Category Archives: Creative Process

 

 See more of Bryan’s art at: Bryan Rasmussen

For interviews with other sculptors see: Turry Lindstrom / Maria Willison

As a sculptor, Bryan works primarily with steel and his studio, designed around the manipulation and fabrication of that metal, has an almost industrial feel. “I’m here most days, all day,” he says, “except for ‘relationship days’ that I spend with my fiancé, Christine. After my morning run I come in, put on some music, crank the volume up, and get to work.” Music is important to Bryan and his tastes are eclectic. He spent a few years after high school in the Chattanooga music scene where he played bass for several punk rock bands as well as being a photographer for various groups.

Growing up in the small north Georgia town of LaFayette, Bryan Rasmussen had one goal, and it wasn’t making sculpture—he didn’t want to work in a factory when he grew up. As a boy he was often drawing and his family, particularly his grandmother, encouraged him. In time he got a camera and became interested in photography. As his interest in that medium grew, he left his bass guitar behind and enrolled at the University of West Georgia as an art major with a specialization in photography. He was the first person in his family to go to college and get a degree and it was there, in the UWG art program that he discovered his artistic path.

“As part of the art program I had to take a sculpture class and I became very involved with the techniques for metal casting. The immediacy of the work appealed to me. In photography I could shoot two or three rolls of film photographing some object, then spend eight hours in the dark room and come away with a pounding headache from the chemicals and maybe a few prints I thought were really good. On top of that, it was the late 1990’s and photography was rapidly going digital. That, too, made it less appealing, since the digital process seemed almost surreal to me as an artist. On the other hand, with sculpture I would spend the day working and feel like I’d made some real progress, say building a mold or finishing a casting I’d done earlier. The physical labor was good; it gave me a sense of satisfaction. My hands would be dirty, maybe I’d have a cut, but there, at the end of the day, was the evidence that I’d done something. I found a reality in sculpture that was missing for me in photography.”

“I like to think of my work as objects of contemplation, that is, when placed in a space, they create a charged area for meditation and contemplation.”

With this early exposure to sculpture, he didn’t abandon photography immediately. Rather, he sought to incorporate a sculptural feel in his photographs and he began cutting up negatives and pasting them back together, forming what amounted to sculptural collages and making prints from the manipulated negative. Eventually a photography professor told him, “you’re not really doing photography any more, you’re trying to make sculpture with photography so why don’t you go do it for real?”

And Bryan did. He began studying with the sculpture professor at UWG, Kevin Shunn and it was an important formative experience. “He allowed his students to follow their ideas in a way that was unconstrained by his own preconceptions. Some teachers try to produce young versions of themselves but he didn’t. In addition, we were always free to explore the more conceptual aspects of sculpture and not just focus on object making. He was a great resource on technical matters, too. Mr. Shunn always seemed to have a lot of knowledge about any medium that you might want to work in.”

In 2005 Bryan received his BFA with a double concentration in photography and sculpture, but rather than go on to graduate school for an MFA, Bryan worked for next two years as a studio assistant to Carrollton, GA sculptor Gordon Chandler. In 2007 Bryan moved to Chattanooga, TN, where he was hired by the internationally recognized sculptor, John Henry (www.johnhenrysculptor.com), as a studio assistant. Bryan spent the next six years doing the hardest work of his life fabricating, delivering, and assembling John Henry’s designs on site.

“It was a really hard job—very intense and physically demanding. We worked in all weathers. Sometimes it was cold but the worst was when it was hot. Remember we don’t do anything to cool metal down, it’s the opposite, what we do, welding and all, just heats it up. You have to get used to burned hands and blisters. Then, after working for eight to ten hours it’s time to go to your studio and do your own work.”

Yet his time with John Henry was not without benefits for the young artist. “I’ll always keep what I learned about construction, engineering, and fabrication. Plus, I made contacts in the art world that would have taken me much longer any other way, and I really had a chance to learn the business side of the process.” A friend, the established sculptor Hank Lautz, advised him to learn everything he could in this area as it would be essential for his professional progress.

John Henry also helped Bryan by giving him a critique of his work. Bryan showed him several of his most recent pieces and John Henry, after looking the body of work over carefully, said that all of it was good, but each piece looked as if it had been made by a different artist. He saw no cohesiveness, no unity of vision. “I could see the links”, said Bryan, “but he couldn’t and it caused me to rethink my approach.”

“I stripped everything away and asked myself ‘what am I trying to convey through my sculpture?’ I want a sense of contrast and I want the feeling that something is being revealed, that something is coming apart.” His new work became more visually simple and direct. “I thought, what’s the simplest most direct thing there is? For me it’s the line, and to convey a line sculpturally I turned to square tubing. Then I made a cut and had the tube (or line) come apart to reveal the unseen. I added contrast using color both flat and glossy. Having the work stripped down to its very ‘seed’ allows it to grow in any direction and become more complicated and different.” But it is complication that is defined and controlled by the essence of his vision.

Bryan’s early sculpture was never painted. “I believed you needed to let the properties of the metal show and that you could get a sense of color through things like patina and rust, the natural oxidation of the metals.” Seeking additional textures he included such things as beeswax and cotton in his work.

With time and experience he changed his mind about the idea of paint and he now sees it as another tool, something to catch the eye and draw the viewer further into the work. “I don’t let paint overpower the piece—the form is important, indeed, the most important thing. That’s why I don’t put any text on my work, because I feel it then becomes about the text and the sculpture becomes just a sort of canvas. I want the form of the sculpture to be the most important thing.

Bryan’s use of color is carefully measured to get the necessary visual impact with an economy of means that harmonizes with his elemental shapes. He uses complementary colors but seeks subtly in their use, for instance employing near complements such as a rusty orange with a powder blue. “Complementary colors, if they are balanced right and lit correctly, are going to vibrate and catch the eye.” In seeking interesting color harmonies, Bryan utilizes everything from a close observation of nature to seeking out the color combinations seen in fashion magazines. His metal working studio must be one of very few that has back issues of Vogue magazine lying around.

Bryan’s approach to developing all aspects of his art is a methodical one. He keeps carefully written journals of his thoughts on art and sketchbooks of future projects. “I like to write about things, collect ideas, and even gather natural things like seed pods or the vertebrae of small animals that can inform my thinking. It’s very important to the evolution of my work.”

That evolution now includes works in both large and small formats, though larger formats are a newer and less comfortable thing for him. In the past his use of such materials as beeswax and cotton precluded outdoor display. “I think of my work as objects of contemplation and for that they don’t have to be big. I find that sometimes with bigger pieces the size is more impressive than the concept. Of course you get more recognition because your large work is out in public, but smaller pieces can be more personal and immediate.”

 

In addition to his main focus on sculpture, Bryan also works with two-dimensional media drawing images, which he describes as being, “what my sculptures would be if they were drawings”. Yet even with these drawings, requiring as they do techniques so different from those he employs with his sculptures, he has an approach that rises out of his work with metal. After a base image is created he uses a sander with fine grain sandpaper to work over the surface of the drawing, thereby creating a subtly varied surface.

And as for the future?

“I’m working on making my shapes more complicated in order to give my work more interest. I guess you could call it enhancing the visual terrain. I want any piece I make to be the most interesting thing in the room. I’m always seeking to push to the next level.” And that search for the next level is an unending process for Bryan Rasmussen. As he says, “I am an artist. I don’t feel like I could truly be anything else. Nothing else would satisfy me. I’d rather do this than anything.”

