New Exhibition at Mars Hill University

 One of the things I do besides create artworks is to show artworks.  I manage the art gallery at Mars Hill University.  We just finished installing the first show of the spring semester.  It's a series of prose and poetry printed in letterpress, along with line etchings, all made with exquisite quality.  I'm not exaggerating: it's some of the best I've ever seen.  And the story that the artist is telling is extremely powerful. 

Click on the image to see a larger version.  Then zoom in on it even more.  Take your time - the more you look, the more you're going to see.

Artist koreloy mcwhirter has created this collection of works titled "redhanded: a songe forre the loste". She doesn't capitalize names or titles, and deliberately uses spelling that evokes olde English.  It's essentially a book of prose, poetry, and imagery, each page of which is individually mounted, framed, and presented.  They're arranged such that you enter the gallery and follow the "book" around the wall, one page at a time, in order.

redhanded is based on her own experiences of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, both as a very young child and continuing into adulthood.  This is not a happy story.  It's not a hopeless story, either, and you'll find humor, love, mourning, forgiveness, anger, and much more.

You'll find it, that is, if you take the time to read the prose and poetry, and to study the prints.  It's not an exhibition that you can pop in, get a quick look, and say you've "seen" it.  But if you take the time, you will be profoundly moved.

Weizenblatt Gallery is in the Moore Fine Art building on the Mars Hill University campus in Mars Hill, North Carolina, about 20 miles north of Asheville.  Hours are 10-4 MWF.  We're having a reception for the artist on Tuesday, Jan 16, from 5-7 pm.  I hear from koreloy that there will be music, singing, and maybe some dancing as well.  

Be there.

Solo Exhibition!

My new solo exhibition opened Friday.  The show is titled "What May Be" and consists of twelve paintings that explore the theme of what might be in our future if we don't get our collective acts together.  Doesn't sound like a cheerful romp, does it?  Well, as is typical of my shows, it isn't.  (Previous such collections: "Old Times", about aging; "Bush League", a political satire series about the Bush administration; and "Meditation on War", about the effects of war on people and nations).  

Here's the artist statement: 

"News reports today can be frightening.  Wars rage across the globe.  The world’s population is exploding at the same time that climate change threatens our ability to produce food.  Social media and news sources stoke anger and violence on the local, national, and international scales.  At a time when cooperation is more in need than ever before, it is in very short supply. 

I was asked once whether I was an optimist or a pessimist.  My answer was that I am a short-term optimist and a long-term pessimist.  We have an amazing ability to muddle through in the short term, but the long-term trends are ominous.  That’s what underlies all these paintings.  However, I was surprised  at the hope that came out during the making of some of these paintings.  Maybe I’m more optimistic than I thought.

These paintings are arranged in a rough timeline.  At one end of the gallery is the present and at the other is some possible future.  The future may or may not happen as these creations suggest.  Nobody knows.  But one thing is certain: we all will have a hand in how it develops."

The Mountain XPress, the local Asheville paper, ran an article on it in this week's edition.  They got the general gist of it right even though some of the facts are a bit off.  You can read the article here.  If you want to see the paintings, they're on my website. 

The reception was Friday night and was lots of fun.  Many friends showed up, some of whom I hadn't seen in years.  Met some interesting people as well.  

The show will be up until September 25th.  If you're in Asheville, swing by Pink Dog Creative at 348 Depot Street, in the River Arts District, and go through the show.  And let me know what you think.

Upcoming Exhibition

 Six of my small portraits from Iraq will be in an exhibition of art by veterans in a couple of weeks.  "Through Their Eyes" showcases art by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.  One of my paintings, "Iraqi Guard" is shown in the ad.  The exhibition will be in the Bridgewater Commons mall, in Bridgewater, NJ, from November 6-13.  They'll have an opening reception on the 6th at 4 pm.  If you're in the area, go see it!

Choosing Exhibitions for Universities

In a previous post, I wrote about some of the things I've learned while installing exhibitions in a university art gallery.  Right now, we're going through the process of selecting the final exhibition for the 2019-2020 school year, and I thought it would be a good time to talk about what goes into these selections.

