Our Story

Our Story -  (Acrylic and pencil on canvas, found objects on panel) 2016, 60x48”

While in Mexico last January I began working on canvas for the first time. A friend had given me a large piece of canvas and I wanted to make something that I could begin there and then bring back to Tennessee to finish. I tore three pieces from the large canvas, sealed them with gesso, stapled them to the table and began drawing with pencil on them.

On a walk the previous week I found a street that had concrete puzzle pieces for the roadbed and there was a pile of discarded pieces from which I took two that fit together. To me they were male/female, yin and yang and a symbol of how things fit together (or don’t) in life. I traced the puzzle pieces all over the canvases in different configurations and off I went. Once I had the overall patterns from the puzzle pieces for a background, I began freely drawing images on the canvases. 

Then, with acrylics, I spent a couple of weeks staining and painting them. I rolled them up and carried them back to Tennessee. Once back in my studio I glued the canvases to birch panels and continued to paint using thicker acrylic paint. The canvases are smaller than the panels so there is a border of exposed wood around the canvas edge. I then carried the image from the canvas out to the wood border to integrate the canvas with the panel. This is very exciting for me as the initial pencil drawing and original stains are visible in the completed work. Also I was able to draw with pencil at any time during the process. This is very different and somewhat liberating from the carved and thickly textured paintings I have been making for years. I really enjoy the freedom that this process gives me although I will continue to do the carved paintings.

The painting “Our Story” is about our collective immigrant stories but also about my family history in particular. We found a census from 1900 in Boston that has my great grandfather’s family listed. He came first to the U.S. in 1890 from Russian Galicia and the rest of his family came later. My great grandfather is classified as a “coat tailor” and his five children “in school.” I projected the census list onto the top left of the painting and “Coat Tailor” in the middle. I then collaged a small coat, which was on a little puppet that I had in the studio, under the words “coat tailor.” In this way I brought my great grandfather and his story to life over a hundred years later. In light of the current immigration crisis in Europe, I feel it is important for Americans to be sympathetic as the vast majority of us are immigrants here. This story is Our Story.

Andrew Saftel June 2016

Another Time Around the Sun

What was and is to come

The beginning of a new year is always a time of reflection, contemplation and hope for what is to come as well as a chance to see the past year in a different light.

2013 was a busy and productive year in which my work took me to a lot of interesting places.

 

The year started with Where Water Meets Land, an exhibition at The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, of fourteen large-scale photographs and two large collages based on my experience in Bangladesh in 2010. I gave a gallery talk and a hands-on workshop at the museum. We also produced a brochure for the exhibit. It was very meaningful for me to share the imagery from such a beautiful country and talk about my experiences there, especially since Bangladesh is ground zero for important global trade and environmental issues.

I showed the same photographs and collages at Cumberland Gallery in Nashville, where I have been represented for over twenty years. The owner, Carol Stein, an early supporter of my work, organized an evening lecture in the gallery in which she asked me questions about the work and the experience in Bangladesh. I thought it was a very stimulating conversation and the large audience seemed very interested and moved by both the work and words.

Later in the summer I showed the Bangladesh body of photographs at Bennett Gallery in Knoxville, where I have also been exhibiting for over twenty years. They held a Saturday afternoon talk in the gallery there, which was very enjoyable. It was inspiring to connect with interested people about the work and to visit with old friends. People seem to really respond to this work. I don’t consider myself a photographer, but this body of work in photography possesses some of the same sensibilities of light, surface, and image as do the paintings. At Bennett Galleries, I showed nine new paintings with the photographs.  The photographs and paintings remain for sale at Bennett Galleries, Knoxville.

In the Spring I juried an exhibition of regional high school art for an exhibit at the Gallery at St. Andrews Sewanee High School. I also gave a lecture on my current work and attended the opening for the exhibit. I cannot fully express how meaningful it was to interact with the students and be supportive of their art endeavors. I have been involved with this school for many years. They have a really committed studio art faculty, great facilities, and an emphasis on the arts. I am a deep believer in the importance of arts education for all grade levels. This is another conversation.

