Fine Art Sculpture
The Alberta Society of Artists showcasing the best of their membership.
I am very proud to have 2 pieces juried into this exhibition. Please join me at Lougheed House September 9 from 1:30 to 3:30 or September 16 from 10:00 to 1:00.
So I have kind of an ironic story about a studio accident I had with these pins I use so much in my art.
I was snipping some with wire cutters and try as I may to contain the pieces some went here and there around my studio floor.
One stray went straight into the bottom of my heavily soled studio shoes. Unaware I carried it around with me until it was time to take off my shoes. My shoes are backless so I just kick them off using my other foot. Using the foot that already had the shoe removed I kicked the back of the other shoe to remove it. Missing; my foot slipped and I stabbed myself in my big toe with the stray pin. Ouch! Hopped around a bit and thought nothing of it and went to bed.
Next day the big toe hurt even more and two days later the big red streak appeared. I was infected! What the heck? I prick myself with pins all the time.
Off to the doctor thinking I was going to have to have my toe lanced. All he gave me was antibiotics and suggested that the pin had some bacteria on it.
A few days later while taking my daily look at my unfortunate big toe to see how the infection was receding; I noticed a tiny pin head (pun intended) size dark spot, hum. So I mustered up some courage and placed an ice pack on my toe for 10 minutes to numb it. Then I got a needle, tweezers and some alcohol swabs, disinfected them and held my breath.
I opened the sore and called my husband; this was a two person job. While I held back a piece of skin he was able to grab a hold of the dark spot (which we thought was just dried blood or something), pulling out a 3/8” (I measured it) piece of pin; the pointy part.
The body is an amazing thing; it was trying to eject this foreign object from my toe. My big toe feels so much better now, thank you.
The irony is that while I am using pins and needles to make an artistic statement about what stilettos can do to harm your feet, this very item ended up harming my foot.
Do you have a studio accident that you survived to tell the story?
About this exhibition by Jarvis Hall
It is time again for me to have a look outside of our regular roster of artists and curate an exhibition inviting artists that I admire to hang on our walls. Last August our first Summer Survey Bring The Noise was a great success and a point of conversation throughout the year with collectors and artists alike. It is in this spirit of thought provoking exhibitions that I present to you Summer Survey II, featuring:
Paintings by Janine Hall (courtesy of the Weiss Gallery), Becky McMaster, Elena Evanoff, Marianne Gerlinger and Leslie Sweder. Drawings by Debra Rushfeldt. Sculpture by Donna White, Kim Bruce , Jen Somerville and Shelley Ouellet. Photographs by Angela Inglis.
We are not having a title for this year’s summer survey show. I had intended to come up with a clever or insightful title referencing the fact that all of the exhibiting artists are women. I have decided that gender is not the point of this exhibition at all. The art is, as it should be, the thing. During studio visits I realized that while the energy was coming from a feminine place the impact of the work did not rely on this information. I was encouraged as a curator, to realize that I was looking at commanding artworks. To say that I am attempting to curate an exhibition that opens a feminist dialogue would be wrong. This exhibition is an honest survey of what is happening in the studios of artists that I admire. The hope is for the audience to be inspired by the variety of vision these artists bring to this exhibition.
Jarvis Hall
Work in Exhibition
It is hard time consuming work to write a grant application especially for a visual person to whom words do not come as naturally as imagery. But if you’re willing to invest the time you will find that there are all sorts of benefits even if you are not successful. The least of which is that you will know yourself and your work that much better and may come out of it with one hell of an artist statement.
I don’t think there is a magic formula to writing a grant proposal. You just have to write as if the jurors know absolutely nothing about you or your work. We are so close to our work that it can be difficult to remove oneself and talk about the project as if the reader knows nothing about you. Things that are obvious to you may not be to the jury.
Here are some things that may help you write your grant proposal.
The AFA (Alberta Foundation for the Arts) has a really good General Tips document that helps you formulate your outline and write your prose.
These 4 questions from the grant tips really helped me get clear on what I need to write about.
If you follow the tips and organize your outline exactly as they have laid out it will remove a lot of confusion and provide some structure to work within.
I had a couple of things in my favour for this particular grant application. First, I already had an exhibition scheduled for the work I was going to produce. And second, I will be the only Canadian (Albertan) artist in this international exhibition.
I put emphasis on these 2 points when writing my proposal. It probably also helped that the exhibition has a curator.
If you are writing a grant, even if it for another institution, the A.F.A. General Tips document will probably help you understand and organize your proposal. They also have a great Digital Images Tip document for photographing work and a budget example to use as a template. All are available to download from the AFA’s website.
