Tucson Art

Last Saturday went to two art events.  First, to the Davis Dominguez Gallery¹ for a reception for Small Things Considered.  Great show – you must see it (May 7-June 27)!  These are just a few of the over 80 artists represented.

Below, a cunningly framed photographic print by Regina Heitzer-Momaday and the next by Carrie Seid,  silk stretched over copper, which she bends into curves. Her description (emphasis mine) follows:

The pieces are constructed using a hardwood base, cut and formed sheet metals (copper, brass and aluminum), and silk. The metal forms an understructure which supports a stretched layer of silk. Modulated color (in the form of under-painting or dyed silk) is sometimes used to enhance depth, structure and dimension. The additional step of oiling the fabric “skin” creates various degrees of translucence, allowing the outer layer to be visually penetrable – a watercolor rendered in three dimensions.

A marvelous dish of clay by Gary Benna.  (You must click on it to see the detail of the bodies in the center.)  Oil on paper by Danielle Neibling.

My absolute favorite, Golden Doves on Cholla Ribs by Thomas Kerrigan, done in clay!  And this bronze jackrabbit by Mark Rossi. You may have seen his javelina in the entry to the Desert Museum.

One of my favorite artists, Gail Marcus Orlen, has done this oil (which includes the bird), and one of our CAS members, Barbara Jo, has created More Filipinos Than Fish (photographed in front of handwoven linen by another CAS member, Claire Campbell Park; both women taught at Pima).

An oil by another CAS member, Moira Geoffrion, from a photo which she took when we were in Venice, and cast glass by Katja Fritzsche, whose studio we (CAS) had recently visited².

Another piece of art that I wish I could afford, this Nest by Phil Lichtenhan in metal with ceramic eggs.

After that reception a few of us went to the Raices Taller 222 gallery for a dance performance by ZUZI! Dance⁴ to conclude the Mujeres, Mujeres, Mujeres exhibit. A snippet from their website:

The Guerrilla Girls⁵, a women’s artist coalition, has discovered that only 3% of the artists in the Metropolitan Museum’s modern art sections are women and that 90% of the solo exhibitions were of work by white male artists.³

The gallery was small, so we squished against the walls to allow the dancers room.  This woman’s tats were distinctive.

Crazy Weather

Tucson has had unusual weather this June.  May was beautiful, with high temperatures 78°-83°, then you blinked, and while your eyes were closed, it was 93°, and when the blink was finished, in June, it was 103°.  Reminded me a a young child playing hopscotch, jumping over the squares with stones in them.  Last week we got a bit of rain and the temperatures abated slightly (to the 90’s).  Night before last another splatter of rain (if you scratch the dirt, you can see the dampness is only ¹/₈” thick) and it has “cooled” to the high 80’s.

A month and a half ago the palo verdes had bloomed⁶.  With this unusual rain they’re blooming again.  And my agapanthus look great.

Mating Season

Birds crash into my windows at this time of the year because their brains aren’t fully functional during mating season.  And I have a flycatcher who has been attacking his reflection in the window for a few days.  Same reason.

 

¹http://davisdominguez.com/
²https://notesfromthewest.wordpress.com/2015/05/28/art-and-the-desert/
³www.raicestaller222.org/CurrentExhibition.htm
⁴http://www.zuzimoveit.org/dancecompany/upcomingshows.html
⁵http://www.guerrillagirls.com/
⁶https://notesfromthewest.wordpress.com/2015/04/22/earth-day/

October, 2013

Chicks

Don’t know if it’s ‘cause my cousin’s daughter has dozens of chickens in Phoenix (about which I have bogged many times – see below¹), or it started when I took my grandkids to Superstition Farm and my granddaughter learned to hold a chicken and love it² but my daughter just bought four chicks and a ready-made coop.   She’s already had them eating bugs in her compost pile.

Tucson Women Artists

Saturday went to the opening at Davis Dominguez Gallery for their Focus-Five Women Artists show to hear the artists speak about their works.   Moira Geoffrion did paintings based on photos from our trip to Cuba a year ago.  (I neglected to take my camera, so these photos are from the Davis Dominguez Gallery website⁴.  Especially like Julia Andres’ patina work in bronze, Ode to Mexican Picture Gourds.  The weaver, Claire Park, teaches art at Pima.  The exhibit is on through November second.

I have to tell a story about Mike Dominquez.  Mutual friends have a yearly Leif Erikson party in the fall to celebrate the Norse explorer, the first European known to have set foot in North America.  Anyway, one year Mike brought nametags for everyone.  They all said Sven.

Humanities Week

Shall be going to Brit Wit this evening at the University of Arizona and Trotsky in Mexico tomorrow evening.  Monday night went to Meteorite Hunters.  Interesting talks, and they’re free!

Raccoons

I blogged about the raccoon next door in February³ and my neighbors are just now seeing it.