I returned to Sewanee in June to teach a one-week printmaking workshop at Shakerag Workshops, which had its ten-year anniversary last year. Shakerag was started by several art faculty members at St. Andrews to provide two weeks of craft workshops with leading artists and craftspeople. This was my third time teaching there. I just love being there with inspiring people in such a beautiful setting, focused on what we all love. Studios are open twenty fours hours and it is an all out, high–energy mix of work, food, play, lectures and connecting with other artists.

I was invited to give a short talk on my work at the Frist Center for the Arts in Nashville along with two other artists as we all had work on exhibit in the Martin Artquest Gallery. This is an excellent hands-on experiential gallery for people of all ages. I spoke about my experiences with art education as an artist and a teacher. They hung my large woodcut, La Frontera (2010), a large 33-color woodcut printed in Patzcuaro, Mexico, and also two of the blocks used for printing.  People are allowed to do rubbings from the blocks. The Frist has been a monumental addition to the cultural world in our region, originating and hanging many important exhibitions. I stop in every time I go to Nashville and there is always something worth stopping in for.

 

The highlight of 2013 for me was my exhibition, Las FrutasDel Mundo, (Fruits of the World) at the Centro Cultural Antiguo Colegio Jesuita in Patzcuaro, Michoacan, Mexico. This exhibit consisted of two strains of work made in Mexico since 2009.

I have been working in the printmaking workshop at the Colegio since 2009 and have produced drypoint etchings, woodcuts, and collagraph prints, in collaboration with the printers there. Some of the imagery in the prints references the Mexico-U.S. border (la frontera), with movement indicating crossing. This imagery became the basis for another ongoing project with local weavers.

Beginning in 2011 with a chance visit to a local store, looking for rugs, I asked about the possibility of using some of my own imagery for a rug. Thus began a collaboration between myself, a family of weavers, and the talented and knowledgeable Ruth Mitchell de Aguilar who procures and dyes the wool. A father, Victoriano Servin, and his son, Ricardo, and nephew, Juan, have been weaving spectacular tapestries based on my images. They are all enormously talented.

For me it is a welcome challenge to create images for the weavers to interpret in woven wool. It forces me to simplify and consider the images more carefully. It is very exciting to see what they will do with the image using the spectacular dyed colors. I can’t wait to see the next one! These are one of a kind, non-computer aided, hand dyed, hand-made tapestries for wall or floor. Inquiries welcome (inquiries@andrewsaftel.com)

So, back to the exhibition, which consisted of eleven of the tapestries hung on the walls, eight small, framed tapestry designs, eight prints, four large watercolors, two panel paintings and a collage on panel. Some of the tapestries are quite large so it was an impressive exhibit in a grand space in an old stone building with tile floors and large windows along one wall. There is an evident evolution in the imagery from the earlier prints to the tapestries so that all of the other works are visible in the tapestries.

People loved the work and really praised the weavers for their impressive skills. I’d like for them to receive even more recognition. We have all formed friendships through this project, which will continue and will nurture our cross-border, cross-cultural endeavor. We produced a brochure for this exhibit as well and also a documentary film by Nemesis Films: Eduardo Bautista, filmmaker. You can see the complete film Las Frutas del Mundo on You Tube. I think he did a great job to tell the story of the tapestries and capture the feeling and emotion of the collaboration. I am very proud of this project, exhibition, collaborations in printmaking and tapestries and see a lot of possibilities for future work together in Mexico.

As I go through the year, sometimes it seems like things are stalled and nothing is happening with the work and I’m disconnected from the world out there. But as I look back on all of the exhibits, talks, workshops, travel and connections with people, it adds up to a deep and rich life.

 

                                                     What is to Come?

 

Always a tough question but one can speculate, reach and hope for things. I try to put ideas in motion, like a train, and then see where they go. I just keep working  everyday and know that it will add up to more than I can imagine a year from now.

