Category Archives: Philadelphia

The Philly art scene is vibrant, filled with characters who create innovative, avant garde art in the 21st Century. New techniques and technologies are converging to develop a new vision of reality.

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

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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.

Interchange: Contemporary Photography & Video from Ireland @ CFEVA

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Mandy O’Niell, Untitled, Interchange: Contemporary Photography & Video from Ireland @ CFEVA

“The Center for Emerging Visual Artists (CFEVA), in cooperation with Culture Ireland, The PhotoIreland Festival, and Broadstone Studios, presents an international exchange of exhibitions – Interchange: Contemporary Photography & Video from Ireland, and Adapt: Contemporary Photography & Video by CFEVA Fellows from the US. This exchange was created to enhance the artistic dialogue between Philadelphia and Dublin and to promote collaboration between local and international artists. The exhibition in Philadelphia, Interchange: Contemporary Photography and Video from Ireland, was curated by Angela Duignan and features works by Michelle Browne, Padraig Cunningham & Linda Shevlin, Angela Duignan, Michael Fortune, Niamh O’Connor, Mandy O’Neill, and David J. Pierce. It is an exhibition of contemporary artists from Ireland, which explores the narrative mode through the mediums of video, audio, and photography. The works exhibited encapsulate and reflect aspects of identity, heritage, story telling, ritual, and social change. They present a view of a contemporary Ireland – its culture and heritage – while drawing parallels to a wider global context.”

Mandy O’Niell, Untitled, Interchange: Contemporary Photography & Video from Ireland @ CFEVA

Philadelphia artist Amy Stevens stayed in Roscommon with Angela Duignan and her two daughters while on an artist exchange to Ireland. The fellow artists became fast friends and concocted a scheme to bring photography and video from Ireland to Philadelpha and vice versa. Amy is going back to Ireland this summer with the CFEVA contingent featuring Noah Addis, Joelle Jensen, Allison Kaufman, Michael Mergen, Tim Portlock, Jeffrey Stockbridge, and Kimberly Witham curating the exhibit for The PhotoIreland Festival, a month long photography festival. Angela Duignan told DoN, Its an exhange between Ireland and the States. Amy came over for a three week artist residency and stayed with me while she was there and out of that friendship weve created an exchange show. Its taken two years for it to come together, find the spaces and all. Amy said, Since I went through the CFEVA program I thought it would be a good fit. Its a nice exchange, its a good way to do it.”

In Angela Duignan‘s address to the audience gathered in the gallery she said, “First I’d like to thank Amy and CFEVA for taking this on and the huge generosity of bringing this show over from Ireland. Id particularly like to thank Amy Stevens for her incredible work hanging the show and organizing it. Her show will be brought over to Ireland in July as a part of The PhotoIreland Festival.

Well start off with Mic (Michael) Fortunes work, hes from Wexford, east coast of Ireland, he works in video, photography and audio. This particular piece is three video pieces, for three years, each year, he photographed and videoed his mother who dressed up on Halloween. And she goes next door to her mothers house to try and play with her head. Theres actually six years of video footage. Hes also working on a documentary on folklore and heritage and his background is an educator and hes presented at 120 shows in the last year all over the world in film festivals as well as gallery spaces.

Niamh O’Connor, Mary Ellen’s Cottage, Interchange: Contemporary Photography & Video from Ireland @ CFEVA

In the video projection is Michelle Brownes video pieceLinda Shevlin, shot in Belfast and the third is David J. Pierce, shot in Dublin. The gallery was dark for the video and projections; the photographs are displayed in the anti-chamber and hall. In the corner of the darkened gallery is a strange chair, a semi-circular red chair with high sides and headphones. Angie explained, Its a ten minute audio of my daughter telling her version of The Princess and the Pea story. It is connected to the large print outside of the girl on a stack of mattresses. The base of that piece is how memory changes as the story is told over time, the story is remembered and changed, on and on. Angie Duignan explained to DoN that she was in a shop with a stack of mattresses, she put her daughter up top and took some shots. But decided to dress up her little girl and bring her back for a more refined photographic narrative.

Angela Duignan, How Does That Story Go Again?, Lambda photographic print, laminated onto MDF, Interchange: Contemporary Photography & Video from Ireland @ CFEVA

IIn the hall is a group of portraits of boxers, photographer Mandy ONeill said, My work is about particular groups of people or individuals through an instinctual desire to get closer to another part of the world. The images Im presenting in the show were taken between 2007 and 2009 in a boxing hall called Saint Xaviers in the inner city of Dublin. Theyve been exhibited nationally and internationally, most notably in the European Month of Photography in Berlin and Gallery of Photography in Dublin. Around 2007 when the work began Ireland was in the grips of the so-called Celtic Tiger, everything seemed to be going really fast, excessive consumerism was the order of the day. This is something I never felt part of; I felt a longing for something more authentic and simple.

The image of the lone figure of the boxer, theres a romanticism attached to this that I think resonates around the world. Norman Mailer stated, Boxing is a metaphor for life, I saw the boxer as an embodiment of this idea and a pared down more authentic existence. I also like the idea of being able to come back into our own bodies rather than buying all this stuff required to make us happy. The particular club I chose to shoot at turned out to be a great place, the camaraderie, care and support for the young kids around the area was amazing and they would make you feel at home just by not making you feel you were in the way. I was in their training area in a corner with my camera and lights while they were skipping and jumping around. The smells and sound of the place became familiar to me and the bell rings every three minutes and is followed by a one-minute break. The subjects were all filmed within this one-minute break in an attempt to capture this heightened physical excitement. My assistant would run and grab somebody and then we had thirty seconds to grab the shot before they went back. The title Exhale comes from this pair of struggle then respite and always trying to move slightly forward. I saw it as a general metaphor for life.

Niamh O’Connor, Desert Island Rain, Termon Road, Taum Triangle Row, Marrion & Maggies, giclee photographic prints, Interchange: Contemporary Photography & Video from Ireland @ CFEVA.