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

Creating Tapestries in Mexico

For the last several years I have been spending time in Patzcuaro, Michoacan, Mexico. I was first invited by some friends to visit Patzcuaro for my 50th birthday and on that trip, I was able to work in a printmaking workshop housed in an old Jesuit College, which has been converted into a cultural center.

I made a small drypoint etching there and was so impressed with the facility and the wonderful people running the shop that I vowed to return to engage in a larger project. Upon returning to Tennessee I was determined to invent a project in order to return to work in that shop.

In 2010 I received a grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission and drove back to Patzcuaro for a month's stay the following spring to produce the La Frontera woodcut and drypoint etchings. I fell in love with the town, its people and the Mexican culture and have been back many times since.

Last year we visited a shop in Patzcuaro, which sells very high quality rugs, sweaters and other woven goods run by an American woman named Ruth Mitchell de Aguillar, who went to Mexico from Alaska in the seventies. There she met and married a Mexican man and began dyeing wool for weavers, prompting her to start her own business.

At Ruth's shop, my wife and I each bought sweaters and that's when I noticed the interesting designs used in the carpets. I saw a sign saying that they do custom work and asked Ruth if they would be able and/or interested in making some rugs with my designs. She responded positively so I looked through my images on the computer and printed several of them. I should note that I simplified the designs a bit for the weavers by painting the printed images with opaque watercolor.

Ruth chose the first design, which I made by simplifying the drypoint etching titled “La Frontera/Row" (pictured above). I was impressed by this first attempt by the weavers to undertake my designs but could see room for improvement. This tapestry is 5x5 feet .

I see these tapestries being used as wall hangings but they can also be used on the floor. A tapestry is a weaving in which an image or design is created by working different areas of the textile with colored threads as opposed to a weaving where a shuttle goes back and forth across the entire textile at once to distribute the threads evenly across the piece.

The weavers that Ruth has been working with are an extended family named the Servins. I visited them when the master weaver Victoriano Servin was working on the second design, “My Island," which was taken from a fairly complex small watercolor, pen and colored pencil drawing. When I visited, Victoriano had completed about 24 inches of what would eventually become the tour de force 7 ½ by 9' "My Island" tapestry.



My Island drawing

I was completely amazed by the astonishing colors and mysterious process with which he was working. He works from the drawing with no pattern behind the loom and starts at the bottom. Working his way up, he uses an intuitive and very skillful eye to get the proportions and composition right. He literally draws with the colored threads as he works his way up through the composition.

Ruth dyes all of the wool according to the drawing and creates many exceptionally colored wool threads to give to the Servins to weave. We walked around the family complex where there were many looms in operation by different family members. The whole family was so warm and welcoming to me and we immediately became friends for life.

My Island tapestry

Several months later the finished “My Island” rug was shipped to me and I am completely amazed and extremely excited about it and the prospects for future projects. Victoriano takes liberties with aspects of the imagery and colors, which I encouraged, so this process becomes a collaboration between us.

I asked Victoriano to add his initials alongside mine on these rugs since they are collaborations. He has been weaving for his whole life and had never signed a rug. This is a shame to me for he is a master craftsmen who should be recognized for his talents. I have created 12 designs that he will work on in to the future.

Also, the Servin's son Ricardo just completed his first attempt at one of my images and did a great job. I created 5 designs for him to weave that are somewhat simpler than the designs his father undertakes.

For me, this collaboration is very meaningful on a personal level as well as an artistic one. It is very exciting to see my work interpreted in another medium, however, it is more important to really connect with artisans from another culture. By giving them different sorts of imagery to weave, challenging their skills and assumptions about their craft, I feel that this encourages them to push their limits and elevate their craft.

I see exciting potential for this collaboration. The director of the cultural center in Patzcuaro has invited us to exhibit the rugs along with the original artwork in a gallery exhibition that would feature myself and the weavers equally. My hope is that this will get the Servin family some long overdue recognition for their very skillful work.

Andrew Saftel November 2012

Behind the Scenes: Summer 2012

 

This video was shot this summer after I had gone through something of a frustrating time with my work and ended up creating this piece (also seen in the blog header) called "Summer 2012." I often incorporate found objects in my art and this piece contains pages from an old autograph book -- the kind in which students would write little notes to one another such as "don't forget me over the summer."

One of the pages contained the words "I like Miss Lula" so I used that text as the central part of the work. The image that became Miss Lula (the blonde woman in blue) was from a previous project of small portraits I had done, but it captures who I think Miss Lula might have been.

The figures to the far right are depictions of woodcarvings by a Tennessee folk artist and the little dog, I carved from wine corks over the course of several days. This panel is a good example of what can be created when you allow yourself to have fun with your work. I felt like an 8-year old boy, just coming into the studio and having a blast.

I delivered this piece to Bennett Galleries in Knoxville last week where it was part of a First Friday exhibition, along with a couple other newer works I have done. If you're in Knoxville, stop in and see it. I'm happy to answer any questions you might have via this blog or my email so please feel free to get in touch. I hope you enjoy it!