When Alex Tolstoy tried her hand at oil painting at the age of eight or nine, her mother’s friends wanted to buy her work. Though she put down her brushes throughout school and a distinguished career as a scientist and mathematician, she never left art behind. “I promised myself I’d go back to it when I was 60,” she explains.
True to her pledge, she began taking classes at the McLean Project for the Arts in 2008. Now 67, Tolstoy has emerged as an accomplished watercolorist. With a light touch, her paintings explore the elusive quality of the medium to suggest momentarily, often brooding views. Scenes on land and sea recall collective memories: A phantom ship merging with overcast skies. Solitary farmhouses shrouded in mist. Dusty dunes rolling toward a dark horizon. In a kind of spare visual poetry, spaces left empty echo the reflective mood.
Tolstoy knew nothing about watercolor when she took that first class not far from her home. “I thought watercolor would be quick, that it would get some action going immediately,” she remembers. Midway into the course, she says, “I fell in love with the process. You end up with surprises. You never quite know what you’ll get.”
Her art blends broad washes of mostly monochromatic color with dabs of the deepest hues. Tolstoy’s fluid style contrasts with the meticulous approach taken by other watercolorists. “Some artists, like Andrew Wyeth, create beautifully controlled, highly realistic paintings,” she says. “I’m impressed when people can do it, but I don’t have the patience for hyper-realism.” She is inspired by the atmospheric watercolors of British marine painter J.M.W. Turner, among others.
In her first career, Tolstoy worked at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington. She spent most of the day at a computer formulating research models about the behavior of sound waves in the ocean. Any connection between that specialty and the water themes in her paintings, she says, “is not conscious or deliberate.” As a theoretician, Tolstoy gladly avoided going out to sea. “It’s not like being on a sailing ship looking out into the sunset,” says the artist, who now captures those fleeting moments in her paintings.
In fact, Tolstoy prefers working in her studio to observing nature in the open air. Conveniently located in the basement of the McLean townhouse she shares with her husband, photographer Ron Colbroth, her studio is a laboratory for her art.
After taking many classes with artist Barbara Januszkiewicz and working in her medium for seven years, Tolstoy has reached the point where, she says, “I have a feel for how the paint behaves.” Certain colors stain the paper quickly, others cover it completely and can’t be changed. While some paper allows paint to be lifted and erased, handmade and rice papers absorb it instantly. “If you make a mistake, you have to live with it,” the artist notes ruefully.
Tolstoy starts by brushing an area with clear water, then laying down the colors. “Paint will follow the water,” she has learned. “I direct it, at least.” If you flood the paper with water, she cautions, “then you have no control.”
As the white paper slowly disappears, an image starts to come through. Once that background is gone, the artist notes from experience, “It’s the only part of watercolor that’s hard to get back.” She puts a premium on colors that can merge, rather than block out. And she values watercolor’s unique quality of transparency. “The more that paints can be mixed and paper shows through, the more interesting the picture is,” she believes.
That clarity and freshness come from watercolor’s composition. It is simply pigment suspended in water without any additives. Paintings appear spontaneous because they typically dry within an hour. Tolstoy generally completes an image in one sitting, but occasionally returns to apply the second layer of paint.
She usually sits down with some germ of an idea before she begins. It may be a building, a color or a section of a picture she has seen. “Something will kind of brew, percolate. All of a sudden, I’ll find time to do it, and a complete painting will come out,” says Tolstoy with ongoing wonder at the process. “It’s magical.”
Writer Tina Coplan is based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. For more information, visit atolstoyart.com, or contact the artist at [email protected].
Growing up in rural Chesterland, Ohio, Eve Stockton loved exploring the deep woods and environs near her home. The house, overlooking farm fields, was cantilevered above a ravine that led to a small series of caves. “It was really magical,” recalls Stockton. “I would go out and play for most of the day. It seemed so natural.”
Those early adventures are much more than distant memories for the artist. Drawing from a lifetime of outdoor observations, her large-scale prints—vivid seascapes, hazy landscapes, imagined stirrings of life—conjure the primal power and robust beauty of nature. Inspiration has also come from printed images collected over years. “I’ve always been so interested in nature and exploring imagery,” she says, adding enthusiastically, “Woodcut printing is a brilliant medium for what I want to express.”
This earliest print technique involves carving a design into a block of wood. The print is made from the raised surface that remains. “The medium is hard-edged and tends to be very graphic and dynamic,” says Stockton. Referring to the rough-hewn German Expressionist woodcuts of the last century, she observes admiringly, “You can see one from 50 feet away. It makes a very strong impression.”
In the renovated-garage studio beside her home in Alexandria, the printmaker recently started carving a new wood block. She sketched the design, an exploding pattern called Burst, onto the veneered wood. First using an electric engraving tool to outline the image, she proceeded to remove large areas and details with hand-held gouges. Carving a new block may take from “an intense week” to a month or more to complete, she says.
Once fixed with varnish, the Burst block—along with several others and a stack of unfinished prints—is loaded into her van headed to the printing studio. Stockton works hands-on with master printers at Lily Press in Rockville, Maryland, and at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk, Connecticut, where she began her printmaking career.
