Art as Community

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Cheap Art, Free Drinks, and Outstanding Music

by Heather Gordon, Artist Liaison for the Golden Belt Artists

Sound too good to be true? It’s the 2nd Annual 12X12 Art Sale & Benefit Concert at Golden Belt. Starting on Thursday, Nov 15th from 5:30-7:30pm, you can choose from over 300 works of art by 35 artists, all priced at $50, $100 or $200 while listening to the sweet music of KidZNotes and the debut performance of the Eric Hirsh Quartet. Free wine and beer will be provided along with yummy nibbles and finger foods. It’s all for free, but we sure would like you to consider making a $10 donation at the door to KidZNotes to help sustain their good work.

New this year, we’ve invited the artists from Liberty Arts and DogStar Tattoo to contribute works to the exhibition AND we have ROOM 100 set-up for the entire month, thanks to a generous donation of space from the Durham Art Guild. When you buy art, 12% of the sale price goes directly to KidZNotes.

House Cat by Madelyn Smoak

“It’s a pleasure, honor and privilege to contribute to an organization focused on integrating the arts into the lives of children who might not otherwise have the experience,” says Madelyn Smoak, metalsmith & jeweler at Golden Belt artist studios.

Sentiments like this are the reason we, the artists at Golden Belt, come together each year to organize this event. This year we’ve chosen to honor KidZNotes, a Durham-based musical education non-profit organization that fights poverty and encourages positive decision making by instructing and engaging children in classical orchestral music.

10/17/2012 5:46am by Ross Ford

“KidZNotes is an organization I believe in. With art and music education disappearing from public schools all across the country, groups like KidZNotes are not supplemental. They are required. For me, access to the arts in public school has made my life more fulfilling, and it’s critical to have the early encouragement of a mentor,” says Ross Ford, painter at Golden Belt.

By making our children strong, we ensure all our futures. Learning to play music teaches us self-discipline as well as intuitive action. Music is an important part of the human experience, and these skills are essential to becoming a fully-realized human being.

Can’t make it Thursday night? Don’t worry. The fun continues during Third Friday from 6-9pm on November 16th at Golden Belt. Come meet and greet the artists in their studios and buy art to help support KidZNotes and their educational cause.

Find out more about the 12X12 here: http://gbartists.posterous.com/event-details, and be sure to RSVP and invite your friends on Facebook.

About the Artists at Golden Belt

Opened in 2008, the newly restored historic Golden Belt Manufacturing Co. is home to the studios of more than 40 working artists. The public is welcome to visit Golden Belt any time during normal open hours or on the monthly 3rd Friday open house. Supporting artists of all kinds working in a variety of media, Golden Belt is the premier art destination in Durham for those interested in purchasing original artwork and meeting artists in their studios. For more information please visit http://gbartists.posterous.com/.

For media inquiries contact:

Heather Gordon
Artists at Golden Belt
807 East Main Street
Durham, NC 27701
828-242-1027
mail@heather-gordon.com

Jennifer Blank
Development and Marketing Manager
KidZNotes
120 Morris Street
Durham, NC 27701
919-560-2712
blank.kidznotes@gmail.com

Liberty Arts
Cordoba Arts Center
923 Franklin St.
Durham, NC 27701
contact@liberty-arts.org

Art with the Artist – Heather Gordon

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Representational Visualization in the Abstract

Aside from the large canvases on the wall and a stack of art stored in a corner, Heather Gordon’s studio at Golden Belt doesn’t look like the typical image of the artist’s lair that I hold in my mind. No paint covered brushes. No rickety easels or half finished canvases. The air smells like microwave popcorn rather than turpentine, and the lighting is dimmer than I would expect.

The sliding door is held open by a bucket. A little black mixed breed dog with the bulging eyes of chihuahua sniffs me suspiciously. I bend to pet him, and he licks my chin. Several chairs are arranged in a semicircular conversation area around a velvet green chair. A bookshelf hides the desk where Heather works during the day as a freelance graphic artist and web designer. The books on the shelves cover a wide variety of topics, but most seem to be about computer code and web development.

Heather’s mind is as varied as the contents of her bookshelves. “I tend to pull from here and here and here and here. And it kinda simmers together and I get a soup,” she says. Our conversation jumps quickly between literature, algorithms, current events, chemistry, computer science – firing off ideas so rapidly that I am reminded of a game from my childhood called Mouse Trap – rotate a plastic lever to spin an old boot that tips a small silver ball down a set of crooked stairs and sparks a continuing series of chain reactions that ultimately spring a mouse trap. But in Heather’s case, those random, skittering electrical impulses, like a mental Rube Goldberg machine, create works of art.

“One afternoon I was taking a lab, and you have to create these programs, and in order to do that you have to create variables and you have to name your variables. These projects can be really dry, so I would always name them according to characters in a book. I had named this particular project according to Moby Dick. I had an Ahab and a Starbuck and a Queequeg and all that stuff. My professor was giggling over my shoulder at it, and the nineteen-year-old boy next to me didn’t know who Ahab was. So I thought to myself how completely literate this boy was (clearly because he’s in college), and illiterate too, I mean, not well read. I had these graph papers, they were chart papers for measuring temperature change in different environments, and they had been sitting on my desk for a year or two. I didn’t know what to do with them. That’s when I thought to myself, “I’m going to take Moby Dick and convert however many characters will fit on this paper to binary and I’m going to plot them.” Because it’s completely representations and completely illegible. I thought it was hilarious, really funny. So I call these my 8-bit Classics. And I’ve been going through a list of 100 books that were culled together from 100 famous writers.”

