Loren's 75th Birthday Rolls Around and He's Still Hiking

I'm sure that's Loren on this lovely path.
Photo from Harmony in Life, Sylvania's Main Street haven.

Cardinal, Andrea Patton,
Watercolorist

My brother Loren would have been 75 years old today, November 12, but age doesn't matter a whit where he is now, on some path or another beyond the horizon. 

This is what's interesting about him being where he is. At seventy-five he still has the energy of his 63 years when he died suddenly while hiking along the Aucilla River in northern Florida. His heart gave out, but not his spirit. 

I used to call it his last hike, but now I'm not so sure. 

I think he's still hiking, traveling the world, free as a bird. Elissa was sure Loren was with us when this cardinal followed us on a path we were walking at Wildwood Metropark. That bird stopped when we stopped, followed us when we moved. "Yep, Mom, Loren's listening in." 

He's also telegraphing ideas to me. I get a compulsion to look something up, like a nagging thought. That's how I discovered the artist Andrea Patton. As it turns out, most of these nagging curiosities have to do with issues and subjects Loren himself embraced. It's kind of how telepathy works I guess.   

Andrea Patton is a wonderful artist. She's from Houston, lives in Alaska, likes to travel, to Italy, all over Europe, to Colorado and around the wonders of America the beautiful.    

When I saw Patton's vibrant painting of a Rainbow Warrior, a colorful watercolor of a Native American warrior, I knew then and there it was Loren channeling the artist, nudging me to discover her. 

Loren knew more about Native American history and culture than anyone I know. It was his life-long passion, along with his environmental activism. He did his Master's thesis at Goddard exploring social ecology and Native beliefs and culture. 

Andrea Patton, Colorado

It's Fall now, Loren's favorite season. Great time to hike. I think Loren was on this path in Colorado, painted by Patton, when our minds connected.  

It's a time when Nature takes a hike, too, leaving a bright path across America, across the world. A Ukraine fall looks like autumn in Ohio or in New England. Loren knew how much I cared about Ukraine and its people. He tells me they will triumph. I believe him.

Nature brightens before the dying of the light, Loren mused, as we were hiking at St. Marks National Wildlife Preserve near Tallahassee. "It's the way of Mother Earth."  She promises to return after her winter rest into her rebirth in Spring.  For Loren, there was no better guide to the cycles of life and death. 

He may be 75 years old, but he remains young in spirit. He is one with Mother Earth. It's where he always wanted to be. That's why I think he's still hiking. 

Lyubov Panchenko, Ukrainian Folk Artist, a Victim of Russia's Genocide

Lyubov Panchenko, Red Viburnum, collage.

Motherhood, collage with coat fabric, at Sixtiers Dissident
Movement Museum, Kyiv. Interesting to know it exists.
Also, Panchenko was a fashion designer in the 60s, a reason
she often used fabric in her collages. 

Bucha, a northern suburb of the capital Kyiv, one of Putin's early targets in his personal vendetta war to annihilate Ukraine, lay in ruins after February 24. That's when Putin's unprovoked war began. He aimed to surround and occupy the ancient Ukrainian capital, but was pushed back. He had not expected it, and the revenge of his armed forces was fierce. 

When Russian forces withdrew from the Kyiv region, the vicious war crimes of the invaders were revealed, to the horror of the world. The suburb of Bucha was destroyed. Civilians were executed, raped, tortured, starved, shot while their hands were tied behind their backs, while walking their dog, while shopping, caring for the wounded, sleeping in their beds. War crimes. Documented, witnessed and recorded, by eye-witnesses and early investigators. Bucha, like Mariupol after it, became a symbol of Putin's full-fledged war against Ukraine--horrific, relentless, a genocide.

Lyubov Panchenko, In Starry Space, collage with coat fabric,
The Ukrainian Sixtiers Dissident Movement Museum, 

Kyiv, Ukraine.

Among the starved and the dead, we have recently learned, was 84-year-old Ukrainian artist Lyubov Panchenko (1938-2022), a long-time freedom fighter and social activist who aimed to preserve Ukrainian traditions and folklife through her art.

Bucha was her hometown, and it is her grave. She was found alone in her apartment, her dog by her side, starving slowly, barely conscious. A neighbor discovered her, alerted by her dog wandering the road in a lonely trek. Volunteers took Lyubov to a nearby hospital, but little could be done to save her. She died soon thereafter. "She was nothing but bones," a doctor said. 

