Artreach wow

October 2012

Looking Around:

The Artist andThe Landscape An Art Reach Traveling Exhibition from the

Kalamazoo Institute of Arts

is a publication of Kalamazoo RESA’s Education for the Arts, Aesthetic Education Program

Windows on the Work Committee

Window Narrator: Contributors:

Design:

Nick Mahmat Hilary Anthony Kalamazoo Institute of Arts Megan Buchanan Schopf Nancy Husk Angie Melvin Tara Sytsma Michele VanderBeek Mary Whalen

Nick Mahmat

Education for the Arts Director: Bryan Zocher Director’s Secretary: Kris DeRyder Coordinator: Deb Strickland Aesthetic Education Program Coordinator: Nick Mahmat Alternative and Special Education Arts Initiative Program Coordinator: Angie Melvin

Comments or questions about this publication may be directed to Nick Mahmat, Aesthetic Education Program Coordinator at 488-6267 or nmahmat@kresa.org

Strategies for using the Window on the Work Purpose The purpose of the Window on the Work is to provide educators and teaching artists with contextual information pertaining to the focus works presented by the Education for the Arts Aesthetic Education Program. This information can fuel the educational process between educators and teaching artists in developing lesson plans and can offer additional pathways (windows) into the repertory and possible connections to existing school curriculum.

There are several ways that the information may be shared. For instance: • • Each educator reads a section and reports back to the school team in the planning process • Questions are brainstormed about the work of art and then researched by the educators • Additional resources are identified for further investigation

In the planning process, use the Window on the Work:

During the unit of study, use the Window on the Work:

After the unit of study, use the Window on the Work:

• To brainstorm themes for study development • As a reference tool as questions and interests develop in the planning session • To elaborate and expand the instructional focus that has developed out of the planning process • To learn more about the work of art • To consider possible responses to the question pages as the Window is read • To discover connections to other work by the same artists and to other works in the same genre

• To expand on a lesson idea • As a reference to respond to students’ questions • To keep the discussion about the work alive in the classroom • For source material such as artist quotes or background information that may be utilized when incorporating contextual information experientially into a workshop.

• To discover additional connections

• To continue discussion about the work • To compare to other works of art the class may study in the future • To expand curriculum study in the classroom on a particular culture, period in history, etc.

• As a jumping-off point to make connections with other classroom activities, personal connections, and courses of study

Windows on the Work are written for Classroom Teachers and Teaching Artists working in the Aesthetic Education Program and as such are not written or intended for a student audience. The Window on the Work publications should be used for planning purposes and should not be shared with students prior to attending the work of art under study.

The Work

The Work

Artists can picture the world in new and unexpected ways—even the everyday world we take for granted.

Through their choice of media, personal techniques, and individual visions, the artists in this exhibit show new ways of looking and thinking about the landscape that combine observation and imagination.

Currated by the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, the seven distinctive works in Looking Around interpret the landscape through oil pastels, painting, relief prints, and infrared photography. Each reflects its own special sense of wonder in the world we live in. Join the fun as we look around!

The following section contains information on the traveling exhibition Looking Around:The Artist and the Landscape. Please consider the following questions as you view and read about the work. They may also serve as helpful discussion questions with students during workshops or after viewing the performance.

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What do you notice?

Describe the detail you see when looking at the work.

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What stands out to you?

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This exhibit was curated through the lens of looking at different ways artists choose to represent a landscape. What are some of the different choices the artists make in representing a landscape?

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What are the effects of some of those choices?

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What do you notice about how the artists create the illusion of a 3-dimensional space on a 2-dimensional surface?

Thornapple River 3

Christopher Light | Infrared photograph

q

Untitled

Cloud

Jim StipeMaas | Oil on wood and plaster

q

Brent Spink | Oil on canvas

Devils Island, Ca. Martin Hubbard | Color woodcut

Vine Row 3

Doug Berger | Color woodcut

q

Melissa

Jill Taylor Waskowsky | Oil pastel

A Distant Night Sky: Galactic Plane q

David Jay Spyker | Oil on plywood

The Artists

The Artists

The following section contains information about select artists whose work is featured in Looking Around:The Artist and the Landscape. You may wish to consider the following questions as you read along.