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Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Maria Willison moved to Bristol, Tennessee at 6 years old, upon her father’s taking a position at King University. Her interest in art began in high school. She pursued painting and drawing, though she didn’t learn much about technique. “It was all about expressing yourself, without much mention of how to do it,” she says. After graduation she enrolled in Covenant College, graduating with a BA. Currently she works as a studio assistant to Cessna Decosimo and has taught at the Townsend Atelier. She has had her sculptures in several shows, most recently at the 2014 Four Bridges Festival in Chattanooga, where she received a grant as an emerging artist. In October 2014, her sculpture was featured in a joint show, “Figuratively Speaking,” at The Northshore Gallery, which also included the paintings of James Tucker.

See more of Maria’s art at Maria Willison

For interviews with other sculptors, see Bryan Rasmussen / Turry Lindstrom

 So, how did you find your way to sculpture?

I took a sculpture class during my sophomore year at Covenant College and thought, “This is exactly how my brain works! This is exactly how I can express myself!” Sculpture became my passion.

Did you have an exceptional art professor who triggered this reaction, or was it the medium and its possibilities that so excited you?

Both. The messier I am, the more fun I have, and with clay, you’re basically working with mud (laughs). My teacher was Kay Carpenter–her married name is now Joseph–and she was trained in classical sculpting techniques in Florence, Italy. She has a deep knowledge of anatomy and figurative sculpture. I just fell in love with that approach and put a lot of effort into anatomical studies. She was very inspiring and really pushed me a lot. At the beginning of her classes, we would often have quizzes on anatomy—the muscles of the arm, the back, and so on. We also built a sculpture muscle by muscle. In addition to that, I took an anatomy class in the Biology Department to add to my knowledge base.

Why does the human form attract you so much?

Throughout history it has been a subject that really draws people in. You can work directly with human emotions, and people understand that because, after all, we’re all human. I love that. There is also the complexity and the challenge of it. The human body is a really hard thing to sculpt well, and I’ve set myself the goal of mastering it. I mean, really, if you can sculpt the human form, you should be able to do anything else. The human form is exciting because it is so complex, but it can also be posed in meaningful ways that allow me to work with complex negative spaces around the figure.  Often, I don’t see all the implications right away, but I’ll come back to a piece after a while, and it will just hit me: ‘ Wow, that side form was really what I was looking for!’

In an artistic statement, you said that negative space, dramatic line, and the dichotomy between peace and tension were what you thought about when making a sculpture. Can you elaborate on that?

Well, I’ve already talked about negative space, but that integrates with the line of the form. The empty spaces around the sculpture define negative space, whereas the dramatic lines lead the eye through the sculpture. The human figure, with its limbs and lines of muscle movement, gives you the chance to point the viewer’s eye where you want it. It’s a cool way to draw the viewer into the work. By establishing the pose, I both define the figure and move the viewer mentally through the work.

My piece, ‘Grace and Disgrace,’ is an example of what I mean by the peace and tension dynamic. The rising figure is almost the very essence of tension. It’s a pose that is almost painful to look at and would be impossible to hold, and yet, if you look at the face, there is a sense of peace and joy. If you look at the other pose, which is that of a person crouched and hiding herself, it’s physically peaceful, but it has psychological tension. It is the face of anguish and sorrow. A further dynamic comes into play because the two figures have to work together, pushing and pulling each other.

 

Do you have a preference for working with a male or female figure?

I do more female figures, I suppose, because I connect with a female’s emotions more. From a conceptual point of view, I tend to think more in terms of the female figure, but I really enjoy working with the male figure, too. I choose male or female models based on which one best helps me get my ideas across. In really simplistic terms, I suppose you could say that the male presents a more powerful muscular form and the female a more graceful, poetic one. Though in reality, it’s often a question of who is available as a model!

Why realism? We live in a world that is obsessed with being modern. It’s almost a fetish in some quarters to be continually on the ‘cutting edge.’ Do you worry about your style being perceived as passé?

I just see the world that way and find great beauty in how it, and particularly the human body, actually appears. There is great joy in rendering reality as it actually is. I enjoy helping people see what’s already in front of them. The challenge is working with what’s there but shaping it to make it my own.

That brings up an interesting idea. To what extent is your work not realistic?

Art is about personal expression, so I do emphasize certain things, but the distortion is subtle. I try to pick a model whose appearance is close to what I want aesthetically. If I have an extreme pose, one that a person can’t hold long without hurting themselves, I might push the pose beyond where the model actually is, based on my knowledge of anatomy. Since I’m working in a realist idiom, the figure has to ‘read’ as correct, but there are often small exaggerations made to better express what is inherent in the pose.

When a pose is extreme, like the ‘Grace’ figure in ‘Grace and Disgrace,’ do you take photographs to shorten the posing time for the model?

I do take photos for reference. But a method I prefer in that situation is to have the model do partial poses that she can maintain. For instance, in the ‘Grace’ figure, I had the model sit in a chair and bend backward as I worked the top half of the figure. Then, I had her kneel and bend backward in a less extreme way that I exaggerated in my work so her body was consistent with the more extreme bend when sitting. The hard part is making sure you have the rhythm of the overall flow of the body when working from partial views. That can be tricky, but it’s essential. You have to handle the transitions correctly, and I’ve gotten better and better at doing that.

Where do your ideas for new sculpture come from?

Usually, they come from my own life experiences or those of the people around me. I think there’s a lot of anguish in my work, though people may not see it. In ‘Enervare’—that comes from a root word that means ‘enervate’ or drained of energy—the concept is about someone who has done something wrong and has done it over and over, becoming completely drained of energy, wondering, ‘why can’t I stop?’. When I have an idea, I try to figure out what it would look like visually. In this case, what would it look like if you were utterly exhausted?

Are you saying that you begin with an idea and then work out a physical expression of that idea?

Sometimes, but not always. There are two basic ways I approach making a sculpture, and that’s one of them. Sometimes, I work in the opposite way. I’ll wonder if it would be cool to have the model pose in such and such a way, an intriguing and visually interesting pose, and then I will work to give that pose additional levels of meaning. Though I may begin with beauty for beauty’s sake, I rarely end there. To be honest, the knack for brainstorming a concept is a work in progress for me. That wasn’t the focus of my training, so it’s something I’m learning to do now.

After you’ve got the beginning point of a sculpture, how do you turn this idea into an actual artwork? What are your methods as you proceed from that point?

I start by doing some preliminary drawings. I used to not do those, but now I find them useful. I draw four or so different angles to think through the pose. Sometimes, I do a maquette, which is like a small three-dimensional sketch, just to be sure my thinking is solid enough to carry through. Then, I build the armature, which is the wire framework that gives strength to the clay. One of the things that I love about sculpture is that there are parts of the process that are very mechanical, and since I’m a very mechanically-minded person, I find that sort of thing fun. Once that’s done, I move on to getting the pelvis and the ribcage situated correctly. Those two things have got to be right. It’s not unusual for me to work on that aspect even before I engage a model. Once I’m satisfied, it’s just a question of building the work out: first, the figure is roughed in, and then it’s defined, and the transitions are smoothed out.

