VOL 05 ISSUE
7 
June 6, 2006
BACK ISSUES | ° | ¤ | CURRENT ISSUE
VOL 05 ISSUE
7 BACK ISSUES | ° | ¤ | CURRENT ISSUE |
| SUN BLOOD HEAT FLAG:BADARO SHARES SCHOLARSHIP | ||||
 SEEING RED is a marker of passion and
intensity, and a recent show by the faculty of the Mat-Su College art department hosted in
Anchorage at the UAA Campus Center Gallery was interrelated by the prominent use of red in
most of the works. Suzanne Bach, department head, featured the work of the Fulbright
exchange professor Enrique Badaró Nadal of Montevideo, Uruguay for this impromptu
opportunity. Badaró Nadal's piece Blood is shown in partial detail at
the right. A set of square canvases were connected to open red boxes on the floor by thin
plastic tubing and textual elements. The canvases were divided
into halves and the boxes contained various items including some flickering candles and
other items suggesting interconnectivity. |
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WIND IN THE PINES:BADARO
POETICS Enrique Badaró Nadal, Director of the Subte Museum
in Montevideo, Uruguay, Art Consultant for the Division of Culture, Montevideo, &
Director of Programs on Workshops for the Visual Arts, Montevideo, operates
his own busy atelier there and designs theatrical sets as well. He has been cheerfully
sharing his expertise and point of view in classes at Mat-Su College, in a panel
discussion at UAA, and has a busy summer scheduled, with lectures including one Sunday
June 25 at 2pm at the Anchorage Museum and informal events like a solstice paint-out
planned for Hatcher Pass. He is shown at left posing with his installation canvas Wind
in the Pines which was hosted last month at the International Gallery of Contemporary
Art in Anchorage, where he served as a juror for their premier All-Alaska Jurored
Competition. His is a poetic vision, including abstracted human figures often associated with their doppelgangers, or shadows, and interspersed with fragments of copy, in this case poetry by the Japanese sage Mitsuhake. The Fulbright Exchange is operated by the US State Department and is actively supporting academics and scholars intermingling between countries in this hemisphere and all over the world. |
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DESERT SCENE:LAURENCE FAR
NORTH A return visit to the Far North Gallery on Fireweed Lane in
Anchorage during a recent open house held on a Saturday and Sunday afternoon rewarded
ArtSceneAK with a look at two original Sydney Laurence paintings returned to the state
through the magic of the internet and offered for sale by Charles McAlpine. In the Desert
Scene, possibly from California, Laurence's travels beyond Alaska and his ability to
capture any type of landscape are showcased. Mountains are not snow-capped and an oak tree
stands in for the traditional spruce, and yet Laurence's velvety violets introduce his
familiar atmospheric perspective skills. The really big tree, the cart path winding
into the painting and the dashes of color representing flowering underbrush are all
elements taught today in the Bob Ross school of painting, and it is possible Laurence made
this painting rapidly as well. It could change hands rapidly for more than $42,000. Laurence's signature is shown in the detail at left and is found in the lower right hand corner of this painting. His skill with the brush is revealed almost casually in the swashes of his Chancery based lettering style. Another painting by Laurence (not shown) is new to the Gallery, and it is unique in that it includes a living creature, rare for him. A soaring eagle is framed by a canyon looking across to high snow swept peaks, presumably McKinley. The definition and concision of the bird detail is curious, hovering as it does over a fairly flatly painted area of the canvas in medium tones. This bravura perspective and dramatic wildlife portrait are staples of contemporary wildlife artists. Laurence's canvas of The Trapper owned by the Anchorage Museum includes a human hunter with a dead lynx. |
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CEPHALOPOD SHADOW:TILLION
INK Far North Gallery also had a fresh Machetanz oil painting of a
Native girl, and continues to support the works of several living artists as well. Dianne
Tillion, of Seldovia, attended the open house and enthusiastically shared her dedication
to the use of wild octopus ink. She explains that sephia and cephalopod have similar
entymological origins, and details her methods of obtaining the ink, showing several large
landscape drawings done with the faint brown and accented with little dots of bright red
in appropriate places. The drawing Cephalopod Shadow shown at left depicts an
intriguing insight into octopus behavior. Startled by the halibut seen looming at the
bottom left foreground, the octopus 'inks' --- a defensive technique expelling the dark
toxin and propelling itself in the away direction. The ink density trails after the
