Giovanni Battista

I have been sort of having an artist's block lately when it comes to my own drawings, which is a bad thing, since I have a show opening December 16 at Fraser Gallery Georgetown.

I'd like to have about 25 new drawings, and so far... ahhh...

So whenever I am stuck, one of the subjects that I tend to return to are the recurring images in my artwork, such as images of Frida Kahlo, which I have been drawing, painting and sculpting since 1977, when I first saw her amazing work, or Che Guevara, whose iconic face and figure keeps reappearing in my art throughout the years.

Or in this case, the image of John The Baptist. The below piece is a new drawing (charcoal on 300 weight paper, about 3 x 9 inches):

Opportunities for Artists

Deadline: January 15, 2006

New Contemporary Gallery in Denver, Colorado is now accepting submissions for its 2006 exhibition schedule. Open to national artists with an emphasis on contemporary works. Email inquiries to Remmifineart@aol.com or please send resume, bio, SASE and 15 images of work on slides or CD to:
Remmi Fine Art
776 Santa Fe Dr.
Denver, CO 80204

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Deadline: January 27, 2006

The 2006 Bethesda International Photography Competition. Open to all photographers 18 years and older. All photography not previously exhibited at the Fraser Gallery. The maximum dimension (including frame) should not exceed 40 inches in any direction. $950 in cash prizes. Details and entry forms here or email the Gallery for an entry form or send a SASE to:
Fraser Gallery
7700 Wisconsin Avenue
Suite E
Bethesda, MD 20814
301/718-9651
info@thefrasergallery.com

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Deadline: March 1, 2006

The Second Chance Foundation Gallery is located on Martha's Vineyard, and they are accepting artist submissions for exhibition opportunities. Qualifications: emerging and professional artists with regional/national experience and exposure. Note: only submissions with a bio, resume and a minimum of five color slides will be considered. Send SASE to:
The Second Chance Foundation
c/o Artist Submission
P.O. Box 727
Vineyard Haven, MA 02568

Tate on TV

Around Town has a piece on Tim Tate currently running on WETA TV. See it online here.

It will also be on TV tomorrow (Wednesday evening) at 10:52PM.

The Vlogging Revolution

DMV artist Rob Parrish is a Vlogger and Hopper Video is his Vlog.

Vlogging (aka video podcasting) should be of interest not only to video artists but to all artists and art venues in general. The key event that has made posting video so attractive is that there are now several sites that will host your video for free. This eliminates worries regarding bandwidth issues. If you're interested check out FreeVlog. It is a very well done guide to vlogging.

And I agree with Rob Parrish in that Vlogging has some potential for artist self-promotion, especially since it can be done for free!

Anyway... Vlogs are essentially blogs that have video content in addition to text. And like podcasts, you can subscribe to a vlog and have the videos downloaded to your computer via iTunes or via specialty vlog aggregators (Check out MeFeedia.com and also GetFireAnt.com).

Mefeedia has some interesting tools to search for vlogs. FireAnt comes with about thirty or so vlogs pre-loaded.

Another fun way to find vlogs, if you've got some time on your hands, is to go to vlogmap.org. There you will find a satellite picture of the world via Google Earth. On the picture are flags, and each flag represents a vlog's physical location and contains a link to the vlog. So, you can trot around the world checking out vlogs.

Soon, perhaps we will have all of our artists discussing their shows through an online video, and perhaps even sooner, we'll have online art bloggers doing our art criticism thing through a terrific marriage of words and video and imagery.

Can anyone else hear the end of the printed newspaper creep a little closer?

Lawrence on DC art round-up

Sidney Lawrence writes a really good round-up of our area's visual arts goings-ons published at Art Net Magazine and in the process mentions DC Art News!

Thank you Sidney! Read the Capital Roundup here.

For all the new art devotees checking in: come back often.

Smithsonian debuts art blog!

Kriston has been keeping all of us in check about announcing Eye Level, the new art blog by the Smithsonian, but today it's official!

So what's this new important art blog about?

Here's the short version: Eye Level investigates American art—its history, evolution, and currents. The hope is that this blog hosts a vital conversation among artists, curators, collectors, and enthusiasts on a broad range of subjects related to American art. It's the kind of conversation you have in a museum—that unique social space that a museum provides—that Eye Level would like to bring to the blogosphere.