And so this beloved folk artist became a victim of the Bucha massacre. Her death casts a pall across the cultural landscape of Ukraine. 

Lyubov lived alone and died alone. Survivors will remember her life-long fight for freedom, her involvement in the 1980s with the Sixtiers dissident movement, which fought against the Russification of Ukrainian culture, and her lifelong advocacy for a unique Ukrainian identity. (Note 1) 

Panchenko's Cossack on the Bandura, a 60-string Ukrainian folk instrument. I heard it played in Lviv..

I was not surprised but happy to learn she loved the poems of Taras Shevchenko, an early and equally strong advocate of a unique Ukrainian identity. "When I die, bury me on Ukraine's broad steppes...near the Dnieper River's great roar," he declared in his popular poem "Testament." Today, it is Shevchenko's poem "fight, and you will win," that resonates most loudly, a Ukrainian call to arms to defend their country against Russia.  

Aren't these Lyobov Panchenko designs gorgeous?  

Lyubov's nationalism did not endear her to the Soviet authorities, who could make her life miserable. She did not have a public exhibition of her work until 1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union. Imagine that!  She'd been practicing her art for over 40-50 years by then, her painting, collages and fashion designs. Yes, she also designed dresses adorned with exquisite Ukrainian motifs. I would love to know if any of them exist today, when Ukrainian attire is a proud symbol of Standing with Ukraine in war.

For the Soviets at that time, however, the 1960s through the 1980s, "she was guilty of being born in Ukraine, guilty for considering herself Ukrainian not Russian, and for promoting Ukrainian culture," noted Igor Kulyk, head of Ukraine's Archives of National Memory (note 4). She created in the shadows of Soviet oppression, as did most of her compatriot artists, poets, and creative thinkers of her time. 

An Unexpected Visitor.

After the early 1990s, Panchenko became famous for her collages. When people had the opportunity to see them, examine them, they were adored and celebrated. Her collages, those I've seen online, are fanciful, colorful, embracing a purity and innocence, a joy. Sometimes dark clouds appear around the edges. But mostly they evoke harmony, look to the past, honor it. 

Her death in Russia's 21st-century rerun of World War II, which we thought could never happen again, is tragic. For me, the collage above encompasses the surrealism of this holocaust: the unexpected visitor, the Russian bull, mean, power-hungry, threatening a smaller prey, stalking across the garden, out to destroy everything in its path. Not that Panchenko was any stranger to Russian cruelty. She lived through World War II and its aftermath. She resisted Soviet oppression. She had fought against it all her life.  She died because of it.

from 1994, bright and bold

The aggression that killed her had only strengthened her resolve to celebrate Ukrainian traditions until she took her last dying breath. “She was not broken by the KGB during Soviet times,” said Ukraine’s first lady Olena Zelenska. “But the Russian occupation broke her.” 

The Daily Art Magazine's Emily Snow, art critic, remembered her this way: "Lyubov Panchenko demonstrated the revolutionary power of art throughout 84 years of her life. Perhaps she would have found earlier success as an artist if not for Soviet censorship. She would likely still be crafting collages in her Bucha studio today if not for the latest Russian invasion."

"She was killed by the Russians," Igor Kulyk of the Ukraine Archives remarked, "But her legacy will live on." 

I think her legacy will become entwined like a vine she created into the story of RUs genocidal war, now in its 6th month. Putin's terrorism has leveled most of Ukraine's cities, towns and villages, and the vast farmlands surrounding them. The Donbas and southern Ukraine around the Black Sea have been hit the hardest. Ukraine is now receiving the advanced weapon systems they need to counterattack and conduct offensive battles against Russian positions. It's about time, because Ukraine is fighting World War III on its own, defending the West and Europe, and democracy around the world. 

Panchenko knew one thing in her heart and soul: Ukraine's art and folk traditions, its creativity and distinctive culture, will never be destroyed. Nor will Ukraine's independence and freedom. The land will be rebuilt on this promise, on this foundation. That will make Lyobov Panchenko smile. 

Sources/Notes

1.  https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/lyubov-panchenko/, by Emily Snow, remembering the artist. 

2.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaCD0XlxYgA, the horrors of Bucha, the war crimes, the cruelty.

3.  https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/20/europe/bucha-ukraine-reported-killings-intl/index.html, more evidence of Putin's sickening war crimes against civilians in Bucha.

4. https://kyivindependent.com/national/ukrainian-artist-liubov-panchenko-died-after-month-of-starvation-in-russian-occupied-bucha. The Kyiv Independent remembers Panchenko. 