The key driver, for me, is diversity. The art world is made up of art in all media, including many that typically aren't considered art media.  It consists of drawing, painting, printmaking (and all that is just in my own studio), encaustic, graffiti, woodworking, pottery, sculpture, metal, glass, installations, quilts, fabric, found objects, photography, and all the different types of mixed media that you can possibly imagine and more.  And that's just in media.  In concept and execution, there are many more.  Painting alone has representational, photorealism, abstract, impressionist, expressionist, drip, and various movements within and combining those types.  So there are a ton of different types of art.  And many students in a university have never been in an art gallery (I've heard that several times just this past fall), so our job is to expose them to a wide variety of different art forms.

The exhibitions this year are doing just that.  We've had a faculty show, an exhibition of works that combine 2D imagery with 3D furniture, and a set of raw paintings followed by a very precise exhibition of 125 instant photographs.  The students seem to have gotten a lot out of the variety that has been presented.

As a painter, it's easy for me to name a dozen other painters who would be great to have in our gallery.  But that doesn't do right by the students, faculty, staff, and local residents who are our "customers", if you will use that term.  So I've been reaching out beyond my norms to identify other types of exhibitions.

So over the next 18 months, we're going to have quite a variety.  One show will be by convicts in a prison's art therapy program.  We're having a show of art by Madison County public school students.  We'll have a very energetic abstract painter, followed by a classically-trained painter whose subject matter ties in with the University's Bascom Lamar Lunsford festival of Appalachian music.  There's a photographer who creates edgy, large-scale works.  We'll have a group show of potters working here in the county.  There will be an exhibition of sculptures by several individuals who will be teaching workshops on campus.  And we'll wind up the season with an exhibition of student work, followed by an exhibition of work by our seniors.

Commercial galleries find their own unique niche and then fill it with art that they believe they can sell.  That's a great thing for artists, but it doesn't answer all of a community's needs.  A university isn't worried about selling, its mission is to educate, and it does that with variety.  And meeting that mission is forcing THIS painter out of his comfort zone!

Creating an Art Exhibition

Last fall, I added a new job to my hodge-podge collection of activities.  I became the Director for the Weizenblatt Art Gallery at Mars Hill University.  "Director" is a kinda grandiose title, but the duties entail making sure the exhibits are put up, taken down, and advertised in various media, and that the receptions happen on schedule.  It's not rocket science.  It has provided quite a bit of insight into all the little things that make an exhibit a success, as well as how schools choose their shows.

The first exhibit this past fall was the biannual Faculty Exhibit.  Trying to corral a group of artists into delivering their work to a specific place by a specific time can be challenging.  Fortunately, this group of faculty members were pretty good about it.  Even better, they left the layout and installation of their works to me, the new guy, that some of them hadn't even met yet.  Now I'm of the opinion that the installation of a show is an artwork in itself.  You want each piece to have some breathing room around it, you want each to show itself to its best, and you want it to flow well from one piece, and one artist, to the next.  And that's whether the viewers are moving right to left or left to right.

(Note: you can click on the images to enlarge them).

I decided to group each artist's pieces together, first and foremost.  Then they were positioned so that there was some kind of a connection to the adjacent artist's work: similar colors, similar subject matter, similar size, whatever was "similar".  I spent quite a bit of time leaning stuff up against all the walls and then adjusting their order and spacing.  Once it felt right, I hung them.  For the pottery, I hauled out a bunch of pedestals and put them all together in the center of one of the two rooms.  This created a kinda free-form sculpture to hold all the pieces, helping to focus attention on them and allow the eye to move from one to the next.  It also provided a bit of protection: when pedestals are scattered around the room, people can/will bump into them and knock them over.  In the photo above, there are figurative photos on the left, leading to my figurative charcoal/pastel pieces, along with the "pottery island" in the center of the room.

The next show was very different.  We had Randy Shull, who has been a professional artist for a few decades now and is very experienced in showing his work.  As I said before, I think the installation is an artwork itself, and nobody knows the work better than the artist.  So I let them decide what goes where, while my role is to provide tools and other assistance to help them build the show they want.  Randy was super easy to work with: very easygoing, very professional, and well prepared.  His show was a mix of combined painting/furniture/sculpture pieces (yes, all three aspects in one work) as well as mixed-media pieces.  Here's how the opening looked:

You can kinda see here how Randy followed the same concepts: the colors in the small orange piece on the left were reflected in the large wall hanging/floor-furniture piece next to it, whose blues were picked up in the three small pieces to its right, and so on around the room.

