Category Archives: Lectures

Gesshel at Jed Williams Studio, Printmaking Demonstration

Gesshel at Jed Williams Studio, Printmaking Demonstration

Gesshel at Jed Williams Studio, Printmaking Demonstration 8/22/2012

Philadelphia artist Barbara Gesshel is a printmaker who combines excellent drawing skills with multiple printmaking processes. Old planks of wood become reliefs carved with images of nature in reverse, an old headboard is repurposed and carved away to reveal a family portrait, mono-prints become statement pieces…at Jed Williams Studio, 615 Bainbridge Street, Gesshel will demonstrate several printmaking techniques tonight, August 22nd, followed by refreshments and question and answer session. You may get a chance to even make your own print plus you will get a preview of Gesshel‘s upcoming solo show at Jed Williams Studio in October. Tickets are $7.00

Read more at SideArts.com 

http://gesshelprintmakingdemo.eventbrite.com

Through SideArts.comDoN is offering online and in-person one-on-one consulting services to visual and craft artists and art businesses.  Read all about it here.

Written and Photographed by DoN Brewer

Follow DoN on Twitter @DoNNieBeat58

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Ivette Spradlin, Everything Changed, Then Changed Again at Center for Emerging Visual Artists

Ivette Spradlin, Everything Changes, Then Changed Again at Center for Emerging Visual Artists

Ivette SpradlinShuanna with Child, Braddock PA, inkjet print, Everything Changes, Then Changed Again at Center for Emerging Visual Artists

The Center for Emerging Visual Artists has had artist exchange exhibits with the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts for the past five years.  The current show which ends April 20th is Ivette Spradlin‘s Everything Changes, Then Changed Again, is an exhibit of large scape black and white “portraits”.  Ivette Spradlin has ties to Philadelphia because she went to grad school and taught here at Tyler School of Art, graduating in 2007 after which she briefly moved back to Atlanta then on to Pittsburgh. When she began working there Ivette realized she needed to build a community of friends and figure out a way to meet people. Her photography project came about from the need and desire to connect to people and wasn’t originally intended to be shown but more of a way to get access to people.  The collection was first shown at Pittsburgh FilmmakersCFEVA is the second venue for the collection. 

I wanted to start shooting portraits again so I started asking a couple of people that I knew there and it kind of built up from there.   I would meet people and ask if I could take their portrait and I would have them choose a space and location and let them know that I was looking for a space in transition.   Some of these people are in some sort of transition in their own life and I felt I was, so, this was a way of documenting that transition for me and for them.  And getting to know Pittsburgh.”Ivette Spradlin at Center for Emerging Visual Artists

Ivette Spradlin at Center for Emerging Visual Artists 

The Center for Emerging Visual Artists has had artist exchange exhibits with the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts for the past five years.  The current show which ends April 20th is Ivette Spradlin‘s Everything Changes, Then Changed Again, is an exhibit of large scape black and white “portraits”.  Ivette Spradlin has ties to Philadelphia because she went to grad school and taught here at Tyler School of Art, graduating in 2007 after which she briefly moved back to Atlanta then on to Pittsburgh. When she began working there Ivette realized she needed to build a community of friends and figure out a way to meet people. Her photography project came about from the need and desire to connect to people and wasn’t originally intended to be shown but more of a way to get access to people.  The collection was first shown at Pittsburgh FilmmakersCFEVA is the second venue for the collection.

Ivette Spradlin at Center for Emerging Visual Artists

Ivette Spradlin, Heather in Marchester, Pittsburgh PA, inkjet print, 42″ x 52″

I think that those ideas about adapting are always in my head  and that’s definitely what this work was for me, adapting to Pittsburgh and learning to be a person there, an artist there, a teacher there, a friend.   When I first started it, I really wanted the figure to be really small and encompassed in a landscape, part of that is a visual thing but Pittsburgh’s landscape it can kind of tower over you, there are a lot of mountains, and I wanted it to feel like you’re enveloped in the landscape, almost a little bit lost in it.   Then some of the turns (of the subject) we came up with are kind of an optimism, a hope, like the turn of a transition, like their life was looking towards something else.  Some of them are getting divorced, some of them are having babies, so I think that had a lot to do with that.”  Most of Ivette Spradlin’s portraits were collaborations with her subjects as far as setting and wardrobe but sometimes she would be led to a certain spot and learn some of the subject’s personal history.   “We shot in many locations for each person and that’s the part where the photographer makes the decisions, like where you’re going to photograph them?  And where they’d look good, what’s nice aesthetically.”

Written and photographed by DoN Brewer 

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Recommended reading from Ivette Spradlin

Apocalypse Soon: 2012 @ Da Vinci Art Alliance

DoN Brewer I Was Here Apocalypse Soon: 2012

 I Was Here, DoN Brewer, digital photograph @ Da Vinci Art Alliance‘s Apocalypse Soon: 2012.