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Who are the artists whose work is displayed in Looking Around:The Artist and the Landscape?

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What are their backgrounds and experiences as artists?

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What is their creative process or how do they approach their work?

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How do these artists describe their work?

Brent Spink is a plein air artist and

memeber of Plein Air Artists of West Michigan. He was born in 1958 in Minneapolis, Minn., lived in Denver, for a time and moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan, with his family in 1968. He got a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1980 at Western Michigan University/ A bit of a nomad Brent continues to live in Kalamazoo but also Montana, New Mexico, northern Minnesota and elsewhere—He is content as long as he can be and paint outdoors. Favorite themes are a juxtaposition of the man-made and natural worlds, and the landscape and wildlife of the Great Lakes region.

“Coming out of a culture that has ‘moved indoors’ my work as a painter takes me out into a world that is prickly, hot, slimy, cold, wet, dry, insect laden, windy, mucky, or perfect, depending on the moment. I am out in that place, making myself available for a chance meeting with occurrences that define our relationships; our relationships with a place that we work very hard at insulating ourselves from. I am looking for moments that speak of those relationships. What I often find is an uncomfortable alliance that is born from our tireless efforts to mine from the landscape without getting any of it on us. As a painter and as a person I benefit from what I find out there while wandering in search of captivating images and stories.”

“It's about personality, what's in your heart, what you love - you know, that's what makes your art great, that's what gives it feeling.

Without all of that coming through, what's the point?”

– David Jay Spyker

David Jay Spyker is a representational artist working in acrylics, watercolors, graphite, charcoal, conté, While David Jay Spyker studied for brief periods, he is mostly self-taught. Originally from Rochester New York David now resides in Kalamazoo, Michigan. His work is included in the collections of the Grand Rapids Art Museum, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, the Art Center of Battle Creek, Carnage Center for the Arts in Three Rivers Michigan, and the South Bend Museum of Art in South Bend, Indiana.

Christopher Light

A Kalamazoo native, Christopher Light grew up with a darkroom and the use of his father's 4 x 5 camera. He earned a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University and worked first as a newspaper reporter-photographer the later as a college professor and free-lance writer for the early microcomputer magazines.

In 1995, after moving back to Kalamazoo, Light returned to photography, combining his knowledge of photography with his computer skills, and, as a refresher, took several photography courses at the KIA. Since then he has had more than a dozen one-person shows in several Michigan galleries and produced large-scale digitally printed photographs for public buildings in Kalamazoo and Ann Arbor.

Recently Lights work was featured in a one man show at the KIA marking his first museum show.

Jim StipeMaas

“The main focus of my paintings for the past 20 or so years has been landscape. I am an outdoors person, I like to get out and see things in all seasons, times of day and in every type of weather. Getting out into Nature is a spiritual experience and painting my experiences is a form of my devotion, a meditation on what has come through me. I find light to be infinitely more interesting than the human condition. When a low sunrise light breaks across a gnarled branch of an old Cedar tree, with the smell of the Pine woods and feel of the cold wind on my back playing into the whole scene, I am filled with a deep rooted need to express this image. To conjure this up in a sketch on the spot and a painting back in the studio is a commitment I have made and continue to work toward perfecting. Landscape painting is a long process of reliving memories and developing the moods and light that makes the places come back to life.”

Jill Waskowsky

Jill Waskowsky is a well known member of the Kalamazoo community. She is an artist, educator, and often recognized gardener. Originally from Chicago, Jill has made Kalamazoo her home. She often works in portraiture. For a number of years Waskowsky has been painting students from photographs she takes in the classroom. “Each student, in his or her own way, has integrity and dignity.” She says. “Sometimes it’s something in the quality of the face that I’m trying to get. I want something that reveals human experience.” Jill currently teaches at Portage Central High school.