That one moment in Heather’s life has spawned a collection of art that plays with different representations of literacy and how we interpret data.

“Each work looks at the idea of data and their meaning – that moment where we acquire what it is that the value and the meaning is, but only you decide.”

Heather painstakingly plots in ink on chart paper the 8-bit binary strings created from classic works of literature. The viewer can enjoy her ink drawings as works of art but is not away that they are viewing a representation of, say, Moby Dick, unless they are informed by the artist. Heather enjoys playing with the idea of literacy vs. illiteracy, and she admits that she thinks it’s funny to be the only one with the inside knowledge to appreciate the unknowing illiteracy of her audience. She laughs and says, “You can understand Ulysses just as well this way.”

She has used the same method with sound bytes. At first glance, these larger canvases appear to be rounded abstracts, but the representation goes far deeper than the layers of paint. These works represent a moment in time reduced to the most basic elements, the ones and zeros that make up binary code.

While the viewer may see a large red bullseye, what they are actually witnessing is audio of a historic moment:

“The big round ones are called Sound Bytes – a moment in time, an experience that is very personal for me, but also a cultural moment. This particular one was Nadia Comaniche getting her first perfect ten on the uneven bars. I remember watching that on television, and you couldn’t have a ten on the screen because the scoreboards could only go up to 9.9, so they had to do a 1.0, because they couldn’t do a ten. That’s the sound of the announcers at that moment and the crowd screaming, the whole thing as an mp3. I extracted it out of the video and then changed it to ones and zeros, and I’ve plotted it there.”

She graphed those points on canvas and filled in the grid with a vivid red, matching Nadia’s leotard. The resulting painting is a visual representation of an audio of that historic event. “You can be so abstract with your information, but in fact, every detail is represented,” she says.

Heather has similar paintings that depict Reagan’s challenge to Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, Neil Armstrong’s moon landing, and Bill Clinton’s forceful denial of a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

“These experiences, the information we get, they are all sequential. There’s a sequence to it, a time and a position where that happens in our lives. That there is a one and a zero, there’s an absence and a presence. And when something like this happens, a tiny little stick of dynamite gets a perfect ten, it’s like a spike.  It’s a one in a sea of zeros. It’s this moment that we will remember forever.”

“I was thinking about my own nomadic self, being a military brat, and how this sense of place is very specific, but the sense of time is very elastic. If I remember the perfect ten, I’m drawn right back to that place and time again, sitting in front of the TV. I remember what house we lived in. I remember so much about that moment. So all of it gets compressed into that moment again. There’s something very fascinating about having a cognitive space combined with a geographic place. Something that can be so specific, and yet we remember that very differently. It’s so specific to you. And just as tangible to you and elastic. I think it all boils down to representation. I’m really interested in representation because I think that we think our data is so specific. The more and more that we have of it. We have these huge data sets that are meant to define and track or do whatever they do to represent. But they don’t. Because you can push it this way, you can bias it that way, you can exclude something, you can emphasize some other things, you can remember things differently if I tell you this.”

She used as an example her series of artworks she calls her Conveyance pieces:

“These are all about how words in different contexts mean different things. So the 829 is the numeric value of the word “convertible.” So if you take “convertible” and change it to ACII values like a computer would and add them all up, you would get 829. So the word “convertible” means the car, 829 means convertible, but it can also be a sofa that can be converted to a bed. So context is everything.”

But Heather doesn’t limit her focus to literature, politics, or world events. Her newest creation, a series of origami-like paintings, uses data sets from her own life. She asked herself, “Can I take a set of relationships, a set of values, and make a shape out of it? And can I do that in such a way that I’m making a sculpture without making a sculpture?”

“I took a geographic map of the United States and I took seven people in my life that are important to me. I plotted points – where were they born and where they live now. So I plotted all those points, vertices, and I made a tree, so I connected them. Then I figured out what all the “as the crow flies” distances are on these different segments, so I had spatial relationships on these different segments, and then I took that information and put it into TreeMaker [a program for constructing crease pattern for origami bases]. And then used that to create an asymmetrical folding pattern. So you could actually fold these shapes. And that’s so cool. I call the one with all the people in my life How to Fold My Heart, and I have one with all the places that I’ve lived (which is a lot since I’m military), and I call that one How to Fold My Home.

Heather takes the flat shape, the flat folding pattern, and interprets it to create a shape out of the pattern.

“Now this is not at all what the shape would look like. I mean these look dimensional, but that’s not all what it would fold up to be, it’s just kinda me making a shape out of the grid, unfolded.”

She says she and her father once tried to fold one – she really wants the paintings to be mathematically sound – but they were unsuccessful.

The paints that she uses in the origami series are all premixed paints and paint remnants from other people’s home improvement projects. “I see a can labeled bathroom or kitchen, and I have to buy it,” she says.

“Making this work has been very much an exercise in getting to know me. I didn’t realize I was so geeky.”

“I make my living in the digital world. I work a lot with data, but I’m an analog girl. I like a pen and paper. I like to read paper books. I like to read magazines. I don’t like my cell phone. I pine for the days of the mimeograph machine and the smell of the glue. Do you remember that? There’s something about that that is tactile. It’s engaging and I miss that. And maybe that’s what some of this work is about.”

Heather takes the idea of engaging with her audience very seriously. In fact, she is the Artist Liaison for Golden Belt. She loves meeting with the public and talking about her art. Her work can be viewed in Studio #133 at Golden Belt each Third Friday of the month when the artists open up their studios to the public.

