Collectables

Contemporary Ceramics: Porcelain by ‘Hare with Amber Eyes’ Author, Edmund de Waal

A confession: I “read” text and images, but less frequently objects. My last experience with ceramics was a very poor pot I threw in high school, though I came to know Steuben glass about that time through a first girlfriend’s engineer father.

Pottery is pretty old stuff. Legions of archeologists have reconstructed the pre-Homeric world from large and small shards of crockery and crude and elegant drawings on jars I’ve seen. Pottery is craft, a complex mix of ideational design and its physical execution on wheels, “throwing” and then glazing, temperamental kilns and their mysterious temperature swings, and an amalgam of material, equipment, knowledge, experience, and luck. artes fine arts magazineMore

Chinese Ink Painting: Dialogue between Ancient Traditions and a New Generation of Artists

www.artesmagazine.com — Portrait of the Kangxi Emperor in Formal Dress Holding a Brush, Kangxi Period, 1661-1722, Palace Collection, Beijing.

My article will focus on the contemporary significance of traditional Chinese ink and wash painting and the challenges facing the renewal of traditional materials and tools, form and content. In the context of the recent International Art Critics Association Congress, held in Kosice, Bratislava,, in September, 2013, the conference theme, ‘White Places’ and ‘Black Holes’ in the global distribution of contemporary art—and its uneven reception– will be treated here metaphorically. I will investigate ways of stimulating a meaningful dialogue between ‘white places’ and ‘black holes, in the context of Chinese ink painting. artes fine arts magazine

William Holland Drury was a Newport painter, printmaker, and first and foremost, an art educator. He headed the art department at St. George’s School near Newport, Rhode Island, for 38 years; in Providence he taught at the Wheeler School and at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where in 1927 he was among the first to teach etching. He inspired numbers of other young people including his five children. Two established artists played a formative role in Drury’s own artistic development. From Charles H. Woodbury, Drury learned plein air painting and etching techniques. Drury first attended Woodbury’s Ogunquit Summer School in Maine around 1914, he taught there in 1927, and he absorbed his instructor’s mantra that art is a subjective experience, important for personal growth. Drury’s relationship with George W. Bellows, who summered in Newport in 1918 and 1919, was more social; they painted and picnicked together with their families, but Drury’s later drawings and etchings show Bellows’ influence, and Bellows left him a color chart to practice with. artes fine arts magazineMore

Judy Kensley McKie Studio Furniture, Objects at Boston’s Gallery NAGA

Embodying all that is joyful, beautiful and visually engaging, Judy Kensley McKie’s studio furniture and objects combine the energy, craft and sensations of magical animism and artistic mysticism from her own very personal perspective. Her work makes us inwardly smile.

Her current show at Gallery NAGA in Boston displays her gifts in basic very accessible forms and sensitive details. And yet, her work, like other great art or design goes beyond the physical, the visual and material craft to an ethereal visceral presence. We not only see her pieces but we literally emotionally feel them. Each is always enhanced by some twist of irony or dignified humor in all of her furniture and funtional objects. This adds to their magic, their wonderful spirituality. artes fine arts magazineMore

Boston’s Gallery NAGA Features Work of Master Furniture Builders

Gallery NAGA is perhaps the premiere studio furniture venue in America, certainly one of the best in the world. Their current exhibit, Furniture with Soul, adds to the gallery’s unique and long history of showcasing the best studio furniture by the most notable practitioners in the field. This exhibition is thematically based on David Savage’s book, Furniture with Soul.

One of the most meaningful and perhaps extraordinary aspects of the best of studio furniture is the fact that it transcends both art and design. It is beautiful and functional, and even more, becomes something visceral. artes fine arts magazineMore

Antiquorum Gallery, New York, with ‘Lost and Found: The Pinajian Discovery’

To launch Rediscovered Masters, art historian Peter Hastings Falk assembled Lost and Found: The Pinajian Discovery, the first in a series of exhibitions dedicated to deserving late-career artists and/or those have passed on and whose achievements have been forgotten or overlooked. An important example of one such notable but neglected artist, according to Falk, is Arthur Pinajian, a 20th-century American painter who died in 1999 at the age of 85. and whose much-lauded abstract landscapes, Lost and Found, are being showcased in New York for the first time. The month-long exhibition of 50 paintings runs through March 10 at the Antiquorum Gallery, 41 East 57th Street. artes fine arts magazineMore

Edsel & Eleanor Ford House, Grosse Pointe Shores, Michigan and Art of Quilting

The words ‘innovative’ and ‘groundbreaking’ may seem out of place when situated next to the word ‘quilt,’ but the exhibiting group Quilt Art is forcing the art world to sit back and take notice of a burgeoning art form. These are definitely not your great-grandmother’s quilts.

The 1970s saw a so-called ‘quilt revival’ in the US, spurring a growing number of quilt makers to emerge around the world. However, the display of quilts on art gallery walls was a novelty until after the 1971 exhibition Abstract Design in American Quilts at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, which invited viewers to consider the quilt as abstract art rather than as a domestic and functional object.

Sara Impey, Positivity (2004). Silks, hand and machine pieced, quilted by machine. Photo: Bluebridge Farm Studio. artes fine arts magazine More

Maryland Historical Society Art and Artifacts Tell Story of Divided Nation

Divided Voices at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore is a notable effort to provide a narrative of the American Civil War as it was experienced in Maryland. This exhibition is well worth a visit by anyone interested in American history and culture—or, for that matter, interested in contemporary American life. The exhibition is instructive both for what it has achieved and what it has not achieved. For the thoughtful visitor, Divided Voices is likely to evoke meaningful reflection on one of the seminal events of our national story and on our response to that event 150 years later.

Left: Tattered battle flag of the 4^th Regiment of U.S. Colored Troops- part of the ‘Divided Voices’ exhibition. artes fine arts magazineMore

Massachusetts’s Fuller Craft Museum’s Powerful Ceramic Figurine Exhibit

One thing becomes immediately clear upon entering the Fuller Craft Museum’s current exhibition, Fresh Figurines—these works, gathered from wide-ranging sources under the skillful eye of curator, Gail Brown, will redefine your notion of figurative porcelain. This is NOT your grandmother’s safe and sentimental collection, sitting behind glass in the corner hutch! While not quite a send-up of a centuries-old tradition of three-dimensional image making, the porcelain pieces on display are politically and socially edgy—part satire, part provocation, part self-reflection—while all the time referencing their historic vocabulary in 18th and 19th century European romanticism and 20th century middle-American kitsch.

Left: Chris Antemann (detail), A Tea Party (2010), porcelain, decals, luster. Kamm Teapot Foundation Collection. artes fine arts magazineMore

Pennsylvania Museum, Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts, with Antique Toy Collection

hoyt institute of fine arts artes fine arts magazine 5 — Lehmann-Made Tut-Tut, No 490 (1913). Coll. of L. J. Buehler, 1999. Gifted to Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts, New Castle, PA

“Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.” ~Charles Baudelaire

“Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!” ~Charles Dickens

We may be shopping for the children in our lives, reminiscing about the holidays of our youth, or analyzing our portfolios, hoping that the decision to invest in Barbie instead of G.I. Joe this season turns out to have been the right one; whatever the case may be, whether or not they are a part of our daily lives, the December holiday season is upon us. This is the time of year when toys find themselves at center stage. artes fine arts magazineMore