Woodcut printing is a layered process. It requires that each color and shift in the woodblock design go through the press separately. Stockton introduces a contemporary twist: manipulating freshly carved and reused blocks—all three feet square—in new patterns and color palettes. Typically, she combines three or four different blocks in every new print.
Stockton and master printer Susan Goldman lay the Burst block on the made-in-America press. Goldman compares her role to that of a personal trainer “helping artists work through their ideas.” While transferring white ink from a roller onto the block’s raised surface, Goldman describes color options. “Much of it is about layers. Oftentimes, it is printing successive veils of transparent ink. Or, if you don’t like something, you can block it out by making the color more opaque,” she says.
“It’s like painting,” Stockton adds. “You are reacting to what’s on the paper at that moment. You may decide this needs something else. What’s it going to be?”
The two will work out such art/technique questions together; meanwhile, they remove splattered ink from the block’s carved areas. Then, very carefully, they place a sheet of paper on top. After covering the paper with a felt blanket, Goldman manually turns the wheel of the press as the unit moves through the drum under just the right amount of pressure.
Stockton didn’t set out to be a printmaker. After graduating with a master’s degree in architecture from Yale, she spent ten years working for architecture firms in DC, New Haven, and New York. During a work slowdown when she was a young mother in Westport, Connecticut, she returned to a longstanding interest in making art and joined the area’s thriving artists’ community, exhibiting paintings and sculpture at juried exhibitions.
On a whim, she signed up for a woodcut printmaking workshop in 1999. “It was a strong eureka moment,” she remembers. “I had been searching for the right medium and this was it.” Being able to visualize a carved design in reverse or imagine a finished print as layers were easy for the former architect, who had mastered the skill of rendering buildings as two-dimensional plans overlaid with mechanical and electrical systems.
The architecture also taught Stockton about structural form, as in the details of a leaf or an imagined genetic structure. “I had a need to get back to nature,” she recalls of that time. Six weeks after taking the woodcut workshop, and with the help of master printer Christopher Shore in Norwalk, Connecticut, Stockton made a six-foot print, Woodlands I.
She has not looked back since.
Writer Tina Coplan is based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Eve Stockton’s woodcut prints can be seen with works by Sondra N. Arkin in “Networks,” an exhibition at Long View Gallery (longviewgallerydc.com) in Washington through May 3. For more information, visit evestockton.com.
Steady tapping breaks the lunchtime stillness at Hilgartner Natural Stone Company.
Sebastian Martorana, a 33-year-old stone carver, chips away at a marble block using a miniature hammer and chisel he made for the job. His studio occupies a corner of this 150-year-old shop of installers, restorers, and carvers located in a fast-disappearing industrial section of Baltimore’s Federal Hill.
White flecks fly. Like fallen snow, they merge with the layer of stone dust covering nearly every surface. Minus industrial equipment, this traditional workshop might have been transported from ancient Greece or Rome. Instead of some allegorical figure, however, Martorana applies his considerable skills to depicting an everyday object—his own work glove. It’s the second in a series.
“The first was a self-portrait,” explains Martorana, whose gentle manner, sturdy frame and practical work clothes suggest a modest self-image. Yet confidence and courage are required to sculpt stone in the grand tradition. Over the hundreds of hours, it often takes to reshape the stone, there’s no going back. As the rough-hewn form emerges from a solid block, a sense of monumentality also takes shape in this three-dimensional still life portraying the hand of the artist.
“I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel,” says Martorana, who studied art history and sculpture for a year in Florence, Italy. “I love Bernini’s work,” he adds, referring to the Baroque master. “But I’m not going to try to sculpt Apollo and Daphne. Anything I do is contemporary.”
His virtuoso sculptures pay lasting tribute to the currents of modern life. In his droll Icon series, the artist drapes pop-culture figures like Lego Man and Muppet Sam the Eagle in Greco-Roman garb. “I wanted to do figures that are part of our collective consciousness,” he observes while noting, “Legos were probably the genesis of [my] becoming a sculptor—that and play dough.”
Impressions meticulously convey the softness of a pillow in marble. It records the artist’s final memory of his deceased father-in-law—the place where his head last rested. Now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s permanent collection, the piece was part of the Renwick Gallery’s 2012 landmark exhibition of new craft directions by 40 artists under age 40.
Martorana, who majored in illustration at Syracuse University, explains: “I’m trying to illustrate in three dimensions,” a practice he says dates back to the ancient world. “They were literally telling stories in the media of that time. They didn’t have comic books; they had stone sculpture.” He now teaches illustration at Maryland Institute College of Art’s Rinehart School of Sculpture in Baltimore, where he received an MFA degree.
Between college and graduate school, the aspiring sculptor apprenticed for four years at Manassas Granite & Marble, in the Virginia town where he grew up. “I wanted to learn how to use the material like a professional stone carver, so the craft side would be second nature,” he recalls.
As a graduate student, Martorana found a job at Hilgartner, where he continues to balance commercial and artworks. Collaborating with other skilled stone workers, he has hand-carved thousands of letters on slate at Johns Hopkins University and on a limestone base for Winston Churchill’s statue in the U.S. Capitol; restored exterior stone at The Phillips Collection; and spearheaded the dimensional layout and carving for a grand spiral staircase at Polo Ralph Lauren’s flagship store in Greenwich, Connecticut.