The Artists at Golden Belt, in partnership with Liberty Arts and the Cordoba Arts Center, will host the second annual “Twelve by Twelve” Art Sale and Benefit Concert. The event will be a fundraiser for KidZNotes, a Durham-based musical education non-profit organization that fights poverty and encourages positive decision making by instructing and engaging children in classical orchestral music.

The event starts Thursday, November 15th from 5:30-7:30pm with over 250 works of art for sale and will feature a one-hour performance by KidZNotes students and instructors with special guest, the Eric Hirsh Quartet. There is a suggested donation of $10 at the door, 100% of which directly benefits KidZNotes. Free food and drink will be provided. Participating artists will donate at least 12% of all proceeds from the show to KidZNotes.

Art with the Artist – Pete Connolly

“Ford,” Reverse Painting on Glass by Pete Connolly

The Loneliness of the Junked Car 

I’ve been following Birds and Arrows for about two years now, ever since my family and I moved to Chapel Hill. They are a local band that seamlessly blends folk music and rock to create a unique sound with beautiful and haunting vocals that makes me wish I could sing. I’m not a music critic, so when I found out that their drummer Pete Connolly was also a visual artist, I knew I wanted to interview him for my blog. And then I saw his paintings, and I was blown away!

So I find myself, once again, winding through the countryside on the way to his home on the outskirts of Orange Country. I know I’m way out beyond the edges of civilization when I pass a political sign done entirely in camouflage that reads, “Rod Chaney: A Chaney You Can Hunt With.” A dappled horse watches me dispassionately as I drive down the Connolly’s driveway and park in front of a sweet little log cabin nestled in the trees. A sleek gray cat promptly jumps onto the hood of my Jeep and eyes me through the windshield.

Pete meets me at the door, wearing slouchy jeans, a Tshirt that states “People Fest 2000,” and a hesitant smile that says he isn’t sure what he’s gotten himself into. He ushers me into a living room dominated by a giant drum set that he’s embellished with a painted image of Old Yeller attacking a bear. In a quiet voice that can barely be heard over the banging of the washing machine that has shimmied off balance, Pete begins to talk about his biography as an artist.

When Pete was hired for his first paying art job, he asked his dad if he should take some college classes on illustration. He mimics his father’s clipped British accent: “You don’t bloody well need to do that. Just go to the library and get a book on colored pencils.” Pete jokes that his art education consisted of less classical training and more Dewey Decimal System.

The Connolly Tarot Deck illustrated by Pete Connolly

Pete’s artistic evolution took the same unconventional path as his art education. His wife Andrea proudly shows me his first official commission – the “Connolly” deck of tarot cards Pete illustrated with his mother Eileen, a well-known author, educator and international parapsychologist. Seventy-eight vivid, yet delicately shaded, colored pencil drawings make up one of the industry’s most popular tarot decks. The images Pete created have a medieval feeling, though many of the male figures appear in robes that are almost Biblical. Each card looks like an individual stained glass panel. It took Pete two years to complete all of the drawings for the deck.

Feng Shui Tarot Deck illustrated by Pete Connolly

The “Feng Shui” deck followed ten years later – intricate watercolor images with pen and ink detailing. The mythical beasts and oriental figures on the cards in the Feng Shui deck are brightly colored and beautifully rendered. Each character’s kimono has a different pattern or design. Of the details on the garments, Pete says, “I had to be sort of a clothing designer.” Andrea wants to get one of the images from the deck tattooed on her arm, but she can’t decide which one she likes best.

In the ten years between the production of the two tarot decks, Pete honed his skills in a more traditional artistic arena:

“I was living in Santa Barbara at the time, and I came across this idea that I thought was completely unique, not realizing that the technique had been done forever. I did reverse painting on glass, and it’s a technique where it’s the opposite of traditional painting in that you have to start with the highlights on the back of the glass and build out to the background. So you start with the foreground, go to middle ground, and then background.”

The technique may not be as unique as he wanted it to be, but Pete’s artworks are strictly his own. A collage built around a photograph of a stack of junked cars (Pete snuck into a scrap yard in Pulaski, Virginia to take the picture). An almost photorealistic painting of a dilapidated Ford. A haunting, not-quite-abstract image of two silhouetted figures in front of a snowbound car. Pete chronicles the mundane, the sad, the broken. He places these objects against a dramatic backdrop (an eerie night sky or a desolate field) and turns them into something that’s quite beautiful. The emphasis is on the picture as an object, rather than as a glimpse of something in the artist’s emotional world.

“I don’t honestly know what it represents, but it keeps coming back, this whole taking junk and focusing on it, isolating it in a field. I’m not sure what it means.”

“It’s kind of dreamlike; it’s things unnaturally lit by the night sky, as if it has some sort of strange, other worldly light source. And that’s kinda cool.”

As his wife says:

“It’s really beautiful, but it has an edge to it. It has a disturbed vibe to it – but not in a bad way. Sometimes it’s humorous; sometimes it’s just a disturbing visual. There’s something about it that makes you feel a little strange, but in a good way… You start wanting to know the story behind them.”

“Snowblind,” Reverse Painting on Glass by Pete Connolly

Pete has taken a couple of years off from his art to focus on his music with Birds and Arrows, but it has never been far from his thoughts. All of the cover art on the Birds and Arrows albums is based off of paintings done by Pete. He illustrates a yearly calendar that contains the same offbeat humor as the old single-panel Far Side comics. He haunts thrift stores and second hand shops, collecting old photographs, antique keys, quirky little items that might someday make their way into one of his collages. Pete recently found pages of a boy’s homework from 1966 that contain an essay on racial tension and the KKK. He has a jar full of over 600 bread tags that he’s amassed over the past six years. He jokes that they would make a really cool suit of chain mail.

