Tag: Core Fellowship

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Studio Visit: Audrey Bell

 

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Audrey Bell remembers her father bringing home old typesetting drawers, fiddling with the compartments inside, and then filling them with objects. She laughs after saying it, maybe because it’s such an obvious connection to what she’s making now: wood compartments populated by figures and objects, habitats within cabinets, drawers that aren’t drawers, and frames that aren’t frames.

 

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Here’s one (at left) she finished this winter. The painting moves: lines in the bodies, the woman’s hair, a sweeping slant of sky, shapes and colors brought out from the wood. The dark stain of a shadow. There’s a hairline of aqua tracing this shadow–another kind of container. This is microwork, drawing one very close to the wall, asking a viewer to consider what is the nature of the mark or the surface? And then you step back: funny yellow dart, yellow of the toy store blaring yet somehow in check with the shifting subtle tones in the painting and the wood.

 

The painting and the wood in this work–it’s a palette reminiscent of Andrew Wyeth, one of several artists Audrey notes as an influence. Influence is tracked in Audrey’s world. This is an understatement. Um, just take a look at her journal:

 

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Audrey is wild about Giotto’s geometry, colors, and figures; old masters like Hans Holbein and Jan van Eyck (subjects of drawings she’s done this winter and letterpressed on cards). She tells us about a painting she saw on a recent trip to D.C: Honore Sharrer’s Tribute to the American Working People. “Oh my god I wish I’d done it,” says Audrey, paging through her journal for Sharrer’s name. “Pea-green next to vibrant–I don’t know–green-green?” she says, describing Sharrer’s use of color.

 

Sharrer’s painting took five years, and Margalit Fox’s 2009 obituary for Sharrer in the New York Times closes with the fact that she used “more than 200 delicate, ‘double-zero’ paintbrushes” for the work. It’s a detail from the world of concrete things, 200 double-zero paintbrushes, brought to the foreground by the writer. In Audrey’s work, a similar instinct for the double-zero: a tenderness for it.
Photographs by Robin Dreyer, writing by Elaine Bleakney

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Moving Day

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Today, core fellows Molly Kite Spadone and Liz Koerner were packing up work they had shown in Gorelick Hall this week. Molly had left her boots near the door, pointing in. They’d just finished moving out of Morgan, their home for the last two years.

Zee Boudreaux, Mike Krupiarz, and Rachel Mauser: are you packed up already, too?

Goodbyes are hard and too easily cheapened in writing. So let’s look at Molly’s good, mud-loved boots.

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Winter Studio Visit: Angela Eastman

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We stopped by the drawing and painting studio recently where core fellow Angela Eastman has set up winter operations. She showed us this span of foliage she was assembling–a shaped wire armature with painted tar paper cuts affixed (see above). The piece is Angela’s first private commission, made for a Brevard family’s home. 

 
Angela walked us through the process of creating the piece, opening her sketchbook to drawings she made at the site. “The spear pattern on the wire is a continuation of patterns I found outside of the house,” she said. 

 

As we looked back up at the piece, we saw the sketches translated into three dimensions–a challenging fluidity captured. We talked about how the installation would go. Angela smiled and recounted carrying one of her wing-like wire pieces up a hill on her back, and how it jived with an ongoing thought she has: try some paper-form costumes for dancers and pieces for the stage. 
 

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After looking at the commissioned piece, Angela handed us one of the metal cups stuffed with black tar-paper cuts left over from the process–she will use them for something–and continue her exploration of pattern, line, and form. She expressed a desire to use all materials at hand as well as employ greener resources. Next in Angela’s sights? Chasing a balance between making smaller, functional work and larger pieces: floor-length paper-cuts, jewelry and neckpieces, ephemeral land-based sculpture.
 

 
But our eyes were drawn back to the world of small things in Angela’s work space. This table, which speaks to one artist’s close attention to visual rhythms and disturbances in nature: 

 

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To view an image of the finished private commission by Angela Eastman (seen above), visit: angelaeastman.com
 
Photographs by Robin Dreyer, writing by Elaine Bleakney