Untraditional Tapestry

Artist Laurie dill-Kocher has an arm’s-length resume. That reference goes back to the military and the rank of an officer with stripes that reach the length of his arm, meaning he was highly experienced and had the stripes to prove it. Dill-Kocher’s work has been published, purchased, displayed and revered for three decades now. But her work is anything but traditional. “My approach to any work is a celebration of the visual tension that I can create through dyeing, coloring or manipulation of the material. I endeavor to visually excite the viewer, and provoke them to expand their concepts of a traditional medium. This manipulation of materials is only the beginning of the playful approach that I have towards my work. I strive to imbue each piece with the emotional composition of nature; to keep developing, renewing and growing.”

The three tapestries dill-Kocher currently has on display with buyoutsidthebox.com are vibrant, filled with color and the unexpected tension she speaks of. “I utilize the visual imagery to draw the viewer in and entice them to understand the narrative element of the work. Each piece has a different story, a parable of sorts, which provide the viewer a glimpse into a subject sometimes not easily discussed.”

Take a peek at these beautiful works now—Ruth Mitchell

(c) 2006 - Ruth Mitchell - all rights reserved

Technologizing with Warp Speed

I once had the privilege to interview world-renown architect Cesar Pelli, whose firm designed the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lampur Malaysia, which at the time of their completion in 1998, were the tallest buildings in the world. If you’ve ever seen the movie "Entrapment," a fast paced action-adventure movie starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta Jones, then you have been exposed to its innovative design, but because the towers are in Malaysia and not the U.S. you might even be unaware of them, but being self-absorbed Americans is another topic altogether.

Before my telephone interview with Mr. Pelli, he graciously sent me a book he had written on architecture titled, “Observations for Young Architects.” It is a wonderful book filled with his ideas and knowledge of architecture, which is extensive. Pelli is not only an architect, but an educator. He was appointed Dean of the School of Architecture at Yale University in 1977, and served in that capacity until 1984. He started his venerable career in the offices of the great Eero Saarinen and also designed the World Financial Center complex in downtown Manhattan, those surrounding buildings around the now fallen World Trade Center.

I still pick up his book from time to time and review it, mostly scanning the highlights I made in preparation for our phone interview. Recently while I was perusing it there were several salient items that I remembered and was glad to become reacquainted with. First, Pelli talks about the temporal age of a city, or “the period when the structures that give it its character were built.” His examples are Paris with a temporal center created in the early 19th century; New York, early 20th Century and places like Los Angeles or Hong Kong with their temporal centers in the future because they are perceived by their citizens as still being made and moving toward their futures.

Pelli also talks a great deal about the relationship between art and architecture, and his ruminations on Post Modernism, finally pointed me to a more complete understanding of the term for the first time. Not to oversimplify, but to make a certain point: “This disconnection (with the history of architecture) was harmful in itself, cutting off our own roots, but it also sanctioned an attitude of ignoring precedents, a reluctance to learn from experience.”

Wow, suddenly a light bulb went off in my brain! A reluctance to learn from experience had not only permeated art and architecture, but our society as a whole, especially in that time period when I was a budding human being. Technology including the invention of: television, the computer, the microwave, and even birth control were wreaking havoc on our collective psyche. With so much to absorb so fast, we were reluctant to learn from experience because we had so many new and exciting gadgets to master.

While it is too recent to determine if we are still in Post Modernism or not, I’m thinking that we are still technologizing with warp speed, and it is like riding a wave with no prior knowledge of how to balance a surf board. It is both exhilarating and without definition or parameters. Despite this, I have to keep in mind the many artists I have interviewed over the years, who have told me in one way or another, each work builds upon the last. The best work they have ever created is the next one. They are not talking about the collective train of thought of all artists however, and speak in purely individual terms. That is the difference in today’s art, the artist paints his own vision and owns the work, selling it to a collector that appreciates his image for what it is; while in the days of the Old Masters, typically the patron commissioned a work often a religious scene with a particular aesthetic purpose in mind, the artist was just the person who brought the vision of others to life.

For an example of a personal and distinctive style of art that has been refined through the years I’d like to share with you the work of Alberto D’Assumpção, a Portuguese artist exhibiting since 1989, and now available on Buyoutsidethebox.com.
(c) 2006 - Ruth Mitchell - all rights reserved

Antagonism - Alberto D'Assumpcao

Piecing it Together

"Squared" - Nancy Billings

Hand-dyed and hand-painted cotton and silk. Freehand machine embroidery with sleeve ready for hanging. 27"x29"

As Americans we have the notion that frugal pioneer women invented quilting as a means to create attractive bedding out of scraps of scarce fabric, but the truth is quilting goes way back as far as the ancient Egyptians. My first experience with quilting was my own meager attempt to piece together some fabric and hand sew it together. I was into making bread at the time as well. I lived on a dairy farm in Wisconsin and I used a wood stove to raise the dough, and obviously I was into the "Mother Earth" catalog. I actually got beyond creating bricks of bread that would make great missiles for breaking windows, progessing onto a light, yeasty manna that eaten hot out of the oven with a big pat of butter, makes me salivate even now.

