Archive for July, 2012

Pearallel Universe

Monday, July 30th, 2012

 

Pearallel Universe

Pearallel Universe
collage with combined mediums by J A Dixon
private collection

Whoahh, Terie!

Sunday, July 29th, 2012

“You are lost the moment you know what the result will be.”
—Juan Gris

Years ago, as an old-school graphic designer and illustrator, I found myself rapidly adapting to a more computer-oriented profession. As a response, I began creating more greeting cards by hand to preserve my manual dexterity. I’d been making cards since youth, but this provided a new opportunity to experiment with greater intuitive spontaneity, so I created over a thousand hand-crafted “miniatures” between 1999 and 2003. Most of these exercises took the form of birthday, anniversary, and holiday cards. The near-daily practice established a foundation and direction for my current work as a collage artist who focuses on the small format. I still produce as many as 100 cards a year, most of which rely on “found material,” as with the works I make available for purchase by collectors.
 

Whoahh, Terie! by J A Dixon

Whoahh, Terie!
collage miniature by J A Dixon
collection of T L Strock

Gardenshapes ~ art by Kathleen O’Brien

Saturday, July 28th, 2012

“Beauty should be shared, for it enhances our joys.
To explore its mystery is to venture towards the sublime.”
―Joseph Cornell


 

I hesitate to use a sports term to begin this review, but, since the Summer Olympics opened last night, I’ll set my disinclination aside to state emphatically that artist Kathleen O’Brien is at the top of her game!

Gardenshapes —an exhibition of her mixed-media collage finishing its run in the main gallery of Danville’s Community Arts Center— has ample proof to support my claim. I made one more return visit yesterday to experience the diverse subtleties of her singular creations.

Inspired by birds and flowers, and exploring the garden as a metaphor, this collection of artworks represents everything that has captivated me for years about Kathleen’s approach. These works have clearly grown out of how she thoughtfully observes and attunes with nature. They also literally contain and preserve natural ingredients. But in contrast to collage that maintains its focus on formal or intellectual juxtapositions, Kathleen’s art always nudges one toward a deeper sense of wholeness and the inner complexity of our balanced existence as both organic and spiritual beings. Without question, she has made a personal commitment to creating art as a mystical practice, and, on a communal level, to providing nature-inspired beauty as a source of healing in a fractured world.

With the strong presence of these intangible dimensions, Kathleen’s art is always esoteric, and yet she manages to make the work accessible to all with her choice of subject matter and allegiance to traditional drawing. At the same time, she can delight the eye of a fellow artist with her methodology, aesthetic choices, and pictorial skill. I’m not ashamed to admit that much of Kathleen’s symbolic virtuosity is beyond my ken, but I appreciate that it’s all in play at the intuitive level. Being near the prolific output of her creative life is simply uplifting, and that’s because all the facets of her art —whether conscious or subliminal— unify as a total perception to nourish the mind, heart, and soul.

Getting back to the show, I was initially struck by the five largest pieces (28 x 36 inches), beautifully presented against white in deep gallery-style frames of natural wood. This “look” is familiar to those who know Kathleen’s art, and enhances the work’s identity as an unique artifact, preserved behind glass, like a rare botanical or zoological specimen. They are titled with reference to the garden theme. In contrast, a separate piece (24 x 30 inches) is presented with its surface exposed in the manner of an easel painting. It looks equally at home, released from behind the glass, expertly varnished in a way that does not distract. Its name is Heaven & Earth, Yin & Yang, Dark & Light, Birds & Trees, Flowers & Bees. My eyebrows lifted as I began to read the lengthy title, but was pleased with the closing rhyme as I finished. This artist always has a quiet surprise in store. Each of the large works is visually distinctive, but very much a cohesive part of a series unified by her long dedication to compositional abstraction, to a consistent theory of color, and to diligent mark making.

The large piece titled Garden for Queen Anne’s Lace is marked by a cellular pattern resembling microscopic tissue, which, while remaining highly abstract, transforms itself into a flower garden, with an interesting emphasis on each “drop of Queen’s blood” that, when closely examined, becomes a dance of circles, squares, and triangles —a dynamic that exemplifies Kathleen’s knack for taking the observer/participant through layers of meaning. The design also incorporates the application of illustrated postage stamps. Kathleen is never far removed from a devotion to cultural references and ephemera, and her Joseph Cornell influences are ever present. A fine example of this are four pieces dedicated to bird-species (16 x 20 inches) that combine found printed patterns with her typical labor of liquid media. Nests are created with random shards and colorful scraps. Dried and painted star-like blossoms effectively merge the organic, symbolic, and celestial. In Kathleen’s collage there are many allusions to language, both literal and archetypal, and here we discover many fragments of the printed word, as well as her “trademark” calligraphy. I was particularly drawn to Garden for Blue Grosbeaks, a strong arrangement of symmetrical and asymmetrical elements that carries out more of her evident investigation into fundamental shapes —circle, square, and triangle. These compositions are anything but static, a characteristic of Kathleen’s art built on a myriad of ways in which she provokes eye movement by simulating the dynamic patterns of nature, often with the application of actual plants and minerals. A perfect case in point is 9 Bird Eggs (30 x 30 inches), with its nimble use of botanicals most artists would overlook as raw material, through which she creates a variety of rhythms within a formal, 3×3 grid structure.