I’ve read that you work with both clay and plasticine.

Yes, I use both, and they are rather different. With traditional water-based clay, you have a limited time to work on a piece. Though there are ways to keep your work from drying out, the drying can’t be delayed forever. You either have to fire the piece or make a mold from it while it’s still wet. And, of course, once a piece is fired, you can’t change it. Plasticine, which is oil-based, never dries out. When the sculpture I’m working on is ready, I make a mold and then take a casting from the mold. At that point, the casting becomes the finished piece, and the plasticine can go back into the tub to be used over and over. The torso I had in the show at The Northshore Gallery was made that way.

Do you have a preference between clay and plasticine?

I really don’t. I tend to work in one until I get tired of it, and then I switch. Clay allows me to go really fast. I like the speed and immediacy, and it really shows the process because it’s so sensitive to the touch. You can get that appearance with plasticine, but it usually means working on the surface with tools. It’s easier to get that look with clay. Also, plasticine is harder to control with your fingers, and my hands get really tired when I work with it. However, with plasticine, there is no time constraint, which encourages a push/pull, add and subtract exploration process that isn’t hurried. You can leave a piece for a long time and then come back to it

 

How did you do the finish on that torso? The surface had a delightful quality about it.

I use a wax finish. I brush it on, and it hardens pretty quickly. Then I polish it until it gets a nice sheen. I love wax and use it all the time. That particular finish shows the marks made in the process of making the piece, which I think gives the work a warmer, more immediate feel.

You use a variety of finishes: gray and bronze, among others. Are those your color signatures for a given sculpture? Are they meant as an immediate draw for the viewer’s eye?

I suppose so, though the best patina emphasizes the form and doesn’t call attention to itself. The idea is for the patina to catch the viewer’s eye, drawing him to experience the form and the dynamic tensions in the piece.

What artists have influenced your work?

Rodin, of course. His poses are really amazing! He’s very exciting to look at. And Bernini. The detail of his work is fantastic. I’ve only seen photos of his work, but in September, I’m going with my husband to Florence, Italy, and I’ll finally get a chance to see the real thing. The movement in his Apollo and Daphne is amazing. His work has visual motion and an incredible level of detail, but he keeps it all subordinated to the needs of the piece.

You’re at an early stage of your career; where do you think your art is headed?

That’s a good question. I can see it becoming more abstract in time. Historically, that seems to be how it goes with many sculptors. I can see myself breaking down the human form and manipulating it more obviously. My way of working is getting increasingly internalized, and my muscle memory has really developed to the point I’m often working without having to think everything through. As the process gets more automatic, it can get more creative.

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At 27, Josiah Golson has already achieved much. A graduate of the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga and the University of Texas-Austin law school, he recently began practicing real estate law in Chattanooga. He is also an artist, and is involved with several arts groups.

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See more of Josiah’s art at: Josiah Golson

For interviews with other painters see: Ellyn Bivin / David Jones / James Mckissic / Renel Plouffe / James Tucker / Larry Young

How did you become interested in art?

My mother is a trained artist, and in fact an art teacher. She was an early inspiration for me. When I was six years old, I remember making drawings that I imagined being in motion. Even then I was trying to tell a story with pictures. I made little comic books and so on. I’ve drawn all my life, but I wasn’t serious about sharing my art until my second year of law school. I was dealing with some issues around whether I wanted to continue in that field. I’ve always had an interest in the arts, from drawing to film making, and as a diversion I began to draw pictures in the style of a film strip, what I call ‘frames’. I began to create story lines and to illustrate them.

So your approach to drawing evolved as an emotional experience based on a love for a variety of visual media?

Yes, I think it was an attempt to connect with my youth and with things that inspired me.

Can you describe your approach to making your drawings and how you arrived at it?

I didn’t have any real formal training, such as working from a live model. My drawings come from my imagination. I see the image as if it was in a movie, and then I draw it straight from that. A big influence on my work is cinema and the process of cinema, particularly the making of story boards. I like story boards because you know there is a story being told, but there is not a need for perfection. That allows me to just go with the flow of the ideas that I’m getting. It gives me the freedom to draw in a way that’s quick enough so I don’t lose momentum. Usually I’m moving at a pace that allows me to get the image down while it’s fresh and vital. I don’t want to start over-thinking it or muddling about. I could lose the inspiration that caused me to choose the visual idea in the first place. I’m seeking a rhythm, almost a musical quality in my drawing.

You certainly have a very ‘live’ line in your work. To what extent do you pre-plan these strips of related drawings?

I do most of my planning in my head, waiting until I get to the point where I can see where I want to take a piece. To the extent that I do that sort of planning, it’s usually only for two or three images at a time. For instance, one of the pictures I have in the Graffiti show is called “The Fall of Rock”. It centers on the punk rock scene. For that drawing I tried to think of images that were not stereotypical but have a powerful element to them. Sometimes I draw a quick sketch on a separate piece of paper but most often I work directly by placing key images on the paper and then working in other images that complement them.

The Fall of Rock 18×24 Conte Crayon on paper

Let me walk back through what you’ve just said. You have a basic structure in your head when you start out, but the exact nature of an individual image is left to the moment as you work.

Yes. That’s right.

Your two black and white drawings, “The Fall of Rock” and “Crossroads Chronicles” are done in an obvious ‘film strip’ style. However, “The Living Flag”, another of your drawings, is clearly telling a story but not in a sequential way.

The Living Flag 18×24 Pastel on paper

I’ve actually done several “Living Flag” pictures. In those pieces my goal was to present the American experience, the spirit of America if you will, as it is represented in the meaning of the flag—the ideas of freedom, justice, equality, and the sacrifices that people have made for those things. I could have put them in a scene by scene format but those facets of our lives are so intertwined with the idea of America and with each other, so emotionally connected, or in some cases opposed, I decided to have them collide, as it were, on the flag itself. I tried to relate the individual elements to the colors of the flag, which I felt intensified the visual experience.

You have a fourth drawing you’re showing, “Reunion”, that takes yet another approach and doesn’t, at least to my eye, seem to tell a story at all.

Yes, in that one and in some other of my work there’s not a clear narrative. It’s just a scene. It doesn’t have a specific story. It’s pure action. That’s what motivates the piece.

Reunion 18×24 Pastel on paper

I chose the title “Reunion” because I felt as I was drawing the different characters and individuals there is a sense of unity present. However, at the same time, there is sense of diversity and difference. So I think there are linkages, but at no time was I going for a narrative that you’d find in the other pieces we’ve been talking about.

At 27 you’re at the beginning of your career in art, but do you have a sense of how your work might be evolving?

I do. Well, a little bit, anyway. I know I want to move forward with the narrative style. I think that’s where I’m strongest. I’d like to see how far I can take it. In our society we rely on cinema a way to process experience. It’s become so much a part of our culture, it’s now all pervasive. Even though people don’t go to galleries and museums as much as they see film and TV, I think that can work in favor of the plastic and visual arts. The imagery of the cinema can be utilized to enhance visual art. I’d like to tell more complete stories, though not to the point of graphic novels, we already have those, but I’m moving toward doing more complete stories that may not be as explicit as a graphic novel, but will have a compressed richness to them.

What artists have influenced you?

I have people I feel have influenced how I think about art, but not all of them are artists.