My point being is that quilting is not for amateurs. I never got more than a 12-inch square completed, if that much, and I did learn to make pretty good bread, which is sort of an art in itself. That’s why I am so wowed by Nancy Billing’s wonderful textile art. Nancy Billings, a New York native, now located in Miami, received her BFA in Fashion Design at Pratt Institute. A quilt maker for 25 years, Nancy has gone the full spectrum in her career, from creating traditional bed coverings to contemporary wall art. Nancy now often includes mixed media along with dyeing her own cottons and silks for both quilt art and art to wear. She has been published in Joen Wolfrom's Magical Effects of Color, Art Quilt Magazine, American Quilter Magazine and The Miami Herald and has exhibited in juried art shows around the country including the Coconut Grove Arts Festival.

“My obsession with fabric started when I was 12, when I learned to sew from my grandfather who gifted me a respect for creating with fabric. Partner the love of color with the passion for fabric and you get a lifelong journey that has taken me to glorious moments and has also helped me heal from sad times in my life,” she says.” By using unusual color and pattern combinations I try to get the right balance of color, value and contrast and blend them together into a harmonious work of art. With freehand machine embroidery I am able to add another dimension of texture and interest to my art.” One of Nancy’s latest endeavors is making Chuppot (wedding canopies). “This has become a most rewarding and exciting direction in my work,” she says. Lucky brides everywhere!---Ruth Mitchell

(c) 2006 - Ruth Mitchell - all rights reserved

Have You Lost Your Marbles?

Anemone Marble - Kevin Ivey

Who knows why we are fascinated with marbles, but boys and their toys and girls with their pearls go way back. We know that the ancient Romans played a game referred to as “nuts” with clay marbles, and engraved clay marbles have been found in ancient mounds across North America. Marbles have been made out of clay, stone, wood and any other material that can be fashioned into a round ball, but the media we are most often familiar with today is glass. Contemporary glass artists are making some spectacularly beautiful marbles, and collectors are snatching them up.

Dichroic glass is a very popular choice with glass artists today, especially so when creating marbles, because of its properties of having more than one color and when viewed from different angles, has a sparkle effect, much like a cut gemstone. Dichroic glass is actually a product created by the space industry, and was first used as an interference filter for precise scientific measuring. To create this effect, glass artists use a thin layer of metallic oxides including magnesium, silicon and titanium at high temperatures.

Galaxy Marble - Kevin Ivey

Kevin Ivey, of San Antonio, Texas, is a self-taught glass artist who began blowing glass in 2000. He has since become obsessed with the form, shape, color, and texture of glass. Kevin is often inspired by music, art, and nature. His glass marbles, most of them the oversized kind, are popular with collectors.

Less is often More

For all you art aficionados out there, I'd like to recommend a great website to visit-- askart.com. It's a very informative site dedicated to American artists. That's why when I visited the “record prices per square inch” page I was a little surprised. Where’s Picasso? Where are the impressionists? Where are the realists? Da Vinci?? Oh yes, this is about American artists. Are they important enough to have their own website?

Then I was embarrassed to say I didn’t recognize the top contender at a whopping $382, 390 per square inch was artist John Ramage. Followed not too closely behind at $39,792 was Jasper Johns, now there is an artist I know. It would probably benefit you to be more of an historian than an art critic to understand why Ramage is so high on the per-square-inch-scale.

The Dublin-born Irishman went to work in New York City as a goldsmith and miniature painter. According to askart.com the highest auction price of his work, a portrait of George Washington, only 2.12” tall by 1.50” wide was auctioned off on January 19, 2001, explaining perhaps the huge gap between him and Johns.

Now we’re talking trivia here, but it is part of the American culture to idolize others before we recognize our own when it comes to art, and many other things for that matter. It’s part of our heritage, being such a young country, we still have that cultural hangover that we have some catching up to do.

One of our artists that does really nice work in a small format is George Wittenberg with his Postcard Art, which features his watercolor versions of places he visits including some unususal and beautiful postal stamps that carry an intrinsic value in the image. His paintings tend to be a smaller scale, ususally 6x9 inches. This smaller scale was founded in the fact that George actually mails the art before selling it, so any travel bruises and canceled stamp marks become part of the art. Very intriguing concept in my mind.