 

Janet Sobel, Ukrainian-American Pioneer of Abstract Expressionism

Milky Way series 

"Contrary to established myth . . . Jackson Pollock's 'signature' style [his so-called 'drip paintings'] wasn't his invention at all, but the brainchild of another artist, one whose extraordinary story confounds and invigorates our understanding of one of the most celebrated contours in recent cultural history. Put simply, modern art has a problem. Her name is Janet Sobel."

I saw this painting that I liked (to the left) and thought it was a Jackson Pollock. Wrong.

It was posted on the Female Artist in History site and the artist was Janet Sobel. Really? I noted that Sobel was Ukrainian-American, which interested me right away, and that she was a friend of John Dewey, one of my favorite early 20th-century educational reformers. I had discovered Dewey when taking an Intellectual History class with Professor Bill Taylor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Now I'm discovering the story of a woman artist hidden from public view named Janet Sobel (1893-1968), who, it turns out, is really the forerunner of Abstract Expressionism. It was she who influenced Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. Not the other way around.

Burning Bush

This we know now. Post-World War II male artists, always recognized as the founders and major purveyors of Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and other cultural trends, made it a point to belittle and ignore women artists of their time, pushing them quite deliberately to the margins. Just women dappling, nothing more.

Art critic Clement Greenburg in the mid-1940s and 1950s described Sobel's work as "primitive," denigrated her work as that of a "housewife," while praising Pollock's paintings as "innovative and masculine to the core." Yes, "masculine to the core." He, along with other critics, puffed Wyoming-born Pollock up as a kind of Marlboro Man conquering his paintings like a Wyoming cowhand, free from tradition, a Wild West art warrior.

It was a myth. It was t

he height of patriarchy in the American art scene.

We are still uncovering the brilliant women artists who worked in the shadows of these male artists. Janet Sobel is one of them.

Sobel, "Milky Way" series

Sobel, "Hiroshima"

She was born Jennie Lechovsky in a small Jewish village in eastern Ukraine, near what is now Dnipro in Lugansk oblast and under Russian obliteration bombing. Her mother and three siblings escaped to the US after her father was killed in a vicious anti-Semitic pogram. They arrived in New York City in 1908. Sobel was fifteen years old. A few years later, she married Max Sobel, an engraver and goldsmith, and raised five children. The Russian-Jewish enclave in Brooklyn provided a safe haven for a young mother who had escaped anti-Semitism in this World War II era.  

Sobel didn't begin painting until her mid-40s, apparently when her son Sol gave up art and gave all his painting materials to her. She began by experimenting with canvases laid out on the floor, using a style that came to be called "drip painting" and "all-over painting," in which no surface is left bare or untouched.(Note 4 below) 

It was, for Sobel, a housewife, mother, and grandmother, a moment of self-expression. You can feel a sense of freedom in her work. Talent unbound. 

It was this moment in her life, inhabiting the meaning of living in a democracy, that led to her meeting John Dewey, who championed her work. He wrote about her in a catalogue for the Puma Gallery in New York in 1944. She was just getting started.  "Her work is extraordinarily free from...self-consciousness and pretense. One can believe that to an unusual degree her forms and colors well up from a subconsciousness that is richly stored with sensitive impressions received directly from nature, impressions which have been reorganized in figures in which color and form are happily wed." (Note 1)

Her forms and colors also welled up from her experiences under Russian pograms, as well as the economic difficulties her family experienced during the Great Depression, when food was often scarce.  

Untitled

New York Times photo

Sobel enjoyed a brief spurt of public recognition in the late 1940s, then disappeared from view, and viewings of her art, when her husband moved the family from Brooklyn to Plainsfield, NJ for business reasons. Away from the vibrant New York art scene, she seemed to become lost into the role of suburban wife and mother, the very women Betty Friedan wrote about in The Feminine Mystique in 1963. Apparently there was some talk that she had developed an allergy to something in paint, but her more modern granddaughter asserted that it was more an allergy to Suburbia than paint. 

The rise of what Friedan called the Feminine Mystique, prescribing a narrow role for women in the private arena of hearth and home, while men dominated the public arena, left it's mark. Sobel was one of its victims, I think, although she never talked about it..

How could a piece of art so powerful
become so hidden?

Her art fell into that black hole of neglect that swallowed up lots of female artist then and  over time.  After 1946, no gallery showed her art during her lifetime. I found that sad. Because she kept painting into her old age. 