departing tentacles and forms an imitation of the cephalopod, which can be seen exiting
the right of the painting much lighter. Tillion's anecdotes included her memories of visiting Sydney Laurence during his final hospital stay, dismayed by how few visited him. Laurence famously went for his last haircut to prepare for his own death. What a boy scout! |
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BEAR FOX GOOSE
MOOSE:DOWDY The plaza at the corner of F Street and 5th Avenue in
Anchorage was graced by four new 'life size' ferrocement sculptures by Rachelle Dowdy, the
Bear Fox and Goose of which can be seen in the fore and middle ground of the photo at
left. The heads are freely interpreted in scale and detail, and surmount armless boddies
in ambling poses caricaturizing the tourist shuffle. Dowdy's sense of humor has a serious
side, as she explains that the pieces express the interconnectedness of the animal and
human natures. This theme resonated with the 8th World Wilderness Conference, which
commissions sculptures as permanent markers of its conventions in consenting host cities. This corner is literally pulsating with public art, with the Tightrope Walker by Jim Dault and Shala Dobson in the overhead walkway seen at left, the colored circles marquee on the PAC building, the chromed Salmon Abstract at the visitors center, and the whaling Wyland on the JC Penny's wall just some of the visual art delectables for touristic consumption readily available to the public. The Wild Salmon on Parade people have commissioned another set of decorated salmons to put around downtown this summer, including Debbie Durak's Alaska Railroad locomotive salmon, not shown (and worth searching out). All of these are solid examples of how investing in art and culture complements the efforts of the tourist industry. |
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BOB ATWOOD BUST:BUGBEE
BRONZE Commissioning artwork serves a public purpose in more
traditional ways as well, such as commemorating a local hero in a building named after
him. In this case, Joan Bugbee Jackson created a lively and accurate depiction of the late
newspaper publisher Robert Atwood to grace the lobby of the multi-story State
offices building in Anchorage named after him. Bugbee Jackson has used two shades of
patina to differentiate the statesman's white shirt and hair, and her facility with
working the clay animates his features. A bronze bust doesn't allow for infinite detail
yet the bust almost seems to have eyelashes, beard stubble, maybe some nose hairs? Atwood
was considered an inveterate booster of Anchorage and kept the tradition of a two
newspaper town alive in Anchorage when it was disappearing in the lower 48 states.
His vestiges live on in the surviving morning paper as a half page of a two page editorial
section. The pre-eminence of Ms Jackson as Alaska's portrait sculptor should not preclude a discreet plaque detailing her authorship and the date of commission, as is required in most RFP's from the state. This is missing here. The AIPP 1% for Art associated with the original renovations was commissioned from Homer's Leo Vait and called Bone Music. It is either yet to be installed or not accessible to the public. |
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BIG RED:FOR
LOVE OF TRUCKS Alexandra Sonneborn hosted a show themed 'I Love My
Truck' which attracted two dozen entries and is hung at her PaintSpot Gallery on 3rd
Street in Anchorage this month. Her own original Big Red shown at left exudes a
fondness for old trucks, and looks handsome above the mantle in the living room of her
gallery. Many of the beloved trucks seemed to be permanently parked, like the Willy's in
Patricia Compton's Dillingham Lodge, a detail of which is the index image for
this issue. An important item to note is that the subject matter appeals to the male
aesthetic and father's day is coming up. Two original watercolors by Dot Badarson of Seward Alaska are also being offered for sale in this show. Badarson has sold her Seward gallery and studio and 'retired', although her popular prints will still be available under the new management there. A June 23-25 plein air painting expedition to Seward organized by Sonneborn will be hosted by the Ressurection Art Gallery further uptown this summer, and promises to be a bundle of fun for all involved. |
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LEGACY:UAA
PRINT CLUB EX LIBRIS Bookplates are small prints identifying the owners
and pasted on the inside front cover of volumes in their libraries. They typically bear
the Latin phrase Ex Libris (from the books) and the names of the parties who commissioned
the prints. The UAA Print Club continues its series of Ex Libris Exchanges where
participating artists submit editions of just over a dozen and receive a set of a dozen
various bookplates by their colleagues in return. Such are the perks of printmaking.
