Category Archives: Mixed Media Art

Mixed media art by Philadelphia artists.

Eric Hall, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit

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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Certain Circuits 2.1 Bookazine and Blog

W.G. Middleton, Body Aesthetic at Twenty-Two Gallery

Stop Slavery Now: A Conversation About Human Trafficking

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Eva Preston, Judgement Day, mixed media at Stop Slavery Now: A Conversation About Human Trafficking

Bonnie MacAllister and Joanna Fulginiti know each other through the Women’s Caucus for Art and worked together at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rachel Udell, also a member in the show, worked at the museum as well. Bonnie explained to DoN, “We got into F & N Gallery because we were curated into a show…and we talked to the gallery director and he with a wonderful woman named Jess McCann invited us and donated the space to us, it was this beautiful collaboration. We were able to extend the call beyond our WCA members and got work from as far away as Atlanta, we have a film that was lent to us for the night, and the dolls will be in the window for a week.” Sorry, little DoNSters it’s taken a while to get this story together, this event was April First Friday, the dolls are at http://phila-wca.blogspot.com/2011/08/call-for-art-rag-dolls.html

The Ragdoll Project is meant to create awareness for human trafficking, they invited participants from different workshops, in West Philly through Spiral Q Puppet Theater, Follicle Hair Studio on South Street. Joanna described the production to DoN, “We set up sewing machines, we used donated fabrics and we just made dolls. The dolls will be sold and all the money will go to Dawn’s Place which is a shelter for victims of human trafficking in Philadelphia. Dawn’s Place is the only place in Philadelphia that helps victims of sex trafficking specifically. And they do need money, they need donations, so we’re going to sell all the dolls and donate all the money.”

Rachel Udell, I’m Tired, digital image and Danielle Ferrell, effraye’, screen print at Stop Slavery Now: A Conversation About Human Trafficking

“The dolls were made by the Women’s Caucus for Art and other people that come to our workshops. I get dolls sent to me in the mail everyday from people who heard about it on www.theragdollproject.org That will show you how you can make a doll and donate it, anyone can make a doll and it is a donation, so they won’t get it back but we’ll sell it and the money will go to the victims of trafficking.” Jess McCann, the co-curator of the show is part of the Philadelphia Modern Stop Slavery Group, she and Joanna Fulginiti selected art by women and intended the installation to have an educational aspect. “We have certain statistics or quotes that we felt were very important to capture about the issue that would inform the people something that they might not be familiar with. A lot are quotes from Johns who purchase sex, statistics about who is prosecuted; rarely are the pimps or traffickers prosecuted it’s usually the women, the women themselves. Who are often victims.”

Beth Prusky, This is How It Feels, charcoal and acrylic on archival mylar at Stop Slavery Now: A Conversation About Human Trafficking

“They wind up going in jail, that’s something people need to know about. The violence like this piece by Rachel Udell, this is about the violence women in prostitution face. They have a violent life.” Joanna points out a particular quote, “A study of 475 people in prostitution finds 62% reported having been raped, 73% reported having experienced physical assault and 92% said they wanted to escape prostitution.” Joanna is passionate about the subject, “It’s a violent life and the violence comes from the pimps and the Johns. People have this idea of prostitution like it Julia Roberts, Pretty Woman, glamorous, but it’s not. It’s full of violence. That’s what the first two pieces are about, the inner turmoil.”

Lauretta Paraguassu, Children of the Night, watercolor and ink on paper at Stop Slavery Now: A Conversation About Human Trafficking

Quote from a John, “She gave up her rights when she accepted my money.” Joanna dismisses this myth, “You know, men just kind of doing this like it’s that old boy’s club kind of thing, ‘there’s nothing wrong with this’, ‘this is how you treat women’, like blindly going along with this male idea.”