At Hilgartner, the sculptor has access to a huge forklift, cranes, a bridge saw—and extra manpower. These come in handy when he moves or cuts heavy blocks of stone, like the 600-pound marble stair steps he has salvaged from demolition sites around Baltimore. For a public art project last summer, Martorana repurposed several as outdoor chess tables and benches, then returned them to the Barclay neighborhood from which they’d been reclaimed. The sculptor is pleased with this turnaround. “It’s the same use the steps had before: a place to get together, hang out and talk. It’s the history of chess and checkerboards too,” he points out. “Accessible and free, 100 percent of the time.”
Most of Baltimore’s renowned front stoops were made of Beaver Dam marble from quarries, now closed, in Cockeysville, Maryland. “It’s unique to the area. You can’t get it anymore,” the sculptor says of the white marble, which was also used on the Washington Monument. “It can be very hard, a real bear to carve.” Pausing for a moment, he considers, “There’s something beautiful in trying to do something hard, and trying to do it gracefully.”
Tina Coplan is based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Sebastian Martorana’s sculpture can be seen in “Rinehart’s Studio: Rough Stone to Living Marble” at The Walters Art Museum (thewalters.org) March 29 through August 30, and “Hand/Made” at MICA (fyi.mica.edu) through March 15. For more information, visit sebastian works.com. For sales and studio visits, email Debrah Dunner at [email protected].
Approaching the home of collector Judy Weisman, few clues appear to distinguish it from neighboring houses along a tree-shaded street in Chevy Chase, Maryland. But once the front door opens, all resemblances fade, as visitors enter a lofty sanctuary studded with major works of contemporary craft. Harmony prevails, from towering fiber works punctuating the entrance to smaller objects aligned on living room walls to sculptural ceramics showcased in fitted shelves in the family room. The overall unity suggests a small, modern museum—a serene, residential one.
“Some people think you can only create a beautiful environment and not live in it,” says Weisman, seated in a shapely swivel chair facing some of the exceptional fine craft pieces she has gathered over 25 years. “It’s a joy to live here,” she beams. An interior designer and art consultant who helps others stage their collections, she understands the dilemmas passionate collectors face. “I integrate art in a way that’s comfortable to live with and not just to look at,” she observes. “You don’t have to be afraid of it.”
Weisman lives by the design principles she preaches: All projects should be calm and beautiful; group like objects by color, size or theme; every piece needs space around it; and look at all spaces as possible opportunities for display.
On that last point, limited space in part prompted her decision to renovate the modest Cape Cod house where she lived for more than a decade. Weisman’s first priority was greater wall height to better display large-scale pieces. Her second was a bigger kitchen. And she wanted to accomplish those objectives while retaining the home’s basic footprint.
The solution, she believed, could happen by focusing on what she considered the property’s greatest potential—its sizable garden with a perfectly formed Japanese maple as its centerpiece. “I was set on opening up the house to the garden and integrating interior and exterior spaces,” she says. “That offered an opportunity to make the space feel larger—in essence, adding another room.”
To help realize her vision, Weisman turned to architect Ben Ames. He suggested removing part of the second floor to create a two-story entrance, a scheme that added height and space for displaying art on a new mezzanine facing the entrance. At the back of the house, Weisman proposed removing the living room fireplace and back wall to gain a full-height garden view. To exhibit smaller works more intimately, enclosed galleries were refashioned from the former kitchen and den on opposite sides of the entrance.
“Each design decision related back to her collection,” Ames recalls. “That was the litmus test—to create spaces that would make sure the work was properly displayed.” To accommodate the new kitchen and dining area, a glass-walled addition projects like a private greenhouse into the garden. Further viewing perspectives are available from the master bedroom above.
Landscape architect Kevin Campion worked closely with Weisman on the garden plan. The stunning Japanese maple became the focal point, set off by plantings in masses and orderly hardscape surfaces. Views from the house change with the seasons, as the tree’s lacy leaf mound transitions to a barren winter trunk that Weisman compares to a wooden sculpture. The striking impression is doubled when reflected in the still waters of a two-tiered fountain. “Every element had a purpose,” says Campion. “There wasn’t one plant that we didn’t talk about. It’s a better space because of our challenging each other.”
Weisman agrees. In her professional role, she often collaborates with artists on special furnishings; during construction of her home, she invited artist Sonya Clark to select a spot for a commissioned piece. Clark’s 16-foot-high assemblage—made from ordinary
plastic combs—now rises beside the front door. “It’s the first thing people see when they walk in, and they’re fascinated,” says Weisman. “I like when an object draws you in, and you have to stop and think about it.”
Adding new works required taking others away. “If you can’t see each piece in a peaceful way, it should be removed,” she declares. Biting the bullet, the designer gave away 50 works to her grown children or sent them to storage.
With her display spaces filled, Weisman still enjoys helping others make purchases. She advises clients and museums through her service in the crafts community, as acquisitions chair for the James Renwick Alliance, a nonprofit group supporting the Renwick Gallery, and on the acquisitions committee of the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts. “I get as much satisfaction from that as I do from my own personal collecting,” she reflects.
