Art Basel MB week: Day One

I arrive at 11 am and we take down the Rosemary Feit Covey triptych that we had laboriously set up the day before and replace them with some of Covey's strong signature pieces; it's just a gut feeling.

The day passes through slowly, and we are across from the Bustelo coffee stand, which has free chilled coffee drinks and free Cuban coffee all day long. Gallerists and dealers from Scope next door keep sneaking in through the tent's side door to grab free coffee.

Somewhere in the early afternoon MFA sells another Michael Fitts painting and I get into an almost fist-fight over the Che Guevara video piece. Later that day a well-known video collector from Texas drops by and MFA owner Sheila Giolitti sells her a video, sight unseen, by Norfolk video artist John Miles Runner.

DC artist Trevor Young, who is with Civilian Projects over at Scope, drops by and we chat about the NPG David Wojnarowicz controversy back in DC, about William Sickert, and about the arbitrary choosing of 22 seconds as the max time sample for audio. Young has sold three paintings so far at Scope and is having a well-deserved super fair.

At 6PM free tequila drinks begin to be served and now the invasion from Scope is in full mass as Scope artists and dealers use Red Dot's side door to sneak in and grab a free drink.

Later that night, the crowd thickens and Lynnvale's Lou Gagnon's elegant landscapes start to get a lot of attention from the Wednesday night crowd. At some point after that, Andrew Wodzianski cracks the ice and one of his "Android Series" (Bad Hair Day II (Sue Richards)) pieces finds a home with a Miami collector.

As the night moves, another Michael Fitts painting is sold and almost immediately I sell my Frida Kahlo homage drawing (done at the last possible minute), to one of the DMV's best known art collecting couples.

At seven the fair closes and I drive to Hialeah to pick up my daughter Vanessa at the airport and drive her to cousin Jorge's fortress house in Little Havana. When she arrives, she's hungry and Jorge feeds her sopa de chicharos.

Art Basel MB week: Day Oneish (Preview Day)

The day starts with last minute adjustments to the booth and artists' names and work title tags go up. By 3:30 the staff is kicking everyone out for a couple of hours in order for the cleaning crew to vacuum Red Dot's new black carpet before the grand opening preview at 6PM.

By 4:00PM I'm in my hotel in Hollywood showering and putting on the uniform for tonight's festivities. Little Junes is sitting on a makeshift high chair in the hotel eating Cheerios and wondering why dad is running around the room all in a hurry.

By 5:00PM we're out the door and driving the 15 miles to Wynwood. Miami traffic gets in the way and the drive turns into an hour and so I barely make it to the fair in time for the opening.

The cleaning crew is still working and by the time the order is given to stop vacuuming, as the doors will open to the invited VIPs and press, our booth is the only one that hasn't been cleaned and the brand new black carpet is littered with tons of white debris.

The floor looks so speckled with withe dots and paint and tape chunks that it almost looks like an installation worth of a booth at Scope (the story of what happened at Scope on check-in that will come later... it's a good one).

MFA owner and director Sheila Giolitti is justifiably upset and is searching for a broom to sweep the floor as she's told that no more vacuuming is to be done because of the fire marshall is on the premises.

Ahhh...

The crowd starts pouring in, and before all the good food gets scarfed up, I grab a couple of good plates of decent finger food and a couple of generously poured tequila mixers. There is a lot of free booze being poured away.

As usual, the elegant paintings of Russian painter Alexey Terenin get a lot of attention, as does Joey Manlapaz's hyper-realistic paintings. Also grabbing some good discussion are Judith Peck's series inspired by John Rawls' Veil of Ignorance thought experiments. The press is all over John Roth's sensuous sculptures and a lot of photographs of them are taken.

An interior designer grabs a lot of attention and time from gallery owner Sheila Giolitti. She's grabbing artwork from all over the place and discussing it in terms of this and that... she does this for almost an hour before disappearing on a trek to the bathroom.

My Che Guevara video piece is getting a lot of attention - mostly from people of Cuban ancestry familiar with Che's brutal excesses. An old man with tired blue eyes tells me in Spanish that I must take the drawing down or he will. I spend some time explaining the video piece to him and he apologizes and compliments me on the work. This happens several times during the night as I spend a lot of time explaining the entrapment of a video drawing that requires a lot of intellectual capital to fully understand. This piece has already been successful beyond my wildest estimations; I am almost afraid that someone will punch me out at some point during this art fair, seeing exactly what they want to see, rather what they would see with a little guidance.