More about what Eye Level is about here. Visit often: Eyelevel is here.

When are the openings?

This is the most common question emailed to me, as new readers and new people interested in the DC area visual art scene discover DC Art News and our area's visual art scene itself.

DC area art galleries are generally now centered on six loosely gathered gallery concentrations: Dupont Circle, Bethesda, 14th Street area, Georgetown, 7th Street corridor, and Old Town Alexandria.

First Fridays: With 21 member galleries and art venues, the Dupont Circle galleries has the largest number of galleries roughly concentrated around the Dupont Circle area of DC. Many of these galleries host openings and extended hours (generally 6-8PM) on the First Friday of each month.

Second Thursdays: Seven galleries in and around King Street in Old Town Alexandria host openings and extended hours on the Second Thursday of each month. Other galleries in the area, as well as the 83 artists studios inside the Torpedo Factory host different openings ad hoc.

Second Fridays: With 12 member galleries and art venues, the Bethesda Art Walk also has a good number of participating visual art spaces offering openings and extended hours (6-9PM) as well as a free guided tour on the Second Friday of each month.

Third Thursdays: A handful of art galleries and venues are within walking distance of each other around the 7th Street, NW corridor and still host (I think) joint 3rd Thursday extended hours and openings.

Third Fridays: The five galleries inside the Canal Square (31st and M Street, NW in Georgetown) host joint openings or extended hours from 6-9PM each and every 3rd Friday of the month. The other half dozen or so Georgetown galleries within walking distance host their openings ad hoc.

14th Street: Initially anchored by Fusebox Gallery, a handful of very good art galleries and art venues now congregate around the 14th Street, NW area and host openings at various times throughout the month.

Georgetown Openings

Next Friday, December 2, from 6-8PM, two of the Canal Square galleries are having openings from 6-8PM.

On the second floor, the Anne C. Fisher Gallery hosts a reception in honor of their well-received, current exhibition, South American Holiday. This lively exhibition by several South American artists is a feast for the eyes! It includes mixed media collages by Joan Belmar, paintings in acrylic on canvas and acrylic on paper by Patricia Secco, and monoprints, hanging paper constructions and the video Zapatos Blancos by artist Helga Thomson.

Under the Anne C. Fisher Gallery, our neighbor Parish Gallery opens a new group show with work by Floyd Coleman, Victor Ekpuk, Ron Flemmings, Liani Foster, Naza McFarren, Roberto Morassi, Deanna Schwartzberg, Stephanie Parish Taylor, and Yvette Watson.

Congratulations

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has awarded the 2005 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art to Elizabeth Johns, professor emerita of the history of art at the University of Pennsylvania.

Her recent book, Winslow Homer: The Nature of Observation, is recognized for its complex and sympathetic portrait of the artist. She has written several influential books on American art, and curated a number of exhibitions.

Johns will be giving a lecture on Thursday, December 8 starting at 3:30 p.m. with a reception to follow.

Gallery Talk

This Saturday, Nov. 26th at 1 pm Tim Tate will be giving a gallery talk about his new work at our Fraser Gallery in Bethesda. Plenty of validated parking underneath the gallery, and one block north of the Bethesda Metro stop on the red line.

What : Tim Tate's new solo sculpture show: "Caged By History" - Gallery Talk
Where :
Fraser Gallery
7700 Wisconsin Ave
Bethesda Plaza, Suite E
Bethesda, MD 20814
301-718-9651

When : Saturday, Nov. 26th at 1pm
Show runs thru Dec. 7th, 2005

Art Bill Passes in the Senate

Last March, I asked everyone to write their congressperson in support of H.R. 1120 "ARTISTS' CONTRIBUTION TO AMERICAN HERITAGE ACT" Introduced by Congressmen Jim Ramstad (R-MN) and Ben Cardin (D-MD) and Senate Bill S. 372 "ARTIST-MUSEUM PARTNERSHIP ACT" Introduced by Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Robert Bennett (R-UT).

The artists' bill is making it possible once again for artists to receive a fair market value deduction for donated works and has been making its way through the legislative process. The bills had been reintroduced in both the House and the Senate and the wording of the bill was approved Friday as an amendment to a broader $59.6 billion tax relief bill passed by the Senate.