The third show was very different.  David Hopes is a very intuitive painter, building his paintings organically.  He's also a poet, playwright, actor, and singer - an all-around Renaissance man.  David brought his intuitive sense to his installation: "if it feels right, do it".  So there was none of the careful measuring and adherence to gallery norms in this installation.  For example, most galleries will hang paintings using a 60" standard, meaning the center of the work is usually placed at a height of 60 inches.  Not David.  Some works were placed close together, some hung in places we've never hung a work before (for example, on the 6" wide end of the dividing wall), and there was one 15-ft wall that had nothing on it.  It was very free-form.  But for all that, the feeling of the installation seemed to match the feeling from the paintings.  I had some reservations, but decided to hold off until I saw how it looked.  It definitely provoked some discussion, but in all, I think letting David hang his own paintings without interference was the right call.

This week, we hung a new show.  Jay Kranyik is a photographer working with Polaroid and Fuji "instant" cameras and film.  These are small images, very intimate, with a unique sense of color.  Jay's subject is primarily urban landscapes: geometric arrangements in primary colors.  All of his 125 images were mounted on 8"x8" mats.  Jay was extremely careful about accurate positioning of every one of his images, down to the half inch.  It was the polar opposite of working with David, but then, Jay's photos are the polar opposite of David's paintings.  We had a bit of a conundrum in deciding how to hang the works on the walls, since there were no wires on the backs.  Our first thought was to use L-pins to clip them to the walls, but we couldn't find 500 pins in time.  (Yes, with 125 artworks and 4 pins/artwork, that's a lotta pins).  In the end, we went unconventional: we used roofing nails.  These nails have wide heads that overlap the artworks to pin them to the wall.  They're also a helluva lot cheaper than the L-pins.  We then set up a pedestal to show visitors his old Polaroid camera and newer Fuji camera.  For college kids, this may be the first time they've seen something other than digital!

So those are some of my experiences in managing a university art gallery.  There are a lot more aspects to it, like getting to talk with the college students, running receptions, planning exhibitions for the coming year, and handling publicity.  I'll get to some of those in future posts.

A Bit of Success

I had a bit of success this past week and wanted to share it here.  Two of my paintings were juried into the Grace Center's annual juried art exhibition.  They're very different paintings, although they are both figurative paintings about real people.  

Cinderella's Seamstress

Oil on canvas, 48"x48" 

Saddle Up

Oil on canvas, 50"x40"

I went to the opening reception on Saturday night and was blown away when both of them won awards.  Saddle Up got an Honorable Mention while Cinderella's Seamstress was awarded Best of Show!  Absolutely amazing.  There is a lot of really good work in the show, so I was happy just to be in it, but to have both pieces recognized like that is something out of this world.

I had a great time talking with some of the other artists as well as other art professionals.  One woman had a beautiful collage in the show that had so much to say in addition to being so wonderfully made.  We had a short conversation but I'm hoping to talk with her in more depth sometime soon as I'd love to have some insight into the way she puts her pieces together.  Something tells me that her basic process is not that different from mine, but the medium and end results are so very different.

The show will be up until the first week of January.  If you're in the Mills River area, I recommend stopping by to see it!

Carolina's Got Art!

Years ago, the Fayetteville Museum of Art had an annual competition for artists from North and South Carolina.  I was fortunate to be juried in several times, and to win awards a couple of times.  Unfortunately, the museum didn't survive the economic downturn of the late "aughts" and had to close.  This year, the Elder Gallery in Charlotte stepped up with a replacement: the "Carolina's Got Art!" competition and exhibit.  One of my paintings, "Returning to Base", was selected for the show.  Last night was the opening, and I went down to Charlotte to take a look.

The Elder Art Gallery is very large, at least for a gallery.  They had a number of sponsors who helped provide the funding to make this show first-rate.  Artwork filled the walls, stood on pedestals, and filled nearly every available space.  I wouldn't say it was salon-style (in which artwork covers every inch of wall space, both vertically and horizontally), because it wasn't, but there was a lot of work.  And what I saw was very, very good.

