Archives for July 2010

Fishtown artists had the vibe, but few produced the goods. It’s tough to work in a leaky shack. For every James Castle, using spit and soot on discarded bits of cardboard, there must be hundreds of artists who could have connected if they had a creature comfort or two. Below, 10 non-Fishtown painters (and one photographer) who’ve covered the Skagit. All could retreat to  rooms somewhere, far away from the cold night air. 

Richard Gilkey A 1955 weather report: muck with the certainty of flowers.

Guy Anderson, not dated. (Yes, the earth moved.)  It’s depressing how few good Andersons are online.

Also Anderson:

Norman Lundin He can imply rain without painting it.

Kathryn Altus The Asian influence. Water becomes another shade of sky.

Clayton James The jeweled earth.

Jay Steensma  Alone, even when he’s with someone else. His idea of shelter is like a dirty lung, struggling to expand and contract.

Alice Wheeler The air leaks blue.

Ray Hill Father figure to Alden Mason. Peel back on Hill’s serenity and you have Mason’s jitterbug forms.

Alden Mason Life in a junkyard invaded by farms.

Thomas Wood Tulips become clouds.

Paul Havas Like the barrier across the road in Lundin’s Skagit roadway, Havas’ thicket gives the viewer work to do.

Starting in the late 1960s, a motley group of young poets and painters took over abandoned shacks bordering the mouth of the Skagit River within walking distance to La Conner. They lived there for a decade without the burden of rent, running water or electricity.

As a fellow-traveler from that time observed in the catalog for Fishtown and the Skagit River, an exhibit at the Museum of Northwest Art, through Oct. 3:

I never lived in Fishtown. I couldn’t afford the rent.

Yeah, I know, the place was well beyond the reach of landlords and realtors, but let’s face it, the wages of Zen are not inconsiderable: all that chopping wood and hauling water.

Fishtown disappeared as property values rose, bulldozed out of existence in 1980 and leaving a number of curatorial choices for its examination. Curator Kathleen Moles chose inclusion. Anybody with mud on his (or more rarely her) cracked boots who lived lean and wet on that river has a place in the show, if anything he made happens to survive, even on a postcard.

Right choice, because Fishtown was not about hierarchy. Instead of sanitized, the Fishtown story unfolds at the museum as if emerging from a long hangover. A faint air of river rot pervades galleries stacked with paintings, photos, drawings and poems, nearly all celebrating Eastern philosophies and sharing a fetish for bad framing.

Photo, David King
 
Charles Krafft stands out in spite of himself. While he was trying to free his mind from the wreckage of his body, he made art that stumbled along paths cleared by others, from Morris Graves and Guy Anderson to Li Po and Gary Snyder. Huffing volatile solvents and drinking incapacitating amounts of alcohol are not paths to greatness. Krafft hit his stride only after he sobered up and moved away. Fishtown is for him the scene of the crime, but it’s also part of his personal roots music. He continues to play it on the keener, deeper instrument he allowed himself to become.

Beyond Krafft, there are the liquid-light paintings of William Slater, the clarity of (visitor) Mary Randlett’s photos, Hans Nelsen’s woodwork, Paul Hansen’s watercolors and Tom Robbins’ Buddha-joke drawings.

Beyond them and more than equal to any are the poems of Robert Sund, rendered in calligraphy, typewriter and pen. He is the heart of Fishtown, the soul of old La Conner and a giant in the Northwest’s poetic tradition.

My favorite Sund isn’t the show but should be. It’s printed on a leaflet whose facing page shows a photo of the artist as a boy, arm around his infant brother.

ANSWERING, FOR MY BROTHER (1974)

What do I do?…
I show you barns in the air over Porter Creek,
tulips that drop from the trees in Venezuela
and fall to the ground bursting into roosters.
They whip the dust out of the small valleys
        under their wings.
Under the arches of their clawed feet,
mountains blossom,
        distant but clear.

At the edge of ploughed fields
the surrounding sunflowers
       march weary-hearted,
heading into the cities of the sun.
Impossible not to follow them
and go
with strange-shaped footsteps
that may slowly turn bitter as green seeds.

Thin floating webs glide on the upper winds,
flash once or twice a dry silver fire,
then return to their invisible journey.
        It is easy to see
that among the insect world
many pilgrims have fallen to their knees.