It now goes to a House-Senate conference committee. Unfortunately, the House version of the tax relief bill does not currently include the arts provision, but the senators who introduced the amendment - Charlie Schumer, Democrat of New York, and Pete Domenici, Republican from New Mexico, both have apparently stated that they are hopeful that the House committee would support it.

So... contact your House Representative ASAP! If you do not know how to contact your legislator, visit this website. A sample letter is available here.

Currently, when an artist donates a work of art, the artist can deduct the cost of the materials; however, if anyone else (but the artist) donates the work, they can deduct the actual fair market value of the work. This law would allow the artist to deduct the fair appraised value of the donated work, if donated within a certain period of time.

New DC Arts Blog

Painterly Visions is a new arts blog by DC area artist Anne Marchand.

And she already comes up with a scoop by revealing that CuDC no longer hosting the 3rd Thursdays gallery crawls in the Penn Quarter.

I invite CuDC to respond, but I hope that this is not true, as we need to continue to grow, not scale back, our gallery scene.

Read Painterly Visions here.

Silverthorne on current shows

Alexandra Silverthorne reviews Gilliam, Warhol and Scully at various venues around town.

Read them here.

Tim Tate Review

Dr. Claudia Rousseau reviews Tim Tate in The Gazette; she writes:

In his third solo exhibit at Fraser Gallery in Bethesda, artist Tim Tate shows new work with exciting explorations of subject matter and materials. "Caged by History" is tightly themed with a marked unity of form and content. The show’s title refers to the myriad ways our histories direct our futures, the carrying of memory and the persistent effects of choices and events of the past.

Tate’s work also references the great unseen forces of nature that inexorably shape and direct our lives. The latter is especially well represented in works that include iron filings held captive by earth magnets. A fine example is the formally elegant "Sacred Cone of Magnetism," with its echoing shapes and etched formulas for magnetic forces.

The brilliance of Tate’s work is in the way it fuses expression of ideas such as these with a deeply personal iconography about taking control of fate, healing and the will to live. "Positive Reliquaries, No. 1-3" are three blown-glass spheres topped with large red cast-glass crosses. They are also plus signs. Inside each is a cast glass nest, each with three spotted glass eggs. All around the exterior of the spheres the artist has etched a handwritten narrative relating his reaction to being diagnosed HIV-positive 20 years ago, and of the process this fact provoked. It was then that he decided to become an artist and then that the whole array of life affirming, healing imagery he uses began to come into focus.

Much of this imagery has a distinctly Catholic feeling. For example, the spheres topped by crosses unavoidably look like the orbs often held by Christ in medieval and renaissance art. The hot-glass flaming hearts – here in strong reds and blues, traditionally colors of divine and human love — are distinctly reminiscent of votive objects. Nevertheless, these works have a fascinating polyvalence, a sense of layered history that draws the viewer close and rewards attention with a rich variety of allusive meaning.

Tate has long used steel as a corollary to fragile glass in his work, which also frequently contains found objects. Recently, he has experimented with concrete as a sculptural medium with varied results. One of the most powerful works in this exhibit, however, is "Heart of St. Sebastian," a concrete heart with a neck, like a vessel, topped with a dark red cast-glass flame. By shaking the concrete in the rubber mold, Tate caused a skin to separate from the heart form into which he has cut a large plus sign — an equal armed cross. In the neck is a tiny biohazard symbol. The work explores a number of iconographies including an identification with St. Sebastian, martyred by arrows, and the sense of being targeted as a biohazard when one is HIV-positive. A consciousness of death produces no pathos here, rather life-affirming strength, hard and resistant as the Sacrete Concrete mix with which the work is made.

Tate will be discussing his work at an artist's talk at Fraser Gallery Bethesda this coming Saturday, November 26, starting at 1PM.

Arthelps 5th Annual Silent Art Auction Benefit and Reception



JAM Communications is the sponsor for this year's Arthelps 5th Annual Silent Art Auction Benefit and Reception to raise money for Food & Friends and the DC Arts Center (DCAC) – two organizations are in their own way are key components of our area's social and cultural tapestry.

Support from artists and art donors is integral in making this night a success and that is why they are asking for your help. They welcome a variety of art donations–from original and limited edition paintings and prints, to photographs, glasswork, jewelry and sculpture.

I have donated to this auction and really encourage galleries (my kudos to Irvine Contemporary for donating several pieces) and artists to do as well!