"A supremely gifted artist, whose work spans folk tradition, surrealism, and abstract expressionism," wrote art critic Victoria Linchong in a May 2022 article, "Sobel deserves wider recognition for revolutionizing 20th century art during a a meteoritic career that was cut short by the patriarchy of her time." (Note 9)

The good new is that Sobel's oeuvre has been recently rediscovered, recaptured and brought to light.

Museums like MOMA and well-known art galleries like Gary Snyder Fine Art in NYC have begun  exhibiting and selling the works of women artists so the world knows they existed. Sobel is among them. She is found again.  She had left behind "hundreds of paintings," telling us that she continued painting into her obscurity. Some of these paintings are now included in major exhibits, most recently Women in Abstraction, a 1921 exhibit that traveled from the Pompidou Center in Paris to the Guggenheim in Bilbao. And galleries are selling her work. It's about time. Wouldn't it be lovely to grace a wall with one of her paintings, one that influenced Abstract Expressionism and left a legacy of creativity and beauty. 

Sources/Notes: 

1.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Sobel

2.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey, 1859 – 1952,  American philosopher, educational reformer, a founder of "pragmaticism," a public intellectual. The overriding theme of Dewey's works was his deep belief in democracy. Although he is best known for his publications about education, he also wrote about aesthetics, social theory, and art. The latter brought him in touch with Janet Sobel, who shared his beliefs in democracy and an educated citizenry. 

3.  https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/janet-sobel-forgotten-female-artist/ Excerpt from Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction, 2017, MOMA. "Sobel’s artistic technique became later known as "drip painting“ when it was adopted by Jackson Pollock. Sobel’s artwork from 1945 entitled Milky Way is a prime example of the artist’s “drip technique." Pollack knew Sobel's work, and he adopted it for himself. While art critics dismissed and belittled her work, arts patron Peggy Guggenheim noticed Sobel’s work and decided to include it in her gallery, The Art of this Century, in 1945"  Jackson Pollock, himself, visited this gallery and ultimately admitted that Sobel’s work “had made an impression on him." Unfortunately for Sobel, her work was overshadowed by her male counterparts in an Abstract Expressionist movement that was male-dominated. Thus did time forget her as the true creator of the “drip painting” technique for which Jackson Pollock became so well-known.

4.  https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220307-janet-sobel-the-woman-written-out-of-history, by Kelly Grovier, March 2022. It's about time that Sobel is being recognized for her contribution to art history. 

5.  https://design-fixation.com/2010/02/jackson-pollock-vs-janet-sobe.html

6.  https://www.wikiart.org/en/janet-sobel

7.  https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/obituaries/janet-sobel-overlooked.html?

8.  https://gaillevin.commons.gc.cuny.edu/files/2014/03/Janet-Sobel-Primitivist-Surrealist-and-Abstract-Expressionist-2005.pdf, an article by art historian Gail Levin.

9. https://www.messynessychic.com/2022/05/11/before-pollock-saw-her-work-a-ukrainian-woman-pioneered-drip-painting/by Victoria Linchong, May 20,2022.

Note: Trying to access some of these links doesn't work, they are "hidden," but I'm including them in case I want to use them for future reference.  

Ukraine Violated: My Village is Occupied by Russia

 

The stunning Dnieper River, a major European waterway, 
the Ukrainian Mississippi. The bridges over Kyiv. Anton Petrus/Getty image.

On the 100th day of Putin's vicious war crimes campaign and genocide in Ukraine:

At a summer camp for kids from all over
the Lugansk region. Where are they now?

Дорогая Фрэн, Мы в подвале...Русские преследуют людей. стучится в двери. Я думаю, что могу быть в списке за свою активность. Я плачу, когда вижу, что наш флаг опущен. Мы боимся каждого звука, каждого шума, каждого шага, каждого голоса. Как долго мы сможем продержаться? Я не знаю. From a dear friend in the Donbas

Dear Fran, We're in the basement...The Russians are after the people, knocking on doors. I think I might be on a list for being active. I cry when I see our flag down. We are afraid of every sound, every noise, every step, every voice. How long can we hold on? I don't know.

The village where I served with the Peace Corp in the Donbas is now occupied by the Russians. The town I know and love, where I lived for two years, is suffering, overwhelmed by a war the world didn't think possible in our time. 

My friends write that Russian soldiers are stalking them, scaring them, arresting them. Some are "disappearing," исчезновение.  They are horrified at the thought they are being tortured, or sent to gulags in Russia, along with thousands of other Ukrainians. They fear young girls are being brutalized and trafficked. They live under constant stress. Russian military leaders occupying towns and villages have lists, they say, and  they fear they may be on them.