More on Fishtown here, here, here and here. More on Robert Sund. More on Charles Krafft, who is featured through Saturday in a solo exhibit at Lucia Douglas Gallery in Bellingham and a Fishtown update show at Smith &Vallee in Edison through Sunday.

Because the past is a sealed world, what we know of it we’ve replanted in our own soil and viewed through our own strange light. Canvases rolled up and left in the attic or discarded by relatives hoping to forget the dead are lost. What of the loyal who guard their own family’s past? Sentimental attachments do not long survive each generation’s efforts to define itself. In a capitalist country, an artwork’s only hope is to have attracted monetary value, but even the cash-worthy have a tough time avoiding time’s edit.

When photographs fade, paintings crack and sculptures crumble, the living give up on them. Exceptions are artworks stored in museums. There they’ll remain till they go out of fashion and can be later lost (deaccessioned) in a larger forgetting.

Enter art  historians. Although the Northwest has had few, one of the best is currently alive: David Martin of the Martin-Zambito Gallery, specializing in American art from the 19th century to the 1940s, with a focus on the Northwest.

Whatcom Museum senior curator Barbara Matilsky wisely consulted him for her Show of Hands: Northwest Women Artists 1880-2010, which is why the exhibit’s early years are so compelling.

Compelling but disjointed. There is no way to create a narrative that spans 130 years of Northwest art. The picked-over past remains remote, and the present top heavy. If this exhibit were an essay, its lack of transitions would cause it to crumble.

Part of my reaction can be attributed to my mistake on the entry path. Instead of turning left along the corridor along a series of Margie Livingston‘s whorls of paint and Victoria Haven’s wall painting, I turned right from Livingston and Haven and dumped myself into the exhibit’s endpoint, in the past.

Livingston, Lacey Yellow Loops, 2009
Acrylic
12 x 15.25 inches

Victoria Haven, Site-specific wall painting for the Whatcom Museum, 2010
(Unlike many artists devoted to geometries, Haven never slips into formula.)

The clean lines and rigorously pale tonalities of Louise Crow‘s Eagle Dance at San Ildefonso, 1919, softened the fall. This painting was a tiny step from a dumpster till rescued at the very last minute.

Seattle has the Northwest School, reduced in many minds to Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Guy Anderson and Kenneth Callahan. Vancouver has Emily Carr. The world keeps Tobey and Graves alive, while the Northwest continues to support the remaining three.

Emily M. Carr (1871-1945)
Untitled, c. 1920
Oil on composition board
12 15/16 x 16 in. (board)
Henry Art Gallery, gift of Mrs. Viola Patterson

Helen Loggie was a briliant printmaker, attracted to nothing but trees.

Loggie, King Goblin, 1939

The 1940s through the 1980s look pretty good, with Helmi, Maude Kerns, Margaret Tomkins, Sally Haley, Patti Warashina, Mary Henry, Doris Chase, Karin Helmich, Gwen Knight, Norie Sato, Fay Jones and  Elizabeth Sandvig.

Sandvig, Broken Columns, early 1970s

Working off Kandinsky, Leo Kenny is much better than Maude Kerns. While he trusted his forms, she cluttered up her background, but, hey, this show is girls-only. (In a Northwest art exhibit spanning 130 years that wants to rescue some of the forgotten, picking only women makes as much sense as picking only the left-handed. Everybody’s forgotten.)

Which brings us to the unruly present. Operating under the bloom-where-you’re-planted rule, Matilsky probably felt she had to include local fave Susan Bennerstrom, but, like Seattle’s Kathleen Gemberling Adkison, Bennerstrom is a dead spot where the ball won’t bounce. There are better choices close to the WA/B.C. divide, such as Jasmine Valandani.

Sheila Klein, however, is a fine choice. Stand, 2000

South of Seattle, so is Gail Tremblay. An Iroquois Dreams That the Tribes of the Middle East Will Take the Message of Deganawida to Heart and Make Peace, 2009

Even so, Seattle dominates the present, which didn’t have to happen. No exhibit is fair. We seek them out not for justice but for impact. On that latter score, this one suceeds.

Take it away, Seattle.