I am enjoying where the imagery has been going and hope to continue to use the ideas and characters in the newer work.  I think there is a good balance between the humor and references to more serious issues in the falling fruit imagery and the idea of horizontal movement across borders. Right now I am working on some sizeable watercolors/ drawings, searching for more images for new tapestries and paintings.

I am eagerly looking forward to several upcoming projects, workshops, travel and exhibits in 2014 in addition to the studio work. First off, Cumberland Gallery in Nashville will be taking some of my work to the LA Art Fair- January 16-18. Carol Stein does several of these fairs each year, which is great exposure for my work. Her booths always look great since she has a selective, eclectic, quality eye for art.

In June I will be returning to Bangladesh to lead printmaking workshops under the direction of the Bengal Foundation. As we did on the 2010 trip to Bangladesh, my friend and poet Whitney Baker and I will travel together, he leading poetry workshops. I am a little nervous but really excited about the trip. We have a lot of friends and fellow artists there that we will be glad to reconnect with. There is an election there right now so hopefully the outcome will lead to a better situation. The details are just being outlined but I’m sure it will be a very deep experience in many ways.

 I will be teaching a two-week printmaking workshop, at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine from August 10-22. This will be my third time teaching at Haystack and I really look forward to it. I will teach multi-block collagraph and relief printmaking. The campus is in a fantasy setting on the rocks of the Maine coast. The director, Stuart Kestenbaum, has a special way of setting a great tone at this really special school.

We will see what else the year brings but I eagerly await whatever comes in the studio and out in the world of people moving through time together.

As always, thank you for stopping by my blog and please feel free to share it with anyone you think might enjoy. You can also follow along on social media (Twitter & Facebook) to keep up with the latest happenings. 

The Forest Unseen: Looking at the land with eyes of an artist and a scientist

I've been connected with the folks at the St. Andrew's Sewannee School for some time. This is where I'll be teaching my upcoming summer collograph workshop, at the annual Shakerag Workshop.

As an artist living and working in rural Tennessee, thinking about how I connect with nature is a big part of what I do. I've written about my experiences gardening, spending time with the earth and just taking it all in.

This is why I wanted to share a wonderful book with you, written by a Botany professor at Sewannee by the name of David Haskell. Over the course of one year, Haskell observed the activity of 1 square meter of land on a wooded slope in Shakerag Hollow, Sewannee, Tennessee. His book, The Forest Unseen, chronicles just what he observed and witnessed during the 12-month period.

By taking time to stop and really observe the land, Haskell saw many things that others most definitely would miss.

As an artist, I rely very heavily on the powers of observation. All artists are individuals looking at the world, trying to glean something from what we see. That's what I experience when creating a new piece of work.

I often feel that as a society, we need more hope. And nature is a great place to look and find that such a hope does exist...if we simply stop and look for it.

Here's a short video about the book and Haskell's experience. I think you'll enjoy it.

Pictures, Not Words

I was recently invited to speak at the Frist Visual Arts Center because my woodcut and the block it was printed on are in the Martin Artquest Gallery. I shared some of my experiences with art education and I wanted to share them here with you on my blog.



"Lesson" acrylic, collage & found objects on panel

As a child, I went to public schools and we always had art class. I wasn’t a great student in general and being left handed made the writing messy. One of my earliest memories of doing art was with Mrs. Damico in second grade. She had us reach in to a paper bag and grasp an object and draw what it made us think of. I felt something furry (a rabbits foot keychain) and drew a squirrel with a gigantic tail. It won a prize in a local kids' art show but I remember loving the feeling of making something up on paper stemming from a real experience.

In high school I had Mrs. Hall for art, who was very supportive of my art interest and made up a job for me as art room monitor and gave me a key to the room. This was my first studio and the beginning of my identity as the artist.

