Calvin's reaction to a painting we have

One year for my birthday Quinn bought me a painting from a man who was selling his art outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The painting is called "Midnight Snack" and is of a naked woman kneeling in front of an open refrigerator. It was very cartoony, like Wallace and Gromit, almost.

Anyway, whenever Calvin see's it he points and says "Mommy." Like he has no doubt in his mind that it is of me. It's pretty funny. I'm going to edit this post in the next day or two with a scanned image of the painting.

Jack Knife

Quinn and I had a party in our back yard on Sunday, with brats, beer, about 40 friends and and awesome local band, called Jack Knife.

The members, Dave Hemsing (bass), Dan Seitz (drums), James Carothers (lead guitar), Adam Houlton (rhythm guitar) and Jerry Adair (vocals) are from Los Alamos and have been playing together for years. They play a blend of southern rock, metal and country, but were cool with playing an acoustic show in my back yard while everybody ate their corn on the cob.

They made our birthday/housewarming party very memorable.

Jerry Beguin

Jerry Beguin’s artwork is being exhibited in the Portal Gallery at the Art Center at Fuller Lodge, in Los Alamos, May 8th – June 13th.

I visited his studio which is full of photographs, "Muzart" and paintings. The eight-by-five canvas by the door is covered in sketches based on String Theory. He joked, “It’s a theory of everything that predicts absolutely nothing!”

Beguin’s artistic life has truly been unpredictable.

He knew that he was an artist when he was in the third grade. His teacher was always scolding him for drawing in class, instead of doing his work. But one day she let him draw a castle on the chalk board with colored chalk, and she ended up leaving the drawing up for the rest of the year.

When he was older he talked to his parents about going to art school, but his dad said that it was a “sissy” thing to do, and so he went into construction instead. He worked as a carpenter for 45 years, but continued to work on his art the entire time.

Then in 2000 his was one of the 400 Los Alamos homes that burned down in the Cerro Grande fire. He lost everything. He had a lifetime of art in the house, including watercolors of his tour in Viet Nam, and and a five by eight painting that he had just finished. His family’s creativity had blossomed into two businesses. He had created dozens of games that he was going to sell, and his wife had about five hundred handmade dolls that she was about to sell online with a company called Blossom Dolls. His house and yard were completely leveled.



Having his work destroyed shook him. He asked himself Why did I become an artist, do all this work, only to have it burn? “I still don’t think I’ve recovered,” he said. “It was like losing my lover. It was like a death.”

The fire suppressed his interest in art for a few years, but then several years ago he just had a strong drive to do more artwork. When he started to work again he found that he had changed as an artist. “I see better. I see more clearly. I used to be finicky about artwork. It had to be perfect. Now it doesn’t have to be perfect.”

That’s why his newest work, Muzart, fascinates him so much. He and his son make music together (their duo is called “Metal Tomatoes”) and then he uses that music to create colorful images on his computer that he experiments with to create art.

He hopes to develop a program that would allow people to make art from music, and possibly to allow people who are physically handicapped to create art using only the movements of their facial muscles.

Looking around his home, I realize that we are completely surrounded by products of his creativity. He built and designed his house, and his son’s house next door. He showed me the tiny outbuilding where he and his wife lived while they were building their new house. He filled his yard with trees and a garden to give himself a peaceful sanctuary.

Being able to create after his work had been destroyed in the fire is what makes Jerry an artist. “There’s a meaning to it. It’s going to affect someone’s life.”

Solidify your imagination

Last fall I visited Marc Hudson’s garage studio to watch him throw. The six pound lump of clay that he plopped onto his wheel was completely amorphous. As Marc described it, the clay, “Doesn’t have any opinions about its final destiny. It’s the byproduct of erosion and it doesn’t mind that. When people see clay (or a blank sheet of paper or an empty canvas) they need to create something, to use it to solidify their imagination.”

It’s physical – he leans his body into the clay as he slowly moves around the piece, allowing it to take shape. First it becomes a tall cylinder, and as he coaxes the walls to expand, to be less than an eighth inch thick, until it becomes what he calls a “rumptious round.”

It looks like a form of meditation. It turns out that when he began working with clay, that’s exactly what it was.

He had just been drafted to the Viet-Nam war. He said, “The fact that I could contribute to killing people just by doing what I was told was hard to accept. I needed a relaxing center in clay as an alternative to being in the military.”

Since then, working with clay has been a long creative journey where Marc has developed his sense of style by devising experiments that allow him to get the results that he wants.

For example, he wasn’t getting the results that he wanted using commercial glazes. The list of people available to teach him how glaze materials work was pretty short and he wasn’t getting the answers he needed.

He bought tools – a scale for measuring ingredients, bags of chemicals, books with recipes and chemical analyses of ingredients, and software that describes how ingredients interacted with one another – and experimented.

He wasn’t being a perfectionist; he just wanted glazing to be an adventure. He said, “My usual approach to clay is to exercise considerable control while it is on the wheel or in the extruder, so it is refreshing to let my guard down and let the glaze act and react serendipitously.”