Music and visual art are both integral parts of what makes Pete Connolly tick. When I asked him which he would choose if he had to decide between music and painting, he laughed and said, “I think I’d choose suicide. I couldn’t. I don’t think I could make that choice. I think I’d be miserable without the other.”

“If you listen to the songs I write, my lyrics tend to be very visual. Music inspires me to think lyrically and write words that are beautiful and paint beautiful scenes verbally. So it’s kind of a similar process to create something visual that, hopefully, is beautiful or bizarre.  I think it’s kind of the same stuff.”

Luckily for the rest of us, Pete Connolly doesn’t have to make that choice. His musical career is on the upswing. Upon its release, Birds and Arrows’ first album “Starmaker” was picked by the Independent Weekly as the “Album of the Month,” and the band is scheduled to release their third album soon. As for his visual art, Pete is working on a new series for Pop Up art show in Norfolk, Virginia at The Montecello Arcade in February, 2013. His goal is to have thirty paintings ready to display by the beginning of the new year.

Your one and only chance to see Birds and Arrows locally this fall will be on Saturday, October 27 at The Carrack Modern Art in Durham. The band will be debuting songs from their upcoming record Coyotes. Tickets are $7 at the door. Beer and wine will be provided.

Art as Fashion – Katharine Whalen

Tucked away in a quiet corner of cool, green serenity north of Efland, NC, is a renovated farmhouse that started its life as a rustic log cabin. The smell of sage drifts in the smoke from a branch smoldering in a brick fire pit, and a tiny dog barks excitedly in a wire enclosure. A screen door bangs open. Katharine Whalen, a former member of the Chapel Hill band Squirrel Nut Zippers, best known for her smoky voice and quirky singing style, steps out on her porch. A tiny piece of dried flower clings to her hair.

Though she is still involved in music and has a new album with her band Katherine Whalen and Her Fascinators scheduled for release on September 27, Katherine’s newest project is quite a departure from heartfelt lyrics and tenor banjos. Channeling her love for vintage textiles, she has started a line of headwear called Tambourine, turning found fabrics and flea market purchases into wearable art. A chance gift from a relative three and a half years ago started her along the millinery path:

Katharine Whalen’s Yoyo Headband

“My aunt had given me this yoyo quilt. I really love textiles. I have always collected and been fascinated with textiles. So this quilt was put together with tons of these [little rosettes]. I was actually on a walk, and I thought, “Oh, my god, I could take this apart and put it back together.” So I made these headbands, and I would sell them at my shows.”

“I’ve always collected hats and fabric, so it was a really good way to start using all that stuff. I love hats. I’ve always worn hats. I don’t care how silly I look in them. And that’s how it started.”

The inspirations for her hat designs are diverse. She has an extensive reference library that includes drawings of World War I era Russian ballet costumes, pages from a 1907 Ladies Home Journal, and books on African tribal decoration, smiling natives in elaborate face paint and headdresses fashioned from leaves, flowers and feathers. “It’s adornment,” she says, “and being really into natural elements.”

“I started with just really simple, very nice, very wearable, ladylike headbands. And now, it’s off into this other territory – darkly.”

“My goal at the moment is to figure out how to use [the family] lace and these dried chicken pelts that my uncle gave me. Very strange. So I’m definitely going to do something with that. My long-term goal is to work with felt and be able to make really nice winter hats in some kind of really cool shape – and very wearable. And be known for that. That would be ideal. The summer stuff is always more temporary by its nature. So have that continue to be kind of whimsical. But I would like to make serious pieces for winter that you could hand down through generations.”

Katharine Whalen’s summer hats

All of her hats are hand-sewn in her studio, a cozy room with slanted ceilings and warm, bead board walls, tucked neatly under the eaves of her home. Her summer styles include little boaters in fun retro fabrics, floppy sun hats with elaborate ribbons and trims, and chic cloches with subtle, more restrained details. For her fall/winter line, Katharine is working on felted hats in rich autumn colors, wide-brimmed and decorated with leather belts in deep mahoganies – the perfect hats to match the classic, sophisticated styles on trend for the 2012 season.

But the line she is creating for her upcoming art show, opening at The Carrack in Durham on September 28, slants away from whimsy and angles towards the fantastical. Designed as companion pieces to the paintings of Chance Murray, who will be showing at the same time, these are the hats Catharine considers “dark” and “strange,” wild pairing of skulls and flowers, antlers and velvet ribbons. The hat that Katharine hopes to wear to the opening is made of living moss in a glass petri dish. “I’m going pretty far out,” she says, “but only to temper doing the other ladylike stuff.”

Her Tambourine line is not Katharine’s first foray into the world of visual art. She worked with oil paints for years, creating Impressionist landscapes and minimalist self-portraits, and she still designs all the posters for her shows with her band. But her hats are her current passion.

“My goal is to have people realize that these [hats] are art as well. There’s a difference between being someone who is crafting and someone who is trying to make artworks that are possibly not even purchasable or wearable. They are just conceptual.”

She does see parallels between her music and her millinery art:

“It’s like writing songs, where you might get one phrase and then you build off of that. So the hats, for me, are the same. I’ll get one concept or one little idea that sends me off, and then I’ll do a whole line.”

“I’m trying to combine them [music and hat design]. It’s a little bit hard. When I do a show, I’ll come with a trunk, and I’ll make a little trunk show, but it’s hard because it’s dark in venues and people aren’t thinking about getting a hat. I haven’t quite figured out how to get them combined.”