I should mention that Kathleen’s control of what I call “implied viewing distance” is masterful. Enjoying her watercolor effects and hidden treasures up close is inevitably a satisfying experience, as is true with much of current small-scale mixed media collage, but her pieces also can be savored at a distance. I found myself continually studying a work from across the room and then, taking off my eye-wear, sticking my nose near the glass to examine fine detail. Whether from this point of view or from half a block away, Kathleen’s distinctive impression is always recognizable, an enviable accomplishment for any artist. For example, both Royal Lily Garden and Staple Garden contain brushwork that only can be achieved by someone who is continuously handling liquid on a tool and is fully at ease with her surface. On the other hand, she uses this micro-fluency to create the intended multi-layered depth of her macro-composition, and yet I was constantly invited to step back into the intimacy of the picture plane, much as one feels when standing back to admire a flower garden, while being compelled to converge at hand’s length, only to spy a miniature surprise —a dutiful pollinator or tiny feat of nature’s diversity within repetition.

With my fixation on the bigger paintings, it was too easy to neglect the smaller items, so I had to instruct myself to visually isolate and appreciate several other works. Two of these were within squares, and each have treatments not as pronounced elsewhere in the exhibition. Feathers uses paper itself as a dimensional medium, and The Blessing of Rain features a darker atmospheric background —a shimmering chalk texture that makes me wish Kathleen would more intensively explore the potential of pastel effects. In addition, there are three bird portraits (9 x 12 inches), with coatings of what appeared to be beeswax, which recall for me the investigations of 19th-century naturalists. My favorite is Garden for Eastern Bluebirds, with its deft pencil work and luscious color palette. Kathleen pushes her highly capable layering beyond technique to create a sense of time distortion, an interplay of wildlife and cultural antiquity that makes certain the work is much more than a lovely rendering of birds. Throughout this outstanding show are many such allusions to natural and human-made cycles that fuse the worlds of growing things and a striving race that has always responded with symbolic culture to seek a balanced place in the scheme of life.

Indeed, Kathleen O’Brien has found her place. With a home studio close to nature, and a creative passion that distills her observations and meditations through heart, head, and hand, she is a gold-medal artist of the soul.

© 2012, John Andrew Dixon

Garden for Eastern Bluebirds and Garden for Scarlet Tanagers
by Kathleen O’Brien

Welcome to The Collage Miniaturist.

Saturday, July 21st, 2012

The Collage Miniaturist

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Friday, July 21, 2012

Today is as good a time as any for a public launch of this site. A hearty welcome to all. My sincere thanks to all the great folks at Xorph.com for their kind assistance.

My main purpose here, I have no problem admitting, is to showcase my work as a collage artist. That’s the selfish part. I would hope that it also becomes a point of reference for others who create or appreciate the medium. I make no claim as an authority. My only expertise is doing what I do, based on 40+ years of observation, creative investigation, and hands-on experience. And may the emphasis be on “hands.” I have nothing at all against digital collage —far from it— but this space will be devoted to the art and craftsmanship of 20th-century-mode, tear-and-glue, up-close-and-analogue collage — the 100-year-old approach that results in a singular, physical artifact.

If you happen to like this spot, please pay a return visit frequently, and let me know what you think. Visual art is a collaborative activity, no matter what some may say. I’ll expound more on that at another time. Begin today with a long paragraph that serves as my “statement.”

After a full century, people may continue to debate whether collage as a technique was “invented” by Georges Braque or Pablo Picasso, but in my considered view, the seminal genius of the medium was Kurt Schwitters, perhaps the first modern artist to fully master the process. I hold the opinion that relatively few aesthetic traditions emerged from early-20th-century collage experiments without the inherent sensibilities of Dada or Surrealism, and I find it endlessly fascinating to probe toward the heart of creative spontaneity while unraveling the ever-present contrasts of beauty versus non-beauty, optimism versus pessimism, and art versus anti-art. In addition to being intrigued by such mindful intuition, I remain awestruck by the capacity to create extrinsic value from everyday material that has virtually no intrinsic worth. By aesthetic sensitivity and creative ingenuity, anything that has been discarded can be infused with meaning or be brought into a contributory connection with our daily awareness. Thus, the core relationship between found material and the art of collage transmits a unifying principle. When the remnants of ordinary living are physically re-purposed to inevitably resolve their unique compositional harmony, the underlying link between visual form and symbolic communication is revealed. When the literal characteristics of the ingredient elements are successfully transcended, a culminating artifact offers the potential for a shared experience with each participating observer. I am convinced that the resulting totality of emotional impressions and layered associations derive more from a deeper artistic intent than from conscious decision making. As in most improvisational activity, there is ample opportunity for surprise, amusement, mystery, intrigue, discovery, and joy.

Majestic Fetch

Friday, July 13th, 2012

“The response of the observer is part of the creative act.”
—Eric Kandel

Doing some preliminary work before this site has its public unveiling, and this small square seems to go with Friday the 13th, for some peculiar reason. May the creative act be extended to your most honorable response.
 

Majestic Fetch by J A Dixon

Majestic Fetch
collage miniature by J A Dixon
6 x 6 inches
private collection

an intimate world of collage

Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

Ah . . . so you have cleverly found this site before it officially launches, perhaps because you are as interested in collage as am I, who shall humbly ruminate and juxtapose right before your eyes on a regular basis — that is, if you will be so kind as to pay a return visit.

Protected: Artist Portal

Sunday, July 1st, 2012

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