I saw a Racoon sitting on our back patio about 4:45 am this morning[Oct 4]. When I turned on the back patio lights he just sat there and stared back at me, them climbed the tree and went over the wall. I know those critters can be pretty nasty, especially to people with pets. Just wanted to make you aware.
Arnold

I had two of them recently.  They were attracted to the bird feeders.  Destroyed one of them and ate all the contents.  Also this week I spotted a large hawk on the wall.  They can be a threat to small pets too.
Valerie

A friend of mine used to be a raccoon rescue person when she lived in Mancos, Colorado.  She would nurse an injured raccoon or raise cubs if the mother had been killed.  She taught them to raid her chicken coop for eggs, and trained them catch crawdads and to wash their food in her cattle ponds.

¹https://notesfromthewest.wordpress.com/2013/06/02/pima-college/ (the chicken plucker)
https://notesfromthewest.wordpress.com/2013/04/07/signs-of-spring/ (the eating chickens)
www.wishwehadacres.com (my cousin’s blog)
https://notesfromthewest.wordpress.com/2012/12/04/entomophagy/ (the farm b’day party)
https://notesfromthewest.wordpress.com/2011/06/10/goats-and-chicks/ (goats and chicks)
https://notesfromthewest.wordpress.com/2011/06/05/hot-hot-hot/ (farm animals in the city)
²https://notesfromthewest.wordpress.com/2011/03/19/the-farm/ (he Superstition Farm in Phoenix)
³https://notesfromthewest.wordpress.com/2013/02/20/raccoon/
⁴http://www.davisdominguez.com/current.htm

February 10, 2012

Snow

After Denver was inundated with snow on the second of this month I emailed a friend: How much snow in your area?  Have you tricked your dog into fetching snowballs?  Over 30 year ago (December 7, 1971) Tucson had the most snow ever recorded – about 7 inches.  I was teaching back then and, of course, school was cancelled.  Our dog went crazy in the backyard, and tried to fetch our snowballs!  She sent me a video of her dog bouncing through the snow (which I can’t insert into this blog unless I buy more space) and this note:

It was GREAT, I believe that there was about 18” in my yard.  I wish I would have thought about trying to get Maggie to fetch the snowballs!  She loves to play Frisbee and would probably try to catch the snow.

By contrast, here in Tucson it’s supposed to be 76° today and 80° tomorrow.

Art

TMA’s Contemporary Art Society went to an ArtSpeak program at the Davis Dominguez gallery last weekend.  Duncan Martin, a realist landscape painter from Colorado, and abstract sculptor Barbara Jo McLaughlin spoke about their work.

Barbara’s works were inspired by her trips to pre-Columbian ruins inCentral and South America.  (No photos of her sculptures.  I should take my camera when I go to galleries!)

Duncan’s 15 pieces are the beginning of his 58 in 58 painting project: Painting in All 58 National Parks in 58 Months.  Shown here is Morning, Needles, Canyonlands  48″ x 60″ oil on canvas.  http://duncanmartin.squarespace.com/

The Pima Community College west side campus where I work has a nice little gallery, the Louis Carlos Bernal Gallery, in the Center for the Arts, the building on the east side of the campus.  I’d gone to a number of musical performances at the Center, but had never been in the gallery until my friend, Nancy Tokar Miller, asked me to the opening of EAST/PACIFIC/WEST: CONFLUENCE this week where she and two fabric artists, Claire Campbell Park and Mary Babcock, are shown.  Beautifully curated.  Here is Nancy’s Over Molokai,  62” x 66” acrylic on canvas.

Chatted with Barbara, who now lives in Hawaii.  She weaves on a vertical loom, from discarded nets.  This from the web:

While living in Oregon, the fiber artist collected gill nets from a man who ran a fishermen’s union. The discarded nets, dumped in a freshwater river when they became ripped or obsolete, were sent to the union for recycling.

“He had a whole room full of old nets. It was amazing and beautiful, all those colored pieces of fiber,” she recalls.

Babcock cut up the nets and wove them back together using deep-sea leader lines. The end products reflect the green and blue hues of the ocean.

“Each (tapestry) is primarily one net apiece. All that color range comes just from being used out in the water and the sun. I did no dyeing,” she says. “The real exciting thing, when I moved to Hawaii and brought them with me, was that in the Northwest, that’s not the color of the water. But they reflect so much of the colors of the water here.”

Babcock’s fascination  with fishnets continued when she moved to Hawaii five years ago (she’s chairwoman of fiber at the University of Hawaii-Manoa art department), and she began collecting nets at Kailua beaches. A couple of tapestries in the show are made from nets retrieved from Kalama Beach.

“I think it’s seasonal. The nets seem to wash up during the winter,” Babcock says.

Nets from Kailua shores are different from Oregon gill nets. The fibrous lines are 1 inch thick and much more vibrant in color. Babcock says that because these nets come from the ocean, with living debris such as algae attached, preparing them for weaving requires sun bleaching to kill the debris and do away with the strong ocean smell.

It’s easy to make distinctions between the gill net tapestries and those made from nets from Kalama Beach. But one piece, titled “Pacific Exchange” (shown here), combines the Oregon and Hawaii nets.

“They’re really both from the Pacific Ocean — from opposite pieces of the same ocean,” says Babcock.

If you’ve got some time this weekend, I’d recommend both shows.