Monthly Archives: May 2012

Peter Cunicelli, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit

Peter Cunicelli, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit

915 Spring Garden Art Studios hosts an artist’s open studio tour in the Spring and during Philadelphia Open Studio Tours in the Fall. Spike the biker, Jeff the photographer and DoN visited the artist’s studio building on a sunny but chilly Sunday afternoon, starting on the fifth floor and working our way through the studios that were open. Frankly by the time we got to the third floor we had been there three hours and we found respite in the lounge area near the old timey caged elevator. Our art crawling trio realized this was more than could be accomplished in one visit, there is just so much to see and DoN loves interviewing artists which made our visit take longer. But DoN doesn’t like to just pop in and out of studios without engaging the artists in conversation.

Peter Cunicelli, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit

As a veteran of Philadelphia Open Studio Tours, DoN is aware of the extra work required to host guests in your workspace, the least DoN can do is talk to the artists. And as this series of blog posts attests, there are lessons to be learned. With a bit of renewed energy the art crawlers went to the first floor to visit the inspiring studio of long time 915 Spring Garden Art Studios, Peter Cunicelli. Peter is one of the first artists DoN blogged about on DoNArTNeWs way back in October 2008. Since that time the ceramics artist has moved his studio from an upper floor to the first and the extra effort our weary art crawl crew summoned to visit his art space was well worth it.

Peter Cunicelli, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit, photograph by Jeff Stroud

Peter Cunicelli explained, “Everything here is hand built, everything’s slab form built, including other than the stand-up vases, that’s much more random. The vases are more precise, they’re templates.” DoN noted how unique each piece is an asked if the artist ever makes a series of popular styles? “…some of them, I might do a lot of them, I’m not crazy about the glaze on that one but I might redo it with a more matte glaze. Sometimes I’ll do multiples just to do multiples, you know, each one gets better. And other times I’ll do a one off, sometimes they’re too involved and I don’t want to do another.” The space is beautiful with the aspirational ceramics everywhere, DoN wondered if the artist gets inspired by his own creations? “I do, I don’t want to sound narcissistic, but a lot of those are pieces I could never sell.”

Peter Cunicelli, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit, photograph by Jeff Stroud

“Sometimes it’s because there’s something wrong with them, whether it’s the glaze or a crack, or like the glaze on the green one chipped off. But I like having them there, it reminds me I keep having to like what I’m doing. There’s a lot of form up there (referring to a high shelf loaded with various vases) that I like, so I try to reuse it or do something with it. The really original stuff, almost twelve years old, I would never sell. I also have them at home, I just like being surrounded by them. I was never formally trained so I just ran with it. Do you know Doug Herren? He’s Philadelphia, his work is amazing. When I started he was doing very functional work, thrown work and a combination of thrown and hand built. I love the fullness of his forms and crisp lines, so I started trying in my own way to mimic that, that’s how I ended up developing my own style. Now he does stuff that’s very industrial, it’s all sculptural, really beautiful work.”

Peter Cunicelli, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit, photograph by Jeff Stroud

DoN asked where Peter Cunicelli exhibits? “Right now, Show of Hands, 1006 Pine Street, but this year I want to get out there, get into some galleries. It has to be out of my zip code but, Show of Hands has an amazing salesman. I always admired his eye, he always has amazing stuff. I went in one day, I was with a friend of mine and I went up meekly to him and asked if knew of any craft shows or does anyone ever bring you work? He said he does but sometimes artists have delusions of grandeur. I thought, ‘Alright, I’m going for broke now’, he asked about my work and I said I have a website. So he went to the website and pulled up one image and went, ‘Gasp!’, and I wanted to say, ‘Delusions of grandeur, eh?'”

Peter Cunicelli, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit

“So he said to me to bring six pieces, then I got a call asking for nine pieces, and then ten. I think I brought in eleven pieces the first time, he’s a salesman, a really good salesman. Most of the pottery he has in there is very traditional, so mine sticks out. And I like having that, I like it being different. I don’t want to be the best, I always say I want to be the bottom of the barrel because I want to be surrounded by greatness, but the ceramic work there is very good and very traditional. Which is nice, and I think it’s one of the reasons he’s able to sell it, it’s a good place, he’s got good craft.”

Peter Cunicelli told DoN that he has yet to sell anything from his website, using it as a portfolio of his work. He also used social media, like e-mail newsletter and FaceBook, to advertise the open studio.

Read more about 915 Spring Garden artists:

Written and photographed by DoN Brewer except where noted

Thank you to Contributing Photographer, Jeff Stroud

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Katya Held, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit

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Katya Held, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit

Katya Held‘s painting studio at 915 Spring Garden Street displays a number or works in transition to a realist completion. The painter’s studio was open to the public for the art studio building’s Spring open studio tour, a rare opportunity to visit artists in their work space. Katya is an alumni of Studio Incamminati, the portraits are based in the proven methods the Nelson Shanks school teaches, with strong grounds of color fields layered with considered gradients of hue and impeccable brushwork. DoN asked Katya what her experiences at the prestigious art school was like for her? “I studied at Studio Incamminati for four years and I’m a Fellow now. I studied with the instructors that Nelson Shanks taught directly… but I do get critiques from him when he’s available.”