A lovely window on a 
home in my village.

Putin's war crimes campaign to obliterate Ukraine from the face of the earth is a 21st-century genocide that we thought, we prayed, would never happen again. 

The people of the town where I served have been resisting Russian incursions  since 2014, when Putin invaded Crimea and the Donbas, Lugansk and Donetsk oblasts, and nothing was done to stop it. Now they too are being "temporarily occupied," as the Ukrainians say. But I'm terrified of the outcome. Meanwhile, the residents, my Ukrainian family and beloved friends, are living under unbearable fear and anxiety. 

It's what happens when a vicious dictator, using the Hitler/Stalin war and purge playbook, plus the Georgia and Syria total mass destruction play book, invades a foreign country and gets away with it.    

Inessa Morozova, born 1981 in Kherson,
southern Ukraine, now under relentless
RU attacks & unspeakable war crimes. 

Putin is destroying everything in sight, intentionally bombing civilian targets without mercy, relentlessly. Death and destruction for the purpose of death and destruction. Putin's depravity on full display.  No military targets, just civilian targets. Not just once, but over and over. Mariupol writ large. 

At this writing it's Severodonetsk that's being savaged, the Lugansk oblast city where I did my banking and where I loved walking the streets around the Chemical Palace, the bus station, the markets.  I would buy Luba flowers, like the large white calla lilies Frieda Kahlo and Georgia O'Keeffe painted. I'd also buy Roshen chocolates and good cognac, though I knew she regifted them. 

Severodonetsk is now obliterated. The whole city, gone. Since Putin's war crimes campaign began on February 24, 2022, all battles have come at a heavy price to civilian lives, infrastructure, hopes and dreams. Ukraine is being bombed to death into Putin's Mariupol, his Bucha, his Kherson.  He is claiming victory over the wasteland he's created. 

Putin's using every weapon in his arsenal: heavy artillery, long-range and ballistic missiles, illegal cluster bombs and hypersonic bombs, weapons of mass destruction, aimed indiscriminately at the places where people live, work, go to school, go to church, go to a hospital, celebrate their cultural heritage, walk and bike about their neighborhoods.

It's a form of murder. It's a Syrian style of Russian warfare, "to wipe everything off the face of the earth and then 'conquer' the ruins. A city of over 100,000 residents is now in rubble." (EuroMaidan PR and RPCV Harlen Rife, who is following the war closely, reporting). 

Ukraine's request for longer-range rocket systems is in part driven by the need to prevent this destruction through counter-battery fire.

Severodonetsk in Lugansk oblast
no more. 90% of the city destroyed.

 Biden is promising this aid. Will it arrive soon enough? Russia now occupies 20% of the country, according to President Zelensky. It's overwhelming.

The war won't stop until Putin is stopped.  

Ukrainian artist Iryna Kolesnikova,
lives and works in Odessa

An emotional John Kirby, Pentagon spokesperson and retired Navy admiral, put it honestly and forthrightly at a recent press conference, when he admitted how hard it is to absorb the tragedy of Putin's lethal invasion:

Odessa, by Roman Chudnovsky, born 1965 in Kyiv.

"It’s hard to look at what Putin's doing in Ukraine, what his forces are doing in Ukraine, and think that any ethical, moral individual could justify that. It’s difficult to look at some of the images and imagine that any well-thinking, serious, mature leader would do that....So I can’t talk to his psychology, but I think we can all speak to his depravity. It’s hard to square [Putin’s], let’s just call it what it is, his BS, that this is about Nazism....about protecting Russians in Ukraine...about defending Russian national interests, when none of them — none of them — were threatened by Ukraine,” Kirby added, while lightly pounding his fist on the podium./"It’s hard to square that rhetoric by what he’s actually doing inside Ukraine to innocent people: shot in the back of the head; hands tied behind their backs; women, pregnant women being killed; hospitals being bombed. I mean, it’s just unconscionable,” he said. “It’s just beyond me. (crisis.org/en/rosiyany-provodyat-masshtabnu-filtratsiyu-gromadyan-ukrayiny)

Save Odessa.
The Opera House by Roman Chudnovsky

.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysychansk

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/20/russia-ukraine-war-severodonetsk-zelenskiy-says-donbas-hell

https://kyivindependent.com/national/russia-destroys-ukraines-historic-heritage-steals-rare-collections-from-museums/.  This also pains me, Russia's deliberate bombing of cultural and historic museums, theaters, Houses of Culture, collections and artifacts. Putin aims to destroy Ukrianian heritage and identity. 

