Category Archives: Fine Art Philadelphia

Fine art created by Philadelphia area artists.

Hayley Tomlinson, Moore College of Art and Design Senior Exhibit 2012

Hayley Tomlinson, Moore College of Art & Design Senior Exhibit 2012

Artist, Hayley Tomlinson‘s installation at the Galleries at Moore for the Senior Show was grand in every way from concept to execution to presentation. The artist made a splash with her needle point award ribbons in the Philadelphia art blogs last year, her use of an old fashioned technology like crochet or needlepoint mashed into modern social networking is an on point comment on how information spreads. The information stored in knitting is powerful; fabric is a metaphor for storing information. Scan the QRCode in one of her fabric iPads and it will take you to her website. Hayley Tomlinson‘s senior thesis from Moore College of Art & Design, her degree is 3D Fine Arts, also takes on the fame side of art with an homage to Jeff Koons and the information stored in balloon dogs.

“My paper is about artists that I envy and who I want to be like one day. But, I’m also kind of jealous because of the money that they have and I really want to be rich and famous.”

Hayley Tomlinson, Moore College of Art & Design Senior Exhibit 2012

Hayley Tomlinson graduated magna cum laude and already has a job as a graphic designer in Philadelphia. She told DoN, “Now that I have this full time job I can find a way to support my separate art career. So, I guess we’ll see, I’m moving to a new place, starting a new job, I need to organize myself and figure out what I want to make. I won the Blick Art Award so I want to go to Blick Art Materials and buy a lot of markers and paper and draw things and see where that takes me.”

Hayley Tomlinson, Moore College of Art & Design Senior Exhibit 2012

“I made the bunny as the poor man’s Jeff Koons, it’s stuffed and I made it myself and I can’t pay other people to make it for me. So it’s stuff that’s very soft, I put it on cement blocks because I can’t have a concrete pedestal like Jeff Koons can. The iPads I made are also about envy, it’s more focussed on things I have a love/hate relationship with and that like, ‘I hate myself for loving these things’. So, I’m going to keep working with those ideas that I make.”

“I’ve got a degree, I’ve got a job, I’ve got ideas in my head, so, it will be good.”

Bob Jackson, 100 Faces of Bob at Off the Wall Gallery

Marjorie Grigonis, Kristine Flannery at Third Street Gallery

Peter Cunicelli, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit

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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

[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”