So tell me about them.

Well, music certainly has a huge impact on me and is a very important part of my life. Among musicians, I’d have to say that one of my biggest influences is Bruce Springsteen—his whole narrative of struggle in life, his themes around the American landscape and the endless unfolding of American self-discovery. His way of making beauty out of life–the little things in life–are an inspiration to me.

There’s also a film maker, Julian Schnabel. I found him when I saw a movie on Jean Michel Basquiat, who is a painter I like. Schnabel’s film, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfuly”, feels like a painting. I mean as a film it’s made in a painterly way. It’s not using all the traditional cinematic techniques, but idiosyncratically tells its story in a powerful way. I love the way he juxtaposes images—old film, old pictures, old iconography—and mixes everyday things and lush European landscapes. In a sense, he made a painting out of a movie, which has inspired me to make movies out of drawings.

As for artists, two come immediately to mind. The drawings of Picasso had a big impact on me. Despite his being on a pedestal as THE 20th century artist, I love the drama and freedom in his work. The way he transformed life into image, even something as horrible as “Guernica”, helped to free me up to draw stories as I evolve them in my mind. Seeing his work allowed me a freedom I doubt I could have found in a more classical approach to drawing. The other artist is Matisse, because of how he combined a linear approach with color. I love his color. Sometimes I find the more color I use in my own work, the less linear it becomes. I love exploring how color impacts my basic approach.

Beside your drawings, are you working in other media?

Yes, I am. Currently my favorite media, as you might guess, are conte crayon and pastel, but I’m also working with acrylic paints. They’re not as natural for me as pastel, but the work is coming along. I still feel more comfortable with the drawings but I’d like to develop as a painter because I think there is more I can do with that. I can push my art further.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Rien ne se perd,
Rien ne se crée,
Tout se transforme!*
— Antoine Lavoisier 1743-1794
(Note on Renel’ Plouffe’s studio wall)

*Nothing is lost,
Nothing is created,
All is transformed!

Artist Renel Plouffe

www.renelplouffe.com

French Canadian artist Renel Plouffe throws herself into the moment of artistic creation, glorying in the act of painting. Her passion is readily visible. Surfaces are roughly, almost violently, textured. The pigment is applied lavishly in color combinations that range from an elemental clash of primaries to an almost mystically subtle variation in shades of analogous colors. Her art is a profound and primary means of communication for her. It is an art that does not make compromises.

“I break down the subject to its visual essentials—light, dark, color, tone, movements, and textures. Each canvas is absorbed by color brushstrokes, and a textured background. The result is a reflection of my true essence and outlook on life.”

Creating series of paintings around a common theme is central to Renel’s approach to her art. She has used a variety of such themes over the course of her career, systematically exploring ideas that have meaning for her. At any given time, she is mining two or three such thematic areas. The paintings in her current show focus on two: ‘city’ and ‘water’.

“I’m a city girl,” she says. “You know when you go in a big city and everything is moving—I just love the electricity in the air. I used to fill my city pictures with people and cars. That was how I presented what I really love about urban life, the craziness and the energy of the city.”

                                                                                               

   Traffic  20×16    Oil                         Heure de Pointe   30×15   Oil

“When I paint something like ‘Traffic,’ I feel like I’m telling a story. In this painting you can feel the tension and the anger, but you have to smile because it’s just ridiculous. I mean, everyone is angry, but the panel van is just happy to be there, and that makes everything over into a joke.”

However, her city ‘theme’ is evolving and has changed in significant ways in the work she has done for her latest show. “I don’t put people in my city paintings anymore,” she notes. “It’s just buildings, which I suppose is sort of silly in a way since, even at night, it’s impossible to have a city without people. I used to do buildings with people in them. I stopped. I don’t know why.”

         Esperance      30×30       Oil

I think the city represents my more rational side and yet I love the seeming randomness of nature and the sense freedom it gives me.”

 Another theme she is currently working with is water. “My nature painting is more minimalist,” she says.  “Painting water is peaceful. It’s almost like meditation. I’m very loose when I do it, and I’m very free. I don’t think so much.  I play more with the texture as compared to line. For me nature is color and texture and subtle revelation. I think the city represents my more rational side, but I love the seeming randomness of nature and the sense of freedom it gives me.”

Eclosion   30×15   Oil

She makes no secret of the fact that the themes and subjects she chooses reflect where she is in her life mentally and emotionally. “I’m always struggling to have balance in my life. I can be pretty extreme in the way I approach things. Right now, I think I need these two types of images. My art is the mirror of who I am. Maybe I seek balance by moving back and forth between these sorts of images. However, for some reason my themes of ‘water’ and ‘city’ are coming together stylistically. I suppose to some extent the categories are beginning to merge.”

“Painting is my speech, my playground, my reality”

Born in Gatineau, Canada, in the province of Quebec, Renel first pursued psychology and mathematics upon graduating from secondary school. However, her early and powerful love of art soon won out over her mathematical and scientific gifts, so she changed direction. “My parents always traveled a lot. We spent time in Europe and went to many, many museums. They had a big interest in art. My mother painted, and from when I was a little girl, I did too.”

She received her degree from the University of Hull (Canada) in fine art and graphic design while also doing additional work to gain certification in both 2D and 3D animation. She then moved to Montreal, a city known for its art scene, to launch her career. Starting work with a company that made video games, she soon discovered the truth about an industry many believe to be glamorous. “It’s not what people think,” she says. “What you have to understand is the gaming and movie industries are very, very difficult, tough worlds. And they are a man’s world. You work a lot of hours, and compared to the U.S., the wages are low. I didn’t have a life.”

Despite her long hours and difficult schedule, Renel found a way to further her artistic development, choosing to attend evening classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. For two years, she took painting classes from the Russian artist Nikolai Kupriakov. “Kupriakov was very strong in teaching the fundamentals. And he really showed how to deconstruct and interpret a subject. I found that fascinating.”

“I can, be pretty extreme in how I approach things,” she says, with little appreciation of her understatement.

She liked Montreal and was making progress, becoming established with Montreal galleries and doing commercial design work, when her husband’s company transferred him to Houston, TX. “That was a very strange time for me. In Montreal I’d been working 60-65 hours a week and had gotten to know a lot of people in the art world there—all that was suddenly gone.” Unable to work in the United States without a work visa, she threw herself into a full time schedule of painting. “I found a good dealer and was selling well. I was doing a lot of work with the figure, particularly with nudes.” Over the course of the next four years, she established herself as both a fine artist and, when her work visa was granted, as a commercial artist in the Houston area. Then her husband was transferred again, this time to Chattanooga, TN.

Nuit sur Ville      30×30      Oil

Today, she embraces a schedule that would crush a less driven artist. Renel is at her easel every morning at 7:15 when she returns from taking her twin daughters to preschool, then works until around 1:00 in the afternoon. In the evening, with her family fed and her children in bed, she often returns to her studio to work “until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning or until I find myself getting impatient with what I’m working on. I can be pretty extreme in how I approach things,” she says, with little appreciation of her understatement.

Renel always starts a painting in the same simple way.  “I just start. I don’t do preparatory sketches. That’s not as aimless as it sounds. I almost always work in series around central themes, so I have a good idea of where I want to go with a painting. I have an image in my mind when I start. I see the painting I want to do in my mind, and I just do it.” She is usually working on more than one picture at a time, switching between them.

