Story Without a Plot Artist Talk

Through the month of August, I will be the featured artist at RiverSea Gallery in beautiful Astoria, OR.

Show dates: August 8th - September 8th
RiverSea Gallery 1160 Commercial St, Astoria, OR.

The opening night for Story Without a Plot was a wonderful success!
Thank you to all the people who attended my art opening at RiverSea Gallery last night, online or in person.
In association with the show we held an artist talk. Times being what they are, we did it online in a zoom call. This is an edited video of the artist talk. I talked about why I am inspired by film noir, discuss how I develop an image, then open the “room” up for questions.

Additionally, a portion of the opening was filmed, and you can watch the video embedded below. In it you can see the art up on the wall, and listen to myself and other people talk about the work.

 

 

My NYC Art Infusion (plus-my first internet rant!)

I turned 50 years old this year. It’s enough to make a girl think about her past, and how it affects her present. 

I was fortunate enough to go to college in New York, and graduated from Queens College in 1991. I came back home to Portland and never moved away.
If I am any good at art at all, I’d say it’s because a.) my instructors at Queens College were exceptional and b.) I spent many countless hours in some of the greatest museums in the world, wandering aimlessly and drawing.
So I went on a sentimental journey through my past. My goals were to visit a few college friends and to recapture that experience of the slow, intuitive progress through a museum.

Rembrandt

(For more pictures of the drawings I did in NYC, see my facebook photo album here.) 

No matter how much you enjoy the company of a companion in a museum, it changes your experience. Like Madeline said in Vertigo, “Only one is a wanderer; two together are always going somewhere.”

Unless, of course, you go with another artist.

My BBF Bridget Benton Carwyn met me in NYC and together we infused ourselves with art. The key to our successful saturation is that much of the time we split up, sometimes even going to different museums, and meeting up to share a meal and debrief.

We saw some amazing exhibits, such as The Brooklyn Museum's Frida Kahlo show, and The Guggenhiem's Hilda af Klint show.

I visited paintings I used to gaze at during my formative student years. I reexamined art I had dismissed before. I sketched, and filed away material for potential future work into the recesses of my unconscious. 

Now for the rant.

Tourism has changed in the past quarter century. Namely, there is a lot more of it. The number of folks milling about in art museums seems to have grown steadily. But the onset of the smart phone has changed everything.

To me, an art museum is a place where one goes to look at art. But to many, it is a tourist destination. They are there to say “I was there”, but don’t seem to be paying much attention to what they are actually seeing. Crowds of people take selfies in front of famous paintings makes it so that no one really gets to see the painting in question. To add insult to injury, often I saw one person posing in front of a painting pretending to look at the art, while a companion shoots a pic to upload it onto social media.

 I understand that, as an artist, I am in the minority, even in an art museum. I know I am probably coming off as a snob. It’s just tough having a wonderful experience get mauled to death. When you go to museums, try to talk quietly. Don’t talk loudly on your phone. Be aware of the people around you who are also trying to see the art. Stand slightly off to the side when looking at a painting, don’t block other peoples’ view. If you bring your kids, engage them with the art by talking to them about it and asking them questions about what they see, and teach them about museum etiquette.

For an interesting article about how social media has changed viewing art, click here for the New York Times Article “What the MonaLisa Tells Us About Art in the Instagram Era”

A New Commission with Old Traditions

Over the years I have done many commissions, and I have just recently finished one that I am particularly proud of.

This is a painting for a friend of mine with her mother and her daughter. I stitched it together using several different photographs, one set in Chicago, which is where they are from. 

I was particularly touched by the idea that there would be three generations of women depicted in the finished image. I tried to emphasize this by depicting their hands; one tiny and young, one in full womanhood, the third wizened with age. 

I also supported the element of three by forming the composition in a triangle. 

The use of a triangle in portraiture common throughout western art. It conveys a sense of stability and monumentality that is pleasing in general, but in particular when used in family groups. In fact, it was used often by Renaissance artists when painting The Madonna and Child. 

Raphael, Madonna and Child with Book

Raphael was one of the great masters of the Renaissance era. Below is a depiction of The Madonna and Child plus St. John the Baptist, which not only has the triangular composition but also has three figures.

