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.

Growing Season for Blackberry Farm Hospice du Rhone

When asked to create a piece of art to be used for the Hospice du Rhone event at Blackberry Farm, I immediately knew that some of the imagery I have been recently developing would be perfect.

Growing Season, 2013 watercolor, pencil, colored pencil & collage on watercolor board 25x36"

For the last couple of years my work has become more narrative and figurative and two of the figures I've created appear in this work. {Here are other examples of recent work with figures: La Frontera, La Frontera Fly, and Troubadour}

Located at the bottom right of Growing Season is a character I call The King of Falling Fruit and on the left Reaching Man. They both represent an attitude towards life, which is that one needs to constantly reach and stretch in order to find things in life.

As artists we need to constantly reach and search for ideas and images for our work; to experience as much as possible in order to speak about what we find.

To me, fruit is a metaphor for good things in life. There is fruit everywhere in this piece, like rain from the sky. In this case the fruit is grapes and the King has his hands out to get him some.

The title of this work, Growing Season, is derived from handwriting by John Coykendal, the master gardener at Blackberry Farm. This could be a straightforward reference to a growing season in a garden or vineyard but also serves as a reference to the growing season of our lives from birth to death.

-- Andrew Saftel

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! 

Shakerag Workshop: Color Collograph & Relief Printmaking

I'm very excited about an upcoming workshop I'll be teaching at the Shakerag Workshops on the campus of St. Andrew's - Sewannee School this summer. Below is a short description of the course and a link to the website where you can register. It's going to be a great time of learning and growing and I hope you'll consider taking part!

Impressions: Color Collagraph and Relief Printmaking 

June 16-22,2013

Course Description

A collagraph print is made from a surface on which collage elements and texture have been applied. Using oil-based paints and inks applied with brushes and rollers, we will create colorful, textured, one-of-a-kind prints. This is a very direct, painterly, and fun way to make a print on paper with an embossed surface. Both the making of the blocks and the inking process allow for endless possibilities. This low–tech approach to printmaking will produce stunning qualities and rich color combinations. Using multiple blocks printed over each other with transparent inks on one sheet of paper will yield exciting and surprising results.

For more about this class or to register, click here.

The Art of Community: Janet and Jim Ayers' Collection of Tennessee Art

I'm very honored to have been included in a recent publication called The Art of Community: Janet & Jim Ayers' Collection of Tennessee Art. The Ayers, who own FirstBank, are art supporters, art lovers and art collectors. They decided to create a major corporate art collection to appoint FirstBank's new headquarters in Nashville.

The collection is documented in a wonderful publication, which features the more than 200 works of art in various mediums representing more than 60 artists from Memphis to Mountain City, Tennessee. The Ayers wanted to choose pieces that honor the spirit and character of Tennessee and I'm so thrilled to have been included and have my work featured on the book's cover.

Not only that, my wife Susan, along with Celia Walker, wrote the catalogue for the The Art of Community. You can read some of her thoughts about the project in this article, featured in Nashville Arts Magazine.

The book is available at Parnassus Books and The Arts Company.  

www.parnassusbooks.net    www.theartscompany.com