As you can see, there was quite a turnout for the opening last night.  Seemed like anybody who was anybody in the Charlotte art scene was there.  I saw a lot of artists there as well, which was good.  My painting is way back in one of the nooks, as far back as is possible to go, but what the heck, it's on a gallery wall, so I'm happy.  I saw a number of people taking their time in looking at it.

I also ran into somebody that I hadn't seen in over 16 years.  Julie and her husband were stationed with us in Misawa, Japan, in the late '90's during my last tour in the Navy.  It was good to see her again and spend some time catching up.

Other than Julie, I didn't know a soul there, so I went walking around the gallery, looking at all the art.  There are a lot of really good artists in North and South Carolina and it was great to see such a wide range of styles, subject matter, and visions.  Here are some that caught my eye.

Mark Poteat had one of his "Factory Series" paintings in the show.  It was a really interesting abstraction based on factory shapes: architecture, pipes, cranes, and so on.  He's an art instructor at Western Piedmont Community College.  No web site that I could find, but there are some images on the web.

I'm a sucker for good figurative work, and Pamela Freeman is good.  She had a small, quiet painting of two women in conversation.  Her figures are abstracted a bit, which made them more universal in nature, rather than identifiable people.  And I really liked her paint handling: confident, subtle, nuanced, and beautifully done.

Robert Maniscalco is a portrait artist in Charleston.  He submitted a beautiful painting of an older woman, very strong, well-structured, and well-painted.

John Stennett is an Asheville-based artist.  He had a large, abstract, very atmospheric piece.  Although I'm not an abstract painter, I can greatly appreciate when an abstract is well done.  This one had a calm, quiet, and intriguing presence.

Tyrone Geter's large drawing was, for me, the strongest piece in the show.  It was a mixed-media drawing in charcoal on torn paper, assembled into a striking composition.  Tyrone is really, really good at this.  His figures had immense internal strength and depth.  The torn paper can be a gimmick in other hands, but here it both hid and revealed, which added significantly to the work.  Check out his web site, particularly his drawings, and go see the works in person if you can.

Landscape paintings can be so ... what, overdone, common, bland?  Everybody does them.  However, I was drawn to Joy Moser's landscape.  Really strong and well done, it pulled me in.  And she lives in Weaverville, so I can check out her work around here.

Jeremy Russell is a friend of mine.  He and I studied art at UNCA at the same time.  Jeremy's work spills over with more energy and vibrancy than can possibly be expressed in one sitting.  He had a moderate-sized abstract work that dominated the wall on which it was hung.  And I got a kick out of it: if you know Jeremy, that picture was essentially a self-portrait.

I met the owner of the gallery, Larry Elder.  Very nice guy, very personable.  He and his gallery did a bang-up job with this exhibition.  I'm glad to be a small part of it.

Lament

Oil on canvas, 60"x60", 2006

"Lament", one of the paintings from my Meditation on War series, is now in a curated exhibition in Tipton Gallery in Johnson City, Tennessee.  The show is "Colors of Aspiration: The Flag in Contemporary Art".  As the curator, Karlota Contreras-Koterbay, stated:

"The exhibition features works by contemporary artists who employ the symbolic image of the flag to address social issues and its manipulation as visual dialogue.  The American flag has been a potent symbol of patriotism as well as powerful icon for social agency.  Artists, most prominently Jasper Johns, have employed the Stars and Stripes in various configurations and materials to pursue artistic ambivalence and encourage discussions in the nature of art.  The artists in the exhibition continue on this trajectory."

I painted "Lament" in 2006, when the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were getting worse.  I was angry about how the administration had led us into two wars, and angry about how so many people callously disregarded the costs.  I wanted to make a statement that reminded people that, when you go to war, there is a tremendous cost to pay.  People die.  People get hurt.  Irreplaceable things are destroyed.

But people don't want to think of that at the start of the war.  Then, it's parades and speeches and a grand adventure where our boys are going to go kick the other guys' asses and be home in time for dinner.  Only it never turns out that way.  As our forebears learned in the Revolutionary War, and again in the War of 1812, and the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War, and World War 1, and World War 2, and the Korean War, and Vietnam, and any number of "police actions", it never goes as planned, and Johnny doesn't always come marching home again.

We need to be reminded of that anytime our politicians start talking about sending in military forces.  It's always, always, going to be worse than they say.

Lots of Shows!

When shows come, they seem to come in bunches.