As she works, Renel focuses her attention on two aspects of painting that are of particular imprtance to her: surface texture and color.

“Paintings should be like people. People are multi-layered and only give up their layers and secrets over time. A painting should do that. I paint in layers and then scratch or otherwise work my way back to expose those layers to a greater or lesser extent.”

“When I started out, I used to do very flat almost liquid surfaces on my paintings. Then, I began playing with texture about ten years ago, and I loved the depth it gave my work. I put a color down, paint over it, and then remove part of the surface layer to reveal an underlying contrasting color. I use brushes when I paint, of course, but I also paint a lot with the palette knife, which I also use to scratch the dry or partially dry surface for additional texture. I love having a rough on my paintings. I’ve developed a method for stressing the painting’s surface with braided wire using varying gauges I have unbraided at the end. The wire strands make fine scratches on the surface when used on both wet and dry surfaces. Working into dry surfaces gives a finer, more subtle effect. There are also times when I use texturing agents such as acrylic medium mixed with sand to alter the paint itself. I’m willing to do anything to get the surface texture I’m looking for.”

Color is also of crucial importance to her art. She always starts with a set of colors she will use, and her choices are intuitive. “I just naturally know which ones I’ll be using. It’s rare for me to do a painting without at least an accent in red. It’s my signature color. Red, for me, is really intense. I love red. My dad loved red. He always bought red roses for my mom. “ Renel’s paintings are built around dramatic color combinations, juxtapositions of complements of richly colored pigments. At other times, the effects she seeks are more subtle, but always, her color is dramatic and personal.

                

Facade  24×12    Oil                        Evasion  30×15     Oil

With her ever-evolving themes, where do her ideas for new work come from? “I keep images—photos, things I cut out of magazines—really anything that I find visually interesting. If I think they will be useful, I paste them on the wall. These images are not there to copy but to spark ideas. I look at them, and over time, they suggest things to me. However, when I start painting, they are of no use to me. By then, the image I want is in my head—a palette of colors, the textures—it’s all there before I start.”

“Painting is a way of expressing myself and communicating with others. And when I paint, I can stop the conscious stream of thought in my mind and access a subconscious flow. That’s the only time that happens for me. I paint because I need to paint.”

Does she have any sense of what lies next in her artistic journey? She greets the question with a classic French shrug of her shoulders. “I don’t know,” she says. “I never really know.  It goes with what I’m feeling and what I’m living in my life. If I look at my art from 15 years ago, it’s completely different than it is now, but I was a completely different person then, too. As for the future, my art will depend on who I become as a person.”

 

 

 See more of Turry’s art at: Turry Lindstrom 

For interviews with other sculptors see: Bryan Rasmussen / Maria Willison

 Turry Lindstrom comes from a family of artists: his father and sister are professional portrait artists, and another sister is a talented vocal artist. Turry’s  own early artistic efforts came in junior high school working with clay. He won an award for his work, but found he did not really enjoy that form of sculpting. In 2007 he learned to weld at Chattanooga State College and realized that he had a  love for the process of cutting, shaping, and welding steel.  When working as an assistant on an ornamental iron project, he began to tap into his artistic leanings  by creating human and animal figures from leftover scrap metal. He enjoyed every  aspect of making these small figures for family and friends, and began to  experiment with different means of fabricating art objects in metal. In the spring  of 2013 he took the leap into the world of art, building a small studio at his home  to work full time producing metal sculpture. His work has found a very positive reception, selling in Atlanta as well as at the 2014 4 Bridges Art Festival in Chattanooga. He has a one man show at Graffiti Gallery, also in Chattanooga, and has then been invited to show his work at the Gallery DeRubeis in Key West, Florida.

Where do your ideas for your sculptures come from? Do you keep an idea book or sketchbook in which you evolve your designs?

No, I just keep ideas in my head. Lots of ideas cycle through my mind constantly and sometimes one will stand out, but it’s rare that I’ll ever start working on it right away. I usually have to stew on an idea, working it out for days, if not weeks, in my head. Sometimes it helps to do things that help trigger the creativity, like listening to music with my eyes closed as I play with various sculptural images in my mind. I read that Thomas Edison used to doze in a chair with BBs in each hand so that if he left the half-awake/ half-asleep state and began to sleep more deeply, he’d drop the metal balls, and the noise would bring him back to a half-awake state. That was when he was at his most creative, letting his subconscious do the work.

  How long do you “stew” on an idea before acting on it?

It varies. Eventually the idea becomes so complete and so compelling that I have to create a work of art. The energy just builds and builds until I almost feel like I’m being shot mentally and physically out of a giant slingshot. At that point I’m really manic in how intensely and rapidly I work. Even though an idea can take weeks, maybe even longer, to come to completion in my mind, it’s usually executed in just a few days of really intense work. When a piece is finally complete, sometimes my arms feel like wet noodles and I’m utterly spent. I’ll get a cup of coffee and sit down to talk with my wife and just fall asleep. It sometimes takes a few days to rest up after I finish a sculpture.

The fact that you plan your work without any aids beyond your mind and memory amazes me since it’s not simple in concept. For instance, in your appropriately named piece “Complexity”, you’ve created a spiral shape that loops around to create a sense of a geometric shape, a circle, that seemingly arises out of a Dionysian vortex of lines.

Well, I’m not saying my way doesn’t have some disadvantages. It’s like my ideas are in folders in my mind, but I’m sure there are some ideas that get lost. That’s just the way it is. The things I see in my mind I can’t get down in a meaningful way in two dimensions. That’s just not in my nature; it just doesn’t work for me. My ideas go straight from a mental state to reality expressed in steel. Of course, there are happy accidents that happen while I’m working on a piece, and those get included in the finished work, but I pretty much know how a piece will look before I begin. Planning the way I do, in my head, is the only way I feel comfortable. For me there’s just a disconnect between the 2D and the 3D worlds—the 2D/3D divide. 2D just does not work in my world. Frankly, when I’ve reached the point where I could model a piece, I might as well just make it. Doing drawings and making models will just sap the energy I try to bring to my work and which is essential to its existence.

Well, your work is all about energy. Each piece almost crackles with energy and movement. Do you feel the immediacy of your process drives this effect?

Absolutely! As I said, I don’t want to use mental energy on anything but the sculpture. That other stuff would just clutter things up. All that stewing on an idea is to lead me to the slingshot moment when the energy is released and the idea becomes the work itself.

Let’s imagine that the slingshot moment has arrived and you go into the studio. What happens next

Well, as you know, I work with steel plate. I’m restricted on size at this point because I have a really tiny studio—I can touch both walls with my hands by holding out my arms going one way, and the other way is about ten feet. It’s okay, I manage, but it’s more like a welding closet than a studio. The steel I use is ¼ inch thick, 12 inches wide, and as long as I need it. For the realization of my ideas at this point that’s just fine. I can see a time when I’ll want to work bigger but my studio size prevents that right now. Still, I’m really excited by the work I’m doing even with these physical limits.

What happens next?

Well, I’ve visualized the finished work, and as part of that process I’ve visualized the cuts I’ll have to make on the flat piece of steel to get the shapes I’ll work with later. I guess you might think of the steel as my canvas. Anyway, then I start to cut.

With what?