Megan Kelly, Body Monster, collaged painting on paper at Stop Slavery Now: A Conversation About Human Trafficking

Joanna Fulginiti, Ragdolls, mixed media at Stop Slavery Now: A Conversation About Human Trafficking

Joanna Fulginiti‘s painting started The Ragdoll Project, “I did that piece because these girls are just being treated like rag dolls, they’re not even human beings. They can be tossed away after they’re used and I started that and once we starting thinking of a project we could do to raise money for the victims and someone commented on my piece like, ‘Oh, maybe we can work with rag dolls.’ They’re not hard to make so that’s how we started with this.”

Stop Slavery Now: A Conversation About Human Trafficking

Joanna explained the context of the art, “Most people don’t know that the average age of a prostitute is 13 years old. Which is so scary, this is a children’s issue. Pimps are luring teenagers into this. The average age of entry is thirteen and actually the average lifespan of a girl after she enters prostitution is six years. So it’s stealing their childhood, that’s what these pieces are about. Suicide, homicide, like many of these girls are homeless girls, they may have lived in foster families their whole lives, so it’s not like they even know where they are. Some of these women became prostitutes and no one even came looking for them or cared where they are.”

Joyce Ellen Weinstein, Blind Leading the Blind: Captured, screen print/linoleum block print at Stop Slavery Now: A Conversation About Human Trafficking

“You know I don’t think in the justice system they’re seen as victims. Yet. Certain states are more progressive than others but a lot of times in law enforcement they consider the women the criminals when a lot of them are forced into this. They’re victims. This is about treating girls as criminals. There is hope you know? These women can start over.”

Alison Altergott, Saturday’s Child, mixed media at Stop Slavery Now: A Conversation About Human Trafficking

According to Joanna, “The more you read about a country where it’s legal versus a country where it’s illegal, if you read about what actually happens, it’s very, very clear that legalizing it, increases demand. It normalizes the activity. so, them more people are prone to do it and there’s so much demand they can’t get enough women who want to do this on their own. They have to get, well – if it’s Amsterdam, it’s from Eastern Europe and they have to start trafficking because they just can’t keep up with the demand. If you legalize prostitution, your demand goes up so much that you have to force women into it just to keep up with it…there’s this idea that if you legalize it you can control it and make it safer but it’s almost impossible. It’s so violent. How do you make it safer? When a John beats up a prostitute, how do you stop that? The facts show when you legalize it, it increases demand and you’re putting all these girls at risk for being trafficked.”

Written and photographed by DoN Brewer

Read more at Side Arts Philadelphia Art Blog

Thread of Thought, Tara O’Brien Artist’s Talk at CFEVA

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Thread of Thought, Tara O’Brien at CFEVA

“I came to book arts as a librarian’s daughter and my poor father practically had a heart attack when he found out I was applying to grad school to do book arts. ‘Those are those nut jobs that take books and nail them to canvasses and call them art.'” said Tara O’Brien during her artist talk at The Center for Emerging Visual Artists. “A lot of what I was dealing with in Graduate School was making sure that that’s not what I’m doing, I’m not desecrating the Book. In fact, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what is the future of the book, where is it going? In 2003 we were just getting into a huge tipping point with the Internet and you went there instead of to a book, unless you were my father. A lot of that time was spent thinking, ‘What is a book? What can it be? What’s the conceptual quality of the book?’ And so for the early pieces in the show, these two Thread of Thought and Plenum in the back is what could it be?”

Thread of Thought, Tara O’Brien at CFEVA

“Plenum, for example, is a term physicists use to describe all of the matter in the universe. So, what is a book, what can it be? It can be anything in the Universe. As I was talking earlier about Plenum the other thing I wanted you to do is approach the book when it was closed and when you open it it reveals a completely different structure inside, a surprise in finding a book. Which is what you get when you approach a novel and find that that stellar writing you kind of think, ‘Oh, they wrote that so beautifully.’ So, how can you combine the two in art and literature? How does a book work physically? How do you read a book page by page and how do you follow the threads of what the author is trying to get through to you? And then you can break it down to how are the symbols on the page giving you this linking. And that’s why I chose crocheting instead of knitting because each chain in a crochet is a link from one to the next one but you can build so much from a crochet chain. Both of these books are a single thread all the way through the entire book, the whole narrative, if you will, from the thread references as a you read a book. Like when you’ve gone fifty pages and and you don’t remember turning a single page because you’ve gotten so caught up in this single thread.”