Right now, I've got two paintings in a curated exhibition at Tipton Gallery in Johnson City, TN.  The show is "EQUAL: Modern Family in Contemporary Art".  My two contributions are Pleasantville and The Dancers:

Both of these have been around for a bit.  Dancers was painted in 2003 and Pleasantville in 2007.  Both have been sitting on the rack in the studio for too long and needed to get out in public again.  The exhibition is pretty good and one work in particular knocked me out.  Laura Chenicek's tiny piece No Matter How Hard I Tried is easily described: it's a small broken eggshell that has been sewn back together with silk sutures.  As an artwork about the fragility of relationships, it is extremely powerful.  Click on the link and take a look.

I'm in another show that opens tomorrow at the Fine Arts Museum at Western Carolina University.  "Remote Sites of War" is a curated 3-man show featuring my drawings from Iraq and Afghanistan, photographs of Guantanamo Bay and military training by Christopher Sims, and photographs from Palestine by Todd Drake.  It's quite a strong show.  The museum director, David Brown, arranged all my drawings on one wall:

I really like the effect.  There is a definite rhythm to the layout and it kept pulling me along.  I went down there today to speak to a history class about my experiences in Afghanistan.  Rather than just talk about pictures or events, I tried to talk about the complications and contradictions behind simple images of people, with the message that they need to be aware of unseen complications in their own lives.

So I'll be back at Western tomorrow for the show's opening, then again on Monday to speak to two other classes.  I really enjoy these talks.  

And I learned that I'll be in another exhibit at the end of the month.  My painting Welcome to Sarajevo will be in the national juried show "Mayhem" at the Gallery Underground in Crystal City.  The show will run from Apr 28 to May 31, with an opening reception on Friday, May 2, from 5-8 pm.

So there you have it.  I've been busy as hell with a lot of other things, too, but they can wait for another post.  Meanwhile, if you're in western North Carolina, go see the "Remote Sites of War" exhibit at WCU.  And if you're in the DC area, go see "Mayhem" at the Gallery Underground in Crystal City!

One Show Up, Another Coming Up

The painting that I discussed in my last blog post is now finished and on exhibit at the Asheville Area Arts Council.  It wasn't quite down to the wire, but kinda close - I signed it about 24 hours it was hung.

Negotiation

Oil on canvas, 40"x50"

It was quite a lot of fun to do this painting.  I built it using my old picture-development techniques.  I thought about what I'd want to communicate, I searched through images looking for ideas, did some sketching, and then cut out, recombined, altered, added, deleted, and changed things until I had something to work with.  Then I transferred the rough outline to canvas and started painting.  You can see some of the process in a series of photos on my website at skiprohde.com/development-of-a-painting.html

You don't see the whole story there, though, particularly what went into the overall concept.  I started with the idea of painting something that reflected my experiences in Afghanistan.  For some reason, I connected with the image of the guy in green in this painting.  He had been at an evening meeting we had with our district governor.  I never saw him before or after.  He seemed to be pretty sharp, paid close attention to what was being said, had a good sense of humor, but never said a word.  I knew then that I wanted to draw him, but that wasn't in the cards that night.  Fortunately, we had somebody with us who took a whole lot of photographs, so I had about two dozen to work with.

But a single guy didn't tell much of a story.  I added in the elder, who is based on one that we worked closely with, a really neat guy who was a mujahedeen leader against the Russians many years ago.  But two guys wasn't enough, either.  Since I had an elder and an adult, I tried adding a young man, somebody whose age made him susceptible to Taliban recruitment.  I worked on their expressions and finally settled on having the elder be the one to be actively engaged, the adult to be open but a bit skeptical, and the youth to be potentially hostile.  That pretty much mirrored my experiences.  To further confuse things, I thought that the Afghans should be offering hospitality (symbolized by the tea and plate of nuts), but also show a potential threat symbolized by the AK47 leaning against the wall.

Next was a setting.  I tried it outside in a courtyard, surrounded by villagers, but that was just too busy, so I moved it indoors.  Initially, the door was closed, but then I thought that it would be good to open the door and establish a connection with the local environment.  That lasted a while until I realized that the open door pulled the viewer's attention away from the Afghans, and it also messed with the lighting.  So I closed it again.  That was the last "creative" decision in the painting.  Everything after that was in trying to execute the painting to the best of my ability.