The Kalamazoo Institute of Arts

Curated by the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Looking Around: The Artist and the Landscape, features 7 original works on loan from area artists or pulled from the KIA’s permanent collection.

The Kalamazoo Institute of Arts is an 88-year old art museum and school that serves a nine county region of small cities, towns, and rural areas of Southwest Michigan. Every year, it attracts upwards of 125,000 regional residents and visitors.

The KIA is dedicated to collecting, preserving, and exhibiting art to promote both an appreciation of art, and to support artist development.

Currently, the KIA hosts six to eight traveling exhibitions a year, many of which usually only visit museums in large cities. The museum is dedicated to providing a variety of programming that includes education programs for all ages, a fine arts library, and a curriculum-based art school. Unique and varied programming is also possible with the KIA’s permanent collection.

The Craft The Craft What is an artists craft? How does one describe their artistic process, approach, or the purpose of their work? The following section explores questions that relate to the craft of the works featured in Looking Around:The Artist and the Landscape. You may wish to consider the following questions as you read.

• What mediums appear in the exhibit?

• What are specific challenges associated with the subject matter of landscape?

• What techniques or artistic approaches relate to landscape painting?

• How do the different techniques or mediums used to create a landscape effect the look and style of the finished work?

• Where was the artist standing when he or she made their landscape? How does his or her point of view, or vantage point, affect the way the landscape looks?

The Craft

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO PAINT THE LAND? “The landscape is unique among subject matter – in it’s grandeur, complexity, atmosphere, and color dynamics. Landscape painters are continually challenged to translate the qualities into paint. But nature doesn’t reveal her secrets so easily. Because she is so vast and complex, so varied in her range of light, landscapists must go further and dig deeper to find what they are looking for. “

-Mitchell Albala

Author of: Landscape Painting: Essential Concepts and Techniques for Plein Air and Studio Practice

H

ow does an artist create a landscape? A landscape artist is a sort of magician who can create a whole world on a flat surface. Trees that seem thick with foliage might be made with just a few flicks of a paintbrush. Lakes that shine, waterfalls that splash, grasses that bend in the wind, and dark clouds that promise rain are all made of colors squeezed from paint tubes. How amazing it is that small dabs and smears of color can create vast spaces that recede for miles and places for us to go in our imagination.

Air is an important part of any landscape, although we seldom give it much thought. An artist has to paint the air so skillfully that we seem to feel the heat of the sun and the rush of the wind. He or she has to make us believe that it might take hours for a bird to fly from one side of the picture frame to the other. All of this is hard to do. There are no paint tubes for sale labeled “sunshine,” “frosty air,” “gentle breeze,” or “gloomy day.” An artist has to create the wind, the sunshine, and the mist with the paint at the end of the brush.

It is important to remember that a landscape artist is not a camera that records whatever happens to be in front of the lens. She is not required to render exactly how the landscape appears. Trees can be moved, altered, added or omitted all together as example. The landscape rendered may exist only in the artists head.

A landscape artist has to decide what she wants us to see. If she is painting a field, she has to decide whether she wants us to see each blade of grass or whether she wants us to see the field as a smear of color. She can paint her landscape so that we see the field from above, as if we were looking down from an airplane, or from the ground, as if we were lying flat on a picnic blanket.

An artist must decide whether to work outdoors on the land or indoors in the studio. Working outdoors allows her to observe the colors of nature-the soil, the clouds, and the reflections on water. She can study the patterns of sunlight and shadow that change with every passing moment. On the other hand, if she chooses to paint inside his studio, she can work more slowly, rearrange the composition, and adjust the colors and shapes to her own way of seeing. Many artists find both methods useful. They make sketches outdoors and then do the actual painting back in their studio.

Consider this . . .

Some landscape artists painted out-of-doors; others painted in studios from their sketches and memories. The artists who painted landscapes in their studios often chose to create pleasing compositions, which were not always true to the realities of a particular place.