With its breezy indoor-outdoor flow, Weisman’s home also becomes a perfect setting for entertaining arts groups. As day dissolves into night and the maple’s flaming crimson fades into darkness, lighting under each fountain step transforms the landscape into sculpture. “It’s magical,” says Weisman. “The garden is an art form. It’s about color and texture and scale. In the end, it’s all about art.”
Writer Tina Coplan is based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. John Magor is a photographer in Stafford, Virginia.
RENOVATION ARCHITECTURE: BEN AMES, AIA, Amestudio, Arlington, Virginia. RENOVATION CONTRACTOR: THE LEY GROUP, Washington, DC. INTERIOR DESIGN: JUDITH S. WEISMAN, Judith S. Weisman Interiors, Chevy Chase, Maryland. LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE: KEVIN CAMPION, ASLA, Campion Hruby Landscape Architects, Annapolis, Maryland.
Framed by a gentle slope in front and wooded hills rolling toward the horizon at back, a new home in McLean, Virginia, blends so naturally into its pastoral setting that it seems to have always been there, as owners Bob and Debbie Glamb are regularly reminded. “I’ve had workmen come in and ask, ‘How old was the original house?’” Debbie reports. “A lot of people think we’ve renovated. It happens over and over.”
The new house blends with its surroundings in part because its design springs from the 10-acre site and its rustic history. Architect Donald Lococo nimbly shaped a contemporary residence, drawing inspiration from the past and the owners’ aspirations for the future. As in a complex puzzle, all the pieces fit together precisely once the picture is completed.
Reaching that point was rocky. Before the Glambs acquired the property decades ago, it was a working dairy farm. A barn on the site was used for a time as a horse stable; tractors were stored in another outbuilding. In one plan, the owners considered demolishing these structures and subdividing the property for three new homes.
The Glambs decided to build after realizing it wasn’t practical to renovate a house on the property to accommodate their growing family. They envisioned a welcoming residence for their three teenage children and friends, a place for everyone to gather before the kids headed out on their own. “We wanted a livable house with good flow, big enough to entertain, pet-proof and casual enough for the dogs to run through on bare floors,” Debbie says. Know more about pet-proofing your home at Bored Cesar.
When the process began, however, the couple was not in perfect accord. “I wanted a stone house with hardwood floors and a beer tap,” explains Bob. For her part, Debbie pictured a homestead that would be “light, bright and airy.” They discussed their divergent views with several architects who advised them to iron out their differences before proceeding. Lococo offered a different tack. “I thought we could take what they both like,” he recalls, “using the fact that opposites attract as a whole direction, instead of trying to push them to the middle.”
After a year of designing and another of construction, the ambitious challenge was realized. “Donald had a vision and it worked,” Bob says with admiration, while also praising builder Tony Paulos of The Block Builders Group.
Preserving the barn was at the heart of the plan. Having grown up in an area of Canada where barns were prevalent, Lococo is nostalgic about a time before the scenic buildings became endangered. “Saving these barns is really important,” he says, “and this was an opportunity to save one as a beautiful architectural centerpiece.”
The residence was positioned to capture picturesque barn views from all rooms across the back as well as from two terraces and a screened porch. A few steps away, the former tractor garage is now a stunning pool house with a new pool. Landscape architect Joan Honeyman designed the grounds “in keeping with the modern farmhouse nature,” she says, using hydrangeas, roses and seasonal perennials that would have been found on old farmsteads.
The home’s simple, straightforward lines and natural wood pay homage to the barn aesthetic. Tall ceilings echo the barn’s soaring scale, while rooms are more intimate than expected in a 10,000-square-foot residence. Lococo guarded against anything that might be “too grand or formal.” Nooks, bays and built-ins break up the spaces, creating architectural focal points.
Additional layers of character and charm result from the architect’s approach to the owners’ dueling requests. On the exterior, rough stone is set off against smooth board-and-batten siding, creating in Lococo’s words, “a heavy anchor against a lacy top.” Along the façade, natural materials, stepped rooflines and staggered projections contribute to a vintage impression. “More than just weight, we wanted a sense of history, a sense of time,” Lococo observes.
Indoors, opposing elements again are united. Guests arrive in a bright, two-story space. Plentiful light and crisp white walls provide a perfect foil for the darker textured surfaces of a massive stone wall, rugged roof trusses and random-width hardwood floors. “When you have that polarity of rustic against refined, everything in between works better,” says the architect, adding, “Nothing feels out of place, not even the two dogs.”
All the pieces came together, including Bob’s beer tap: It’s installed on the lower level in a recreation room paneled, appropriately, with wood reclaimed from the nearby barn. But he is more likely to be found outside planting in the garden—a favorite pastime—as Debbie prepares meals with the kids in their inviting custom kitchen.
It’s further evidence that this casually elegant home carries on another aspect of neighborhood history—the tradition of genteel country living.
Writer Tina Coplan is based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Paul Warchol is a photographer in Baltimore. John Cole is a Silver Spring, Maryland, photographer.
ARCHITECTURE & INTERIORS: DONALD LOCOCO, AIA, Donald Lococo Architects, Washington, DC. BUILDER: TONY PAULOS, The Block Builders Group, Bethesda, Maryland. Landscape Architecture: JOAN HONEYMAN, ASLA, Jordan Honeyman Landscape Architecture, Washington, DC.
