Posts Tagged ‘Landscape Painting’
Cowboy Branding; Less is More; Barn Raising
Dennis Ziemienski – “Cowgirl Brand”
Never just one Altamira artist opening a show at that gallery; two weeks ago a trio of artists kicked off the season. June 17-29th, two new shows with works by contemporary Western artists Dennis Ziemienski and Howard Post will be on exhibition.
Ziemienski’s “New Images of the Old West” and Post’s “Western Perspectives” share an opening reception at Altamira Fine Art on Thursday, June 20th, 5-8:00 pm. Works by these artists are bold; Ziemienski’s crisp, poster-bright paintings recall the best magazine advertising of bygone eras (were “Mad Men” set in the West, and the Sterling-Cooper execs living on ranches, their campaigns might look a lot like Ziemienski’s art), and Post’s Western landscapes are, as has been noted, characterized by a richly colored, contemporary impressionist style.
The West—our region, at any rate—was first discovered in part because of posters commissioned by railroad lines. These travel posters promoted new regions opening up to tourism and Ziemenski, a native San Franciscan, puts together idealistic images of cowboy life with a feel for sharp, witty modernism.
Last century’s big rush west attracts Ziemenski.
Dennis Ziemienski – “Yosemite Drive Thru”
“I like that period of time because it hasn’t been well recorded,” Ziemienski said. “You don’t see a lot of paintings of cowboys sitting in Model T Fords. But they did – and right alongside their horses. I was born in 1947. Growing up in California and taking car trips with my family allowed me to see a lot of this imagery. But by the 60’s and 70’s, I noticed that much of it was starting to fade away,” he said. “All of the things I witnessed then started to make me think that some day I would like to record those things. So now I am.”
I recently visited Laramie, a city established by the railroads. Laramie is chock full of great vintage signage–some in good shape, some not as much. But they’re there. Such signs and billboards make a native Californian’s heart leap into her throat.
Howard Post – “Western Meadows”
Post is one of my favorite Western contemporary landscape painters. “Contemporary” in the sense that he’s not exactly a realist, and he’s not exactly an “unexpected” painter. His light and compositions are poetic, translucent and depict the West’s golden light just as we imagine it when we can’t be there. Just as we imagine it when we ARE there, and want to describe it to someone who has never gazed upon it.
Post is, says the gallery, known for his unique aerial perspective that, to my mind, emphasizes Western space. Born in Tucson, that region’s special southwestern light permeates his work, no matter the subject matter.
Wherever you’re from, you bring the light with you.
Howard Post – “Riverbed”
Post was a cowboy, and when he began painting a few decades back he chose the subject he knew best: Arizona’s ranch traditions and the Arizona landscape. His hayfields are sun-drenched loaves of hot grass, basking in the late afternoon sun, thick purple and green trees in partial shadow. A suggestion of an outline surrounds many of Post’s objects, giving them volume. Post’s are landscapes you want to wake up to, go to sleep thinking about; they are ideal.
“My paintings,” says Post, “Are my visual response to the West and how I want it to be.”
Got that. www.altamiraart.com
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“Fewer answers nowadays, but more questions.” | “Parents wrong, discover my own life.” | “Created art, I feel better now.” | “Istanbul highways to National Park trails.”
You thought writing haiku was challenging?
Teton County Library and Culture Front, in collaboration with the Jackson Hole Writers’ Conference, are pleased to present The Six-Word Memoir Project exhibit, debuting June 27th at the Center for the Arts. Sixty Jackson area creative types submitted six-word “snapshots” of their lives; each write up is exactly six words.
“Words create the bridges between us. Without them we would be lost islands. Affection, recognition and understanding travel across these fragile bridges and enable us to discover each other and awaken friendship and intimacy. Words are never just words. The range and depth of a person’s soul is inevitably revealed in the quality of the words used… they also suggest what can never be said.” ~ John O’Donohue, Irish Poet
And so it goes with art. The artists at Trio Fine Art are traveling across bridges, telling us with their paintings what lies in their soul. Springtime, when everything changes, can’t help but put thoughts of summer in our heads.
Plein air painter Bill Sawczuck is watching the landscape. And he acknowledges that painting around here just now can be “challenging.”
“I can take the cold and gloomy skies, but wind is another thing altogether,” writes Bill. “A painter has to fasten his easel to his vehicle, a tree or a nearby fence to prevent the whole outfit from blowing a dozen or so yards away while working on a “promising ” painting. Spring painting also has many rewards. The unfolding change of seasons offers wonderful opportunities to observe wildlife reacting to melting snow, flowing waters and greening landscapes. New life is appearing everywhere, and it is difficult to concentrate on painting when the spring show is center stage.”
Bill’s painting at left, “Winter Leftovers,” painted on Spring Gulch Road (Bill, do I detect some abstract diagonals and energy in that sky????) testifies to the rancher’s foresight last haying season, says Bill. Soon, new grass will take over as the cattles’ primary feed.
And for painter Jennifer Hoffman, spring has been bountiful. Jen received an “Honorable Mention” in the Wyoming Arts Council’s 2013 Visual Artist Fellowships. (By the way, how awesome is Wyoming Arts’ website? It’s fantastic.) She now has the chance to have work exhibited in the Fall Biennial at The Nicolaysen Museum in Casper this fall. AND, she was awarded “Fourth Place in Landscape” in the 14th Annual Pastel 100, sponsored by the Pastel Journal.