My father told me once that as a child on my first visit to the library I told him “Daddy, pictures not words.” I had trouble reading but I drew constantly, making things up, copying comic books, and photographs- I loved the private space and the different sense of time that drawing and making things afforded me.

Museums played a big role too. I remember my father taking me to the Boston museum of Fine Arts when I was around 10 years old and seeing a Monet painting I had coveted in a book and was shocked that it existed in real life. I was mesmerized by the texture of the painted surface.

And so I have had a life in art that I never could have imagined as a child...by never relinquishing the private space of artmaking to the world. When I came to TN in the mid –eighties I worked for two years for the TN Arts Commission’s Artists in the Schools program for KMA. I went to schools all over East Tennessee and worked with mostly elementary school age kids of all socioeconomic backgrounds.I was inspired by the kids and saw that in first and second grade all 30 kids in the class made great, honest art.

I want to share a few excerpts of letters I received from the students.

Thank you for teaching me how to put light in my pictures

I never knew such artwork could exist. Before you came I could not draw at all. Now I am very ,very good

I like drawing because it was fun and we didn’t have to work

I wish in the future there would be more shapes

Thank you so much for the art project and for using up some of our time

I liked the lesson

I used the words from the last student note in a painting called Lesson that I did a few years ago (seen above). To me, using handwritten words and text adds meaning to a work.

Scenic Road

In 2010, I was commissioned, by Chris Hehmeyer, a Memphis native, to create a large painting about Tennessee for his residence in Chicago. For this commission I did research at the Tennessee State Library and Archives in Nashville, from which I copied many old documents, photographs, and postcards pertaining to the state's history, commerce, agriculture, and culture. The painting is called "Postcard from Tennessee."

"Scenic Road" and other paintings from that time were offshoots of the commission and the research I did for it. For this painting I used a postcard that someone wrote from Tennessee describing a trip to the Smoky Mountains. The postmark in the middle of the painting connotes an exact moment: May 16th 1951 at 9 a.m. On the top left of the painting it says Newfound Gap, below that it says "Scenic Road," and "Mama said lets go home" -- all taken from projected images of the actual postcard. On the top right corner of the painting is the Two Cent postage stamp. The old house in the painting is a house on the property adjacent to ours in the Sequatchie valley.

The painting references an exact moment in time that is long lost and the words and feelings that someone had when visiting Tennessee. It also references a method of communication, real and handwritten, that is quickly disappearing. The little house lay dormant and decaying for years but has recently been lovingly restored by new owners, which is a symbol of hope.

This painting encompasses themes that I have been interested in for many years: how people move through time together; how they interact and communicate with each other; how important the hand written word is; how handwriting communicates more than what is being said; what is lost between humans as time moves on; what replaces older methods and materials in our modern world; and how people find hope in different ways in the face of a complicated world.

As an artist I am interested in conveying, through the work I do, my observations and feelings about what I see around me. I am interested in how and what other people are communicating to each other.

Footsteps

 

Footsteps, 2009 (Acrylic, collage and found objects on panel) 96 x 72 inches

 

As an artist my intention is to distill as much of what I see and feel about the world into visual assemblages through which I can share my experiences with others.

 

Sometimes I add found objects, which make me reflect on the experiences of those who might have used them. The large acrylic on panel painting entitled “Footsteps” began when I brought back to the studio, from an afternoon walk, an old brown leather woman’s farm-type shoe. Small and sturdy, with a chunky elevated heel, it was dignified but worn out, ready to rest.

 

It was a story almost left untold. I found it in the hay residue in a neighbor’s old barn and plucked it from the decay like a clam from a low –tide beach. It’s aged, tooled brown leather--holes in the toes, patches attached with bent-nails to cover up the broken-down layers--smelled like work and smoke and the river of days.

 

I puzzled over who might have been its former occupant--the shoe being that person’s connection to the earth for part of a life.

 

It symbolized her path through time and place in a long-gone world.

 

I embedded the shoe into the empty panel as a starting point and began to think about the finite amount of days we have and the places our shoes will take us.