Harlan Rife Reports: "The Ukrainians continue to request longer range precision rocket systems like HIMARS and MLRS. They want to disrupt Russian logistics and prevent advances like we are seeing in the Donbas. They want to push Russian artillery back so they cannot level whole towns as they have at Rubizhne, Popasna, and now Severodonetsk. They want to support their own infantry in liberating occupied territory. At present, they are outgunned. / Chris Miller explains, "With artillery superiority, Russian forces are pounding Ukrainian troops and pulverizing everything else in their way with massive barrages around the clock in an effort to surround and capture strategic cities in the East of Ukraine, colloquially known as the Donbas. He quoted Serhiy Haidai, the head of the Luhansk regional military government who said, “They are carpet-bombing us. The cities they attack are simply being erased from the face of the earth."

Stuart Hodges Riordan, Tallahassee Artist

Looking into the water, Stuart Hodges Riordan (c.1950-April 25, 2022) 

What do you see when you look at this image of a Stuart Riordan painting?  I see a highly stylized dramatic image of a muscular woman in a billowing white gown, enveloping her, richly textured, in a classic Narcissistic pose. But who is she seeing in the mirror? The bright blue water holds the image of a child with floating letters that the strong figure seems to be deciphering. The strange bird at her back holds the key. The key to what? Not sure. Perhaps her younger self, some hidden sense of self? 

Is this Stuart Riordan's re-creation of
 Lizzy Borden, the 19th-century axe murderer,
eventually acquitted of murdering her parents? Is
this powerful woman seeking revenge, about to kill
someone, perhaps her own demons? 

I usually discover artists on internet art sites or through postings of friends on social media.  Then, my curiosity aroused, I google their names, do some research, study the images. I'm especially drawn to the art of women and African Americans whose works are hidden in the shadows of the Western canon.

This Tallahassee artist comes through my sister Andy, who is a friend of the artist's sister Sally. Sally's become my dear friend too. But I never met Stuart, whom I am getting to know through some of her published paintings. She died recently and Andy sent me her obituary. I was moved to dig a little deeper. 

I must say her paintings fascinate me, and confuse me. I'm not sure what I'm looking at. I see strong women, tough, in various poses, but I'm not sure what to make of them. There are elements of Renaissance splendor, in the intricate folds and textures of her dresses, "exquisitely sumptuous...a sense of grandiose and epic scope," as one art critic put it (note 6). There's also some Spanish exuberance and lots of surrealist images. These paintings are personal, internal, deeply symbolic, perhaps depicting aspects of the artist herself. I haven't seen many of her other works, her smaller paintings, but these popular, larger works are stunning and evocative. 

Stuart Hodges Riordan was born in Lynchburg Virginia, grew up in Fairfax, Virginia, married and had two children.  She seems to have had a strong sense of her family tree.  After several dramatic life changes, travelling the world, living in exotic places like Morocco, learning the cello in Moldova, collecting dirt from various places to use in her paintings, she landed in Tallahassee, Florida (notes 1 & 3). I'm not sure if it was a smooth landing or not, in the larger sense of the term. But as noted, this is where her sister Sally lives, and that's how I learned about Stuart Riordan, the artist.  Stuart filled her life with her art and music, perhaps marched to a different drummer. Perhaps her oeuvre is her biography, although I have seen only a small part of it. I'd like to see more, her smaller works, her other visions, works in various mediums. I love this one, published by John Dos Passos Coggen (note 1). 

Stuart Riordan's lovely painting of Palma-de-Majorca.

An art critic, writing about an exhibit she had at the LeMoyne Art Center

Is she scuba diving here,
getting her dog?

 in Tallahassee in 2018, remarked that Riordan's paintings reminded him of Caraveggio and deVinci "with the drama of deep darks and blinding lights called Chiaroscuro...and also Rene Magritte and his surreal references with the impossible poses of her figures as they fly through space or descend as angels onto airport landings."  (note 3)

Stuart Riordan's art takes us on flights of fancy into the souls of mysterious women and places, some mythological, some super realistic, all full of rich textures and fascinating symbolism. Her women are physically strong, adventurous, some angry, some curious, all larger than-life, at least in the images I've seen.  It's an intriguing journey.