When looking at a landscape painting, think about whether it is an image of a real or imagined place. Are there any clues in the painting that would lead you to believe it was made from direct observation, or in a studio?

Space

In many landscapes, understanding how the artist depicts space is important to visually appreciating the work. Below is a glossary of common terms and techniques associated with creating the illusion of space in a two-dimensional form. When viewing a landscape, you may wish to consider which, if any, of the techniques listed below the artist employs to create a sense of space in his/her work.

• Atmospheric Perspective: is sometimes

referred to as aerial perspective. As space recedes into the far distance in a landscape painting or drawing, the intensity of the color fades and there is less contrast of lights and darks. The further back in spatial depth, the lighter the color. Often, colors in the far distance appear as lighter, cooler tones of blue to gray.

• Overlapping: is the placement in a composition

of one object in front of another, which creates the illusion of depth.

• Relative size: (scale) is the size of one object

or part of a landscape in relation to another. For example: a tree in the foreground would appear much larger than a tree in the background.

• Perspective: the theory or art of suggesting

three dimensions on a two-dimensional surface, in order to recreate the appearance and spatial relationships that objects or a scene in recession present to the eye.

• Point of view: can refer to the place or physical

position from which the artist or viewer looks at a subject. It can also refer to an attitude or opinion the artist is expressing about the subject.

Simplification and Massing:

Hans Hoffmann once said: “The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” An essential challenge of landscape painting is finding a way to translate the vast amount of detail into a coherent statement that makes sense to both artist and viewer. It is not a matter of copying nature; that is not possible. Rather it must become a process of seeing the world through the lens of your chosen medium. Whether painting or printmaking it is a process of creative distillation or extracting the most essential elements of the landscape and organizing them into a coherent whole. While it is true all artists, landscapists or not, are involved in the process of simplification what makes this principle so crucial for the landscape artist is the enormity of the subject. It is filled with so much information and detail that is often times disorganized requiring the artists to employ more radical means of simplification. The painter can never paint every blade of grass or leaf on a tree. In its place the artist must translate this complexity into sets of simpler shapes and patterns that can stand in for the original scene.

Selection and Composition:

Unlike still life or figurative subjects in which the subjects can be prearranged to ideal compositions, the landscape painter has no control over the arrangement or lighting of their scene. They must take it as it is. Yes, they do have the power to alter the final scene in their finished work but the process is all mental rearranging and adjusting hypothetically in their minds. They do not have the advantage of tangibly rearranging and reworking the subject solving any compositional problems in advance to rendering it. They do not have the luxury of moving a tree, a mountain, or a farmhouse so that it catches the light better. It is often times a process of looking around at the vastness of a scene and selecting the best section. The landscape artist must have the ability to evaluate a scene before hand and distinguish whether or not it contains the types of subject matter and conditions that will make for an effective translation into their finished work.

Light and Color:

It is often the play of light and color that draw most to landscapes. The sun is a light source like no other rendering a veil of unified color over a scene. There is an inherent brilliance and tone that comes with subjects under natural light. Whether filtered through stormy clouds, shaded by leaves of a tree, or reflected off the warm reds of a canyon wall the light and color provided by the sun is part of the composition in a landscape.

Color shifts, contrasts, intensities, opacities, and tones, lend in creating mood but are also necessary tools in creating the sense of depth and space required and expected of landscapes.

“He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service to speak for him.”

- Henry David Thoreau

The Craft

A

uthor Mitchell Albala, posits in his book Landscape Painting: Essential Concepts and Techniques for Plein Air and Studio Practice, that landscape painting presents a unique set of challenges that demand a genre-specific approach.

He lays out three main areas that encompass many of the challenges associated with the subject of landscape. Said differently these three areas represent problems artists must solve and choices they must make in how they represent a landscape. These three areas, according to Albala, are simplification and massing, site selection and composition and color and light.

The Craft

H

ow does an artist’s choice in medium effect the ways in which they render their chosen subject?