A plasma cutting tool. It weighs almost nothing. I’ve known older steel workers who find it’s too lightweight. They want an acetylene torch that’s heavier. The plasma tool is like a little plastic whip and I can just fly with it. It allows me to come at the work from different angles and just keep moving. The energy flows from my mind, through the torch, and into the steel. Some of the cutting can be repetitive at this point. Normally I hate anything that’s repetitive. When I was punished as a boy and was made to write something over and over, I was, like, just beat me and get it over with! But when I’m making art I just get into a rhythm and it’s okay. I’m planning future steps even as I’m cutting. I work really intensely and really fast at this point. I move so fast that when I’ve worked around other welders I make them nervous and they start saying, “slow down! slow down!”, but that’s just my natural way of working. It’s just the speed I need to go. I know my boundaries and I know I’m safe within them.

 So you’ve cut out a shape, but it’s flat. Then what do you do?

Well, at this point in the process the hard work is done. Now the real fun starts. It’s my reward for doing the construction part: the planning, the layout, and the cutting. It’s where the really creative stuff happens. I use an acetylene torch to heat and bend the plate I’ve cut into the larger shape I want. I just keep the torch going and the metal glows red and idea flows out of me and into the metal. In “Complexity”, the torch never went off for 45 minutes as I bent and twisted the 6 foot long piece of steel I’d cut into the sculpture. I was so fired up with my idea for that piece I bent it all up in one go.

How do you bring a sculpture to its finished ‘gallery ready’ state?

I didn’t say it earlier, but I smooth the edges of my cuts before I start bending. In my work, there isn’t a lot of finishing I want to do to my work. I like the viewer to see hints of the process that made the piece, the color changes that result from heating the metal and the marks of the tools. I just take a wire brush and get off the flaky white stuff that oxidizes on the hot metal, then I put on a clear coat. Sometimes I use color, but more often it’s a clear coat. There’s a lot of me in every one of my sculptures: all the music, and movies, and thinking, and just my life generally. I can see it all there. That’s how I know if a piece is any good. I can see me in the work—see me looking back at myself from the finished piece.

In looking at the pieces you have on your website, it seems to me that your work falls into two broad types: a style that is almost a fevered evocation of energy, and another where that energy is somewhat restrained by more geometric elements. Do these two realizations emerge from a common theme?

 (To see a larger image, please click on a picture below)

                      

Yes. I think I’ve been wrestling with bringing a more structured, ‘engineered’ aspect to my ideas. You might say I’ve begun to play with the idea of harmonizing energy and structure. It’s not easy. I thought over Fractal Vortex longer than any other of my works and in the end, when it was about half finished, I had a sudden insight and took it off in a very different direction than I thought I would go.

Your work has so much movement and energy—we keep coming back to that word—that I have to ask if you’ve considered making mobiles?

No, I don’t want to go that route. It wouldn’t work for me. Kinetic involves as much engineering as anything else. It’s very different from the much more spontaneous way I work. Even so, I think the ‘kinetic’ aspect of my sculpture, its appearance of movement, is important. I like it that people touch my sculptures thinking they will move. I take that as a compliment.

I know you’ve told me about the constraints you have with your studio size but will we see some larger pieces coming from you?

I’d like to work bigger someday, but I also want to remain an artist working in metal and not an engineer assembling and erecting big things. Frankly, at this point I don’t see how I can harmonize my way of working with the lengthy process needed to make something really big. Luckily, I have a lot left to do working in my current studio and with my current materials.

What artists have influenced your work?

I have people who I think have influenced my work but it’s not really other sculptors. I like Jackson Pollock and his free and unrestrained approach to the process of art. Otherwise, it’s mainly people working in the movies, H. R. Giger, James Cameron, and Stanley Kubrick. I really admire Kubrick’s attitude. He didn’t make his movies for anyone but himself. He didn’t repeat himself, and he put his soul into every one of them. He shot many takes of just about every scene. He once said, “I don’t know what I want but I know it when I see it.” I understand that.  I really only look to myself for the source of my creativity. I explore myself. I challenge myself to keep innovating, keep expanding, and never to repeat.

 

 Return to Interviews with Artists

 The following interview was done with Bradley Shelton just prior to his show “Please Seat Yourself”at The Northshore Gallery of Contemporary Art. This photographic essay explores the world of Chattanooga’s Zarzour’s Cafe. A tradition in Chattanooga, Zarzour’s Cafe first opened for business in 1918, and has been in continuous operation at the same location and run by the same family ever since. The show closed at the end of September, 2014. 

See more of Bradley’s art at: Bradley Shelton

For interviews with other photographers see: Art Nomad

You’re a practicing architect here in Chattanooga. How did you also become a photographer?

Back in 1996 I went to Auburn University and majored in architecture. During my sophomore year I took part in the Rural Studio program. That’s a program that sends students out into the community, in my case Hale County, one of the poorest counties in Alabama. In the Rural Studio program the students design and build community based projects. The program required us to read the James Agee and Walker Evans book set in Hale County, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and I loved the Walker Evans photos. When I returned to Auburn, I had an elective I could take. So a buddy and I decided that we would take a photography class. We assumed it would be a breeze and take up little time, since we were focused on our studio work. Turned out it we were wrong; it turned out to be a lot of work — and fun. We shot in black & white using T-Max, a high contrast film made by Kodak. The class was based on the zone system and the goal was to teach us the basics of how to plan, to take, and to develop a photograph. As we matured as photographers, our professor began to teach us the more mental side, like how to pre-visualize a shot. Michael Robinson, an Urban Planning professor, taught this photography course at night. It was during that course and the long nights in the darkroom that I fell in love with the process and complexities of making a photograph. I got a grasp on how to handle the tonalities, and I soon began to pre-visualize how I wanted a photo to look before I snapped the shot.

What equipment did you use on “Please Seat Yourself”?

My camera and equipment are all Nikon, and the camera I use is a D-700. But I don’t get too hung up on equipment. As they say, the best camera is the one you have with you. There are several images in the show I took with my cell phone. You can get a great photo with a cheap camera, and a crappy one with $10,000 state of the art equipment. In the end, it’s about the ability of the photographer and his artistic vision that make all the difference. I not saying that using good equipment isn’t important–it’s a huge part of what I do–it’s just not the essential part.

Do you still use the methods you were taught in film even though you’ve moved to digital?

I definitely continue to rely on the zone system — the 12 zones of gradiation from solid black to solid white. Of course, digital photography has changed the way you pre-visualize. With film you really had to plan carefully in the camera: “the sky is going to be in zone 9 and the tree is going to be in zone 2”, that sort of thing. You still have to capture the right exposure, but the majority of the tonal decisions are made in post-processing. Shooting digitally frees you to focus more on composition, because with the proper exposure, the tonalities can be set during the development process. This equates to less time behind the camera, more time developing in Photoshop.

So today Photoshop is the equivalent of the dark room experience?

Yes, it’s very similar in a lot of ways. Some of the terminology is different, but from an artistic standpoint it’s essentially the same process. I think it was Ansel Adams who said, that when you click the shutter, it’s about capturing information. Art is what happens in the dark room as you work with that information. If you think of it that way, then digital and film are very similar. Of course, with sheet film you have more limited chances when shooting. A roll of 35mm film might give you only 36 shots, and I can take 1,000 in an afternoon with a digital camera. Adams also said, photographs are made, not taken. Snapping the shutter is only half of the process of making a photograph. You’re trying to capture all the information you can,in the camera.  Whether it’s in the dark room or on the computer, if you have the information, you can make the image you want.