“Wood ash particularly appeals to me as a primary ingredient in glazes because it is a bit of a ‘wild card,’ its effect somewhat unpredictable,” Hudson said. “Ash likes to flow at high temperatures, yet its surface tension tries to make the glaze bead up–like a struggle between control and abandonment.”

He devised a system of organization that allows him to easily look up the recipe for any glaze. Over a thousand glazes on test tiles are coiled on the ceiling of his studio. The tiles are all numbered and grouped by thirty on each string.

“While I enjoyed mixing and testing glazes a great deal, my wife told me that I needed to just get on with making pots!” said Hudson. “But learning about clay and glazes is a journey.”

One of his favorite glazes was made possible by his experiments. He wanted to reproduce the recipe for Richard Aerni’s wood ash glaze that was featured in Ceramics Monthly in December 1994. The problem was that Aerni single-fired his pots at cone 10 in a reduction kiln whereas Hudson bisque and glaze fired at cone 6 in an electric kiln. Through experimentation he was able to make a glaze with ash from the fireplace that could be fired at cone 6.

The high chaparral that lines the Rio Grande River between the Jemez and Sangre de Cristo mountains is where Hudson finds inspiration. Many of his pieces are ornamented with a cholla cactus branch. In order to imitate the cactus he designed his own extruder dies.

His innovations with the extruder make his dies more user-friendly and long lasting. He uses an unequal leg aluminum angle in the place of a U-bolt. The pressure of clay deforms the centerpiece of the U-bolt and causes wear and tear. Aluminum doesn’t bend the same way and lasts longer because it is on the shear.

He holds the die parts together with pop rivets, which are easy to adjust. This setup minimizes the clutter inside the die.

His father was a physicist who made oil paintings of physical phenomena like shock waves and crystals forming. Whenever Marc used design, technology and experimentation to let others see what was in his imagination, he followed his father’s example.

He had mastered his craft enough that when his father died, Marc was free to make an urn that was meaningful to him and his family. After dividing his father’s shes into the four urns he sprinkled some of the ashes onto the glaze before firing. The urns turned out beautifully, but more important, he was able to honor his father in a way that resonated with him and once again find peace with clay.

Marc Hudson is part of a new Website; www.printedculture.com. Printed Culture makes art more accessible by creating calendars, prints, posters and greeting cards from photographs of works of art and giving the featured artists a percentage of the profits.

Here's the response I got from Martin Spei's wife, Nancy

Hello Mandy,
Thank you for informing us of your blog regarding Martin Spei's sculpture.
I am Martin's wife and handle all his promos and the business end of the sculpture. Martin forwarded your contact information to me. I want to say thank you for your interest in his work and let you know how much your feedback is appreciated.

Martin's sculpture is atypical of almost all the bronze sculpture you may see out in the contemporary art market. He is able to combine classicism, the traditional bronze medium and a very contemporary wit and humor in his sculpture. Bronze is a stodgy, old material, but when approached with Martin's understanding of the human figure and way of bringing historical references into current, sculptural language the bronze can bring forward all the metaphors Martin has intended to portray.

Artists tend to work in a solitary way and thus have little opportunity for feedback outside of shows and sales of the work. Thank you for taking the time to voice your opinions, you may not realize it, but comments such as yours are very inspirational to Martin. Sometimes it's just nice to know someone out there gets it.
Best of luck to you with future "Art Field Trips"!
Sincerely,
Nancy Spei

ps. Martin is in a show at The Edge Gallery, here is Santa Fe, opening on June 13. Two new pieces, we're excited!

Martin Spei's sculptures capture complex emotions about work

I stopped in at the Art Center at Fuller Lodge to see the Sculptural Ideas exhibit. Martin Spei's bronze sculpture "Dagda III" was what stood out. It's a sculpture of a bald man with bare feet clutching a briefcase, as if it's going to fly away, or someone is threatening it. His work. But the man is so physical, he almost doesn't look like the type to be carrying a briefcase. Like he should be doing something else entirely. He's not suited to be wearing a suit. It was really interesting.

Getting over sticker shock

I was sitting on the lawn at the Shidoni Gallery this morning, with the sprinklers going and the lawn guy weed whacking around the legs of a bronze turtle. It was such a quiet ordinary day, and I wondered what it would be like to choose a piece of art to go in your lawn.

Looking at one of the first pieces that caught my eye, it was clear that I'm not nearly rich enough to collect art. $7,500 for Philip Glashoff's "Lion" and $22,000 for Jospeh Fichter's "Cutting Horse." That's precisely the amount of money that I earned my first year out of college when I worked as a legal proofreader (with all the other starving artists, writers and actors)!

Even though I swallowed my middle-class tongue when I saw the five figure price tag, I can't imagine paying less. Glasshoff's Lion was like a fantasy lion and Fichter captured the horse as it was running and leaning into a sharp turn. Even though it was made of two dimensional slabs of bronze, it was full of life and vigor. It may have taken a whole year to make it, and who can even calculate the time and money that went into developing the talent to sculpt a horse at that impossible angle.

Anyway, artists should make as much money as humanly possible, so they can sit around dreaming of sweet stuff to make. It's not good for artists to actually starve, wasting their time and talent working as legal proofreaders.