7

WORKS, MANY MEDIUMS

The traveling exhibition, Looking Around: The Artist and the Landscape, consists of seven original works by area artists. Though united by a desire to represent the land these seven artists utilize different mediums and techniques to portray the terrain.

1

Oil Painting

All paint consists of the three basic components, binder, solvent, and pigment. The binder, commonly called the vehicle, is the film-forming component of paint. Binder holds the pigment together.

Solvent is the material that dilutes the binder for application. It changes the viscosity allowing paint be spread onto a surface. Pigment is the solid granules in paint that give it color and opacity. Often times, as is the case with oil paint a paint is named after the binder used.

In the case of most oil paint, pigment is suspended in a linseed oil binder. Because of the oil binder it has an extended drying time, allowing the paint to remain workable for quite long periods of time. The viscosity of the paint may be modified by the addition of a solvent such as turpentine or white spirit, and varnish may be added to increase the glossiness of the dried oil paint film. Oil paints have been used in Europe since the 12th century for simple decoration, but were not widely adopted as an artistic medium until the early 15th century.

medium with characteristics similar to pastels and wax crayons. Unlike “soft” or “French” pastel sticks, which are made with a gum or methyl cellulose binder, oil pastels consist of pigment mixed with a non-drying oil and wax binder. The surface of an oil pastel painting is therefore less powdery, but more difficult to protect with a fixative. Oil pastels provide a harder edge than “soft” or “French” pastels but are more difficult to blend.

3

Woodcut

is a relief printing artistic technique in which an image is carved into the surface of a block of wood removing the areas of the image that will not be printed. The surface that remains represents the printed image. The block is cut along the grain of the wood (unlike wood engraving where the block is cut in the end-grain). The surface is covered with ink by rolling over the surface with an ink-covered roller (brayer), leaving ink upon the flat surface but not in the non-printing areas. Because relief printing is a subtractive process (removing parts of materials) it is difficult to create very thin, fluid and closely spaced lines. As a result relief prints tend to exhibit stark contrasts and sharp edges.

PLEIN AIR PAINTING:

4

Digital Photog raphy Digital photography is a form of photography

that uses an array of electronic photodetectors to capture the image focused by the lens, as opposed to an exposure on photographic film. The captured image is then stored as a computer file ready for digital processing, viewing, digital publishing or printing.

Infrared photography: Artist Christopher Light’s

work, Thornapple River 3, is a specialized technique, possible with digital photography, known as infrared photography.

Infrared refers to the portion of the light spectrum with frequencies just below the lowest visible red light. Although invisible to the human eye digital camera sensors can pick up infrared light. Of course cameras are sensitive to the full spectrum of visible light as well; therefore, to create an infrared image a special infrared passing filter is applied to the camera. This special filter lets infrared light pass through to the camera while blocking all or most of the visible light spectrum. As the amount of light entering into the camera is limited by the filter Christopher must shoot long exposures, and his subjects must be lit with bright sunlight to render an image.

Very interesting effects can be obtained through the use of infrared photography. False color or black and white images with a dream-like quality can appear. Blue skies appear darkened while buildings and foliage glow. Summertime trees look as though they have been covered in fresh winter’s snow.

“En plein air” is a French expression which means “in the open air,” and is particularly used to describe the act of painting outdoors. Artists have long painted outdoors, however this practice became particularly important to impressionist artists. The practice continued to increase with the introduction of paint in tubes which allowed for easy transport and instant use. Previously painters made their own paints by grinding and mixing pigment powders with linseed oil.

The Craft

2

Oil Pastel (also called wax oil crayon) is a painting and drawing

The Origins

The Origins The following section contains brief information pertaining to the historical context of the work featured in Looking Around:The Artist and the Landscape. You may wish to consider the following questions as you read.

• When did landscape art come about?

• How have the techniques in creating landscape art evolved over time?

• How have the ways artists portrayed landscapes changed over time?

• What were some of the purposes for creating landscape art?