Thread of Thought, Tara O’Brien at CFEVA, Hyperbolic Space

“Or you get to the point in a book here where you do realize your turning pages faster than you think.” Tara demonstrated how many of the pages pull the others with the thread and pages fly by like a magicians deck of cards. “And finally you almost turn in junior English denouement. So those books lead to thinking metaphysically, ‘What is the future of the book?’ I have no idea. Do I think books are going out of style? No. Not a chance, they just have a chance to evolve now. We’ve got eReaders, they’re here to stay, have fun with them but come back to these. The next group is the little tiny ones they all fall under the title Entelechy, Aristotle’s philosophy that every entity has a force that drives it to self-fulfillment and I just really like that idea. I’d like to know what this force is? What is it made up of? How does it break down? And in making these books I found that opening a page spread in a book is also kind of a metaphor for life.”

Thread of Thought, Tara O’Brien at CFEVA

“If you do these stitches you can see the full spread of a chapter or a moment to a link in your life. For example, as of now, all of February is one page spread for me, I don’t know what’s happening right now in this page spread but I can turn the page back in time and look at what happened in February in my life, and it’s clear now. Whereas in February I had no idea. A little crazy, right? I was really excited about this show because it offered me a chance to do new work. I do a lot of knitting, a lot of crocheting and I’m interested in a lot of things, I’m a library conservator so I get to look at a lot of old stuff, at ancient patterns and I get to look at old cookbooks and all these things that people have been doing forever. How are we going to interpret it?”

“My Winter project this year was to knit a pair of Latvian mittens, in Latvian culture for years and years and years the girls know they will marry at age sixteen and they make these incredibly complex mittens, one pair for every member of the family of her future husband. So, she’s been knitting five hundred pairs of mittens by the time she’s sixteen. They’re complex and double stranded and they start knitting when they’re five years old, it’s part of the culture.”

“Fast forward to 1995, and we have a mathematician from Latvia who finally solves the problem of making a model for hyperbolic space. So, what’s hyperbolic space? Well I’m going to do my best, but, it’s a mathematical thing – continuously negative space. It’s the ruffles on your lettuce, and what she was able to do was disprove Euclid’s theorum, given one straight line and a point off of the line there is only one other parallel line only. But this theorum doesn’t work on a globe but nobody could prove how it didn’t work and why not? In the 50’s they started experimenting with paper models but paper if you cut it, it falls apart.”

“So this person from a knitting culture sat down and said, ‘I know how to do this.’ And so she took these specifically exponentially increased, this one is six to one, you can see these two lines, when you take this continuously negative space and fold it you can bring two lines together and you get a set of parallel lines. As you go on with these, it takes forever to make a row, and then you take another fold and lay it next to that and now you have three parallel lines.

So, this is important for me because it references back to my idea of linking and connecting everything, here’s a woman who just knitted all the time because she was so practiced at it, all of a sudden these higher level ideas were coming out her just regular handwork and solving really massive problems. This book talks about the connection of this handwork from just the regular linking these little moments, these tiny little pearls of brilliant thoughts and made some coherence out of these higher thoughts. I hope that that makes sense.”

Fiber Philadelphia 2012

Thread of Thought at Center for Emerging Visual Artists through March 23rd.

Written and photographed by DoN Brewer, DoNArTNeWs Philadelphia Art News Blog Google and Wikipedia was used extensively to write this article.

Read more about FiberPhiladelphia2012 at Side Arts with Cassandra Hoo‘s excellent article.

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