I learned a lot out of this exercise.  Probably the most important thing is that I need to go a lot further with the drawing stage and work out a lot of issues long before a brush goes on canvas.  The question of whether the door should be open or closed, for example, should have been determined that way.  There were a lot of questions about lighting, colors, and values that I was wrestling with unnecessarily in the later stages.  So I need to stay with the drawing much longer.

It also seems to me that the painting is a bit stiff.  I over-painted too many areas with too great a level of detail.  I kept thinking of how somebody like Sargent would indicate a hand, which is with amazingly few strokes of the brush, or how he'd depict the plate or glasses.  I spent way too much time and paint on mine; his would have been done with a few flicks and looked much better.  So I need to work on that.

But the painting is done and in an exhibit.  We had a good turnout for the opening on Friday night.  I got to see a lot of old friends that I hadn't seen in a long time (years, in some cases).  Two of the other artists sold their work, which is always cool.  I had several good discussions about mine.  In this picture, mine is the one that's catching the full blast of sunlight on the left wall.

But the title of this post alludes to another show coming up.  That's true: I've been invited to participate in an exhibition of veterans' artworks in November.  The show is being curated by somebody out of Washington and will actually be shown in Michigan City, Indiana, which is on the coast of Lake Michigan, a bit east of Chicago.  The actual works that will go are still to be determined.  I'll keep you posted.

"Ten Years" Exhibit Wrapup

I took down my retrospective exhibit "Ten Years" today from the UNCA Highsmith Gallery.  Taking a show down is quicker and easier than hanging one.  Two weeks ago, it took me about 6 hours to get everything placed, hung, lighted, and labelled, and today it took about 3 hours to get everything down, packed, and loaded into the trailer.  Still, it's hard manual labor and I'm stiff and sore.  Good thing that I'll be planted on the couch watching the Daytona 500 tomorrow.

We had a closing reception for this exhibit last night.  Between the location, time, and other activities, there wasn't a big turnout, but we had a number of people there and all had a good time.

The university staff had a new way for visitors to leave their comments.  They could write them on a small piece of paper (like a large Post-It note) and stick it on the wall by the door.  Here's what some of the visitors said:

I laughed out loud at "Pleasantville", which I imagined with the subtitle: "A Vision for America, brought to you by the NRA".  Spot on!

Rarely does an exhibit capture the complexities of war without being trite.  This one does.  Accurate, bright, and moving.

These paintings are very honest in their message; their impact was nevertheless very powerful.  Thank you.

I loved the emotions captured in the eyes of the people ... Since his pieces revolve around the people, this is a crucial thing to be able to deliver and I believe it was done well!

"You Don't Understand" filled my heart and soul with sorrow - familiar sorrow.  Is that the tragedy of the human condition?

I've always believed realistic art to be more powerful than abstract.  This exhibit proves it.  Brilliant!  Beautiful & inspiring.  Tragic & thought provoking.  Thank you!

Yeah!  Vet to Vet - you said it!

Thanks for keeping your eyes on military families.

"Lament" brought tears to my eyes.

Reality captured.  Very moving, Skip.

I think it is Buydouffl.  (Note: this came from a 5-year-old pre-schooler who was spelling "beautiful" phonetically).

I share these, not to build myself up, but to say that one of the reasons I paint is to say things that are important and can't be said any other way.  I want to connect with people.  Selling artworks is nice when it happens, but that is not why I do what I do.  And from these and other comments, both written and verbal, I know that these works have connected.  I'm a happy man.

Art Exhibit at UNC Asheville

I have an exhibit of my artworks up at UNC Asheville.  "Ten Years" is a retrospective of works done in the decade since I graduated from there in 2003.  I have several paintings from the "Meditation on War" series, a couple from my political satire series, drawings and paintings from Iraq, a few of the "Faces of Afghanistan" drawings, and a couple of "model in the studio" paintings.

These walls have (left to right) Pleasantville, Portraits from Iraq, a group of drawings from Iraq and Afghanistan, and Red Dress, one of the "model in the studio" paintings.

Here's a better view of the drawings.

The other main wall has a number of paintings from the "Meditation on War" series, including Grand Re-Opening, Lament, You Don't Understand, Warrior, and Welcome to Sarajevo.  On the far wall is A Pachydermian Portrait of King George II, Pope Karl, and Lord Cheney.

