Category Archives: Philadelphia Open Studio Tours

Philadelphia Open Studio Tours

Bluestone Fine Art Gallery: Amie Potsic, Danielle Bursk and Gregory Brellochs – Lay of the Land

Bluestone Fine Art Gallery: Amie Potsic, Danielle Bursk and Gregory Brellochs

DoN had not been to Old City in a long while for a First Friday art crawl, parking and traffic sucks, so, DoN took the bus. $2.00! with live entertainment included ; ), and a chance to watch the cityscape go by, delivering DoN to the intersection of Market & 3rd Streets right into the hubbub of street artists, musicians and even a puppeteer capitalizing on the monthly crowds of young couples and art lovers. A short stroll down Third to Vine Street is the new Bluestone Fine Art Gallery, just around the corner from the Painted Bride. The current show includes work by three artists – Amie Potsic‘s photographs, Danielle Bursk‘s ink on paper and Gregory Brellochs‘ charcoal and ink drawings. The artists are using different media but the theme of the wonders of nature run through the show like a stream of consciousness.

Bluestone Fine Art Gallery: Amie Potsic

Amie Potsic, Made in China: Yangtze River, archival pigment print

“My mission is to create a process, an action comes from that, whether it’s experiencing more art or it’s doing something political. That’s the hope, I mean, so, you see something like this, you see something in these images and you have a conversation about it, then you see images about that in the news, then you get an e-mail about signing a petition, and then you see a thing about going to a demonstration and you do something!” Amie Potsic‘s scroll-like photographs of trees have a sense of being foreign, the Chinese calligraphy, done by a poet in Taiwan, and the perpendicular typography subtly leads the mind’s eye across the ocean to a distant land. But these trees are probably shot right here in Philly presenting the bewildering notion that maybe China owns these trees and therefore made them.

“Because it’s a cumulative effect of impressions and influences and with all that, nobody does anything. Part of the reason I do this work, some of it was done in Rittenhouse Square, the most chic section of Philly, and there was a very graphic demonstration by a Chinese group that follow the Falun Gong religion, which essentially is Buddhism. But you’re not allowed to practice organized religion in China in that way. So people were jailed and tortured physically and there was a demonstration in the middle of Rittenhouse Square with patients on gurneys being mock-tortured, it was shocking, I got the materials they were handing out and that made me reference my audience with the Dalai Lama and learning about what happened in Tibet and putting those two things together. At the same time I was photographing images of trees in this sort of long scroll format and realized they look like Chinese scroll prints, I saw the demonstration and had been thinking of these issues and all these things came together to form this project.” The metaphors, memes and memories exuding from Potsic’s photographs are like an epic poem which stirs the mind with beauty, mystery, wonder with trepidation for the future and forgotten lessons from the past.

Amie Potsic @ Bluestone Fine Art Gallery in Old City, Philadelphia.

Danielle Bursk, Avalon, ink on paper @ Bluestone Fine Art Gallery

Danielle Bursk, ink on paper @ Bluestone Fine Art Gallery

Danielle Bursk, ink on paper @ Bluestone Fine Art Gallery

DoN commented to Danielle Bursk that he noticed her drawings now include a defined horizon. “The horizon line is the most control you can exert as an artist and I just wanted to try something that was more of a landscape…but the work is also inspired by the ocean. I grew up in Florida, I spent a lot of time at the beach, I still go to the beach quite a bit, if you just sit and stare at the ocean there’s a lot that goes on. I don’t like it to be too representational, so if you approach it thinking that way you can see that it also looks like hills or a tidal wave, with all my work I like an open ended-ness where you can bring what you want to it and interpret it how you want. So, yes, there’s definitely a horizon line, it’s sort of a landscape but not quite.” DoN also noted that Bursk’s drawings could be considered still life like a close up of fabric or fur, “…even something under a microscope.” Danielle Bursk explained to DoN how she’s trying new things like working with a square image as opposed to rectilinear and smaller works using oblique strategies to force changes in her work with arbitrary constraints. Even though the horizon line is consistent across the smaller works in the show, each one is unique and separate from the others. “In fact, I took each one off the wall before I started the next one because I didn’t want to be influenced by it, I was excited when I looked back because some are really dark, some are a little lighter, some have bigger movements, so they all work very differently.”

Gregory Brellochs @ Bluestone Fine Art Gallery

Forest Floor, graphite on paper, Gregory Brellochs @ Bluestone Fine Art Gallery.

Gregory Brellochs is an art professor at Camden County College and is a father of two, “I came on there seven years ago now, they brought me in to teach sculpture and design…and it really gives me the opportunity to shape the program, work with the curriculum, and have direct contact with a lot of the students and we’ve turned it into a much stronger transfer program.” DoN asked where Brellochs finds time to create his heroically scaled drawings? “I just got done with these large curving drawings, you saw one at the CFEVA gallery, that was the fourth one that I’ve done and there’s one that I thought I had finished maybe a year ago and then I just had to go back in and basically quadrupled the detail. The minuteness of the branches and roots, that became the longest drawing that I’ve ever done, the most labor intensive went over four hundred hours of drawing. Um, but, it’s something I love to do. And once the kids are in bed, I make a pot of coffee and up to the studio I go to work until I’m too tired.”