Around 8:00PM I sell my largest drawing, the first sale of the night for MFA. It's from the series of pieces on Eve. It goes to a Miami Beach collector. Almost at the same time MFA sells a gorgeous Michael Fitts trompe l'oeil of Twinkies. As usual, the two sales come almost at the same time.

Someone comes in from Scope next door, complaining that they have plywood floors; we have a brand new black carpet, and our booth's carpet looks like a litter field. Interesting what people will complain about. Someone else adds that Scope is empty of people. An hour earlier I had heard that it was packed. You go figure.

One more sale later and the night is over; somehow the interior designer is back and has Giolitti back under her domain, even outside the fair. I'm exhausted and my wife picks me up and drives me back to Hollywood. Preview day is over.

Opportunity for Photographers

Deadline: December 17, 2010

Call for entries for the Fifth Annual Photography Exhibition at the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop. Entries must be received by December 17, 2010. The Capitol Hill Arts Workshop is seeking submissions of any and all photographic processes, black and white or color, traditional or alternative, material or digital, time-based, performance based, any work exploring the act of photography. The exhibition will open on January 8, 2011 from 5:00-7:00 p.m. and will run through February 4, 2011. Cash awards will be announced at the opening.

The juror for the exhibition is Bruce McKaig, local artist and art educator. Bruce McKaig chairs the Photography Department at CHAW and teaches at Georgetown University and the Smithsonian Associates. He has exhibited nationally and internationally for over thirty years and every once in a while reviews a DMV show in this blog. For more information about his work, please visit his website here.

HOW: Submit the following:
➢ Three to five jpegs on a CD
➢ Image inventory list specifying title, size, medium, date and price (or insurance value)
➢ Contact info including a mailing address, phone number and email
➢ An entry fee of $25.00 for up to five images, payable to CHAW

WHERE: Please hand deliver or mail these materials to:

CHAW
545 7th Street SE
Washington DC 20003

Art Basel MB week: The day before Day One

I arrived here last Saturday, hanging out at Hollywood, less that 20 miles north of the Wynwood Arts district in Miami, where I'm helping Norfolk's Meyer Fine Art and Philly's Projects Gallery hawk some of my artwork at the Red Dot Art fair, which this year shares the block with Scope, Art Asia and the grand daddy of all Miami art fairs, Art Miami.

First night headed to my favorite restaurant on the Hollywood Beach boardwalk, the unexpectedly delicious Sushi-Thai Restaurant, where for $7.95 you can have the mouth-watering Ika Shukgata Yaki (whole grilled squid in ponzu sauce) and a cold one while looking out at the ocean.

Today I drove to Wynwood and from 11am until 7pm it was all about hanging artwork at MFA's booth. MFA is showing work by yours truly, as well as Cuban artist Sandra Ramos, Norfolk's John R. G. Roth, Robert Sites, and Shiela Giolitti, Lynnvale's Lou Gagnon, Charlottesville's Michael Fitts, Prague's Alexey Terenin, and DMV's Joey Manlapaz, Rosemary Feit Covey Andrew Wodzianski and Judith Peck.

I'm stoked about this fair because it will be the first ever showing of my first video drawing.

I had an interesting experience upon checking in, during which somehow I ended up checking in and getting badged (by mistake) into Scope, which is the big tent next to Red Dot, but more on that later.

The grand opening is tomorrow night.

Small works at MEG

Recently I had the pleasure and honor to select the current small photographic works at Multiple Exposures Gallery in Alexandria.

It's wonderful show, if I may say so, and continues this trend that I've been writing about recently, about the unique experience of artwork in a small, intimate scale.

MEG is home to superior, highly talented photographers. In the many years that this photography collective has been around (formerly known as Factory Photoworks), and in the dozens and dozens of shows that I have seen there, seldom, if ever have I seen a weak show. If you are a photography fan and you haven't been to MEG, then you're missing one of the key photography spaces in the Mid Atlantic.