But naming her line of fashion accessories after an instrument of musical accompaniment is a great start.

In addition to her concert venues, Katharine’s hats can be found at local craft markets in Durham and Carrboro. She sets up her “Hat Shop” under two market umbrellas she painted herself and decorates her tables with white lace. “It looks very Parisian,” she says. Her next Hat Shop will be at Cuppa Joe’s in Hillsborough on September 29 where she will be conducting a sale on her summer line. She will also be previewing her new fall hats.

“It’s a cottage industry,” she says, gesturing around her tiny studio. “It’s a tiny little home business that just happens to be artistic.”

Katherine’s show opens at The Carrack Modern Art on September 28 with a reception from 6-9pm. Her art will on display from Sept. 22-30. The Carrack is at 111 W. Parrish St., Durham.

Local Non-profits Provide More Than Just Art Supplies

Stylin’ Scrap Exchange manikin modeling leis and saline bags

In 2010-2011 65,167 tons of waste were delivered to the Orange County landfill. The Wake County Recycling and Solid Waste Division predicts that by 2016 Wake County alone will generate 800,000 tons of waste. I’m not very good with abstract concepts so I needed a little help to visualize 800,000 tons of waste. A quick trip to Google helped me figure out that the Wake County prediction is the equivalent of over 228,500 Ford F150 trucks (at 7,000 lbs. each). If my math is anywhere near correct, that’s a lot of trash!

Two local non-profits have come up with a unique way to assist the arts while keeping solid waste out of the Triangle area’s landfills. The Scrap Exchange and its budding protege Cary Creative Center collect these waste materials from hundreds of individuals, businesses, and solid waste handlers throughout the Triangle. Over 250 industries within 100 miles of its Durham location contribute to the Scrap Exchange alone. These materials would otherwise languish in our landfills.

The Scrap Exchange and Cary Creative Center imagine a completely different use for what others so casually toss into the trash. To them, these waste materials are actually hard-to-find, low cost art supplies. They are delivered to the non-profits’ retails stores, in the case of the Scrap Exchange, a 22,000 square foot warehouse located in the Golden Belt complex in downtown Durham, where the materials are sorted and packaged for use by artists, schools and creative arts programs throughout the community.

Barrel of rubber bands at The Scrap Exchange

Walking through The Scrap Exchange is an adventure that strains the senses but fires the imagination. Organized lines of electric blue fiber drums hold fabric scraps, rubber bands, corks, plastic McDonald’s toys, zip ties and old cassette tapes. Shelf after metal shelf overflows with scrap booking supplies, baskets, ribbons, tile, test tubes, petri dishes, door knobs and hubcaps. You can find saline drip bags, flour sacks and knee-hi pantyhose. Old electric typewriters and boxes of cordless phones await a new life as art or jewelry. One collection of ancient beige headphones reminded me of the hearing tests we used to take in elementary school. Raise your hand when you hear the beep!

In addition to unconventional art supplies and tax write-offs for donations, the Scrap Exchange also offers community outreach programs. Low cost studio space is available for artists and crafters for an hourly or monthly fee. The center sponsors a full schedule of classes ranging from bookmaking to lace tatting to helping your child make his/her own costume wings. Schools and businesses can schedule creativity workshops or corporate team building events, and with Events by the Truckload, The Scrap Exchange will truck their unique blend of creative energy and craft supplies to you. The Make-N-Take room is a great place to bring your kids on a rainy day. For $5 per participant, your child can use any of the materials in the room and take home their creation. It’s a great venue for birthday parties.

The Scrap Exchange also has an in-house art gallery dedicated to showcasing local artists who are using reclaimed materials in their work. The Green Gallery is currently displaying a show by Durham resident Julia Gartrell entitled “Modified Multiples/Mundane Machines.” Her work will be on exhibit from August 17 through September 15.

While the Cary Creative Center, at 1,800 square feet, is a more compact model, offering more traditional arts and crafts supplies, they provide the same outreach programs as The Scrap Exchange. Reuse-crafting instruction is available for scout groups, daycares, home schoolers, teen groups and others. In September they will be sponsoring classes in paper bead making, up-cycle jewelry design, and collage. You can join them Saturday, September 8 at the Cary Reuse Rodeo, where they will be accepting donated items. To date, Cary Creative Center has saved over 22 tons of landfill waste through their innovative creative reuse programs.

There are many ways you can help the community, the environment, The Scrap Exchange, and Cary Creative Center. Volunteers are always welcome. Both non-profits accept monetary donations as well as clean, reusable items (complete lists for each non-profit may be found here and here). You can also shop locally and purchase reclaimed art in The Scrap Exchange’s Artists’ Marketplace and Cary Creative Center’s C3 Artist Marketplace. Products by local artisans include jewelry, handmade bags, metal sculptures, and screen printed clothing.

What would you make if the only limit was your creativity? Visit The Scrap Exchange and Cary Creative Center to find out!

 

Art with the Artist – Ross Ford

Paintings displayed in Golden Belt studio of Ross Ford

Ross Ford has come a long way from drawing pictures of his house and neighborhood on the rolls of freezer paper his mother used to spread across the kitchen floor to help keep him and his sister occupied.

With his boyish good looks, dark hair swept back in a messy ponytail, he looks like the kind of guy you would want to go out and have a beer with. His shorts are paint-splattered, a cotton canvas of oranges, purples, greens and blues. He smiles often as he talks, his eyes roving over the details of his paintings as if searching for imperfections. Ross even stops in mid conversation to pull a piece of tape or something off the bottom of one of his huge canvases. “That was really bothering me,” he says.