See donated artwork (so far) here, and see my donation here.

For more information on how you can donate art, and for additional details on the Arthelps event, please go to www.arthelps.org – where you can download a PDF art donation form.

To arrange for a pickup of your artistic donation call: 202.986.4750 and talk to Ambre Bosko (ext 19) or Alex George (ext 13) or email: ambre@jamagency.com or alex@jamagency.com

You can also drop off or mail your donation to the JAM offices located at:

1638 R Street NW, Suite 400, Washington, DC, 20009,
between the hours of 10 am and 6 pm (Monday – Friday).

Please RSVP for the event at www.arthelps.org.

No excuses! Get your slides ready!

The deadline for the inaugural Bethesda Painting Awards is rapidly approaching, and painters from the DC, Maryland and Virginia region have until Tuesday, January 31, 2006 to submit their applications. With $14,000 in cash prizes, this is one of the largest painting awards in the country, thanks to the incredible generosity of Ms. Carol Trawick, who also sponsors The Trawick Prize.

Once the jurors have selected the finalists, we will exhibit them in our Bethesda gallery, where the final four will be awarded $14,000 in cash prizes based on the actual work. $10,000 will be awarded to the top prize winner, $2,000 to the second place winner, $1,000 to the third place winner. Additionally, a "Young Artist" award of $1,000 (artists born after March 11, 1975) will also be given.

Artists must be 18 years of age or older and residents of Maryland, Virginia or Washington, D.C. All original 2-D painting including oil, acrylic, watercolor, gouache, encaustic and mixed media will be accepted. The maximum dimension should not exceed 60 inches in width. No reproductions. Artwork must have been completed within the last two years and must be available for the duration of the exhibition. Each artist must submit five slides, application and a non-refundable entry fee of $25. Submissions must be received by January 31, 2006. To request an application, please send a self-addressed stamped envelope to:

Bethesda Painting Awards
c/o Bethesda Arts & Entertainment District
7700 Old Georgetown Road
Bethesda, MD 20814

Or call 301/215-6660 or visit www.bethesda.org

For more info:
Bethesda Arts and Entertainment District
Heather Blum
7700 Old Georgetown Road
Bethesda, MD 20814
t: 301.215.6660 x.17 or f: 301.215.6664 or hblum@bethesda.org or www.bethesda.org

Congratulations

Congrats to the award winners from the Unlocked: Open Exhibition selected by Andrea Pollan.

Congrats also to Andrea and the Fairfax Arts Council for putting on a great show in Annandale last Thursday.

First Place - Ian Jehle
Second Place - Saul Becker
Third Place - Linda Hesh
Honorable Mention - Naomi Chung
Honorable Mention - Heidi Fowler

Artist Participation in Online Published Interviews

Deadline: Saturday, December 31, 2005

Black Cat Bone, an art blog edited by artist/photographer firebrand James W. Bailey, has an opportunity for the metro D.C. area artist community to participate in a unique artist interview project titled "The Six of One, Half a Dozen of the Other Modern Art Questions."

Artists may freely participate in this project by emailing their answers to the six project questions posted here.

If you are interested in participating in this project, simply email your answers to the six questions to Bailey.

Also, include up to four jpeg images of your representative work - be sure to name your image files with the proper titles and provide the media for each work.

Artists are also encouraged to include a brief (1-2 paragraphs), bio, and artist's website URL for publication.

For more info:
League of Reston Artists
James W. Bailey
11196 Silentwood Lane
Reston, Virginia 20191
t: 504.669.8650 or jameswbailey@comcast.net or blackcatbone.blogspot.com

Wanna lecture abroad?

Fulbright Grants are available for artists for 2-6 week lecturing and research abroad. There's no application fee, and stipends are available.

Contact:
Fulbright Senior Specialist Program
Council for International Exchange of Scholars
3007 Tilden St NW, Suite 5L
Washington, DC 20008-3009

Phone: 202/686-7877; email: apprequest@cies.iie.org; website: www.cies.org

Is there anything new out there?

A lot, really, a lot, of art critics are stuck in the quagmire that art has to be "new" in order to be good.

"The secret to creativity, is knowing how to hide your sources."
-Albert Einstein

This interesting article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (thanks AJ) discussses the myth of the "new" and submits that there's even a sprinking of the "new" going on out there in the various genres of the arts.