the bubble bursts

I'm back from Chautauqua, and because my wedding is 15 days away, I have not found a lot of time to post anything art-related. Until the craziness has passed and the dust settles, I'll leave you with some images from my last week at the Institute. Things got very quiet after the students left and we spent most the remaining days battening down the hatches for the winter.

One last glimpse of the cleaned and locked-up print studio through the antique warped glass . . .

Kilnmaster Kyle, kiln tech Dan, and I visit Lake Erie.

pictures from Erie

Here are some pictures from my trip to the Erie Art Museum with the ceramics department. The building is this neat old repurposed bank built in the 1830s.

We were there to see the work of ceramicist Kurt Weiser, who paints these incredibly intricate narrative scenes on his slipcast vessels.

I also spied some Kiki Smith in their bronze collection . . .

And a shelf of Krishnas.

infestation

I'm trying to squeeze work days in between trips to Syracuse and visits from family and friends, so posts will be less frequent for a few weeks. I'll be posting some pictures of my trip to Erie with the ceramics department, but until then, here's a photo of the beginnings of a new project. Big things coming to the Chautauqua print studio . . . or a lot of little things . . .

Whatever you do in life, think higher and feel deeper.

Today I stuffed myself into the very packed Amphitheater to attend a lecture by Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, humanitarian, journalist, professor, and author of Night, his memoir about surviving Auschwitz and other concentration camps during the Holocaust.

His talk explored what makes humans moral. It was a complex subject - and a complex talk - that I won't try to write much about, except to reiterate the most important of his points that I took away from the talk (one of those is the title of this post); those being, that morality stems from respecting the Otherness of the Other. Also, he spoke about how morality, and right/wrong, is above all governments, all societies, and maybe even our human perception of God and the way his/her good/evil is represented through religion to us. He spoke about how everyone, athiests, agnostics, and people of all faiths, have an ability to be moral, and that morality isn't something that is learned or exists only in a religious context.

c-town as usual

Not too much exciting news to post. Been busy with class, so no new pieces to post. WNED, the Buffalo public radio/tv station, was hanging around Chautauqua shooting a documentary for PBS that will air next fall. I shot some pictures of the Ceramic department's raku firing that you can check out over at Kyle's blog.

We're officially half done with the season; our print instructor, Craig Taylor, is leaving today, so I'm on my own as far as maintaining the studio and helping the students for the rest of the summer.

I'm out for the weekend - Sara Gibson, my roommate from when I was up here last summer, is visiting.

I'll leave you with some shots of Diana, our work study, and Tom Raneses, our instructor for weeks 1 and 2, hard at work . . .

Finally, new art

I'm in Syracuse for the weekend, but somewhere in between the wedding dress fitting and envelope addressing, I figured I'd post some photos of new etchings. Below, turtles and a martin nest in the clouds.

The Art You've Been Waiting For

I've got new prints hot off the press, but haven't taken pictures yet. In the meantime, I wanted to write about a piece of art that was here on Monday . . . the Porta-Hedge!

Bringing the outside to the inside, and vice versa, it's a trailer disguised as topiary with artificial Christmas tree foliage. It's supplied with field and wildlife guides, blackboards, peepholes to the outside, a small video screen for viewing footage of the trailer's four hidden cameras, and a bathroom. Plus real plants. Below, a shot of the interior.

Porta-Hedge is the work of Justin Shull, a fellow Chautauqua alum ('03 and '07), and you can read about it and its upcoming US tour here.

Also, here's a picture of a new etching I'm working on, based on an afore-posted sketchbook drawing.

More pictures of new work coming soon!

An unexpected visitor

Look what Don found this morning on the quad!

It's a male Polyphemus moth; just couldn't wait to post it!

Zinnia anticipation

I found these giant, gorgeous foxgloves on a bike ride yesterday. Really they were large enough to be badgergloves. I wanted to take them with me, but the blossoms were too fragile.
Also yesterday, our Kilnmaster, Kyle Houser, gave a lecture on his wonderfully kitschy, blobby, tattooed ceramic work. Below are some slides from the lecture:


And finally . . . I'm waiting in extreme anticipation for the blooming of my chartreuse zinnias. Perhaps my patience will be rewarded this week?

52nd Chautauqua Annual and some other cool art

Sunday was the opening of the 52nd Chautauqua Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art, as well as an exhibition of National Geographic photography by Annie Griffiths Belt, and some incredibly neat sculptures by Anne Lemanski. I had not seen her work until now, but clearly, I am a fan.These animals are sewn together from paper. The deer is made from aerial photographs of housing developments, and the pygmy hog (native to India) is made of paper with images of brushfires. Inside the pig's nose:
My favorite bird of the group, made of an astral map:
Materials included old illustrations, collage, film negatives, and road maps.
This piece (out in the sculpture garden, and part of the Annual) is by Roberly Bell, who is also coming to teach here this summer.

Week 1 begins

There's Stanley's painty bike , and below . . .

That blurry man with the gray jacket and white shirt is Garrison Keillor! Week 1 in Chautauqua started with his visit to the amphitheater, plus the 52nd Chautauqua Annual Exhibition (which I'll get to in the next post). Keillor's performance consisted of twenty minutes of singing (with some audience participation) peppered with jokes about Lutherans and Unitarians, followed by several long monologues about Lake Wobegon, one of which had to do with the necessity of making potato salad for family get-togethers from scratch. He wrote up a short web version of this skit on Salon.

By now, all the students are here. The ballerinas (also known as bunheads) have also arrived so that they can stomp around to loud music below our apartments when we are all trying to take naps. The art students just finished a two-day marathon of figure drawing, the instructors are all here, and we've started a regular class schedule. Stanley Lewis, one of the painting instructors, arrived yesterday with his painted bike in tow.

We had our first printmaking class today with about fifteen students, which was double what I expected - good for printmaking, not as good for our office, which will not have enough tools or proof paper for all of them until we can order more. Tom launched into an etching demo immediately and paused every ten minutes or so to allow me to interject some Rules of Communal Print Shop Usage, such as, Do Not Mix Bleach and Ammonia, or, I Just Repainted This Studio So Please Clean Up After Yourselves. We got a big new ventilation system installed in the print studio to cut down on brain cell loss from acid and solvent fumes, too. We mixed the first batch of acid up today, so I will be etching soon and hopefully have photos of some new work to post!

More photos before the storm

New chairs in the studios, and also the first flower of my wildflower window box to bloom this year.

Day 1 in empty Chautauqua

Rolled into Chautauqua today and took some photos of the place before it becomes overrun by vacationers and students . . .

For anyone not in the know, I am spending eight weeks at the Chautauqua Institution this summer. It's a community founded in the late 19th century as a sort of intellectual, artistic, and spiritual retreat, located on Chautauqua Lake in Western New York State.* In addition to lectures, concerts, and other events/facilities at the Institute, there are schools for dancers, musicians, actors, and artists. I'm working as the printmaking technician for the art school, which I attended last year.

* Note to all you out-of-staters and New York City-ans: Note that I do not say Upstate New York, because we are in the Buffalo/Western region over here. "Upstate" New York is the capital region north of New York City (ie., Albany). Just want to point that out.