Vignette: Whitney "Bloom" Olsen

“The optical quality of glass is my muse,” – Whitney “Bloom” Olsen.

"Rosy Retrospection" by Whitney Olsen in collaboration with Keegan Kruse, Light refraction photos, 7 - 22x22in frames, 2017, $500 each

Whitney Olsen, aka as Bloom, is a multi-dimensional artist working with glass, light, mixed media and “…multiple dimensions to indulge in the conversation of being.” If your first thought of glass art takes you to a place of vessels, Bloom’s work will upend those expectations.

“My work exists in the intersection between the corporeal and the imagination, where the fixed and infinite collide through tangible and intangible layers of energy. The optical quality of glass is my muse, translating our ephemeral understanding of the here and now through veiling multiple materials. Illusion is the gateway into my liminal world…”

"Absolute #3" by Whitney Olsen, Mixed media on wood, 58x30in, 2017, $1500

Bloom’s glass pieces are most often components in larger installation sculptures in which light is an active medium. The glass becomes a lens almost as assuredly as if we were peering through a kaleidoscope, and the work begins to shape the viewer’s perception of the environment the piece occupies.

“There is an energy that we possess that feels like butterflies fluttering inside us, it feels like we are going up to the top of a roller coaster. It’s an unsettled, scary but thrilling, anxiety that is beautiful and basic, and it’s so real because it’s your body telling you that you are alive. It’s called passion; the moment when you finally go outside of your comfort zone and you really start to listen to what you want, and you go for it. To be dangerous because it is necessary, and you are happy all the time since you are not missing out on what life has to offer because you are living the way you want to live. To be yourself; being wholly, soulfully, be-you-tifully YOU, like a flower. I want everyone to bloom.”

Since graduating from the Hite Institute at University of Louisville, Bloom has studied glass and neon at Penland School of Crafts and Pilchuck Glass School.

In 2017, Bloom exhibited as a part of Crossing Borders at the Huff Gallery at Spalding University, and had a solo show, Perennial Being at Tim Faulkner Gallery in Louisville.

Age: 25
Hometown: Crestwood, Kentucky
Education: BFA in 3-D Studios, Concentrations in Glass & Sculpture, University of Louisville, 2015
Website: www.whitneyolsen.com
Instagram: whitnaastyy

"Day Dreams" by Whitney Olsen, Blown, cold worked, slumped, etched glass, metal and light, 48x72in, 2015, $12,000

"Ethereal Study #3" by Whitney Olsen, Hand blown glass, video, dimensions vary, 2015, $8000

"TH(is) you and me and everyone else" by Whitney Olsen, Mixed media installation, dimensions vary, 2017

"Neon Bloom" by Whitney Olsen, Neon glass & painted plexi, 14x28in, 2017, $650

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Written by Keith Waits. Entire contents copyright © 2017 Louisville Visual Art. All rights reserved.

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Vignette: Allison Schwartz

“Not all art needs to be so serious or grim, especially in today’s world.” – Allison Schwartz

"Sleepy" by Allison Schwartz, Ceramic, wood, expanding foam, faux fur, acrylic paint, flocking, 25x12.5x11in, 2017, $500

‘Cute and cuddly’ is anathema in the world of ‘serious’ fine art. But these sculptural forms from Allison Schwartz dare to introduce the motif of domestic cats into the mix by embracing any perceived lack of gravitas with bright and bold colors and textures that cry out for you to run your fingers through them. Yet there is also something a little unorthodox in these feline characters, as Schwartz explains: 

"Brat" by Allison Schwarts, Ceramic, expanding foam, faux fur, acrylic paint, wood, flocking, 15x16x17.5in, 2017, $500 (base not included)

“Sea is for Catfish is an installation of fictional creatures that are half cat and half fish, which is based off my love of felines and all aquatic creatures. The contradiction and uncanny nature of their ‘existence’ expresses the unnatural and non-native feeling of pure happiness in my life.” 

“Each sculptural catfish is a combination of ceramic, wood, expanding foam, faux fur and acrylic paint. I love creating texture and strive to reveal the unexpected – or in this case – very familiar textures. These catfish are covered with an extremely soft faux fur, enticing its viewer to interact.”

So Schwartz is more concerned with the visceral experience than any overriding intellectual thesis for her work, so that one might argue that it has a more important connection to expressionist traditions. The synthesis of two distinct species that are historically seen as being at odds communicates a subversive unease that reflects the artist’s own emotional struggles: “My work comes from a desire to connect with others without using words. Recently, I’ve been overcome with a sense of euphoria whereas I had been in a constant haze of anxiety. My hope is that the viewer walks away experiencing the same strange happiness I find daily.”