Ross and his wife moved to the Triangle from Miami, Florida two years ago, and he set up shop in Golden Belt, a restored textile mill in Durham, NC that houses artist studios, loft apartments, offices, restaurants, shops and more. Golden Belt’s 35 studio spaces are in high demand, and Ross had to pass their rigorous application and review process to earn a coveted space. But for him, it was all worth it to be a part of a community of like-minded individuals. It’s is a world apart from the “full liquor” outdoor car wash where he had his first show.

“[The Triangle] is a great area. Of all the places that we could have gone, this is one of the better ones. It’s a lot of smart people doing a lot of cool things. Everyone I meet here is up to something cool – musicians, artists, designers.”

Ross’s studio is sparse, holding only a folding table, a blue canvas camp chair, and the accoutrements of his trade – paint, paper, and canvas. His abstract paintings provide the only splashes of color against the white walls and concrete floor. His paints are mixed in trios of harmonizing values, each saturation stored neatly in a plastic Ziploc container. Ross’s technique for mixing his paints is almost a chemistry equation, except his periodic table is the visible spectrum of light used to create his color palette.

Ross Ford Abstract Painting 427 – Photo courtesy of Ross Ford

He approaches art in a very systematic way, with one eye on scientific method and another on emotion. When Ross speaks about his own process, he mentions the influence of abstract painter Josef Albers and his book Interaction of Color.

“A lot of my favorite artists are people who are very process-intensive… [Albers] was a very scientific artist. He would experiment a lot and then do a lot of studies and comparisons, particularly in relation to color… He influenced me a lot just in terms of his experimental method. He was very much about trying different ways and different proportions and seeing the different effects… In terms of trying different colors and different ways, I love that method.”

“I use the colors to emphasize different shapes and to break apart the shapes so that it’s more ambiguous which one is dominant. It tricks your eye and your brain into composing it in different ways, depending on how your eye moves across the canvas.”

“Part of what makes these shapes so intriguing is that these are the shapes created by the dimensions in your wrist. These are hand styles. They look like handwriting. They are similar to cursive writing in the shapes and the proportions between the shapes. That’s part of what makes them so intriguing to see at this size [7.5 feet tall], because normally you see them that size [a few inches tall], and your body is trained to decode it in a certain way. Your brain decodes it in a certain way.”

He also references minimalist and conceptual artist Sol LeWitt:

“He [LeWitt] was very much about systems. What he would do is create rules for creating artwork, and he would give those rules to different people. So different people would interpret those rules in different ways and create artworks that looked similar but not identical. I was intrigued by his process – a sort of rule-based art. How do the guidelines, the rules that you set, allow for organic variation within a set, and I’ve definitely taken that philosophy to heart. I have certain internal rules for myself that guide the creating of these [paintings]. I’ve chosen to do single or multiple lines and follow certain rules about how I put the colors together. That ensures that they are all similar on a certain level but also different in exactly the same way.

Sketches by Ross Ford – Photo courtesy of Ross Ford

A hidden portion of his art lies in the process itself, almost as if each step in the process creates a marketable commodity (which I suppose it does since he has created signed and dated pages of his sketches which are available for purchase). But the simplicity of his style – graceful, sweeping lines and bright patches of analogous color – belies the amount of effort that goes into each of his paintings. For each one of his works, Ross creates hundreds, if not thousands, of sketches, his pen flicking across the page, spending only seconds on each image. (You can see a quick film clip of this process here). These sketch pages are like a photographer’s contact sheets. He pores over these pages, choosing the sketches that reverberate emotionally, and these are the ones he marks for further exploration.

“A lot of the work that goes into these paintings that you don’t see is not spent on canvas. It’s sorting photographs and scans of drawings and comparing them, coming back to them, grouping them, setting them aside, reorganizing them in different ways… It took about 2 months to paint each of these [his larger works], and that’s just execution. On top of that, it was at least another month of drawing and sorting and all the other work that goes into it.”

Each painting focuses on a range of emotions at one single point in time. Whether those emotions can be ascribed to the artist or the viewer is left to each individual’s perception. All of his art is untitled except for date and time because Ross does not want to prejudice the viewer toward any one interpretation.

“It’s not Cubism that tries to show the progression of time on one figure. This is more about the multidimensionality of emotion. There are very few “unipolar” emotions. You are very rarely either happy or sad. Most of the time it’s many different feelings all wrapped up together that you are experiencing simultaneously. That’s just the nature of humanity…. So that’s what I try to capture. These are multidimensional emotional portraits.”

In addition to the art of art, Ross seems well versed in the business of art as well. He is confident in his work and not afraid to create marketing opportunities for himself. He received considerable media coverage while living in Miami, and he keeps an extensive mailing list of contacts. He even has one past customer who calls him every year on his birthday, just to check in with him and see how he’s doing. Ross offers this advice to aspiring artists:

“One of the best things any artist can do is to keep a list of all your friends, keep that mailing list. Keep in touch with the people who “get it.” Keep building that mailing list, and keep an open mind. You never know what’s going to happen.”

“As an artist, you’ll hear “no” more that you hear “yes.” I mean, it’s a thousand no’s for every one yes… It’s a lot of no’s. You’ve gotta be confident about your work. If you’re not confident about your work, it’s gonna show it’s not confident. Particularly with abstract work. You’ve gotta kinda look like you did it on purpose. That purpose shows. If you are making your marks on your canvas with purpose, that shows in the work.  If it looks like you don’t know where it’s gonna go, it’s gonna show that you don’t know.”