The prints are restricted in size to 5"x 3"and artists are increasingly focusing
on the small print aspect without regard to the original purpose of encouraging borrowers
of books to return them to their libraries. Joyce Majiski from the Yukon
contributed Legacy, shown at the left, which serves as an example. Majiski combined closely
spaced copy, a globe showing the western hemisphere, and a line drawing of an ungulate in
response to the Print Club's suggestion that there be a political bent to the works.
Others teed off on American leadership and foreign policy or women's issues. Artists participated from Kansas, California, Colorado, and other states and even from as far afield as the Ukraine. Print styles ranged from lino to woodcut and from intaglio to inkjet. This new permissiveness in the printmaking field allows the sheep of the machine made open edition in among the wolves of the struck plate limited edition in an eerie parallel to what has happened to chemically developed photographic prints. With nearly 80 examples, each worth at least fifteen seconds of regard, plan to spend twenty minutes at the International Gallery for Contemporary Art this month to enjoy reading what really is a collection of short stories in visual form. Kudos to Linda Robinson, Gary Kaulitz, and others who helped make this happen. |
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- ARTIST OPPORTUNITIES- 6/7/06 deadline extended AKDOT&PF GLENN/BRAGAW INTERCHANGE requests concept proposals and qualifications for a shortlist of artists. The selected contractor will be required to work with the selected artist(s) as a member of the design team. The design team will typically consist of the general contractor, civil design firm, illumination design firm, landscape architecture firm and the artist(s). $25 million project; no specific budget. (1% is $250,000) It is recommended that the artist(s) execute a letter of agreement with design build firms while in the proposal stage and prior to the final team selection. Contact Tom Dougherty, PO Box 196900 4111 Aviation Avenue Anchorage, AK 99519 6/9/06 deadline WASHINGTON STATE 2006 REGISTRY artists are invited to prequalify for short list of recommended artists for upcoming projects. Details online. 6/12/06 deadline ANCHORAGE CONVENTION CENTER design review 4 pm room 160 city hall. 6/27/06 deadline ANCHORAGE CONVENTION CENTER seeks qualifications. RFQ budget $500,000 design review monday june 12 4pm Contact Jocelyn Young 6/28/06 deadline KETCHIKAN GATEWAY FAWN MOUNTAIN ELEMENTARY seeks concept proposals for three designated sites. RFP budget $150,000 total contact Lacey Gilbo 907-225-2211. 6/30/06 deadline OPEN STUDIOS PACIFIC COAST COMPETITION Juror Charlotta Kotik regional painting survey magazine. $30 entry fee. Details contact 1-617-778-5265 8/1/06 deadline ART TRAIN USA ALASKA NATIVE ARTIST FELLOWSHIPS offered for September and October of this year to jolly along a traveling exhibition reaching Anchorage, Fairbanks, Nenana, Palmer and Seward. Details contact Nathan Zamarron at 1-800-ART-1971 8/1/06 deadline MULDOON MIDDLE SCHOOL seeks qualifications RFQ budget $150,000 contact Jocelyn Young 343-6473. 8/13/06 deadline ANCHORAGE MUSEUM invites artists to apply for solo exhibitions for the years 2007-2010 prospectus requires digital files on CD 4-6 week exhibitions offered with no specific budget contact Dave Nicholls Anchorage Museum, 121 West 7th Avenue, Anchorage AK 99501. 8/16/06 deadline ART FOR ALASKA PARKS is inaugurating a competition with a call for entries based on the Chugach State Park in Anchorage. $2000 in prizes, $25 minimum entry fee, extensive restrictions. Contact Joe Nedland, 9/1/06 deadline RASMUSON FOUNDATION INDIVIDUAL ARTIST GRANT CYCLE includes applications for $5000 Artist Project Awards, $12000 Artist Fellowships and a $25,000 Distinguished Artist Award. Application information online 9/29/06 deadline ALASKA WATERCOLOR SOCIETY invites submissions of 2D and 3D experimental artwork using any water media for exhibit at APU. Prospectus