Katya Held, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit

How did you come to study at Studio Incamminati? “I was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and I saw his work. I didn’t understand who was capable of painting, utilizing techniques of old masters, and making it look like contemporary realist work.” Rather than study in Italy at the Florence Academy, Katya discovered the art school in Philadelphia, her studies in Steiglitz St. Petersburg Academy of Art prepared her to study the high level of technique she desired to master. “A lot of the work you see here on the wall is due to the vigorous program.” After the artist discovered the school through their open studios she never left.

Katya Held, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit

Many of the painting are alla prima, portraits that are developed within time constraints, often as preliminary works for more formal portraits. “It’s indirect, multi-layered, more depth, more information that you’re after and that’s a long process.” A five hour sitting can turn into a painting that takes months to complete. “Something that’s fast and spontaneous, there’s more emotion. For example all these construction workers, I recruited them. I saw them smoking on their break and I thought, ‘I have to make a painting ot them.’ Which I’m still working on it, I showed it to the public for the first time today.”

Katya Held, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit

Katya Held explained how she coaxed the models to pose. “I saw there was an ocean there, so much interesting color, the flashing of the light off the ocean on the flesh that I wanted to see them by the water. So, every one of them posed for me for about two to two and half hours. So those are the studies I did and I brought them to my Philadelphia studio and then recreated the atmosphere. These are guys that came to St. Petersburg, Russia, from very far away, from the middle of the country, to make a living. They all have high education but they abandoned their families because they needed to feed them. So, here is sort of their lunch break or a smoke break and everybody’s thinking about that part of life they are from. They are resting in that mode of connecting with their memories.”

Read more about DoN‘s 915 Spring Garden Studio Visits:

Anne Saint Peter

Eric Hall

Laura Adams

Written and photographed by DoN Brewer

[disclosure page] All ad links in this blog post direct to Amazon.com

Anne Saint Peter, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit

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Anne Saint Peter, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit

When the Spiker, Jeff the photographer and DoN arrived in Anne Saint Peter‘s studio on our open studio tour at 915 Spring Garden Art Studios, the collection of unusual photographic prints glowing in the afternoon sun fascinated our art crawling trio. Jeff the photographer shoots with a beautiful Nikon camera, DoN has his trusty Kodak and iPhone for Instagramming, and the Spike-man uses his iPhone camera to document his life through photography. So, when the photo-geeks saw Anne Saint Peter‘s studio there were a lot of questions to ask about photography.

Anne Saint Peter, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit, photograph by Jeff Stroud

DoN asked Anne Saint Peter about the process of printing images on metal? “I was looking to do panoramic photography, I wanted a panoramic camera but they were tremendously expensive because of the lens to do that, so I figured out how to do it by using multiple exposures. And then I was looking for an interesting alternative to inkjets and I found that some people were printing on aluminum and I thought,’That’s sound cool.” But how does that work?

Anne Saint Peter, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit

“It has to have a special coating, the aluminum, in this case it’s roofing material, you have to clean it it, basically scrub it down. You coat it and things working out well it goes evenly. Actually the Epson ink-jets are really good with this type of thing. They can even take cardboard. So, it’s an interesting thing. The bottom ones I got commercially printed because their starting to do it commercially, wedding photographers like it because of the reflective quality. But they’re doing full color photographs and full color photographs done like that on aluminum pop. But if I send them these files they turn out totally differently.”

“I don’t like coating aluminum, it seems kind of a waste of why you’re doing it. They also make what they call metallic paper which gives you some of that pop but the problem with me is that when you cover it with glass you sort of lose it, like what’s the point? I’m trying to figure out how to show it without glass.”

Anne Saint Peter, 915 Spring Garden

The trio of photo geeks were fascinated with the box camera set up in the studio. Anne Saint Peter said, “It’s an eight by ten, the glass plates are under here. You just slide them in and open this up (remove the lens cover) and you’re good to go. This is actually such a small lens, in terms of aperture, you have plenty of time, it takes longer so it works out really well. The problem is the focussing and things like that because the image that you see on here is upside down and reversed. So, it’s interesting, I can’t tell if people are smiling or not. You know, like if you’re doing a portrait and it’s a little hard, if somebody moves you’re out of the pool.”

Anne Saint Peter, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit, photograph by Jeff Stroud

Anne Saint Peter continued, “But when you get it, people who are good at, I’m just not, I don’t do it enough, I can do a smaller one, 4 x 5.” DoN asked if the camera uses glass plates? “No, I use film. You can use the glass plates but then the glass plates have to be coated and processed within a couple minutes, finished in a couple minutes. And that’s, I love the images, but it’s too much to try and control. And what killed me in the end is they were coating them with shellac and alcohol over a flame. And I was out of the pool right there. Shellac sticks to everything, everything’s stuck to your hand, how do you get it even? The answer is you just practice. Over an open flame which could start a fire any minute with glass that’s going to break. No. To me printing with inkjet on aluminum is a lot easier”

Anne Saint Peter, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit, photograph by Jeff Stroud

Written and photographed by DoN Brewer except where noted.