Kim Bruce gratefully acknowledges the grant support from the A.F.A. to produce the work in the Heels series.
I met Bev Tosh in the early 90’s as a student in her figure drawing class at the University of Calgary. Later I attended her figure painting workshop at Series in Red Deer – twice. When I left my design business to pursue my art career full time an opportunity came available for studio space with Burns Visual Arts Society. Bev is one of the founding members of BVAS and I was honoured to have my studio space in the same building as her’s.
My tenure at BVAS was 4 1/2 years during which time I met some pretty amazing artists and made some great friends. I would still be there today if I hadn’t moved away from Calgary. I miss the creative energy of BVAS.
In 2007 I had the privilege of showing with Bev and our dear friend Elizabeth Clark (1947-2008), in our exhibition “Home Bodies” at Profiles Public Art Gallery in St Albert.
For me as emerging artist, this was a milestone and an exhibition that I will always be proud of.
Bev also provided me with the opportunity to work on her first WarBrides.com website when I was just starting Artbiz.ca. We recently converted the old HTML site over to WordPress so that Bev could add and maintain her content. But more than that – At the time I was developing the WordPress Help site for artists and Bev generously acted as my editor, going through each tutorial one by one and offering feedback and telling me where to insert my commas (I’m really bad with commas).
Bev was very generous with her time; in fact Bev is simply a very generous person, period. Her work with the war brides is nothing short of profound. Collecting the stories and painting portraits about these amazing women who gave up life as they knew it to venture forth to a new country, Bev has captured the essence of a generation.
As a documenter and artist, Bev has single handedly become a historian and lecturer about war brides. Her exhibition “One Way Passage” has been shown as far away as New Zealand and she is currently working on a Dutch War Bride exhibition. For little or no monetary gain other than honorariums, Bev funds the travel, insurance and crating of her work.
Passion is just one of the best words that I can use to describe Bev. That and modest; she achieved R.C.A designation with little fanfair. R.C.A. is an acronym for Royal Canadian Academy, one of the highest honours for a Canadian Artist.
I once heard someone in the arts community say that Bev’s pursuit of the War Brides work was a career killer. I was shocked because I have always been under the impression that success as an artist wasn’t about the money but truth. Truth of concept, truth in passion, truth of self. If you sit and talk with Bev you will experience what passion is, what it looks like in someone that has it and aspire to reach that level of belief in yourself and your work.
So while we are all pondering where our next sale is going to come from, perhaps we could define what it is to be an artist. When I moan and groan over my lack of commercial sales I think about what Bev has accomplished and ask myself what does my success as an artist really mean?
Negative Space an exhibition of selected works from the Off the Wall Series
March 3 to April 15, 2012
Opening reception March 2 at 6:00pm
Dade Art & Design Lab
1327 9 AVE SE
Calgary AB
403 454 0243
I started the “Off the Wall” series to study form. Removing the figure which you typically see in my work allowed me to work with form, colour and design in the purest sense. This is the first series that I really bring in the use of colour.
My work has always been stronger when the individual pieces can relate to each other. My mind wants to work in a capsule on an isolated structure. Each piece becomes precious, on to itself. Then when grouped the whole becomes the sum of its parts.
Installing the pieces in a group with the negative space flowing through and around the objects reinforces the individuality of each piece. Rather than framing which would contain the pieces forcing them to be one; with installation and use of negative space each piece remains an individual while working as a whole.
More and more you see calls to artists where there is a $25 to $35 submission fee. I have also seen some that are asking for $10 per image submitted. This fee doesn’t guarantee that you are in the show only that you can submit.
I have also noticed that alot of calls state that you the artist, have to incur the cost of shipping the work to and from the gallery. I found this from a website call:
“Shipped works must be sent in an easily reusable container/packaging with return shipping prepaid, and include the return shipping label with the work.”
I get it that in order to survive that some galleries need to levee these charges especially artists run centers.
I was juried into a The Sculptors Society of Canadian a few years ago. They are based in Toronto and I live in Alberta. In order to show in the gallery I have to pay a $50 submission fee as well as pay for the transport of my work there and back. This is a great group and a lovely gallery and I get it that they don’t have a lot of funding. For a venue like this perhaps it would be alright to participate and pay the submission fees maybe once a year???
I still don’t think artists should have to pay submission fees to show their work! I have always had a policy never to pay submission fees to exhibit my work especially not to a vanity gallery.
Do you pay submission fees to galleries to show your work?
I am a great lover of books both for their content and their aesthetics. Books have been around me for my entire life. My Mother is a big reader and has custom built book shelves in her home.