THE LADY AND THE UNICORN by Tracy Chevalier A promiscuous painter puts his experience and understanding into the creation of a set of tapestries to grace a nobleman's home. A family subcontracts the actual business of weaving the work on time. ArtSceneAK recommends this book as good summer fun and less dry than dust... NEXT: SENTINALS SHORTCUTS: Aggravated again?! Ecstatic?! Let us know you love us or hate us. Help correct attribution errors that you suspect. Tell us about your upcoming event or artist opportunity. Let us know about your website. Form makes it easy to try your hand at pumping or dumping. cf also ART IN ALASKA
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SALON BAPTEME:MT VIEW
SPACE  In order to stress the connection of the visual arts with
the Mountain View land trust's development efforts during visits by representatives of
various foundations recently, the former retail space of the Mobile Trailer Supply
building on Commercial Road was rapidly rejuvenated recently and filled with an impromptu
group show curated by sculptor Sheila Wyne, seen consulting with assistant Buzz Schwall in
the photo at right. Wyne's own rope sculpture can be seen in the foreground. The
room is lit with windows on either side and a diagonal mirrored soffit seen along the top
of the wall in the background, reflecting the stairwell.Efforts are underway to find resources to partially fund a schedule of programs to be solicited as proposals from various curatorial interests. As a gallery space, certain charms and deficiencies became apparent during the invitational 'test run'. Visiting bigwigs were ushered in the back door to meetings held in the upstairs conference room, and expressed polite interest in several pieces en route. Gentrify an industrial zone of your own in the BACK ISSUE Index.
No, Thank You to a subscriber who wrote: "I appreciate your comments. I don't have a profound reason for not including a head - how about 'insert head here'?" --- CW Another reader reports "All is well in Kodiak, except for the cost of getting out of town. " --- JB True that almost everywhere. A bolstering word arrived: "Hang in there Don...keep doing the good work. UAA has the worst record on 1% projects of any Alaskan university in the state. With all of the new projects coming on line throughout the state we would do well to make sure that ASCA gets the info out regarding the state law." -- KA Others won praise: "Paul Tornow had come from Kenai ....very impressive. He works BIG! and in all media. He will be going to NY to further his education and has his eye on a masters, then Phd. With his winning personality, his talent, and being male he will, I'm sure, be a roaring success in the national arts. Alaska will be proud" --- DB An invitation to Halibut Cove: "Please
join us for a fun-filled fundraiser for Bunnell Street Gallery in Halibut Cove June 24! A compliment came in on one of ArtSceneAK editor Donald R Ricker's sketches of John Spike: "amazing suddenly lines of drawing , he catch your personality ...He's great . " -- TG Thanks for the lift! 'Emergence --- Bringing the Obscure into View'. Photographs by recent Rasmuson Foundation Artist Grantee Jen Baron will be on view at the Sheldon Community Arts Hangar from June 10- July 2 in Talkeetna with an opening reception on the 10th.
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text & photos © 2006 Donald R Ricker; artist's works pictured ©2006 to artists credited.
ArtSceneAK is published by Donald R Ricker and sponsored by
BETTER LETTERS, PO Box 103554, Anchorage AK 99510-3554
, a partial listing of links to Museums,
Galleries, and individual Artists around the state.
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