Schwartz is a recent graduate of Northern Kentucky University and just had work in the Main Gallery on that campus.

Age: 23
Hometown: Lancaster, Kentucky
Education: BFA, Spatial Arts, Northern Kentucky University School of the Arts, December 2017
Instagram: @al2lison

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"Cleaner" by Allison Schawrtz, Ceramic, expanding foam, faux fur, acrylic paint, wood, flocking, 16x15x13in, 2017, $500

"Scratcher" by Allison Schwarts, Ceramic, expanding foam, faux fur, acrylic paint, wood, flocking, 12.5x14x24in, 2017, $500 (tower not included)

"Large Cat Tower" by Allison Schwartz, Wood & foam, 32x24inx5ft, 2017, $500 (catfish not included - tower not built for real cats but could be adapted)

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Written by Keith Waits. Entire contents copyright © 2017 Louisville Visual Art. All rights reserved.

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Feature: James Grubola, Distinguished Teaching Artist

After more than forty years teaching at a single institution, the question of legacy is a fair one to consider. First, in an age where upwardly mobile is a literal calling to never stay in one professional situation for very long, lest you be perceived as lacking ambition, that loyalty and dedication to one institution seems charmingly old-fashioned. Perhaps that mentality, commonplace in the corporate world, has yet to infect art professors, who are, after all, working artists who value the financial stability of an academic life.

For James Grubola, the most important metric is established by his students, so the crucial measure is in the achievements from thousands of people who earned their Bachelor’s degrees through the University of Louisville since 1975, when he joined the faculty. But the credentials and formal recognitions are certainly there:

2001 - “Red Apple Award” for excellence in teaching from the University of Louisville's Alumni Association.

2008 -  the “Trustee's Award”, one of the university's highest awards which each year recognizes one faculty member who has had the greatest positive impact on students at the University of Louisville.

2015 - College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Faculty Award in Teaching.

But Grubola also served as Chair of the Department of Fine Arts and Director of the Hite Art Institute at U of L  for 16 years, and if to be a department head is to be a builder, under Grubola’s leadership, Hite saw the introduction of the Mary Spencer Nay Scholarship Endowment, the addition of a program in glass housed in the Cressman Center for Visual Arts - the university’s first, permanent, non-medical facility located in downtown Louisville, and the adoption of a selective admissions policy for the department. Not at all a bad record.

"The Liminal Series- Cycloid Arches" by James Grubola,  silver and goldpoint  22x30in, POR

As a teacher, Grubola served as head of the drawing program, instructing courses on all levels of drawing from beginning through graduate, and anatomy was his specialty. As an artist, he has of late returned to the human form as subject. Working for many years with still life images devoid of the body (the Uranometria Series), and at times distinctly abstract in character (the Liminal Series), for his swan song exhibition as U of L faculty, he has returned to the body, including an ongoing series depicting dancers with the Louisville Ballet.

Early in their careers, Grubola and his wife, artist and curator Kay Grubola, were artists-in-residence at the Christopher Ballet in Michigan, and when he was a graduate student at Indiana University he drew during ballet classes, so the interest in dance figures is nothing new, yet it is interesting that an artist who favors silverpoint and goldpoint as mediums should be focused so intently on the kineticism of choreographed movement. His statement that, “a sense of order has always been an important part of my work,” suggests that Grubola seeks to work through the movement to connect with the tremendous discipline that underlies dance. His past work displays the kind of control required by the arduous silverpoint technique - the carefully crafted linear expression of the Liminal Series barely contains the visceral, sometimes dark emotional energy found in some of those images.

"The Thursday Sessions - 23 March 17 - VII" by James Grubola, graphite, POR

Clearly Grubola is embracing a similar dynamic in the dance studio, as he relates in the statement for the new exhibit: “For me this work is a means to build a vocabulary of gestures and marks that reflect a dancer’s body in motion rather than depicting any individual dancer or specific dance step. As the dancers go through a series of steps - first at the barre, and then moving to floor exercises - I draw, my hand seldom stopping, building lines, gestures and marks.“

The kineticism is there, formed in vigorous line around the barely detectable dancers in motion - think of the Tazmanian Devil cartoon character in full whirling dervish mode. The suggestion of animation seems entirely appropriate to the forceful way Grubola captures the grace and athleticism of dance with such immediacy. The artist has a deep and profound relationship to the world of ballet that is communicated with great clarity. It is a relationship he explicitly cites when referencing the more detailed and developed figure drawings in his statement:

“After the pose has been set, my figure drawings all begin the same. Working life-size (or slightly smaller to fit the full figure on the page) I begin by marking the limits of the body on the page with an empty hand. Just as a ballet dancer ‘marks’ steps in a combination through a series hand gestures to help make a muscle memory, I move over the page trying to visualize key landmarks and measuring distances with my hand creating a muscle memory between my hand and eye of figure before me and the graphic construction to come.”