“Keep painting. It’s easier to continue working and continue evolving than it is to start painting from a stop. And if you let it sit and stop working for a while or get discouraged… you have to not let it get you down and you have to just keep working… It’s not about the people who don’t get it. It’s about the people who do get it, and finding the people who react to it and then maintaining a connection to those people. Because those are the people who are going to continue to support you…They are why you do it… Feed off their positive energy.”

You can view a complete portfolio of Ross Ford’s artwork, including his paintings, drawings and prints here.

Art as Entertainment – Professor Diablo’s True Revue

Photo by Thaddaeus Edwards posted at http://www.cdsporch.org

As much as I love visual art, I am also drawn to the artistry of the spoken and written word. I am a member of a literary group called The Hinge Literary Center, a volunteer group of writers and readers with a common goal of supporting, nurturing and connecting the local literary community. Last night, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, in conjunction with The Hinge, presented the third installment of their series Professor Diablo’s True Revue: Relations at the Casbah in Durham, NC.

This morning, as I sat down to write about the experience, I found myself impotently searching for words to describe the performance. So I turned to my old friend Merriam Webster for a little assistance. Good ole MW defines a revue as “a theatrical production consisting typically of brief, loosely connected, often satirical skits, songs, and dances,” but this definition completely fails to capture the essence of an artistic endeavor that included photography, rap music, a love poem to an HD television, profanity, a rhinestone studded autoharp, and a feisty little African American woman from the mean streets of Oakland. There were skits; there was satire; there were songs and dancing (if you count Grandma’s kung fu jam with her green sequined fan). But there was so much more on that tiny stage. There was passion; there was energy; there was power; and there was art.

His voice deep and resonant, his face shaded by his bucket hat, playwright and poet Howard Craft belted out his poetry while photographs by Thaddaeus Edwards flashed on a large screen in the background. Storyteller, poet, and journalist/producer Anita Woodley‘s fuzzed out afro glowed in the stage lights as she paraded out a hilarious cast of characters from her life in Oakland, CA, including her pimp stepfather, her sassy Grandma, and her precocious six-year-old son Xavier. Justin Robinson, a Grammy winner and former member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, delivered soulful performances on the autoharp and guitar, as well as providing musical accompaniment to the other performers.

Mere words cannot convey the humor and spirit of these talented individuals. This particular show was a one-time performance, but since clips from the first and second installments of Professor Diablo’s True Revue are available on Vimeo, I would assume that this show will make its way onto the web as well. I’ve provided links in the text above so you can find out more about these local artists and possibly catch one of their future shows. I encourage you to do so. It’s totally worth it! And follow me on Facebook to find out about the next performance of Professor Diablo’s True Revue!

Art with the Artist – Virginia Bullman

Bird Bath sculpted by Virginia Bullman

Mosaic Angel by Virginia Bullman

When I reread my blog post about Norma Rae, I felt like it lacked a bit of spice. Yes, the history of Carr Mill is interesting, and the story behind the sculpture adds dimension to Norma Rae’s artistry, but the post was still missing something. Without the voices of her creators, Norma Rae seemed like an orphan, and her story lacked the depth I felt she deserved.

So, in spite of my introverted nature, I dialed the number of one of the sculptors to see if she might be willing to meet with me to talk a little more about Norma Rae. Imagine my surprise when Virginia Bullman not only said yes but invited me out to her home/studio to see more of her work.

The road to Virginia Bullman’s studio winds through pristine, undeveloped forest land and row upon row of nodding heads of corn. It’s as though Nature herself is encouraging you to visit. A meandering gravel road dead ends at her home, an airy, circular modular surrounded by lush trees and a profuse garden seeded with wildflowers and colorful sculptures.

Ms. Bullman greets me at the door and graciously invites me into her home. Her living room is a comfortable mixture of the functional and the artistic. Sculptures, paintings and artworks of all sorts decorate every surface. She jokes that her round home is an interior designers worst nightmare because it is nearly impossible to situate furniture in the pie slices that make up the rooms. Despite its shape, both the forested surroundings and her home/studio itself would make any artist jealous. You only have to look out the sliding glass doors of her workroom to find light and inspiration. The tools of her trade hang neatly on pegboards, and signs of her industry lie all around – fabric projects, oversized paper mache figures covered in plastic to keep out the spiders and shelves of boxes that contain all sorts of mysteries.

She begins to talk about her sculptures and her partnership with LaNelle Davis, and her denim blue eyes light with humor.

“I was making bird baths at that point, and taking them to the [Carrboro] Farmer’s Market, and she [LaNelle] came out to find out about that… She and I just hit it off… One day, we were out there messing around… we were talking about people we had known in our lives… when we were kids, and what an impact those women had made on us. And we decided to do an honoring… Let’s do a great big sculpture project to honor all these women.”

Neither one of them had ever done big sculptures before. Ms. Bullman had attended art school and had family members who had been involved in carpentry, but it was a learning process for both of them.

“We started from the ground up, figuring out how to do armatures, how to do the mix, how to do the whole thing. We had some real colossal disasters.”

The sculptures have a metal framework that makes up the armature. The metal is wrapped in chicken wire that serves as a base for the cement to adhere to. Once the cement is molded onto the forms, Bullman and Davis decorate the sculptures with colorful mosaics made up of broken pottery, china, even salvaged flower pots. On one of the works in progress at Ms. Bullman’s studio, I was even able to identify the top off of a ceramic salt shaker. Local thrift shops save boxes of dishes that they can’t sell that would otherwise end up in the landfill. Ms. Bullman has an entire building near her studio that is full to bursting with shards of broken china, sorted by color into an odd assortment of boxes, bins and baskets.