DoN asked if the images came out of Gregory’s mind? “Yeah, I always work from my imagination and it’s really important to me that that’s how I arrive at that image because it’s not meant to be just a facsimile of Nature, a repetition of something that exists but something that really comes out of the mind’s eye. All as a process of drawing, so that sometimes I don’t start with a composition in mind but a general form language…working with tree root-like structures I kind of allow it to evolve and I find that I am much more in tune with the work when I approach it that way without preliminary sketches or some kind of fixed idea in mind, it allows me to breathe life into the work because it evolves organically.”

The Bluestone Gallery of Fine Art will be open this weekend, October 15th and 16th, as part of the Philadelphia Open Studio Tours 2011, Gregory Brellochs will be hosting.

Photos by DoN

Philadelphia Open Studio Tours 2011, The Perspective from Haus of DoN

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Haus of DoN, Philadelphia Open Studio Tours 2011

Philadelphia Open Studio Tours is the best value in artist public relations available to artists looking to promote their public image in the Philadelphia region. In its twelfth year, the city wide art event has artists of all stripes opening their studios to the public no kidding, a public art event of regional scope with many of the towns top artists welcoming visitors into their think tanks. The event is imbued with freedom, sharing, transparency, creativity and cooperation along with healthy American spirited competition. The open-ness of Philadelphia Open Studio Tours is the coolest part; visitors experience environments that normally are private spaces where artists create and folks are not just allowed but encouraged to go behind the scenes. DoNs claim that POST is the best value from a PR perspective is based on a cost/benefit analysis and target audience response.

POST offered a substantial early entry discount for artists, providing entrants with an artist profile web page with links on their comprehensive web site, listing in the information packed tour book with maps of every corner of the city inhabited by artists, a city and region wide advertising campaign, with banners, posters and art cards strategically supplied to almost 100 locations likely to attract interest to the appropriate demographic as well as special events, venues and workshops for artists whose studio is far off the beaten path. POST's goal was to get the right materials into the hands of art tourists likely to use them in a real way. Every visitor to Haus of DoN held a curled back copy of the glossy catalog with their itinerary planned out to cover the neighborhood they had chosen to explore. Each participating artist is provided with posters, art cards, catalogs and red balloons to promote their studio; the red balloons are a simple, effective signal to art crawlers that theyre heading in the right direction.

DoN's decision to pay the $45 entry fee back in early Spring brought many dedicated friends and art enthusiasts to the Haus of DoN, South of South Street, a mostly residential area not near many commercial businesses. The event pushed DoN to re-organize and display the wide array of interests he explores as part of his multimedia empire. DoN had to spend no other money to promote the event instead advertising through FaceBook and DoNArTNeWs; no new art card this year, even though post cards are cheap to print and fun to design, mailing is costly and impact difficult to track. DoN has had art cards returned by the Post Office months after the event was over. DoN promoted the annual art crawl event on DoNBrewerMultimedia home page, on DoNBrewerMultimedia YouTube channel, @DoNNieBeat58 on Twitter and Philly.SideArts.com, all free media outlets that directly targeted people interested in arts and culture.

Good advise from Ann Koivunen, director of exhibitions for POST, led DoN to think about what he wanted to present to the public and ponder his goals for the event; DoN decided to put on an art show. Simply displaying photos, graphics, paintings and drawings in a beautiful, clean, pure way opened an opportunity to engage with visitors about what DoN does, his interests and connections and get his business card into the hands of each visitor. The result is DoN met and interacted with more than fifty different citizens interested in the arts, including gallery owners, art curators, educators, fellow photographers, new neighbors, old friends and colleagues, he gathered contact information, intercepted feedback on what people like about his art and experienced an authentic feeling of community for well less than a dollar per head including Candy Corn and Sweetzels Ginger Snaps.

Philadelphia Open Studio Tours 2011 continues October 15^th & 16^th, 2011 for studios East of Broad Street.

Haus of DoN – Philadelphia Open Studio Tour 2011, West of Broad Street, October 1st & 2nd

DoNArTNeWs Interview – Ann Koivunen, Philadelphia Open Studio Tours, Top Tips for Artists

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Ann Koivunen is the Director of Studio Tours and Exhibitions for Philadelphia Open Studio Tours, one of the top art events of its kind in the USA. Ann offers great advice on what to do and what not to do to have a successful, fun event. The clip is nine minutes, so get a cup of coffee and sit a spell, Ann has a wonderful perspective on POST. DoNBrewerMultimedia is participating in POST 2011, October 1 & 2, 12 – 6:00PM, check the awesome on-line resources for information on neighborhoods and events at the POST website.