"The Friday Sessions - The Gauze Shirt" by James Grubola, silverpoint, POR

In the finished drawings we see here, the figure is rendered in great representational detail, but the muted tonality that results from meticulous buildup of silverpoint allows an extreme sensitivity to the graphic perception of the nude body. The confrontational aspect of exposing the body is equally muted, putting the viewer at a slight remove, as if we perceive the body as object through a veneer of...civility doesn’t seem the correct word, but there is a condition of safety that would not be provided by a bolder medium, or the introduction of color as realistic as the presentation of the dimensional form. An image of a nude body tends to elicit an emotional reaction, but Grubola reinforces the intellectualism of his point-of-view, the academic distance of a teacher.

James Grubola:
The Friday (and Thursday) Sessions
Figurative and Dance Drawings 2014 - 2017

January 19 - February 24, 2018

Opening Reception
Friday, January 19, 6:00 - 8:00 pm

Cressman Center for Visual Arts
Hite Art Institute | Department of Fine Arts
University of Louisville

Gallery Hours
Wednesday - Friday 11 - 6
Saturday 11 - 3

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"The Thursday Sessions - 19 January - VII" by James Grubola, graphite, POR

"The Friday Sessions - The Gauze Shirt 1" by James Grubola, silverpoint, POR

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Written by Keith Waits.
In addition to his work at the LVA, Keith is also the Managing Editor of a website, www.Arts-Louisville.com, which covers local visual arts, theatre, and music in Louisville.

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Feature: New Yorker Cartoonist Henry Martin - CFAC Student From The 1930's

“I remember (quite clearly!) being four years old and knowing that I wanted to draw.”

–  Henry Martin (1)

In 1972 Jim Geraghty was the Art Editor of The New Yorker. One day each week was “look day” - a group of cartoonists would wait, in turn, outside of his office to pitch cartoons for possible publication in the magazine. They were under contract to The New Yorker, which means Geraghty had the first shot at any new ideas. Henry Martin was one of those artists, bringing about 20 fresh ideas as pencil roughs, but perhaps 10 as finished ink drawings. In a 1972 interview with Cartoonist PROfiles, Martin remembers: “When I began to do magazine cartoons, I didn’t feel competent enough in the drawing department, and I thought that if drew the cartoons up as best I could – every single one – that over the years I’d get to be a better artist.”(2) Whatever Geraghty passed on could then be offered to The Saturday Evening Post, Punch, Better Homes and Gardens, and Ladies Home Journal, but Martin was published often in The New Yorker.

Henry Martin in 1972. Photo by Jim Ruth.

Martin was born in Louisville in 1925, the year that the Art Center Association (now Louisville Visual Art) began its Children’s Fine Art Classes. In the 1930’s, young Henry was enrolled for some time in those classes before the family relocated to Dallas, where he graduated from what is now St. Mark’s School of Texas. He attended Princeton University, graduating in 1948 with a degree in Art History. Later he studied art at the American Academy of Art in Chicago.

His daughter, Ann M. Martin, is the author of the hugely popular "Baby-Sitter’s Club" books for young readers, which she published for more than 30 years. “My father was a self-employed artist who rented a little studio in Princeton, New Jersey, where he went every day for many years to create cartoons and illustrations to sell to magazines and other publications. His work ethic, along with his entrepreneurial spirit and determination to succeed in his chosen profession, made a lasting impact on me and my own career choices.” (1)

In an interview for Scholastic conducted by his daughter in 2014, Martin remembered his early days living in Princeton, New Jersey: “I supported my family by selling cartoons and illustrations to various magazines and taking on odd jobs (for example, painting a mural on the wall of a local store!). I was regularly selling small spot drawings to The New Yorker magazine, but I had a greater goal in mind, and that was to publish cartoons in The New Yorker. I'd been a dedicated reader of The New Yorker since I was a young boy, and I knew that getting published in this magazine was considered to be the pinnacle of anyone's cartooning career. 

To help achieve this goal, I challenged myself to submit twenty cartoons a week, every week, to The New Yorker. I did this without fail for four years, and every single cartoon was turned down. 