Jen and Trio Fine Art’s third artist, Kathryn Mapes Turner, will both be showing at the Governor’s Capitol Art Exhibition at the Wyoming State Museum in Cheyenne in June. Check out the story on Kathryn’s “OneNest” project here.
Trio’s summer schedule shapes up like this. Jen Hoffman’s Show: July 10 – 27th; Bill Sawczuck: July 31 – August 17th; Kathryn Turner: August 21st-September 7th. Opening receptions dates will be posted as we get closer! Please remind me, guys! www.triofineart.com
“Fireflies,” – Jennifer Hoffman.
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“Rocky has completed 14 never before seen paintings now on exhibition at Altamira Fine Art,” reports the gallery. “This new work is painted on canvas using oils and some mixed media. He has revisited a couple of his previous series’ such as the “Archer” and “Horse and Rider” series and has explored a few pieces involving groups of figures in a very minimal setting, not necessarily representing any recognizable background— but presenting bold strokes of shape and color. The painting “Color Bound” explores the early modernist’s cubism style.”
Rocky Hawkins’ new works are on exhibition through June 30, 2013. Many more exhibits happening soon at the gallery! www.altamira.art.com
“Color Bound” – Rocky Hawkins
Mark Nowlin - Landscape, Mixed Media on Paper
“These are all landscapes, I made them on the spot, off the highway, during my drive from Portland, Oregon to Jackson,” says Jackson Hole artist and purveyor of arts supplies Mark Nowlin. Last Sunday, Knowlin took his turn showing and creating art at the new Teton County Library, where—lest you live in a cave—you know that Filament Mind, the huge art installation by conceptual artist Brian Brush has just been completed.
Under the filament tent, a fine cross-section of Jackson’s local artists brought their work to the library. “Stumble on Art in the Afternoons” began by hosting Travis Walker, who blipped on his Facebook page that “the best art I’ve ever seen in Jackson is at the Teton County Library.” Catch any sass, Travis? (I’m teasing…)
Nowlin, so well known in our arts community, is a great proponent of contemporary art. He owns and operates Master’s Studio, a Jackson arts
supply and framing store. His creativity and knowledge of art history, perspective on Jackson’s art scene and where it might be trending and the region’s arts influences, are topics you should talk to him about sometime.
Nowlin does not exhibit often, but he should. Each of his compositions I viewed last week were dynamic, swinging with motion, affected by place, and wholly recognizable even as they embraced abstraction. Nowlin lined up dozens of works, a visual diary of his travels.
Today’s post is a Jackson art quote quiz…..Fun! Leo d.V. ( NOT from Jackson) might have a quote here, but everyone else is anonymous. Enjoy!
“I guess I feel wildflowers are worthy of sainthood.”
“process, engagement, collaboration, instigation~~This year is marked by unique collaborations which engage me on ambiguous terrain and with conceptual duality. I exploit the magical/practical, which brims with repetition and surprise. And I continue to work as a bricoleur!”
“Art is not being recycled from one house to the other. There’s a place for all of it, but it’s nice to see more confidence in people about buying art, other than what they think they should be buying because they live in Jackson.”
“The colt sketch is so loose, but you know what it is; it’s more ethereal.”
“The only good art is post-referential art!”
“To know what you’re painting, everyone can pick up a tube of paint and squeeze. But to know what you’re squeezing, that takes book learning.”
“If someone innocently pulls into town and parks in the parking lot, needs to use the public facilities, they find my art wrapped
around the building!”
“If I avoid painting the Tetons for fear of their being trite, it would be dishonest.”
“Castellazzo got a piece of all the french roast coffee trucked into town, and he is the main supplier of nudes for life drawing classes.”
“The West is industrialized, it’s not perfect and beautiful…but what is tragic, or could be tragic, you weave that into a beautiful pattern of the landscapes.”
“Very few people know that those flowers were not there the day that painting was done. I know they weren’t there, and I know the reason Bob painted them in. But I can’t tell you, it’s a secret.”
"Schwabachers Landing," Todd Kosharek
“I focus on the falseness of our Wyoming terrain – the gentle looking river that tore a canyon into the ground, the soft looking horizon of sage, a snarly and abrasive plant, the calming appearance of the winter landscape that is freezing cold. I love the duality of the way we romanticize nature and what nature really is….I focus on the process of searching.” ~ Todd Kosharek
"Canyon," Todd Kosharek
Blue canyons, blue rooms. Walk into Jackson artist’s Todd Kosharek’s house (shared with his wife, dancer Kate Kosharek) and you’ll find yourself surrounded in blues. Kosharek is not singing the blues, he’s painting them. Kosharek, an effusive, upbeat artist with a passion for art history, spends many a day out in Jackson Hole’s landscapes, painting them. Most plein air artists don’t create whole works devoted to shades of blue, but Kosharek does, and it sets his work apart from traditional Western landscape painters. Kosharek ventures out in bright, harsh mid-day light. His goal is not to paint perfectly, but to feel the landscape’s underlying secrets and get paint on his canvas. His approach to what we describe as beautiful is newly, uniquely his own.
Kosharek says this about his large scale, acrylic works: “What I love in painting, both as an artist and as a viewer, is the feeling I get from seeing something that was meticulously created by pigment and brush. I want to see time – time taken by the painter to think, feel and create – but also the element of time, as if the painting is not frozen as an image but will grow and change with me as a person as I grow and change.”