"The concept of beauty is difficult,” says Francie Hester, standing beside one of the ravishing new art objects displayed recently in an exhibition of her work at Kaller Fine Arts in Washington, DC. “A lot of beauty comes out of destruction.”
For the past decade and a half, from her studio on an industrial byway in Kensington, Hester has been attacking metal with hammers, drills, sandpaper, routers and a blowtorch. Tearing down the surface, she builds it back up, then repeats the process layer by layer, often drop by drop. This laborious technique mirrors ideas at the heart of her work—the passage of time and its ravages, the hard-earned beauty that comes from experiencing life’s turbulence.
“You can’t have joy without pain, highs without lows, life without death,” Hester says philosophically. In her art, light and shadows coexist peaceably. She points to one example, “Relic #4.” The free-standing disk is covered in brilliantly mottled blue shades as indefinable as the colors on peacock feathers.
“Everybody knows what a pretty blue looks like,” says the artist. “But that’s a little ordinary.” To deconstruct it, she added contrasting rust tones. Wherever Hester detects a particularly beautiful passage of color, she feels compelled to counter it with a dark place. “It may be buried in the piece,” she notes, “not seen on the surface.”
Hester likes creating new buried treasures and rediscovering old ones. Her Relic series is based on artifacts unearthed in Chinese burial sites—simplified, enlarged and embedded with new meaning. She begins by roughing up the smooth surface of 29-inch-diameter aluminum disks as they arrive from a fabricator in Minnesota. She adds and subtracts acrylic paints and inks, and sometimes simply water, using squeegees, rubber spatulas, a fork, eyedroppers or whatever is called into play.
Subtly blended colors emerge from beneath encrusted layers, suggesting the erosion of age. Within a perfect circle, radiating borders imply “the continuity of life and death, and the infinity of time,” says the artist. By contrast, in her Convex series, circles are divided into separate segments. Each section is spaced out on the wall and further subdivided into well-defined patterns. These pieces signify a different rhythm—a break in the action.
“There are events in life when we stop and start. And there are times when life is fluid, when things happen in waves,” Hester reflects, tracing at the same time her own life trajectory. Arriving in Washington in the late 1980s, Hester had a lofty downtown studio on the top floor of the then low-rent Lansburgh Building. She earned a master’s degree in art theory from the University of Maryland, and by 2000, her painting had moved from canvas to wavy aluminum panels with a honeycomb core. Then 9/11 hit.
After that momentous day, she recalls thinking, “‘I can’t just paint what I was painting.’ I had to stop and start again.” The everyday imagery in her work vanished. Seeking a spiritual connection, she listened to the pure, extended notes of Gregorian chants. She remembers, “I would hear an absolutely gorgeous passage, then sand away a portion of the paint and build again. I realized then that there was beauty in shadows.” She called that first series Strata—Italian for “layers.”
Subsequent losses triggered further reflection and change. In 2004 and 2010, beloved friends tragically died—journalist and editor Diane Granat Yalowitz, age 49; and Brendan Ogg, a 19-year-old college sophomore, poet and best friend of Hester’s son. In an elegiac tribute, Hester and her studio partner, artist Lisa Hill, brought family and friends together for a communal arts project. All performed a simple task: wrapping cutout paper around paper clips. Each piece bore words scanned from magazine stories by Yalowitz or poems by Ogg.
Some 80,000 paperclips were wrapped. Linked together, they form studded streams grouped into 16-foot-long cascades. Part of the billowing testament, “Wordfall,” is now on view with other works by Hester at the Athenaeum in Alexandria. It is one of five exhibits of Hester’s work to open from March to June in Washington and New York. The shows represent the result of two years of intense work.
Hester talks a lot about “circling back” in her art, as she has done by revisiting her early Strata series. Starting out with a single theme in mind, she lines up several pieces and paints all with the same grid or swirls. Then the paths of each diverge. “It’s almost like writing a novel. You know all the people, but not how they’ll interact,” says the artist. “There’s an evolution that happens.” To decide when a piece is complete, Hester may take it home and live with it. “It has to offer something different each time I look at it,” she adds with the renewed pleasure of discovery.
Tina Coplan is a freelance writer based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Francie Hester’s new work can be seen in “The Spaces in Between” at Kaller Fine Arts (kallerfinearts.com) through June 14; in “Words and Letters” at the Athenaeum in Alexandria, Virginia (nvfaa.org) through June 22, and in a solo show there from June 26 to August 3. Find more at franciehester.com and wordsaslegacy.com.
The beauty of deep-water life inspires the sparkling-glass worlds created by Alison Sigethy. In her signature series, Sea Core Bubble Tubes, artful variations on shells, corals, jellyfish and other exotic forms are stacked in clear glass containers like jewel-toned creatures piled on the ocean floor.
Sigethy calls these lively sculptures “environmentally sensitive aquariums.” Filled with distilled water, transmitting bubbling sounds, they convey the tranquility of a marine environment. Small, organic shapes suspended in water appear to swim—while real specimens remain safely in their natural habitat. The softly lit columns add a soothing note to a nightstand. Rising 30 inches in glass or higher in acrylic tubes, they introduce a commanding focus in any space.