Bullman and Davis’ first collaboration in the early 1990s led to The Gathering of Women, an installation which stood outside a garden center in Hillsborough, NC called Reba and Roses. Four oversized sculptures portrayed a circle of every day farm women involved in various homey pursuits like shelling peas or standing with a hoe, solving the world’s problems while they prepared dinner.

“We didn’t do them for money; we didn’t do them to sell. We just did them because we wanted to do them.”

So was born a partnership that has spanned two decades and resulted in more than 25 sculptures gracing the East Coast from Maine to Florida. Their displays of regular women involved in timeless pursuits inspire a visceral response in people.

“It was funny. You would have two people of different ethnicities looking at the same piece and say, “Oh, that’s my Aunt So and So. Oh, that’s my Grandmother So and So. And we would stand back and just listen. It was really gratifying. We hit a nerve someplace… It was the pose, it was the attitude. They are sort of like icons or archetypes that trigger your memory.”

“I’ve never had any negative responses to my work. At least not to my face. I think one of the things that was the most gratifying, for LaNelle and I both, was to have people recognize the big women. To trigger people’s memories. They understood it. And that’s all we needed.”

Ms. Bullman says she has been involved in art all her life. Her first medium was the paper dolls she played with as a little girl. As the only child of a circuit preacher in rural West Virginia, she says she spent a lot of time entertaining herself, making clothes for the paper dolls, making things with pebbles.

I’ve always done art. All my life. I went to art school. When I was starting in college, women were supposed to learn how to do something in case their husband died. Like learn to be a teacher or a secretary or a nurse. Something acceptable. But I was so bored in that teacher’s college that I switched to the Cleveland Institute of Art for a couple of years. I didn’t finish it, because I got so fed up with all the chauvinistic, cut throat stuff that goes on in that world. It turned me off so I gave that up and started working on my own stuff. I’ve never really quit.”

She made clothes for her three daughters when they were small. She would use the scraps to make collages and wall-size fabric panels. She laughs as she tells me, “I can’t think small. I try, but it just doesn’t work.” She has tried more traditional media, but she says she always wants the works to be more bas-relief or three-dimensional. “It just won’t stay flat,” she says, and the larger-than-life representations of the four elements that she is working on now are a tribute to that statement.

Though she still sculpts with cement and broken china, Ms. Bullman has now come full circle and is once again working with paper. In her living room hang two mobiles, one a paper mache crow with cascades of glossy black feathers, the other a delicate bower formed of white rice paper leaves that create a subtle interplay of light and shadow as they dance in the breeze.

She offers this advice to aspiring artists: “If you don’t like it, change it. If you can’t change it, figure out how to work around it.” She said the advice worked for her and brought her down to live in the Chapel Hill area where she has gained a loyal following.

Do what you love. If you try to do it for some other reason, it’s just merchandise. People can tell. If you do it, it just draws people. You have to put a little piece of your soul into it.

Art as Education – Pauli Murray

Mural for Pauli Murray

Yesterday, I found myself lost in a small neighborhood near Duke University’s east campus. As I struggled to wind my way back to a street name I recognized, I drove past this beautiful mural on the side of a building. I realized I had seen similar murals around Durham, but I had never stopped to look at the details or learn the story behind the artwork. It struck me that discovering the story behind this mural would make an excellent starting point for my blog.

I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t note the topknot on her head (or read the quotes very closely) as I thought to myself, “I should find out more about this guy. He obviously had a profound influence on Durham’s history.” I hang my head as I admit my ignorance, but I’m so glad I stopped to learn more about HER.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, but raised in Durham, NC, the Reverend Dr. Anna Pauline (Pauli) Murray was an American civil rights activist, women’s rights activist, lawyer, and writer. She was also the first black woman ordained as an Episcopalian priest. According to the Pauli Murray Project, she worked throughout her life to address injustice, to give voice to the unheard, to educate, and to promote reconciliation between races and economic classes.

Her life and writings are powerful and moving and have spurred a movement in Durham called the Pauli Murray Project. Sponsored by the Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute, the Pauli Murray Project envisions a Durham community that actively works to break down divisions such as race, class, sexual & gender identity and spiritual practice that often drive a wedge between us. Their vision and goal is to collect stories and ask questions through community dialogues, oral history research, panel discussions and reading circles to tell Durham’s story and present the history of division in Durham in a way that will ultimately bring us all together.

The murals are only a small part of the Pauli Murray Project. They form a collaborative public art project called Face Up: Telling Stories of Community Life. The mural project engaged more than 1,500 people in a series of events hosted between 2007 and 2009 that fostered new connections and dialogue, expanded awareness of local history, and resulted in the creation of fourteen permanent public murals. The project was led by artist Brett Cook who has more than 20 years of experience with collaborative community-based artmaking.

The murals are now installed on the exterior walls of businesses, schools, and other publicly accessible places in downtown and Southwest Central Durham, and reflect the creative involvement of toddlers, elementary school children, middle and high school students, college students, professors, neighborhood residents, and elders—wealthy and working class; African American, Latino, Anglo, and Asian.

If you are interested in taking a self-guided tour of the Face Up murals, including the images of Pauli Murray, a map of their locations can be found here. Or you can wait until you stumble upon them while driving through Durham like I did. But I really think it is worth taking the time to visit them yourself, if just to soak up the fun, artsy, cool vibe of Durham itself. And maybe you will find yourself inspired by Pauli Murray… just like I was.