted figures, but she also painted landscapes and still life.

How to describe her style?  I am struggling to put it into words.  Her paintings are loose, direct, full of expression and emotion.  They are not particular about traditional elements like proportion, or likeness; yet they are still proportionate and almost certainly look very much like the people they portray.  Neel was never shy about outlines or color application- notice the darker line surrounding most shapes that acts like a pencil drawing, or the way you can obviously tell where one color ends and one begins and how that color was applied.  These things are what make her paintings so great, though- they are straightforward and honest, colorful and fun, full of emotion and integrity.  I love that it seems like she didn't really care what other people thought, or about how you're "supposed" to paint, and instead just painted what she saw how she like to paint it.  I also enjoy how she used the white of the canvas, always letting a little bit show through, giving her paintings a slightly unfinished feel that further emphasized the loose, direct quality of them.  Easily one of my all-time favorites!  To learn more about Alice Neel, visit aliceneel.com.

Spotlight: Robert and Shana Parkeharrison

Today's Spotlight is on my favorite husband-and-wife photography duo, Robert and Shana Parkeharrison.  I have been absolutely entranced with their photographs since high school, when I was studying photography, and I continue to be entranced to this day.  Their other-worldly, mysterious, aged-looking photographs are stunning.  They came to speak at MICA while I was there (sadly, I cannot remember or find out exactly when they came and I cannot find my notes from the lecture....irresponsible sounding, isn't it?), and I was SO EXCITED to hear them speak.  Their photographs are elaborate, requiring extensive props and effects.  Robert poses in most of them, as the lone figure in a post-apocalyptic looking world, where he always appear to be attempting to reinvent the wheel, or reinvent flying, or just invent anything.

They are ghostly, romantic, sad, and beautiful.  I learned along the way that they were ecologically driven, aimed at issues of global warming and other environmental problems that we face, but have to say that I was perfectly happy with them before I knew anything about them.  I almost prefer to contemplate what they might mean, all the unspoken, poetic thoughts and feelings that seem to surround them, than to pigeonhole them as "environmental" works.  They are that and so much more.  To check out Robert and Shanna Parkeharrison's new works and locate galleries and museums you can find their work in, go to www.parkeharrison.com.

Spotlight: Kara Walker

So I feel badly about the fact that I have been slacking a little bit, and didn't post on Monday or Tuesday.  I also haven't written any other posts besides the (ideally) daily "Spotlight" and "Quotes".  But I intend to fix both of these issues, and get down to business...if only I didn't have to work so much, and could just concentrate on writing this blog!  But I digress...
Today's Spotlight is on the contemporary artist Kara Walker, whose work I enjoy very much.  I have always been interested in race relations and the issues surrounding racism in our country, and these are topic with which Kara Walker contends in her pieces.  I saw a large retrospective of her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2007, and was enamored with her simple black-and-white cutouts pasted on the walls.  They were at once theatre and funny, as well as serious and thorny.

Walker primarily creates cut paper silhouettes, as well as drawings, films, and collages.  They offer questions without answers, and place the blame for racism on everyone.  A review of the 2007 show by Ariella Budick on Newsday.com says about Walker, "Her work is neither anti-black or anti-white; it is broadly misanthropic.  Both groups, as far as she is concerned, have forgone their claims to nobility or integrity.  Walker scoffs at the notion of progress.  To her, the distortions in self-image wrought by slavery's power relations have been completely internalized by both groups, which remain helpless in the face of history."
Her work has come under fire in the past, mainly from the black community, who feel she misrepresents black people, catering towards wealthy white buyers and perpetuating racial stereotypes.  On the contrary, as Budick also points out in her review, Walker's work challenges all races and members of our global community to realize, through embarrassment, the ways we rely on as much as detest racism; and furthermore, how history has led us to this point.

You can see Kara Walker's work in person at galleries all over the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Spotlight: Fairfield Porter

As promised, Spotlight is back!  Today I want to focus on Fairfield Porter, an artist I mentioned in the Spotlight on Herman Maril.  I have been trying to marshal my thoughts on Porter since yesterday, trying to figure out what it is about his work that I love so much and what exactly I want to convey about him to you.  For whatever reason, Porter's work can be difficult to talk about.  Porter was a realist painter in the 50's through the 70's, a period of time that is often called the "Age of Abstraction"- hence the title of the book on him that I own, "Fairfield Porter: Realist Painter in an Age of Abstraction".  He is well known in so-called "art circles", but I would bet that a random survey of people off the street would yield little recognition.  I had never even heard of him until my freshman year of college, when Timothy App (whose name, along with other influential teachers, will probably pop up often in this blog) introduced him to my Painting 1 class.  And, even in these so-called "art circles" I mentioned, I do not feel that Porter often gets his due for being the fantastic painter that, in my opinion, he was.  He is altogether eclipsed by the shadows of other, more recognizable, Abstract Expressionist painters from the "Age of Abstraction"- Willem DeKooning, Brice Marden, and Roy Lichtenstein to name a few.  Some might say this eclipse happens so easily because Porter went against the tide of the times in painting realist scenes and scenarios.