Every selection in this show is a gem. In Susan Meyer's "Apple in a Vase," the sheer simplicity of the image hides the smart compositional idea behind it. The super sharp focus of the photo also does wonders to bring our attention to the subject, and (as I did) speculate why there's an apple in a flower vase.

I was also quite pleased not only with the superior set of works submitted by Michael Borek, but also with the super-modern, sharp minimalist presentation, where Borek has the small works floating in a deep white frame. I might "borrow" his presentation concept for some future works of my own!

There's also the scent of a master photographer in Grace Taylor's "Three Red Pears." Here we see what can be best described as the subject emerging not only because of its inherent beauty and recognition-factor, but also because the way the Taylor handles it, massages it and presents it; the pears emerge as exotic, sexual fruits, awaiting the first touch of the lips and the first cut of the bite.

Luise Noakes' visually textured, added onto and manipulated photos as well as the always impressive work of Danny Conant also stand out.

The Small Works show goes through January 2, 2011.

Some further considerations on the paintings of Freya Grand

By Claudia Rousseau

An exhibit entitled “Journey” of the paintings of Freya Grand was on view at the Greater Reston Art Center (GRACE) until November 12th. I had made the pilgrimage out there to see the show (and it did seem a pilgrimage from my home in Colesville, MD), and meant to write a review while the show was still up. Swamped with other work, I didn’t make it. Yet, I feel that some thoughts about this remarkable artist are in order, even now that the show has closed.

The first word that comes to mind looking at these paintings as a group might be “sublime”. When thinking about that rather slippery concept as applied to art, one might be imagining something by Turner or Caspar David Friedrich, artists who did try to embody eighteenth-century writer Edmund Burke’s aesthetic notion in actual works of art. The sublime is a feeling that involves an element of fear, something beyond the merely beautiful or picturesque precisely because of that fact. It is something that we experience in nature, as at the edge of the ocean at night when we look out at the horizon, and feel simultaneously exhilarated and overwhelmed at the greatness of what is in front of us—part of that huge sky and water—knowing full well that it would be death to move into it. The experience can occur in art as well, and this was, of course, at the core of Romanticism.

I think the most moving thing about Freya’s paintings is the way that they so completely convey this sense, and the feeling that one is experiencing what the artist experienced confronting the natural scenes represented in these large scale paintings. These are not realistic works, and, although descriptive, do not reproduce the visual record so much as the experiential one. It’s that sense that we are there with her, viewing the volcano Cotopaxi, as thrilled as Frederic Church (Freya’s art great grandfather) had been more than a century ago. Or seeing/feeling the tides pulling out at the water’s edge in Beach. Because these paintings are so full of experience, they provoke memories in the viewer of his/her own moments of the sublime. They rushed in on me as I looked, and kept me looking, and thinking for a long time.

Claudia Rousseau
Critic, member AICA

WPA 2011 Artist Directory

Deadline: February 1, 2011

The Washington Project for the Arts has announced a call for submissions for its 2011 Artist Directory.

Published bi-annually, this four-color, 8.5 x 5.5 inch directory is the definitive listing of established and emerging contemporary artists throughout the Washington region. It is seen by more than 2,000 galleries, curators, art consultants, and interested art patrons. Copies are distributed to selected art critics and other members of the press, and to museums both in the region and outside the area. The 2011 Artist Directory will also be available for sale on the WPA website and at select area retail locations at the price of $9.95.

Each participating artist will be featured on a full page (8.5 x 5.5 inches). The page will include the artist's name, a color digital image of their work, their studio address and phone number, email address, web address, and their gallery affiliation.

All current WPA members are eligible for publication in the Artist Directory. There is an additional registration fee that includes a copy of the Artist Directory. Participants who submit before December 1, 2010 can pay a discounted early registration fee of $65. After December 1, the registration fee increases to $75. The final registration deadline is February 1, 2011. No submissions will be accepted after this date.

All submissions will be handled through an online registration form on the WPA's website.

Each participating artist can upload one image to be featured on their page. Images must be submitted as .eps or .tif files in CMYK format. They must be 300dpi and as close as possible to, but no smaller than 6 inches on the longest side.

If you have any questions regarding the 2011 Artist Directory, please contact Blair Murphy, Membership Directory at bmurphy@wpadc.org or 202-234-7103 x 1.