At one time an avid scuba diver and now a kayaker, Sigethy works at the water’s edge in her studio at the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, Virginia. There, she hand-forms each piece from salvaged, bottle or art glass. Her choices often depend on color.
But several years back, the artist used structural glass recycled from solar-collector panels for her Water Trail series, which she created for outdoor installation. Designed to look like ancient horseshoe crabs washed up on shore, the durable works were intended to draw attention to the fragile ecology of the Anacostia River. Their delicate, weathered appearance and translucent, pierced-shell forms perfectly embody the artist’s environmental message.
Sigethy finds glass an ideal medium. “Its vivid colors, transparency and fluidity really allow me to capture the essence and look of what I’m trying to do,” says the artist, who recognizes the pull of aquatic themes in her work. “Even when I intend to do something else, it ends up related to water!” alisonsigethy.com
When Victoria Larson was working as an interior designer and ordering fabric for clients, she never envisioned one day running her own textile firm. Still, she dreamed. “I’d see designs in my head that I didn’t see in the market,” she remembers. “I always wanted to start a fabric line, but I couldn’t imagine getting from here to there.”
Larson pictured playful, colorful patterns that could bridge traditional and modern décor. She tested ideas on fabric. She researched textile mills and talked about the possibilities, until her husband presented a challenge: “‘Are you actually going to do this? And if not now, when?’” she recalls. “I took a deep breath and launched my line.”
Four years later, her boutique firm Victoria Larson Textiles has expanded to offer 20 classic designs printed on natural linens and cottons. The designer talks regularly with showrooms that carry her textiles in Northern Virginia, her native Annapolis and beyond in Atlanta, Chicago and Sydney, Australia.
“It’s an interesting time for independent textile designers,” Larson says gratefully of the trend that has created a growing network of professionals who share information. Her timing turned out to be perfect. Earlier, she says, “It took a huge financial commitment for one person to start a fabric line.”
Two recent developments brightened that outlook. More textile mills are now willing to print just 25 or 30 yards, compared to runs of 1,000 yards for large fabric houses. And thanks to on-demand printing, independent vendors can benefit from printing only when orders are received. Plus, Larson can match her designs in custom colors for small runs.
The evolution of digital printing also allows greater creative flexibility, since any digital design can be transferred to a fabric’s surface. By contrast, traditional screen-printing requires pressing pigments by hand through engraved screens and into the fabric’s fibers.
“Each has its place,” says Larson, who has used both techniques since her first experiments. One early pattern, School O’ Fish, repeats a primal shape in regimented navy-blue rows. She uses screen-printing for single-color patterns like this and other graphic designs, whether intense hot pink or neutral black. In contrast, Peony, a subtler early design, called for digital printing. The image was taken from one of Larson’s own paintings and its gradations of color and shading reproduced precisely on fabric. Hand-screening would have been “far more difficult, requiring 12 separate screens, one for each color,” Larson points out. “It would be cost-prohibitive.”
While the designer has been an artist and painter since high school, designing textiles involved a steep learning curve and “a lot of trial and error,” she notes. Among lessons learned: how to repeat designs on a 54-inch-wide fabric, how to prepare files to send to mills—and to always approve samples before ordering fabric. “Expensive mistakes can happen,” she discovered.
It took the entrepreneur nearly two years to research textile mills and understand production techniques. “I was determined to keep production in the U.S.,” she says. Happily, she succeeded, locating a screen printer in the old mill town of Westerley, Rhode Island, and a digital printer in Monroe, North Carolina.
Sitting at her home-office computer, Larson moves easily between programs for manipulating images. Every design starts with a scanned image, most taken from a sketch, photograph or painting. Then the real work begins. In the case of School O’ Fish, the primitive form is deceiving. Larson took the basic shape from a block print, then painstakingly redrew 124 new shapes and lines, reviewing each line and its relationship to the other lines and empty spaces around it.
And then there are color decisions. “I like to mix and match,” the former interior designer explains. Since infinite color choices can easily distract, to stay focused Larson posts a small sheet with six watercolor swatches above her desk as a reminder of the neutral color palette in her latest collection.
Many of her themes relate to the outdoors. “There’s so much beauty in nature,” says the avid gardener and sailor, who was raised in a sailing family in Annapolis. Her home is located on a tree-studded property across from a creek, where in late afternoon she enjoys motorboat rides with her twin daughters. Travel also takes the family to coastal regions, as her husband, a professional sailor, competes in regattas.
For a change of pace, Larson designs whimsical fabrics for a New Zealand children’s swimwear company called Snapper Rock. And she plans to introduce her own fabric collections for kids’ and teens’ rooms.
For now, Larson continues to be inspired by the world around her. While driving to pick up her daughters recently, the designer noticed, “When rain washes down the side of the window it makes a really cool pattern. I thought, ‘How am I going to capture that?’ I have to remember what that looks like!”
Writer Tina Coplan is based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Jenna Walcott is a photographer in Easton, Maryland. Victoria Larson’s textiles are available through designers, at the Design Center of Northern Virginia in Herndon and Dream House Studios in Annapolis, or through her website, victoria-larson.com.