The show is in the Highsmith Student Center gallery.  It'll be up for two weeks, until Feb 23rd.  There will be a closing reception on Friday evening, Feb 22nd, from 6-8 pm.  If you're in the Asheville area, it would be great to see you there.

New Year, New Employment

Yes, it's been quite a while since I last posted.  Holiday activities don't really make for interesting blog posts since everybody is doing something more or less similar.  I'm staying away from political rants as much as possible, so all the excitement over the fiscal cliff debacle was just background noise.  Annoying noise, but very predictable these days.  I was also getting over a bad sinus infection, and that really makes for a boring blog post.  So what could I write about?  Movies?  Eh.  Not many rate a post. Weather?  You must be kidding.  The dogs?  They're my life, but you don't really care.  No, I had nothing much to write about, so rather than launch lots of random words into the blogosphere, I decided to just shut up.

But now I have something to write about.  I am employed again.  I'm working as a program and project manager with a defense contractor on a really interesting project.  We're going to help build a security installation overseas.  I've been spending my time reading lots and lots of background material, emails, documentation, websites, and so on, trying to get as smart as possible as fast as possible.  Basically, I'm going thru the same routine here that I did in Afghanistan and Iraq, and repeatedly during my Navy career: I'm thrown into a new situation where I need to be an expert on pretty much everything by sometime yesterday.  And that's a kinda fun place to be.

This new job fits me to a T.  Besides giving me the opportunity to work on a very interesting and worthwhile project, it is (for the most part) virtual.  I don't have to deploy anywhere - I can do the vast majority of work from right here.  So my commute is from my kitchen to the office down the hall.  Cool.  There will be travel occasionally, but nothing that will last very long.  I can be (and am) interrupted by my wife and dogs regularly.  The job is also part-time, or at least it will be once I'm up to speed.  That means that I'll be able to set up a studio and start painting again.  About time, too: it's been going on two years since I've had a real studio and been able to paint, and I'm going through withdrawals.  (Well, not really, but whenever I walk into an artist studio now and smell the linseed oil and solvents, I go weak in the knees).  So I'm a pretty happy man.

Speaking of studio stuff, I learned the other day that two of my paintings will hang in the Pentagon for about a year.  The Veteran Artist Program (run by a group of veterans who are artists in the DC and Baltimore area) has organized an exhibition by veteran artists.  They selected these two works:

Lament

Oil on canvas, 60"x60" 

Warrior

Oil on canvas, 60"x60"

I will have to deliver these paintings to DC personally.  They're large (5 feet by 5 feet each, meaning the figures are life-size) so they'd be really expensive to ship.  And I just don't trust shippers.  Besides, I want to see where these are going to hang.  If they're buried in the basement or something, forget it, I'll bring 'em home.

One final note on art stuff.  Next month, I will have an exhibition at UNC Asheville.  Yes, I know, I just had a show of my Afghan drawings there.  This one will be different.  In the past, they've had a group show of work by various alumni.  This year, the school decided to focus on one alumnus at a time, and the Fickle Finger of Fate pointed to me.  So I'm going to show a broad selection of paintings, prints, and drawings done since I graduated from there almost ten years ago.  (Holy crap, it doesn't seem like that long ... but it is).

So.  Things are moving along.  Feels good to be getting active again!

Janis's Horses

Janis's Horses

Oil on canvas, 36"x48"

Janis's Christmas present is finally done. It came home this afternoon and is hanging on our bedroom wall now. This was a hard one for me to do - I've never done a horse before, and there was certainly a lot to learn. But it's done.

Over the past two weeks, I've gotten two exhibitions lined up. One will be at Wiesenblatt Gallery at Mars Hill College during the month of March. Actual dates are still to be determined, but I'll post them here as soon as they're firmed up. The other will be a larger exhibition at Flood Gallery in Asheville during August. This one will be a bit more raw. Both will feature my "Meditation on War" paintings with some new works. I'm very excited about both of these shows!

So now I'm beginning work on new paintings for both of these shows. Right now it's mostly conceptual: What needs to be painted? What stories need to be told? How are those stories best put into paint? Should it be more direct and in-your-face, or indirect and metaphorical? I think I'll be wrestling with these questions up until, oh, the first of August.