Corbusier Villa, Stairwell - George Wittenberg


George is featured on askart.com. Another neat thing you can do is go to askart.com and give them information about your favorite artist, or you can sign up for email alerts about your favoite artists. Don’t you just love the information age?

TIP OF THE DAY FOR TOTALLY “OUTSIDE” THE VISUAL ARTS: My very hip daughter gave me a Talk Demonic CD for Mother’s Day. It is so beautiful to listen to that I’m afraid I’m going to wear out the plastic disc it came on. While their name suggests a punk rock group, Talk Demonic’s music is exhilarating. I went to their website, and it was so hip I couldn’t figure out how to get information from it. In the not so distant future, Buyoutsidethebox.com will make available independent music for you to buy.

(c) 2006 - Ruth Mitchell - all rights reserved

Good Art at Great Value

Natural Resources - Mixed Media Painting - Ildikó Kalapács

There are many levels of art collecting, but we profess that you always buy what you enjoy and you will never be dissappointed. One should always try to get value for their money, however. And to this end, I have a wonderful artist to suggest at a great value, Ildikó Kalapács.

Ildikó was born in Hungary, but left just before the end of the Soviet occupation and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and has been living in the U.S. since 1987. Her past experiences with social issues are quite outspoken in her work as she explores the two cultures that have influenced her. She is also influenced through her travels as a folk dancer and artist. Her two-dimensional images are derived from the traditions of figurative art mixed with traces of Central European folk art and four languages: Hungarian, Russian, English and Japanese. The complex nature of her art can be traced back to her interest in intercultural disciplines and globalization.

Her three-dimensional art works consist of mostly ceramic works with some mixed media and bronze pieces. The use of these materials follows some tradition in Hungarian art but ceramics also plays a philosophically and conceptually important role in her art, symbolizing the fragile nature of the human body and soul. One must touch it and handle it gingerly and carefully. This is the basic principle and approach to her socially oriented sculptures. Along with the literal form, her work leaves enough room for abstract or conceptual interpretation.


Approximation

If you would like to be more informed about art collecting, here are some excellent books from Amazon.com on collecting art.

(c) 2006 - Ruth Mitchell - all rights reserved

Art Gadgets

It’s no great secret that many of the Old Masters used projection devices and mirrors to create their incredible imagery as has been reported on CBS 60 Minutes and explained in detail in David Hockney’s book, “Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters”a> da Vinci could “really paint,” is of course a gross understatement, but the truth is he rarely finished any of his paintings, because he was always off on some tangent that was much more interesting to him as is well recorded in his famous notebooks. Some experts even think he used his own face as the model for the Mona Lisa.

Today’s news is digital art and other electronic media. In a recent visit to the San Francisco MOMA we were delighted with the innovative electronic presentations of a “media” exhibit. Did we feel like we were watching television? Never. It was innovative art at its best. And don’t forget watching the television was once not the mundane activity we now consider it. Remember the first color versions of Walt Disney on the boob tube? Art and science were melding to enthrall us with this new artistic rendering of life which included cartoons. Artists and scientists are always pushing the envelope, and thank goodness for these innovators. And that’s where art falls out of the decorative category and into the advancement of our collective knowledge.

The ability to look at something and take a paintbrush and copy it explicitly is a rare gift in deed. I know a few people who can do this. In fact I know one person that can do this with amazing capacity, but she doesn’t view herself as a gifted artist, or even an artist at all. Some people once thought photography was not art. Many extraordinary photographers, beginning with Ansel Adams and Dorthea Lange have taught us otherwise.

Now comes digital art in its many forms, a melding of technology that reaches beyond what the camera can capture or the eye can see at first glance. The artist’s imagination is still the key ingredient in this art form, and whether or not the technology is a mystery or mundane is irrelevant. Consider this image,"SRO" a digital painting, by artist Andrew Neighbour was created using Corel Painter©. Archival inkjet limited edition print on Hahnemuhle Paper.--Ruth Mitchell

(c) 2006 - Ruth Mitchell - all rights reserved

The Art in Architecture

Too cool not to share—although it has been around for a few years, the Gateshead Millenium Bridge , a pedestrian bridge over the River Tyne has just been brought to our attention by, Stephen Croft, a Rotarian visitor from the UK. Wilkinson Eyre Architects, and Gifford & Partners of the United Kingdom designed the pedestrian bridge in the shape of an eyelid, with the two arched segments moving in unison to let tall boats through, making it unlike any other bridge we know about. This is very much a case of art in architecture. Check it out for yourself.—Ruth Mitchell

(c) 2006 - Ruth Mitchell - all rights reserved

“Borrowing” in Art

Watercolorist Laurin McCracken has become widely known for painting in the Flemish style. His work is exhilarating, but uniquely his own.