And then one day it finally happened – The New Yorker accepted one of my cartoons.” (1)

The art of the single frame cartoon is deceptive. One image and a scant few words communicating a joke with nearly universal understanding can seem so simple, but try it sometime. Martin’s style was classic, clean and uncluttered, establishing location and context with economy. The cartoons are populated by the kind of white, Everyman characters that exemplify the mid-20th century American aesthetic. Martin’s people are self-satisfied but almost never smug, filled with the confidence of freedom reinforced by a post-World War II society. The humor is dry, affectionately satirical, a tone that would eventually be replaced by the more off-kilter intellectual sensibility of cartoonists such as Gary Larson, and a shift Martin anticipated in the 1972 interview: “I really believe that there will be a wedding of the purely humorous, and the brainy, in cartoons of the future.” (2)

In 1998, Martin and his wife moved to Pennswood Village, a continuing care retirement community in Newtown, Pa. For many years he contributed cartoons to the community newsletter, making his subjects the concerns of the residents: medicines, idleness, and the rueful, bemused perspective that can seem a natural by-product of longevity.

(1) Scholastic.com, Letters from Ann, An Interview With My Father, Cartoonist Henry Martin
(2) Cartoonist PROfiles #14, June 1972, Interview with Henry Martin

Written by Keith Waits.
In addition to his work at LVA, Keith is also the Managing Editor of a website, www.Arts-Louisville.com, which covers local visual arts, theatre, and music in Louisville. Entire contents copyright © 2017 Louisville Visual Art. All rights reserved. Cartoons from The New Yorker published under license from © 2017 Conde Nast.

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Vignette: Sid Webb

“These images are representative of a life long need to use art to reflect the political atmosphere.” – Sid Webb

(Honoré Daumier, after Charles Philipon, who was jailed for the original.)

Political satire has a long and storied history. Honoré-Victorin Daumier (1808-1879) caricatured the French King Louis Phillipe turning into a pear, and often as corrupt. In 1835, the king reinstituted censorship of images, effectively curtailing Daumier’s most pointed political work. By the time Napoleon III took the throne, Daumier had become more careful, inventing Ratapoil, a political henchman of the new king that placed his critiques at a safer remove.

Such commentary in art today is usually more explicit, owing to digital technology that makes it all too easy to incorporate actual photographs of the subject. Of course, their subjects in return attack the artists, but has any period ever provided such ripe targets as this generation’s overexposed and shameless crop of politicians?

"The Word Only He Can Say Publically" by Sid Webb, Digital multi-media, Acrylic, 24x40in, 2017, $3400

Sid Webb is an artist and activist who, now a "Senior Citizen", still takes to the streets with his wife to protest injustice and inequality. As a Kentucky resident, he need not look very far to find the conflict between ideologies and division that defines our age. Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) draws his ire, as does the current President of the United States, Donald Trump.

In a pointed commentary on the now infamous Access Hollywood video, Webb positions the 45th occupant of the Oval Office in conflict and contrast to a sexualized female figure that is both salacious (in its sheer, revealing lace) and innocent (the face of silent movie icon Clara Bow). The result is a bracing image of ego and arrogance run amuck that unfortunately has become an all-too common part of the Modern American Experience.

There is little need to explain Webb’s point-of-view; the images speak for themselves.  The artist has stated before that, “Art is a creation that aptly describes its time and place,” and perhaps that is the explanation necessary. The themes of corruption and the abuse of the people’s trust are here rendered in terms specific to today, but they are universal, the same as expressed by Daumier and others over time, and just as likely to keep being revisited over and over, for the next generation of artists to rail against.

Webb works in a variety of mediums, and included here are figure studies that verge into the abstract. "Green Woman" merges the generous figure of an ancient fertility goddess with a Pop Art sensibility, capturing a Post Modern Feminism in loose gestural fashion and a note of sardonic humor.

Hometown: Lexington, Kentucky
Education: Majored in journalism and political science, University of Kentucky; Atlanta School of Art (High Museum)
Website: www.sidwebb.com

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"'Nuff Hope" by Sid Webb, Digital, 6.25x10in, 2013, $180

"Boys" by Sid Webb, Ink & conte crayon, digital restoration, 16x20in, 1967, $2200

"Green Woman" by Sid Webb, Acrylic, 8x8in, 2017, $180

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Written by Keith Waits. Entire text copyright © 2017 Louisville Visual Art. All rights reserved.
Original works of art, copyright reserved by artist.

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