What film editing programs do you use?

I use Photoshop and Lightroom. Sometimes I use Apple Aperture for certain things, but mostly it’s the first two.

Why do you favor black & white?

I think my interest in black & white comes from my study of form—that’s what draws me to architecture. There’s something about black & white that seems to abstract form, I think, more so than color images. Black & white kind of distills everything.

So you visualize and shoot in black & white?

I typically visualize and develop in black & white, but I shoot in color.

Why?

Most digital cameras have a black and white setting, but much of the tonal information is lost so I never use it. With color there are 256 variations and when shooting in the camera’s black and white mode it will only capture those 12 or so gray tones.  So the camera is interpolating how to condense 256 colors into 12 shades of gray [laughs]. That would make and interesting book title.  No, I want control over the tonality of the image and I want all the information possible. I want to control that conversion to black and white.

 

Are you thinking of the 12 zone system when you set up a shot, even if you’re shooting in color?

Sure. There’s an image in the show I call “Pork and Dressing”. It’s an image of a plate of food I was about to start chowing down on, but I saw a beam of light hitting the plate, making it lighter than everything around it. So I thought, ‘I really need a photo of that!’ Now because of the way the light was hitting the plate, it needed to be in an upper zone, brighter than anything else. The surrounding area would be in a lower darker zone. So you see, the zone system is a way to visual the structure of the photo as well as something to use later in Photoshop. It helps you understand and analyze what you’re seeing and where you’re trying to get to.

Well, you certainly get blacks and grays that are rich and compelling. I liked that when I first saw your series, “Pig Roast”. How do you get that kind of tonality?

You have to expose the photo with that in mind. We’ve talked some about the differences between film and digital, but another of those differences is that in film you expose for your darks, trying to keep as much detail in them as you can. If you get those right, you can handle the highlights okay. With digital, it’s the opposite. You expose to give detail in the highlights. If you don’t, they will wash out and you lose that information.

Now, in both “Pig Roast” and “Please Seat Yourself”, the theme was about people and everyday things. Both required a lower key approach tonally—a deeper, richer look. For me, low key imagery and those subjects go together. So that was driving my desire for  rich dark tones. Still, there are exceptions in the show, like ‘Pork and Dressing’, where the image is in a higher key. I felt that particular situation warranted an overall lighter tonality. Still, at the point where I’m taking the picture the technical aspect is about getting the exposure right. This allows me to focus on the composition of the subject. I think what I’m saying is that I want to make the shot in camera as close as possible to the finished image.

That surprises me. I just assumed you cropped your way into the wonderful compositions your photos have.

No, that’s not my approach. There are occasions when I see something in the development stage that surprises me—something I didn’t notice when shooting and cropping is necessary. Sometimes an image is made better by a healthy crop, but I don’t enter into the process with the mindset that I can just crop later to get a good image.  Most of the time the final composition is what comes out of the camera.

Tell me about the experience of doing this project on Zarzour’s Cafe. It was a long term commitment, which is quite different than, say, doing an afternoon shoot studying the changing shadows on an old building.

Yeah, it was long term. I worked on “Please Seat Yourself” for three years—I thought it would take six months (laughs). Most of the images in the show come from my last two years of shooting. I’ve done the kind of afternoon shoot you’re talking about, but with “Pig Roast” and “Please Seat Yourself”, the idea of the story was just part of the subject.  With “Pig Roast”, we were having ayearly pig roast, and after taking pictures for several years, a story with a timeline emerged. The same thing happened with Zarzour’s, but with an added dimension. I hadn’t worked on that series long before I thought, these are great people! They are real salt of the earth kind of folks, and it is their story that drove the project. It made me want to invest the time and effort to make them proud. I got to know them as people and as friends. I came to find that being there, just talking with them and showing them some of the pictures, had another dividend. I became in a way invisible, well, maybe not invisible, but everyone was comfortable with me shooting and it allowed an honest view of things. I gained an acceptance and an ease of access that made the story deeper.

Why Zarzour’s Café? How did you decide on that subject?

The photographing ofthe yearly pig roast led me to the idea of working on a series done over time. I wanted to tell a story about a place through images.  To be special it hadto gain deeper insights than you could hope for on an afternoon shoot. So from there it was not too big a step to Zarzour’s. I’ve been eating there since I moved to Chattanooga, eight years ago. Chattanooga is lucky to have great places like Zarzour’s Cafe, or Nikki’s Drive-in, or Griffith’s Hotdogs. Places that are long established and have incredible character. So many of those places are gone, driven out by the big chains, and that’s sad. You don’t go in a chain burger joint and chat with the waitress about how her kid did in his baseball game. In places like Zarzour’s, you become part of an extended family. So anyway, I’d been eating there for a while and one day I walked up to Shannon, who now runs Zarzour’s, and showed her my pig roast photos and said, “You mind if I take some pictures around here?” and she said, “Sure.” So every couple of weeks I’d come in and take some pictures. If I got one I liked, I’d print it and show it around to the folks there. I got to know everyone and it just felt more and more natural. One morning, I met Mary at 7:00am and photographed her as she prepared food for the day. It reminded me of my grandmother’s kitchen, how she prepared food, and that’s kind of close to my heart. So I guess that’s how it happened. I showed up one day and said, “I want a roast beef plate and I want to take some pictures.” They are great people and damn if they didn’t let me do it [laughs].

To what extent were you shooting to a prior mental narrative, one you carried with you through the door, and to what extent did your narrative just evolve from what you were seeing and photographing as you tried to make sense of it?

The only plan I had when I started was a notion that it would be great to document aesthetically what the place looked like. I mean allthe pictures on the wall are their family and close friends. Hell, Charles Zarzour’s immigration papers are hanging on the wall. Amazing! The imagery of the space is what attracted me to take the first pictures. Then from that, the urge to tell the daily story of the place emerged. What makes Zarzour’s is that particular family. They’ve run it for four generations, and over time the place has become a portrait of them. But you know, I recently noticed another thing. After three years of taking pictures, I realized you can also read this essay, not onlyas a portrait of the people, but as the story of one day in the life of the restaurant. “Please Seat Yourself” begins with a closed café and ends, after all the activity, the same way. The show could have been entitled, “A Day in the Life of Zarzour’s Café.”

Do you have plans to do additional essays like “Please Seat Yourself” on other local cultural landmarks?

I don’t know as I’ve made that decision yet. I would like to. I think the focus of any project of this nature would be the people involved. Could I do a Barber Shop? There’s potential there. Griffith’s Hotdogs have been around a long time and it has a certain character that is unique in Chattanooga, It’s different from Zarzour’s Café but it’s the same, too. I don’t know what the future holds. I don’t know where the camera will take me.  I think whatever I work on next, it’s important to me that there be an element of Chattanooga in there—that the places be in Chattanooga. These places are important to our culture. They have survived. How did they do they do it? I think it has something to do with the people.