Claire Cowie, Rhinoscape, 2006

Alison Keogh, Newsprint series #4, 2007

Sherry Markovitz, Mourning You/Morning Ewe, 2007

Susan Robb
Gentlest Gesture, 2008
Crystal, Sakura branch, muscle wire, circuit board, Mylar, powder-coated steel shelf
8 x 24 x 17 in.

Through Aug. 8.

1. Eat only in your dreams. Bed and Board

2. Don’t bring your head to the table. (Or your hands.) Bad Manners, detail.

Spike Mafford takes photographs to erase himself. His claim is a romantic one, that wherever he is, he isn’t there. Because his subjects define themselves, they are not limited to theme or style. Mafford is nothing but the projectionist in a theater, running their movies. No one believes that a photograph has nothing to do with the photographer, any more than a painted ship upon a painted ocean owes nothing to the person standing in a studio holding the brush.

And yet, in shrinking his role, Mafford has managed to enlarge the remote purity of a remote world.
Paul Krassner once described a way to tell the difference between
news and dreaming. If you think what you’re reading is unlikely, flap
your arms. If you fly, you’re dreaming. Mafford’s prints fly.

Currently, he’s offering for sale 47 prints for $47 each, size variable. Details at the Spike Shop.
 
Examples:

They’d be accordions.

Drew Daly, COMPRESSION, 2006
One bureau, adhesive, lacquer
34 x 36 x 20.5 inches
Photo credit: Eric Eley

Peter Millett LEVERAGE, 2010
Welded steel
70 x 120 x 24 inches

Can measure his life.

John Kirchner My Sad Daily Life as Measured in
the Daily Paper, Newspaper, rain coat and steel
1994-2005

From muscle tissue with bacon scarf to smoke…

Derrick Jefferies
Anatomy (Muscle)
Polyethylene and tube lamps
2010
Backlight inkjet print & lightbox

When I asked an addict what she got out of heroin, she said, “a shot of sainthood.” I thought of her when looking at Isaac Layman’s photographs at Lawrimore Project, the addict who has my face and sounds like I do on phone, sober now a long time and younger than I am but wrecked, always more wrecked.

Inside a drugged stupor, grace can deliver a hallucinated clarity. It’s only the world in Isaac Layman’s large prints, common as dirt, but his delivery has the force of revelation. Were you Saul, these photos would knock you off your horse.

Because everything he shoots is too real to be real, the exhibit’s title is, 110 Percent.

From Flannery O’Conner’s A Good Man Is Hard To Find:

His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother’s head cleared for an instant. She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children !” She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them.

Hiram and Bobby Lee returned from the woods and stood over the ditch, looking down at the grandmother who half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a child’s and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky.

Without his glasses, The Misfit’s eyes were red-rimmed and pale and defenseless-looking. “Take her off and thow her where you thown the others,” he said, picking up the cat that was rubbing itself against his leg.

“She was a talker, wasn’t she?” Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with a yodel.

“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

The moment that the grandmother is a good woman is the moment when the drug settles into the bloodstream and clears the mind, the moment when God speaks in the wilderness: the moment of transfixed understanding.

Working digitally, Layman combines layers of long exposures to get the same image stuck in a crater of a deepening visual repetition. It’s something like the idea of a rose is a rose, only simultaneously, as if everyone in a crowded room suddenly said “rose.” Everybody would say it a little differently.

Below, Layman’s kitchen cabinet. He doesn’t own that many glasses.The photo is a long scan of the image, many exposures digitally stitched
together, like a quilt.

Max Beckmann said he didn’t need to abstract things, because “each object is unreal
enough already.” Or, for Layman, too real.

More praise for Lawrimore Project: Curator Dan Cameron was in town for a lecture recently and took a day to look around with artists Gretchen Bennett and Joey Veltkamp.

Cameron’s Seattle report here. Below, what he had to say about LP:

Owned by Scott Lawrimore, a former Kucera protégé, the gallery is probably the most visually stunning commercial art space in the US, outstripping any comparable venue in either Chelsea or Culver City. The space is huge, and, more importantly, has been broken up by the Seattle firm Lead Pencil Studios into a cluster of rooms, each of which has an extremely precise character. Tall ceilings and indirect natural light are balanced by a renovation that leaves just enough of the original building’s quirks intact so that walking into Lawrimore feels like stepping into every artist’s ideal vision of an art gallery.