Raphael, Madonna With Child And St John The Baptist

When I went onto choose the colors for this commission, I allowed myself to make further reference to this painting genre by using the colors commonly used to dress The Madonna: red, with a blue overdress.

Although I never intended to imply any religious association with this commission, I did enjoy being able to refer to the special sanctity of family connection and the devotion of loved ones.

A Brief Primer on Film Noir - Part One: The Formal Visual Elements

As many of you know, I have been creating collage paintings based on film noir imagery. Film noir is one of the most enduring and beloved of film genres. The term "Film Noir" was coined after the fact, much the same way many art "movements" were coined by art historians after the so called "movement" was largely over. During WWII many American films were not available in France. In 1946 there was a retrospective in Paris of American Hollywood films and the Parisian critics called the style "film noir", or "black film", which may be more correctly interpreted as "dark film". But what exactly is film noir, and where did it come from?

German expressionism was an art movement in Germany starting at the turn of the 20th century, and encompassed painting, theater, music, literature, and the brand new medium of film. It sought to express emotion and subjective experience by the using symbolism, exaggeration, and distortion. The style reached it’s apex in Berlin during the 1920's. A few of the most famous expressionist films are "Metropolis", "M", and "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" (my personal favorite!).

"Metropolis" poster 

"Metropolis" by Fritz Lang

"M'  by Fritz Lang

"M"  by Fritz Lang 

"The Cabinet of Dr, Caligari" by  Robert Wiene

                     

"The Cabinet of Dr, Caligari" by  Robert Wiene

Then those nasty kill-joys, the Nazi’s came into power. Expressionist artists of all types  were proclaimed “degenerate” and their work was confiscated, destroyed, their careers were derailed and many times their very lives were in danger. On top of that, many were also Jewish, Catholic or queer. Unsurprisingly they made efforts to flee to safer locations as soon as they could. Along with this exodus, a number of film makers wound up in Hollywood.

The Hollywood Studio System was in force at the time, which had a tiered system of movie production costs and qualities. While epic movies got a lot of funding and top star billing, crime and detective movies where considered of a lower budgetary class, sometimes even B movies. They were pot-boilers, and often cranked out quickly.

A number of the new immigrant film makers were assigned to these films. Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, and Otto Preminger are the most famous. German expressionist film was film brought to a high art and were far more sophisticated and considered than anything that was typically produced in the United States at that time. These directors used their techniques and sensibilities developed in Germany in the new crime dramas. This was not fully appreciated at the time; crime and detective movies ran under the radar and attracted no critical praise. But the superior film making techniques made the movies more popular and is what has made so many of these films gain popularity over the decades.

The techniques used included deep focus cinematography, extreme camera angles, dramatic lighting shone from raked angles, and chiaroscuro (which is an painterly technique developed during the Renaissance where use of deep variations of light and dark is used to enhance mood and create dramatic effect).

"Out of the Past"  by Jacques Tourneur  

"Out of the Past"  by Jacques Tourneur 

"The Racket" by John Cromwell and Mel Ferrer

The ultimate example of chiaroscuro; Caravaggio!

Caravaggio "Judith Decapitating Holofernes" 1599

The fact that the movies were often low budget productions actually helped make the movies better. The famously dark lighting covered up cheap productions. Dramatic lighting made up for lack of funding for expensive special effects and uninteresting sets. There was more of a dependence on exciting scripts and clever dialogue. The rushed timetables forced productions to be fast, tight, and efficient. And because they weren’t considered important, they were often under the radar of producers and the Motion Picture Production Code! 

The visual style of film noir is my primary concern when I create an artwork. I consider the masters of noir my teachers as well as my inspiration. Even when I am dealing with an image that hasn’t come directly from a film noir, I still infuse it with the elements of film noir. For example, the image below is based on a Torchy Blane movie "Chinatown" from 1939. While Torchy Blane movies may have involved detectives, reporters and solving crime, they are light comedy adventure films, and most definitely not "dark"!

Leslie Peterson Sapp, "Objective II" 30"x48" 

Aside from the formal artistic elements of noir, I am also inspired by the stories and style. I will write about that in my next blog post, "A Brief Primer on Film Noir - Part Two: Oh, the Drama!"