I daydream about writing a book although I’m not sure what that looks like in words. Mine is a visual language.
Books provide knowledge and ideas, but what if you could not access that knowledge. What if it was taken away? No you can’t turn to the internet that is not what this is about.
These altered books act as my canvas and present themselves as the keepers of knowledge. Vaults. Unreachable. Inaccessible.
I have been very fortunate to have had a few studio visits over my career. The last one is of considerable note but before you get all glad on me; even though it lasted 3 hours, alas it did not lead to representation. But he was very generous with his time and for that I am very grateful.
This gallery owner said as he was viewing the piece that is pictured here, that it was “high art”. So what does that mean exactly? Is it just a nice way to say that my work isn’t salable?
This is what I found when I did a search on the term “High Art”.
Let’s make a list of the things that characterize high art and distinguish it from low art.
1. Complexity of formal properties.
2. Complexity of the responses to the works, which sometimes have no name.
3. The fact that a full and fuller understanding of the work (either the form or the content) allows for an ever fuller enjoyment of the work. One has to gradually grow into the work. It does not reveal everything it has in one exposure.
4. The fact that a full understanding of the work can enhance an understanding of other aspects of life as well.
5. The fact that great works of high art are cross-cultural. They can be enjoyed by people of other cultures who have no other experience of the culture that generated the great work. Each great work of art is potentially a work of world art, not subject to the conditions of its composition.
6. If, according to 5, the work does not fade with distance, it is also true that it does not fade with time.
7. Works of high art are deeply related to morality, in the widest sense of the term, and sometimes problematize morality itself.
8. High art has a history, in which styles, techniques, genres and the entire orientation of the work of art is changed. Properly speaking, low art has no history.
9. Works of high art are individual. They bespeak a personality behind the work. Low art is best when it is anonymous.
Read the rest of this article by Lawrence Nannery
So according to this particular gallery owner rather than trying to find gallery representation apparently I need a patron (one that supports, protects, or champions someone or something). So here goes…
WANTED: One (or two) filthy rich self made entrepreneurs from “high culture” with an appreciation of “high art”. Preference given to those with a slight feminist bend. Please apply within.
Over the years I have made 100’s of submissions and like you I have had gallery rejections way too many times. This isn’t an article about how to handle rejection. We all know that we just pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off and try and try again.
This is a list of my all time favorite rejection letters, emails. Here goes…
“We are not accepting any submissions right now because we have too many artist.
Good Luck,”
If they have “too many artists” would this not be a disservice to their gallery artists. Okay; moving on…
“I wish I had the space, you would not believe how jammed up my backroom is!
We damaged two pieces this morning just trying to move things around… : (“
Good to know how you handle the work in your care…moving on.
“Are you doing a new series of encaustic work for the summer in a brighter palette?”
Not the right question (see my post Paint, sculpt, print what you want)
“Thank you for the update, but yours is not the work for me. Best of luck to you.”
Straight and to the point.
“Please remove us from your mailing list. Many thanks.”
Okay then…
One of my favorites:
“Thank you for your submission but upon review we feel your work does not fit with the curatorial vision of the gallery as we are looking for landscape artists.”
I submitted my encaustic landscapes.
My all time favorite:
“Thank you for contact. We love your work and hope to further talk with you on your preferences for an exhibit in our space.”
“We would be interested in knowing if you are comfortable with showing single pieces or if you favor the all story with the all number in the series. Either way we would set dates with you for exhibiting in the coming year !”
“If this is conciliatory with your vision let us know and would be rather exciting if you were to send an example of your work for our tactile appreciation of it.”
I know it reads as an acceptance but here’s what happen:
I was thrilled that I received such a quick response, like the next day and in response to my email requesting their submission guidelines. It wasn’t a formal submission, but I do send all my emails with a link to my website in the signature. So I thought that they clicked through to my website and voila. Also I know that one of the gallery artists recommended me so I thought perhaps they prescreened me.
I decided rather than email back and forth that I would start the relationship off on the right foot and phone the gallery to talk in person. Which I did but was put through to voicemail. So I left a message thanking them and asking for a call back to discuss which series and which piece they would like me to send.
Nothing – no response.
So I sent an email, still no response.
Well anything could have happened. Maybe they went on vacation the very next day. Maybe (god forbid) someone died. I waited a week, still no response. I tried again to phone; voice mail and I left another message. Nothing.
Finally I sent one last email and to this day have never heard back. I can only guess about what happened and it is my guess is that they sent the email to the wrong artist and didn’t have the courage to fix or admit the error. Obviously I will never submit to this gallery again.
Moving on…
Do you have a favorite rejection letter you would like to share?