So why did he do this?  In an interview with Paul Cummings included in "Fairfield Porter: Realist Painter in an Age of Abstraction", Cummings says to Porter, "You've painted a number of interiors and landscapes." and Porter replies, "What I think now is that it doesn't matter much what you do.  What matters is the painting.  And since a reference to reality is the easiest thing, you just take what's there."  Porter's paintings, while being of said "interiors and landscapes", are nonetheless abstractions.  The definition of "abstract" as it applies to Fine Art implies an emphasis on geometric line, shape, and colors.  Often this results in an image that is not recognizably painted from the world around us; yet if the image that results looks comparatively like our world  it ceases being called abstract and becomes realistic.  Yet many painters regard the line between abstraction and realism to be one drawn unnecessarily, the two are one and the same and to be able to paint a scene and make it look convincingly like "reality" you have to be able to see the abstract in what you are painting from: you have to be able to look at a chair and not see our human concept of a "chair", but simply a brown square shape next to a brown rectangular shape next to a blue shape next to....and so on.  Even the most "realistic" paintings are inescapably altered from "reality" by the act of the artist rendering the scene with his mind's eye and his hand in various materials.  His vision is always embedded in the work, and part of what creates interest in seeing a painting of, for example, a landscape in Maine versus just driving to Maine and seeing the landscape in person is the way the artist has interpreted the landscape with his paint.  The two experiences are entirely different.

Porter's paintings are beautiful, bright, emotional, and personal "interiors and landscapes" that are thoroughly abstract and look effortlessly painted.  I think these qualities are what draws me to them.  I enjoy entering Porter's world through them- many were painted during summers in Maine with his family- and I love being able to, through one eye, see a realistic rendering of whatever he chose to paint, while through the other eye simply seeing the paint- the colors, shapes, and lines it makes.  Porter did not want people to view his paintings looking for an idea or a concept, but to simply see them for what they are- paintings.  Paint on canvas.  John Ashbery, who knew Porter personally, wrote in his essay on Porter "Respect for Things as They are" (again in my "Fairfield Porter: Realist Painter in an Age of Abstraction" book) that Porter's paintings, "...Are intellectual in the classic American tradition...because they have no ideas in them, that is, no ideas that can be separated from the rest.  They are idea, or consciousness, or light, or whatever.  Ideas surround them, but do not and cannot extrude themselves into the being of the art, just as the wilderness surrounds Steven's jar in Tennessee: an artifact, yet paradoxically more natural than the 'slovenly' wilderness that approaches it, and from which it takes 'dominion.'"  I wanted to include this quote in part because Ashbery references the Wallace Stevens poem I quoted just earlier this week, but mainly because I think it sums up the key allure of Porter's work beautifully:  that his work is not this idea or that idea expressed through painting, but simply is painting- and beautiful, enjoyable painting at that.

The book I have referenced and quoted from throughout this Spotlight is titled, "Fairfield Porter: Realist Painter in an Age of Abstraction" with Essays by John Ashbery and Kenworth Moffett.  It was produced by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts in 1982.

Spotlight: Herman Maril

Herman Maril is an artist who came to my attention recently.  The Walters Art Museum here in Baltimore did a show of his work titled, "Herman Maril: An American Modernist".  Since I work at the Walters, I had many occasions to see the show, and even teach it and help pass out evaluation forms to visitors.  I was surprised I had not heard of Maril's work before.  Born and raised in Baltimore, he attended MICA and taught at the University of Maryland.  He also spent summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and his work is influenced by those two places.  His paintings are simplified down to color and shape, two elements that Maril considered extremely important.  In an interview by Carl Schoettler for the Evening Sun in 1983, Maril said, "My preoccupation in painting has always been space...Huge open areas of space.  I like to think of the concept of space.  I like to deal with big open spaces.  And color.  Color and space is painting."

I too feel that painting consists of color and space, and so I appreciate Maril's work and approach to painting.  His work has elements of Cubism, Fauvism, and Modernism to it- i.e. breaking down surface planes and objects into basic shapes and multiple view points, bright unnatural colors, and color field painting.  His beach scenes and delicate interiors also remind me personally of the artist Fairfield Porter, and my own childhood growing up on the beach.  You can see Maril's work in person at the University of Maryland, the Provincetown Art Museum, and other select locations.

Spotlight: Martin Puryear

Welcome to the first artist “Spotlight” here on Art Caravan.  Spotlight will be a daily feature, meant to be a short introduction to various artists I think are worth looking at!  Some may be famous artists that you may have already heard of, and others may be up-and-coming artists whose work I am excited about.  Through Spotlight, I hope to compile a great list of artists that can be perused at anytime, calling notice to artists that I love and respect as well as great artists throughout the history of art.

Today’s Spotlight is on the American artist Martin Puryear.  All of the mediums I work in are 2-D, and I have always had a hard time making/appreciating/liking 3-D work.  So for me to love the work of a sculptor is a big deal, and I love the work of Martin Puryear.  Born in D.C. in 1941, Martin Puryear has won many, many awards for his work and recently had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  This is where I first encountered him- I was in New York during the show in November 2007 for Thanksgiving and got to visit the MoMA.  I was absolutely enamored from the beginning with his monolithic, yet delicate, finely carved and constructed pieces.

They are like familiar enigmas- they seem to remind you of something, and yet you’re not sure what.  Some of them seem almost like eggs, like something could burst out of them at any moment.  They are poetic in their minimalism and quiet presence, and beautiful in material: wood of all different colors, wire, tar, stone, and so on.  While some of his pieces are round and heavy-looking, others are spindly and light.  They come in various sizes, and some are literally larger-than-life.  His work is embedded with themes ranging from colonization and cultural exchange to form and function.  His work is organic and mechanical, African and American, poetic and beautiful.  If you live here in Baltimore and would like to experience one of his pieces, you can trip on over to the Baltimore Museum of Art, where one of his larger works rests in the middle of an open marble court in the museum.   My two favorite things about Puryear’s work are the quiet presence they have about them, their vague familiarity, and also the craftsmanship he brings to them- each piece is nearly perfectly constructed, which is easy for anyone who has ever worked with wood or any other hard sculptural material to appreciate!