Lawrimore opened just in time for the recession. It’s still here, but this year is his financial best. He’s in the biz for the long haul, although his “visually stunning” venue is not. His lease is up next Halloween, his wife’s birthday. Anyone who bets on him signing another in that space will lose money. Layman closes on Aug. 14. Lawrimore has yet to schedule a show to follow it. If you want to see the place that beats the competition in Chelsea or Culver City, go now.

When in Tacoma, the last place on my list is the Museum of Glass. Its exhibits tend toward the didactic and its galleries have no natural light source, remarkable for a glass museum. With their low ceilings, they look like storage units.

Even so, I intended to see Preston Singletary: Echoes, Fire, and Shadows long before now. (It closes Sept. 19.) It’s hard to admit I was hesitant to see what MOG would do with this artist, but there it is. Fortunately, I was wrong. Not once inside this mid-career survey did I think about the limitations of the galleries. Credit goes to curator Melissa G. Post and the museum’s design crew. The show looks terrific.

(All images reproduce sculpture by Singletary, taken from his website. Part of this post comes from a 2002 profile published in the PI. )

Singletary belongs to two tribes — the Tlingit nation into which he was born on his mother’s side, and glass, because glass at its core is tribal. In high school Singletary met lifelong friend Dante Marioni, whose father Paul took the boys to the counter-culture experiment in the woods that became Pilchuck Glass School. First generation artists in the studio glass movement were
frequently at the house, and Singletary met them all.

After high school, glass offered an escape from college. Marioni managed to get his friend a job as night watchman at the Glass Eye. Thanks to his previous Pilchuck experience, he quickly moved onto the floor, blowing Christmas ornaments and other less seasonal decorations.
Glass was beginning to take off, and Singletary found himself along for
the ride.

What he liked best was the company.  No other form of contemporary art is such a clan venture. With music
blaring and heat pouring out of the furnaces, glass artists root for
each other, criticize, applaud and collaborate. 
In 1984, after two years of glass factory work, Singletary became Ben Moore‘s gaffer. Moore’s studio offered not only a paycheck but the chance to blow with some of the best glass artists in
the world.

At Pilchuck, Singletary met Tony Jojola, who encouraged him to find a
way to express his tribal heritage in the context of
contemporary glass.
In Alaska, he met David Svenson, a non-Native artist who opened up elements of Tlingit style Singletary hadn’t previously considered. Back in Seattle, Singletary thought the
hot glass bubble hanging precariously in front of him looked like a
Tlingit rain hat woven in cedar bark.
Eventually, he turned that shape upside down, transforming it into a
vase that all by itself would strike a familiar chord in Tlingit
circles.

Using a sandblasting and
stenciling technique he developed himself, he carved Tlingit designs on
the outer surface.
As Ramona Gault observed in a 1998 cover article in the magazine,
“Indian Artist,” the result is a “conical shape that opens upward like a
lily, its undersurface carved with an animal image that is split like a
Rorschach inkblot. When a light source is positioned above the vessel,
the carved image is cast in shadow on the surface where the vessel
sits.”

Beneath the stark, crisp clarity of his line, blunt old harmonies assert themselves. He
uses glass to express his Tlingit heritage, merging the ancient art of
glass blowing with even more ancient artistic practices of his people in
order to create a 21st-century version of tribal aesthetics.

He’s grateful for the Indian artists working in glass who came
before him, including Larry Ahvakana, Joe David, John Hagen, the late
Conrad House, Marvin Oliver and Susan A. Point, as well as his
contemporaries, such as Ed Archie Noisecat, who carved the masks
Singletary has used as molds.

Thirteen years before 1963, when Singletary was born, Robert Bruce Inverarity wrote that the art of the Northwest
Coast Native Americans was “flourishing when Captain Cook, on his last
voyage, reached the coast in 1778; it had passed its peak by 1910 and is
almost dead today.”  Were he still alive, Inverarity would be happy to have been proved wrong. The glass end of the Northwest Coast tradition  that began in Seattle has inspired Native artists around the world, and Singletary is among its leaders.

For those who need another reason to visit the Museum of Glass, Martin Blank‘s installation in the courtyard plays like frozen music.