A good example of Riordan's fusion of the Chiaroscuro style and Magritte's surrealism,and Salvador Dali's too. This strong woman by
 the sea is surrounded by musical notes. Is the music making her sad?  

Sources:

1.  http://www.johndospassoscoggin.com/artists-and-innovators/artists-innovators-stuart-riordan-painter/

2.  https://m.facebook.com/SFAUniversitySeries/photos/a.240349806175184/240355949507903/?type=3

3.  https://www.tallahassee.com/story/00000/2018/05/05/lemoyne-presents-artist-stuart-riordans-first-tallahassee-exhibit-six-years/570904002/

4.  https://www.tallahassee.com/obituaries/tad065380

5.  https://www.tallahassee.com/picture-gallery/news/local/2022/04/29/tallahassee-artist-stuart-riordan-through-years/9576445002/

6. https://www.sfasu.edu/about-sfa/newsroom/2015/cole-art-center-exhibition-feature-work-florida-artist-riordan.  About an exhibition of Riordan's work entitled "Stuart Riordan: Sardines & Oranges," which was held at the Cole Art Center @ The Old Opera House in downtown Nacogdoches, TX, featuring Riordan's renowned paintings of the human form, according to John Handley, director of galleries at SFA. "Riordan has said of her work, "The human body has more gestures, mystery and intrigue, and everybody can relate to it. I think Socrates said an artist does his stuff but is not 'there' when doing it, and only after it is done can the artist formulate ideas of the work and viewers formulate their ideas." Quoting abstract expressionist artist Willem de Kooning, she said, "'It's all in the flesh' is what de Kooning said, and he was right."

Tallahassee Democrat writer and columnist Mark Hinson wrote: "At first glance, Riordan's accomplished human figure paintings seem formal and even neo-traditional - far away from, for example, de Kooning's 'Women' series. But on closer inspection the viewer notices her attention to the gestural aspects of the painting - the swirls of color, the layering of paint, the strokes that have been created by using the other end of the brush, of the fractured sentences and phrases that run across the work as if yanked out of some larger sequence." Hinson notes that Riordan mixes her own paints, which are made from dirt, clay, pumice and dry pigments imported from distant locations such as Tasmania and Australia.

7. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-19th-century-axe-murderer-lizzie-borden-was-found-not-guilty-180972707/

Nanette Carter, Artist, Expressing the Complex Balancing Acts of Contemporary Life

 

Nanette Carter, Contemporary, "Cantilevered."

"Working with intangible ideas around contemporary issues has been my motivating force. Reading the news about different developments taking place around the world has turned me into a chronicler of our time. How to present these ideas in an abstract vocabulary of form, line, color and texture is the quest. These are the challenges and creative instinct that intrigue me most."

Nanette Carolyn Carter, born January 30, 1954, in Columbus, Ohio, and raised in Montclair, New Jersey, is an African-American artist and college educator living and working in New York City.  She is best known for her collages and assemblages with paper, canvas, and Mylar. 

The minute I saw the art, posted by my artist friend Peter Stebbins in Washington, DC and a friend of my late friend Lily Pilgrim, I was intrigued with the shapes, colors, composition. Some images looked like art teetering on the edge. I felt the relevance.

Al Loving, Abstract Expressionist, born
in Detroit, mentored Nanette Carver.

Carter's work embraces the brilliant African-American abstract art tradition created by the likes of Alma Thomas, Romare Bearden, Sam Gilliam, and Alvin Loving, Jr, her friend and mentor (note 4). These are some of my favorite artists of all time. The influence of Al Loving (1935-2005) is especially clear and direct, as seen in the Loving silkscreen to the right.  

Carter got her undergraduate degree at Oberlin, where she first began exhibiting in the mid-1970s, and art degrees at the prestigious Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. She spent time studying in Italy and won a Fulbright scholarship to Japan, where she studied under well-know Japanese woodcut printers. I can see that influence in her art. She taught at Pratt for 20 years, a popular and beloved teacher whose influence is far-reaching. She is now retired from teaching, devoted to her art full-time.

Her exhibition titled "Cantilevered" expresses her point of view and her perspective. It stems from the architectural term "Form Follows Function," which she translated into her own unique art forms. The shapes she uses inform the viewer of her intention and are choreographed in a way that tells her story, she says. "Since I have been working with conceptual abstractions for decades I have seen the correlation between this architectural idea and semiotics in the work. "Semiotics is the study of signs, symbols, shapes to communicate something. Once I've decided on a theme, I begin to think about how my shapes, colours, line and textures can best portray these concerns. How can I compose this imagery into a universal language." 