With money bombs, pandemics, oil spills, World War III fresh in our consciousness and the 2nd Wave Depression looming, Apocalyse Soon: 2012 is prescient, nihilistic funk-a-rama drama.  Curator Dr Deb Miller and Juror & Awards Judge, Elin Danien, Consulting Scholar, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology gleaned a strange harvest of occult dreamscapes, blob-a-zoid sculptures and paranoid visions of the end of the future.

“I know it’s the last day on earth
We’ll be together while the planet dies
I know it’s the last day on earth
We’ll never say goodbye

Marilyn MansonThe Last Day on Earth

Curator’s Tour, Lecture, and Opening Awards Reception:  Sunday, August 8, 1pm-4 pm(doors open at 12:30)

Brujo de la Mancha, Mexican Identity in the XXIst Century
Debra Miller, PowerPoint lecture, Calendar Cycles of Creation and Destruction in Pre-Columbian Art
Debra Miller, Curator’s tour, Apocalypse Soon:  2012

 

Photo by DoN Brewer.

The Sargent Method presented by Paul DuSold – A DoN Brewer Video

Paul DuSold and DoN have been working on this video since the Winter.  From a lecture series presented in artist Francis Galante‘s uber-cool studio / loft in Old City, Philadelphia, the video is a glimpse into the five hour demonstration Paul presented to a class of about 25 lucky artists.  DuSold explains the Sargent Method of painting and gives a superb painting demonstration while talking – a trait found in PAFA trained teachers.

The High Definition version of the Paul DuSold movie is on DoN’s YouTube channel.

The Sargent Method presented by Paul DuSold - A DoN Brewer Video

 

Envisioning Henry IV, Part 1 @ Lantern Theater – Da Vinci Art Alliance

Ona Kalstein - Henry IV, Part 1 @ Lantern Theater Company

Ona Kalstein by her three entries in the Envisioning Henry IV, Part 1  in the Black Box Gallery @ St. Stevens Theater @ 10th & Ludlow Sts, Lantern Theater Company.  Ona designed images signified with memes, language and typography in a trio of drawings; child-like blood drops spurt from the cracked crown, a “garment made of blood” is saturated with droplets while the King wails and blood soaks the pea fields of the Battle of Shrewsbury with red tear-drops, the simple shapes communicating on multiple levels.  Ona designs hippy-style typography into the image as if they are pages in a coloring book for kids with sophisticated adult language.

June Blumberg @ Henry IV, Part 1

June Blumberg‘s exuberant composition of the hard partying gang hanging around Prince Hal are a buffoonish bunch of clowns – thuggish, scary clowns with swords and big smiles.  Blumberg won an honorable mention for her painting from the jury committee…the naive primitivism & quirky composition is fun but not jokey.

Alden Cole @ Henry IV, Part 1 Lantern Theater Program

Alden Cole attended Lantern Theater Company‘s Art Director, Charles McMann‘s, lecture @ Da Vinci Art Alliance in late February since the play had everyone scratching their heads, Henry IV, Part 1 is not one of Shakespeare‘s better known plays, and the lecture sent Cole into an exploration of the Seven Deadly Sins and how they relate to the characters in the play – Hal is slovenly, Falstaff is corpulent and Hotspur is haughty – all based on self-portraits.  To develop the composition Alden acts out the facial expressions, photographs himself, composes the scene in Photoshop then paints in oils on an enormous canvas.  Acedia Luxuria Superbia.

Envisioning Henry IV, Part 1 - Da Vinci Art Alliance @ Lantern Theater

Lilliana Didovic, Lilliana Didovic & David Foss @ Envisioning Henry IV, Part 1.  Didovic painted abstract weapons and Foss layered and destroyed paint to visualize wounded flesh, the metaphors and significations are not forced but real.  The exhibition is loosely divided between “abstract” and “representational” art, like a battle of the art styles, David’s painting is visceral and scarred like a mutilated warrior and Lilliana’s gentle coloration is a contradiction in terms – beautiful weapons.

 Mina Smith-Segal @ Henry IV, Part1

Mina Smith-Segal with her award winning painting, the brutalist watercolor truly captures the tension & fear of battle.

DoN Brewer @ Henry IV, Part 1 Lantern Theater Company

Hal by DoN, oil on canvas.  Photo by Morris Klein.  DoN Brewer used a variety of media to draw from such as fitness magazines, hairy bear blogs and Google to find inspiration for a new painting based on the play, after being creatively blocked around painting, having a theme to work inspired DoN to paint again.  DoN saw Hal through Jersey Shore eyes with “the situation” and “GTL” representing the young prince, the hairy bear as Falstaff and a leather bar of conspirators based on a painting by John Cawse.

Envisioning Henry IV, Part 1 in the Black Box Theater in the Saint Steven’s Theater is running in conjunction with the Lantern Theater Company’s production of the Shakespeare historical play.

 Envisioning Henry IV, Part 1 - Da Vinci Art Alliance @ St. Stephen’s Theater