Thank you to contributing photographer Jeff Stroud.

Eric Hall, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit

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Eric Hall, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit

Eric Hall has maintained a studio at 915 Spring Garden for more than two years, he used to work at home but desired to create large scale paintings. The high ceilinged bright studio permits the painter to go big, there’s a triptych of bridges that’s enormous. Eric Hall has figured out the largest canvas he can fit through the door – 9 feet high and ten feet wide. DoN commented that that’s a lot of paint? “Yeah, I just need a big idea.” Eric Hall‘s current fascination is a series of paintings based on a glass pyramid. The Spiker, Jeff the photographer and DoN were all impressed by the bold color fields, a visual feast for the eyes during our open studio art crawl.

Eric Hall, 915 Spring Garden

Referring to the canvas on his easel Eric said, “This is acrylic and oil pastels. Did you know oil pastels were originated for Pablo Picasso? He said he wanted something which would give it color and the ability to draw. So he went to Sennelier , his friend and asked them to come up with something and oil pastels is what they came up with. Several companies make them but only Sennelier Oil Pastel has come up with something to fix it with. And they’ve got it heavily patented, so? Remember, oil pastels never really dry.”

Eric Hall, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit

Eric Hall explained that oil pastels are highly susceptible to damage, “Oil pastels have to be covers with glass. But Sennelier has come up with this spray so it’s more like oil paint when it dries. It surprised me because it was only like 1923, I thought it was a much older medium than that. It was about the time Claude Monet was working, his garden was well established, that’s about the time he had his cataract operation.”

Eric Hall, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit

Eric Hall‘s glass pyramid paintings are based on a gift which he found beautiful and inspiring, he has created a series of almost Warholized paintings of the object, creating a sense of celebrity. The studio is filled with large crystal images in glowing color, like Jim Dine‘s bathrobe paintings, Eric Hall‘s crystal pyramids evoke emotions like love, desire and hope. Another large painting glowing in the sunny studio made DoN think of Gerhard Richter, the canvas could have been large quantities of paint squeegeed across the canvas but it’s actually a huge landscape of canyons lit with bright colors of shadow and light. Eric Hall has big ideas.

Read about 915 Spring Garden Art Studios artiss:

Katya Held

Anne Saint Peter

Laura D. Adams

DoNArTNeWs Philadelphia Art News Blog

Written and photographed by DoN Brewer

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Laura D. Adams, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit

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Laura D. Adams, 915 Spring Garden Art Studios, Artists’ House Gallery

915 Spring Garden Art Studios held their Spring open studio tour April 29th, Spike the biker, Jeff the photographer and DoN converged on the fifth floor of the art studio building with the idea of visiting each floor’s artists. The old industrial building, by the decaying aqua duct on Spring Garden Street, is divided into studio spaces and has hosted Philadelphia artists for thirty years. For a time the studios were open only once a year, in the Fall now coinciding with Philadelphia Open Studio Tours city wide art crawl, but many artists in the building opened up for a Springtime tour offering a chance to meet the artists in their work spaces. The first studio our trio visited was Laura D. Adams, a self described realist painter, displaying a group of paintings she had readied for an upcoming show at Artists’ House Gallery in Old City arrayed along the sunny wall of her space, offering us a great preview for her art show opening June 1st.

Laura D. Adams, 915 Spring Garden Art Studios

DoN asked Laura D. Adams what she was doing to prepare for the show at Artists’ House Gallery? “I first agreed to do the show back in May, so I started preparing the work for it, really, in July. I started doing the prep work, planning what work would be in it. I’ve just been working steadily all year towards it, there will be some older works from last year but there will be ten or twelve new paintings. Which is a lot for me to do in a year, I work really slowly.”

DoN questioned Laura about her realist style and if she had a theory of what’s real or not? “Less now than before, I used to be interested in a kind of almost pushing that boundary. Like that painting of the door that’s on the floor. I’m not doing as much trompe l’oeil as I used to, that’s from about three years ago and last year I did some 3D sculptural paintings, they were rolls of tape where I cut them out in the shape of a roll of tape and then I painted the whole thing, all the text, price tags, to look exactly like a roll of tape. I did four of them and then hung them on the wall. The same kind of thing, trying to play with our perception of reality.”

Laura D. Adams, 915 Spring Garden Art Studios

Is there a distinction between realism and trompe l’oeil? Laura D. Adams said, “I kind of veered off, it’s still trompe l’oeil, in the sense that it’s really solid space, I’m still interested in really compressing the picture plane. But I got really interested in patterns, so that’s kind of been a thing this year. Fabric and textiles, I love detail, so that’s a way to explore a lot of detail.”