 

Where have your shoes taken you lately? I've been traveling but I look forward to sharing some stories of my trip with you all here on my blog. Thanks for reading and thanks for your support! 

Thoughts from California

As a teenager growing up in the Northeast in the seventies, California was a mythic destination about which I knew mostly through the music of the sixties and news footage of concerts, Vietnam War protests, Ken Kesey’s bus, people enjoying life, TV shows, beaches, Ansel Adam’s Yosemite and gold. 

"Tennefornia" 2008 oil pastel, graphite, colored pencil, watercolor

My brother picked me up at the San Francisco airport days after my high school graduation and introduced me to the carnival, where I would work for two summers in games on the midway, traveling weekly from county fair to hot parking lot. In our group were some art students working the carnival in the summers. One of them was going to the San Francisco Art Institute and took me to visit the school, perched on a hill overlooking San Francisco Bay, where I would receive my BFA in Printmaking in 1981.

California has remained a deeply embedded facet of my life’s experience and I continually return to be energized by its changing light. I have a cabin and small studio on a mountainside two hundred miles north of San Francisco, where I have been coming since I was in my mid- twenties. It is difficult to describe the impact of a place on one’s life over time but being here has always given me hope and the courage to make my life the way I want it to be. I have grown partly, out of this place.

On the drive up here I pass through the town of Willits, where our carnival used to play Frontier Days on July 4^th. We would camp at Quail Meadows campground and eat at Garibaldi’s diner, both now closed since the recession.

As a young art student at SFAI in the late seventies I was exposed to so much great Bay Area art in galleries and museums.  The William Wiley retrospective “Wiley Territory” at SF MOMA as well as Philip Guston’s survey (not home-grown), were hallmarks for me. The faculty at the Art Institute were all exhibiting at galleries downtown: Robert Hudson, Richard Shaw, Carlos Villa, Julius Hatofsky, Sam Tchakalian , Tom Akawie, Tim Berry and  Alvin  Light. George Kuchar was teaching filmmaking and invited all comers to collaborate on films. Angela Davis taught a lecture class on Art and Revolution.  It was eye-opening and standing room only. 

The Diego Rivera Gallery is to the left of the courtyard upon entering the school, housing a stellar mural by Rivera; a self- portrait of the artist on a scaffold overseeing an industrial scene.  This all inspired me to decide that I would rather try to be an artist than anything else. I had, since childhood, always liked the private time that drawing afforded: time slowed down and relished.

So now, when I come back here, all the early memories surface.  I feel a connection to all the teachers, artists, friends, family, events, years and feelings that grew in this place and continue to shape my outlook and my work.

Seven years ago I was able to build a small studio here, which I love working in. We are off the grid here so I added a solar system to the studio and it provides plenty of power. I like the thought of using the sun to make ice in my small fridge.

In my studio here I have been doing mostly works on paper using pencil, colored pencil, oil pastel and watercolor. These I am able to roll and ship back to TN. It is fulfilling to draw and paint on paper, create new images, explore new territories. I feel a certain sense of freedom working here in the mountains of Northern California. I don’t have all of my tools and the space that I have at home in TN so I work with a different intention here.

My goal is to invent new images and ideas that I can explore further back in TN. I have been doing 42x42inch drawing/ watercolors here, which I generally start by drawing something from nature that I find walking to the studio: a madrone branch, mushroom or seed pod. I begin by drawing the natural form realistically and then create a story around it. I like to just begin working on these pieces without thinking too much about meaning or narrative and then just see where the drawing takes me. There is always more meaning in the art than I can imagine.

 

I will continue to return to this spectacular landscape to work and to just be and feel. I don’t feel encumbered here by the feeling that I should be accomplishing and doing all day long. I have cell phone service and can go to a neighbor’s for the internet but choose not to be connected here.

 

 
I watch the time go by and the light change and am so thankful that I found this place as a young man. I will watch the sunsets through the same old growth fir forest as an old man.