Carter uses the term cantilevered "as a metaphor for living in the 21st century."  I associate the term with Frank Lloyd Wright. A cantilever, Carter explains, "is when a strong horizontal structure is supported only at one end. It's a balancing feat." It's like life itself in this century of social media, divisive politics, senseless violence, a pandemic, climate change. "I feel we are all trying to maintain our balance and sanity."

So it appears in many of Carter's works that "the shapes are teetering, there's a sense of tension." In other works "it seems that somehow the structure is withstanding the weight." (Note 3)  I can see how the term "cantilever" fits the precarious political insanity of our time, the unnerving ebb and flows, the egregious injustice, the ever-changing realities of a democracy on the precipice, a world turned upside down.

Shifting Perspectives #1, 2022, recent works now at the Berry Campbell Gallery,
which is the exclusive representative of Nanette Carter's work..

A new exhibition of her recent work is now at the Berry Campbell Gallery in New York City, entitled "Shape Shifting."  It carries forward many of the same themes of "Cantilevered."  Life is a balancing act. It is signature Nanette Carter.

Can I get to New York to see it during this busy period in my life, selling my house, looking for another place to live? When I get back from Florida, I'm going to think about it. Nanette Carter's art is elegant, intellectual, profoundly creative in concept and execution. I can see how it enriches our mind and our senses at the same time.  I think we can all feel our own shifting shapes in her art. 

Sources 

1.  https://nanettecarter.com/

2.  https://www.theartblog.org/2022/04/nanette-carters-journey-as-artist-educator-and-anonymous-was-a-woman-award-winner/

3. https://www.hunterdonartmuseum.org/exhibitions/forms-follow-function-the-art-of-nanette-carter/ Current exhibit. Carter describes her work. 

4. https://www.berrycampbell.com/exhibition/143,  Nanette Carter's series, "Shape Shifting," on view  at Berry Campbell Gallery, NYC. My friend Peter Stebbins keeps me up-to-date.

5..https://www.galleriesnow.net/shows/nanette-carter-shape-shifting/

Faith Ringgold, Artist, Triumphant

Faith Ringgold, Groovin', at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, 2018 Exhibit

 "When I see my work from all the different series and media assembled together, I feel a great deal of satisfaction that I was able to produce so much and that I had the freedom to find my own voice, against all odds. It’s deeply gratifying — I hope my story can be an inspiration for all artists." Faith Ringgold

"At 91, Faith Ringgold is having a big moment. Six decades of her art are on view in a retrospective exhibition at the New Museum in New York titled American People, paintings, sculptures, works on fabric, and the story quilts, a mix of writing, painting, and quilting, for which she is best known." Jeffrey Brown (note 1 below)

Faith Ringgold, The Sunflower Quilting Bee, one of her famous story quilts.

Faith Ringgold's roots go back to Harlem, where she was born in 1930 and became a talented artist of the late Harlem Renaissance, a painter, quilter, mixed media sculpture, performance artist, writer, teacher. She went to City College of New York (CCNY), travelled in Europe and Africa, made waves in the 1960s Civil Rights movement and Anti-Vietnam War protests. It was during this time she created her first political paintings. She moved toward sculpture, fabric art, and mixed media, establishing her voice and her legacy in the 1970s and 1980s until today. She wrote several books, including wonderful art books for children, and an autobiography, "We Flew Over the Bridge" (Duke U Press, 2005/1995)

"Recording history through her art," that's how Faith Ringgold views her oeuvre over time. And she did it her way, a pioneer in using a variety of mediums to tell what she saw, a pioneer in how she told the stories of her experiences, how she felt, a unique perspective. .

I love this! 

Nigeria, Africa!

This retrospective exhibit is at the New Museum in NYC until June 2022. I hope I can get there to see it. The Artistic Director, Massimilano Gioni, says of the artist: "She's opening doors and windows and making the house of art much more complex and hospitable. The great thing about seeing this work together, seeing 60 years of this work, is you understand how many times Faith Ringgold was right before her time."

Sources:.
1.  https://artscanvas.org/arts-culture/artist-faith-ringgolds-lifes-work-celebrated-in-new-york-exhibit?Great interview with Faith Ringgold on Judy Woodruff's PBS News Hour, by Jeffrey Brown, Anne Azzi Davenport and Allison Thoet.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_Ringgold

3. https://www.selvedge.org/blogs/selvedge/faith-ringgold, by Dr. Catherine Harper.