In transforming a house to accommodate an extraordinary collection of modern paintings and sculpture, the owners produced an elegantly unified home, as minimal and balanced as the abstract art within. Monumental paintings, iconic sculpture and classic 20th-century furniture stand out, interplaying against a canvas of crisp white walls. Contemporary gardens continue the orderly progression outdoors. A sense of harmony prevails throughout.
This perfect synthesis of art and environment is especially remarkable given earlier conditions on the site. Located at the base of a hill in Potomac, the house had suffered regular flooding as well as major structural and mechanical damage. Dated decorating cluttered the interiors.
None of that fazed the prospective owners. “When we walked in,” the wife recalled, “we said, ‘Wow. This would be great!’ There were wide hallways, large spaces, lots of bare walls, a high entrance hall, good light—perfect for hanging art.”
Her husband also looked past obstacles, observing, “The house hadn’t been touched in 20 years. That was both terrible and nice. We didn’t have to fit ourselves into somebody else’s idea.”
The couple had decided to sell their primary home on the bay in Annapolis to be closer to urban conveniences as well as to their children and grandchildren. Their goal was to find a residence to showcase their extensive works of art. Adding to the challenges, they set a tight move-in deadline—just six months. Then they found a dream team that made it happen.
At a recent reunion, interior designer Gerald L. Smith and Steven Kirstein, a principal in the design/build firm BOWA, gathered in the impeccable new dining room. “The project was a great collaboration between all of us sitting around this table,” the husband beamed. “They were the pinnacle of efficiency.”
The owners’ idea to unify art and design was the starting point. “That was the hub, defining the interior architecture and space planning, and how the house was finished,” said Smith, emphasizing that such singular vision is rare. “Art collections are more often embellishments. This was a wonderful and refreshing approach.”
The existing plan—a one-story rambler with added wings—remained. Tearing down the house was never an option. “There wasn’t enough time,” Kirstein acknowledged. However, everything inside was eliminated down to the studs. Any vestige of traditional architecture—crown moldings, paneled doors, high baseboards—was stripped away. All windows, doors, skylights and cabinetry were replaced and streamlined.
Paring down the architecture to basics introduced other hurdles. “Simple is always complicated,” said Smith. Removing soffits that interrupted straight lines between walls and ceilings caused ripple effects. Mechanical systems housed within the soffits had to be relocated underground. Running miles of new wiring and cabling in trenches dug through and under the home’s concrete slab exposed structural flaws. “There were huge voids and cavities in some places. Nothing underpinned some of the bearing walls supporting the house,” Kirstein recalled. “It gave us the opportunity to fix a lot of things.”
Nothing was left to chance. Before walls were finished, the owners’ art curator, Gary Snyder, arrived from New York to position the paintings; then more than 100 ceiling lights were placed to highlight the art. Before shelving was designed, Smith visited the owners’ previous home to measure the depth and linear footage of their limited-edition art books, each signed by author and artist.
Recessed LED lights along the top shelves recall a tradition of white Christmas lights that sparkled along the highest bookshelves in the husband’s previous offices. All of the lighting is part of an integrated whole-house automation system installed by Bethesda Systems that allows the owners to control lighting, drapes, heating and cooling, audio/video and security remotely using a computer, mobile phone or tablet.
Whether at night or in daylight, the colors and contours of the art are set off against uniform white walls. The “absence of color,” as Smith said, “was never questioned: Benjamin Moore’s Bright White. It’s a very neutral white, very clear, crisp and clean.” It serves a purpose familiar to most modern art galleries of not competing with the art.
As the wife pointed out, “Art needs a nondescript background, to breathe.” Views throughout the home are breathtaking. Starting at the soaring entrance, sweeping through the central core of the house and glancing down broad hallways, every perspective is studded with major mid-century works of geometric abstraction and the Washington Color School. Color-saturated paintings by Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler stand like six- and seven-foot-tall sentries beside a large opening to the living room. In the adjacent gallery, an illusionist painting by Al Held, a tile composition by Sol LeWitt, a backlit wood construction by Pamela Gwaltney and an Op-Art screen print by Bridget Riley riff on geometry at different scales. Overhead, an Alexander Calder mobile drifts above Le Corbusier leather armchairs in this luxuriously reductionist, exclusively black-and-white space.
At the back of the house, glass doors frame sunlight glistening from the surface of a bronze water sculpture by Archie Held. Landscape architect Lila Fendrick placed sculptures close to the house to be viewed in all seasons. Wide steps and large bluestone pavers simplify detailing on rear terraces in a serene, unified transition outdoors.
The owners find near-perfection in their completed home. One possible glitch: “We’ve run out of walls,” said the wife, pausing before she reflected with a smile, “But we’ll let this sit for a while and enjoy it.”
Writer Tina Coplan is based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Anice Hoachlander is a principal of Hoachlander Davis Photography in Washington, DC.
RENOVATION DESIGN & CONSTRUCTION: STEVEN KIRSTEIN, BOWA, McLean, Virginia. INTERIOR DESIGN: GERALD L. SMITH, G. L. Smith Associates, Inc., Washington, DC. LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE: LILA FENDRICK, Lila Fendrick Landscape Architects, Chevy Chase, Maryland.