We learn by mimicking. Our first words are mimicking the sounds we hear our parents saying and then we place meaning to those words. We absorb knowledge and using the intellect and imagination we are given, we make it our own. In many art schools painters are taught to copy others, before they are unleashed to create their own style and vision. But sometimes the evolution of creativity is interrupted, perhaps it is a defect of character, a lack of confidence or even a skill unaccompanied by imagination to fulfill it that causes some to “borrow,” “copy,” or “plagiarize” another’s work. This is frowned upon for good reason because it is theft plain and simple.

I once had some photographs stolen that were in a traveling exhibit. My photography teacher spun the disappointment I felt to explain I might consider the act flattery instead an act of violation, that someone had noticed my work, and admired it so much they felt compelled to have it. It sounded nice at the time, and I let the matter go in my mind.

With the instantaneous world of the internet and a new generation coming along that is not privy to the decorum of generations past, plagiarism is becoming rampant. As the author of a children’s history book, I struggled with this issue almost daily for four years. I believe historians, in their effort not to alter history or “rewrite” it; have one of the most challenging jobs when it comes to plagiarism. Several of our most high-profile historians have been confronted with plagiarism in recent years. And God bless them, I think plagiarism is discovered mostly by the plagiarism police. Those people out there who don’t read for learning, but so that they can catch others in making mistakes. They are the people who will call you up to tell you that you misspelled a word. They are watching every comma to make sure it is in place, which it is hard to do considering the style books have many differing opinions on how this works.

In the visual arts, borrowing is more accepted as a learning tool, but not to be profited from. I have in my closet two wonderful images my daughter painted in school. They are black and white paintings of famous paintings she was instructed to copy for a learning experience. I have been carefully instructed of this fact and am not to tell anyone otherwise. I’m planning to frame them soon, but then there is that nagging thought that the “plagiarism police” might find me and scold me.

Copying the Old Masters for profit is a huge business that plagues the art community even today. For those of us with limited budgets, we’re buying art because we like something, not because it might or might not become valuable in decades to come. That way we get full value for our art, we can admire it, study it, and learn from it daily without wondering if we have made a wise decision or not. Its intrinsic value is all we ask of it.--Ruth Mitchell

(c) 2006 - Ruth Mitchell - all rights reserved

Before There Were Wheels

Pottery is one of the most ancient forms of art. It was first just useful, and then somewhere along the way it became handsome, admirable for its aesthetic qualities. This beautiful hand-coiled piece by artist Judith Gary of Tucson, Ariz. is an example of how pottery was made before the invention of the potter's wheel. Built up by layering hand coils, (Remember doing this as a child?) It was then sawdust fired. Sawdust firing is a low fire method making it too porous for food use or to hold water making it for decorative use only. "Before the pot is fired, it is burnished to achieve a sheen on the surface," says Gary. It is then bisque fired to a low enough temperature to enable the surface to absorb the smoke. "You never know what design you will achieve," she says. "Potters like to call it 'the gift of the flame.'"

(c) 2006 - Ruth Mitchell - all rights reserved

Gustav Klimt Innovator

Gustav Klimt
(1862-1918)

He was way ahead of his time. There are just some of those people, whether they are artists, scientists, writers, or some other type of innovator. While they are here on this earth they are usually controversial, misunderstood, underappreciated, but their contributions are great.

I think Austrian artist Gustav Klimt was one such innovator. His work is attributed to the Art Nouveau period, an elegant, decorative art style characterized by intricate patterns of curving lines. And while the movement was popular throughout Europe at the time under different names, the term Art Nouveau was derived from an interior design gallery in Paris, the Maison de l’Art Nouveau, which opened in 1896.

But Klimt’s work, especially his images of women, cannot be hastily lumped into a single category. For me, the sensual elements in his paintings of nature, people, and symbolism marked by a decorative detailing is more sophisticated than his time. That time has passed, and his paintings are still here. Whose work of this generation will remain fresh in a hundred years from now? Is it my imagination or has technology usurped our attention?

A Buyoutsidethebox.com artist that has emulated Klimt’s artistic style at times, is Rene Hein. Hein was inspired to begin her series of "Mummy Cats" about 16 years ago after a visit to the Chicago Field Museum when she was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The themes of the various artists began when someone commissioned me to reproduce a Klimt painting," she says. “I had never looked that seriously at Klimt before but as I looked at his work the patterns seemed like they would work for the mummy cats.” That led to artistic impressions of other artists. To view Hein's work visit http://www.buyoutsidethebox.comtoday.
--Ruth Mitchell

(c) 2006 - Ruth Mitchell - all rights reserved