• How have artists’ intentions in making landscapes evolved throughout history?

A Brief History 14th, 15th and 16th Centuries

The depiction of landscape in art has its roots in Greek and Roman times, with murals of landscapes painted on the walls of expensive villas. However, it was in the Renaissance when landscape gained in popularity. The ‘Classical’ vision of the land as a place for pleasure was reborn and people looked at the landscape with renewed interest.

Landscape painting was not produced in its own right at this time with early Renaissance painters presenting landscape as a backdrop to religious scenes and portraits.

As landscapes became more accurately portrayed, it became easier to integrate figures within them to be shown in proportion to the rest of the picture. Artists also started to use colors and forms in the background that mirrored the mood and the figures of the events depicted in their religious and mythological paintings.

17th Century

Roots in Antiquity Artists have been painting the landscape since ancient times. The Greeks and Romans created wall paintings of landscapes and gardenscapes.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, the tradition of depicting pure landscapes declined, and the landscape was seen only as a setting for religious and figural scenes. This tradition continued until the 16th century when artists

began to view the landscape as a subject in its own right. The artistic shift seems to have corresponded to a growing interest in the natural world sparked by the Renaissance.

By the 17th century there were two main centers of landscape painting in Europe: Italy, where landscape did not enjoy high status and paintings of landscapes tended to be idealized and classical, and the Netherlands.

In the Netherlands, great political changes for the country were reflected in its artwork when the Northern Netherlands won independence from Spain. People no longer wanted Catholic artworks linked to Spanish rule and many artists turned to painting the flat, recognizable landscape of the Dutch Republic, which reflected national pride.

'Fête Galante', which depicted pastoral landscapes with figures enjoying picnics and walks in the countryside. In England, Gainsborough would make preparatory sketches from nature before painting the final scenes in his studio and even built miniature models of his landscapes in order to paint them with more accuracy.

19th Century

One of the most important developments in the history of landscape was the invention of photography. Artists were no longer required to paint faithful, topographical depictions of the land and this led to greater freedom to interpret the landscape.

By the late 17th century, many landscapes in the Netherlands were deeply influenced by the traditions and landscape of Italy in their use of light and color.

New artists' equipment led to a shift to painting outside. 19th-century artists such as Courbet and Boudin painted spontaneous pictures in the open air.

By the latter half of the 19th century, influenced by Boudin and others, the Impressionists were causing a stir by exhibiting paintings that looked unfinished.

18th Century

20th Century and Beyond

The 18th century 'Grand Tour' involved many rich young men (and sometimes women) touring Europe, particularly Italy, visiting places famed for their art and architecture. They would often buy souvenirs, such as capricci (imaginary paintings depicting ruined or intact architecture in picturesque settings) and other landscapes. Canaletto was one of the most popular artists with those tourists, who was famed for his depictions of Venice.

France and Britain became the new centers of landscape art. In France, Watteau invented what is known as the

In the modern period, landscape has come to mean many things as artists embrace new media, in addition to the more traditional media, to create environments using light and color.

As the world becomes more built up, we see urban landscapes as subject matter more and more. Along with an increased focus on the urban landscape artworks that focus on and reflect the plight of the landscape in the face of industrialization and population have become increasingly popular.

The information provided has been compiled from one of the The Museums Networks elearning resources. The Network is a partnership of five museums, one national and four regional, that work together on the care, presentation and use of its collections, including digital and on-the-ground projects for schools. The Education projects are funded by the DCMS/DfES Strategic Commissioning Program.

Check out their website for further resources. http://www.museumnetworkuk.org/landscapes/index.htm

Education for the Arts Offices: Service Center Office: 1819 East Milham Avenue Portage, MI 49002-3035 Epic Center Office: Epic Center Suite 201 359 South Kalamazoo Mall Kalamazoo, MI 49007 Tel: 269.488.6267 www.kresa.org/efa

Kalamazoo Resa, Education for the Arts | Art Reach, Looking Around: The Artist and the Landscape | 2012-2013