 Return to Interviews with Artists

Ellyn Bivin’s paintings are, by turns, colorful, whimsical, thoughtful, and mysterious. Nuanced surfaces, painted with analogous colors, provide the background for local images that appear to dance in relation to each other. The viewer immediately sees the artist’s joy in playing off visual ideas against each other. Those elements—children, birds, houses, feathers, dogs, and cats—can be dramatically present, partly hidden, or subtly disguised.

See more of Ellyn’s art at: Ellen Bivin

For interviews with other painters, see: Josiah Golson / David Jones / James Mckissic / Renel Plouffe / James Tucker / Larry Young

Ellyn’s studio, located in a small cottage that once belonged to her grandmother, is just a short walk from the home she shares with her husband, Ken, along the Tennessee River in Chattanooga. It was in this neighborhood that Ellyn spent her childhood years. The main room of the cottage/studio is well-lit and airy, with several of her recent paintings, in differing states of completion, resting on easels. In the center of the room are tables where she teaches painting. Her student’s work, an assignment based on a still life of lemons, is on the wall. In an adjoining room is a painting by Ellyn’s daughter, Mamie, who is currently an art student at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. Indeed, both of Ellyn’s children, her daughter Mamie and her son Robbie, are artists. 

“I started as a little girl drawing horses because that’s what little girls do. Over the years my subject matter expanded,” she says with a laugh, “but I am often drawn toward children and animals as subjects. My subjects, however I handle them, are people or animals that mean something to me.”

Ellyn has been a fixture in the Chattanooga art scene since the 1980s when she showed with a group of artists who formed the collaborative group Square One. “Ann Poss, a noted regional printmaker, bought a house on Oak Street that she divided into artist studios. Ann had a studio downstairs, as I did. Alan White, the UTC professor, was upstairs, along with Joe Helseth, who is now a professor at Chattanooga State. We were putting on shows around Chattanooga, and we decided we needed a name for the group, but we could never agree on one. It always seemed like every suggestion would get rejected. We’d have to start over—we were always going back to square one. Finally someone suggested we use Square One for the name. That group lasted a few years and became part of the origins of the Association for Visual Arts. The Hunter Museum had a show of our art at one point. We called it “Two x Two,” and it traveled to our sister city, Wuxi, China. They sent their art here, and we sent ours over to them.”

“I don’t want to nail everything down for the viewer. I want them to use their imagination. I want my pictures to have a bit of mystery about them.”

Ellyn briefly attended the University of Tennessee Chattanooga before transferring and earning a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, with an emphasis on printmaking and art education. “I took a beginning course in printmaking as a freshman at UTC and really loved it. When I got to Virginia Commonwealth, it was great. VCU had a printmaking department and absolutely amazing equipment. I just fell in love with the whole process of making prints, particularly intaglio, because I love to draw. I did a lot of lithographs, too, because of the drawing.”

Ellyn loved drawing, but she had no desire to be a painter. “I never got into painting much. I just took painting classes because I had to fulfill my requirements for a degree. I wasn’t a dedicated painter at all. I was a printmaker. I was even snooty about it. ‘Painter? I’m a printmaker!’”

Returning to her hometown, she enrolled at UTC to take additional coursework, though the school did not offer an MFA. “George Cress, the head of the art school at the time, let me use the printmaking equipment. At first, I’d pay for a class to make it official, but after a while, he decided I didn’t have to pay if I was helping out around the department. In addition to more routine jobs, I printed editions for the professors. They would design the plate, and I would print it.”

It was then that she became interested in monoprints, and the change had an impact on Ellyn’s development as an artist. With lithography or etching, the artist draws with a waxy crayon on a stone or cuts into the surface of a metal plate. The goal is to print multiple copies. With monoprint, as the name implies, only one impression is produced, either by painting or making a collage on a block. Monoprint is the most ‘painterly’ method among the printmaking techniques. For Ellyn, it stood as a bridge between pure printmaking and an embrace of painting.

“When I began doing the monoprints, I used to lay things down–torn strips of old phone book paper, for instance–and roll ink over them. I would lift that up, maybe roll back over it, wipe some ink out, and then use stencils. I started working in black and white, and I remember the first time I saw the image the ripped paper had made. I thought, ‘Wow! That’s a landscape!”

It wasn’t long before she was using color in her monoprints, and her move toward painting was underway. “As I worked with increasingly complicated imagery and used more colors, the monoprints took more and more time to produce—really, they were paintings.”

“I move elements around on the surface,” she says. “It’s all about balance for me—playing one thing off against another. My imagery is always moving around.”

Ellyn found herself doing more and more painting, but in a style that echoed her experiences as a printmaker. She loves the way the monoprints look and seeks to rediscover those effects in her work. “Right now,” she says, “I’m trying to ‘print’ my paintings. By that, I mean I’m doing them in layers like I did with the monoprints. I’m trying to use the whole process I used to use doing my monoprints.”

Though she paints on both canvas and rigid supports, she often prefers to work on rugged surfaces like Masonite, which can stand up to multiple reworkings of the surface. Indeed, she says her method of making a painting remains fairly close to the way she produces monoprints, but with a difference. Since the surface isn’t used to make an impression on paper, it isn’t done in reverse. It is the final statement of the artist’s intentions.

“My backgrounds are often based on analogous colors with offsetting highlights. I suppose because of my printmaking background, I just naturally exploit the flatness of the surface plain. Analogous color is a useful part of doing that.”

A painting that will be in her next show features the figures of two girls. The pose of these figures, replicated in different sizes, is unusual, and the shadows they cast form a strong compositional element, which are, from a common perspective, impossible and contradictory. Such considerations don’t matter to Ellyn. She uses all means at her disposal to create a visual world that is at once familiar to the viewer and ambiguous. “I want to make pictures that cause you to use your imagination. I don’t want to nail everything down for the viewer. I want them to use their imagination. I want my pictures to have a bit of mystery about them.”

As for her subject matter, Ellyn chooses elements from her everyday life, which she celebrates in paint. “I draw my own designs from source materials,” she says. “I like to work with the human figure and with animals. Often, I develop ideas from old photographs. I draw my designs and cut out stencils. After putting several layers of paint on a gessoed ground, I then begin moving the stencils around, seeking a balanced composition. That’s the great thing about stencils–they allow you to establish composition, which I can embellish or not, depending on the picture’s needs.”

It is this process of carefully working out her composition by manipulating various drawn and stenciled basic elements against a background painted in layers that gives a dynamic, almost rhythmic, quality to her paintings. These elements can have unexpected relationships that add surprises for the viewer. In the detail of her painting, ‘The Immigrants, ‘ we see several figures, some readily apparent, some drawn in silhouette, some barely suggested, and some seeming to emerge from the background. This, the title of the painting suggests, is the ambiguity of the immigrant experience. A deft use of apparent and concealed meaning reappears in many of Ellyn’s works. 

Ellyn Bivin– Leading by a Nose 18×30 Acrylic on panel

Ellyn’s paintings also reveal her whimsical sense of humor. “I definitely have a sense of humor that I like to bring to my work,” she says. “I even like to give my paintings silly titles sometimes. I had a painting where I used a dog as an important visual element, and I couldn’t resist naming my painting, ‘Where the Nose Leads, the Tail Follows!’. When I was taking a sculpture class, I did a series of tongue-in-cheek pieces, such as one entitled Chest of Drawers, which was a human torso with drawers in it. I don’t think art has to be dead serious to be good.”

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