As a child, Elizabeth Kendall played happily in her grandmother’s sewing room, surrounded by fabric scraps and threads. She watched as her grandmother sewed Barbie Doll dresses, beautifully finished with French seams. Kendall didn’t end up pursuing a textile career, but those early impressions are deeply embedded in her ceramic art. The sculptor’s spare, sensuous abstractions are shorthand memories coded in clay. From Kendall’s perspective, porcelain disks cascading from the wall represent a button box let loose. On a table, silken ceramic curves billow like boat sails blowing in the wind, linked to a longstanding family activity.
“My work relates to telling stories of family history and showing how porcelain can behave, so soft and luscious like fabric,” says the artist. On a break from the studio she’s occupied for 20 years in her split-level home in Vienna, Virginia, she reflects how casual comments by her mother became a major force in her work.
“One night my mother said, ‘Look, the night is shining through the curtains.’ And another time, ‘Oh, they painted the white lines darker,’” Kendall relates. “She turned things around in a way that made you think about them differently. In her mind, the curtains, which are white and soft, were hard. And the night, which is dark, was shining. I’ve retold those phrases in a lot of ways.”
Black against white, light against shadow: unity in opposites. The artist continues to reinterpret these messages of contrast and family—a smooth, porcelain rectangle inlaid in the rough, black body of an oil can indicates an inserted window or fabric scrap; a wall sculpture that unites porcelain and sprung steel casts moving shadows when touched. “It makes the metal seem soft and fluid,” says the artist. “While the porcelain, which people think of as wet and soft before it’s fired, remains hard and fixed.”
Kendall took ceramics classes in high school and some sculpture courses at Smith College in Massachusetts, where she majored in history. Still, her entry into pottery as a profession was serendipitous. When her son, Eli, was born 23 years ago, she searched for an income-producing, home-based activity. She enrolled in a wheel-throwing pottery class with the idea of becoming a production potter and discovered: “I didn’t like making the same thing twice. I wanted to make work that had meaning behind it.” When a teacher asked students, “What do you want your work to be about? Give me five adjectives,” Kendall found her calling.
“I realized I was pleating and tucking the clay, treating it like fabric,” she remembers. “I thought, ‘That’s my story. Let me push that.’”
Starting small, she made stylized bottles, vessels, teapots and cups. Those cups—altered and without bottoms—began migrating to the wall about five years ago. “I wanted to move beyond something you hold to something that occupies a bigger space, to put the same stories into a different framework,” Kendall says. She has adapted these open-cylinder assemblages as panels in the Hyatt Regency in New Orleans, and for a tabletop at the Ritz-Carlton in Tysons Corner, among other commissions.
Kendall’s largest project, composed of 1,000 spindle forms, hung from the ceiling at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts in 2012. Named “Shear Lines” both for boat-building and sewing scissors, the work spanned 10 feet between columns. Each individually hand-thrown and altered spindle was suspended on a clear fishing line at a specific length that followed the sheer-line measurements, at one-third size, of the boat Kendall’s family owns and uses each summer in Maine. Despite its massive scale, the installation appeared to float.
On a recent day, work was underway on a nine-foot-long wall sculpture destined for a bank in Dallas. Kendall’s college-age daughter, Emily, had completed the first step in the hand-building process—pressing the wet porcelain through an industrial roller to form a slab. Using a French wooden rolling pin, Kendall finished smoothing the sheet and beveling the edges. Based on a sketch for the elongated-garland design, she cut the slab into 35 triangles, similar to paper templates for pattern pieces in sewing. After lifting and shaping each section, she inserted foam or cotton balls to maintain the curves while the porcelain hardened. Pieces were then fired in an electric kiln and sanded to a smooth, touchable surface. Pegs glued to the back offset the sculpture from the wall, assuring a contrast of pristine white porcelain against dark shadows.
Over the years, Kendall has adapted varied techniques for different uses: wheel-thrown curves, gas-fired glazed vessels, brushed underglaze for colored patterns on functional objects. “The next step for me is to transfer the way I do colored work onto sculptural pieces in a way that resembles fabric pattern,” says Kendall. “The challenge is to integrate color without interrupting the line of each curve, the light and shadow, the sense of volumes in space.” She adds a personal message: “In my head, each piece talks about the story of my mother and grandmother, about fabric. Others can enjoy it as form.”
Writer Tina Coplan is based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Elizabeth Kendall’s art is on view in two group shows. The “First Annual Cup Invitational” will take place at Flux Studios in Mt. Rainier, Maryland, through January 15; fluxstudiosdc.com. “Small Worthy Works” will be on view at Cross MacKenzie Gallery in DC from December 13 to January 8; crossmackenzie.com. Kendall’s work will be exhibited and sold at the American Craft Council Show in Baltimore, February 21 to 23; shows.craftcouncil.org/baltimore. Visit ekclay.com or email [email protected].
What in the world is that made of?” many viewers ask when seeing Jessica Beels’s translucent sculptures for the first time. Resembling the spiral form of a seashell, the muted color of fossils, the stippled surface of a fallen leaf, her lyrical works echo nature—at once familiar and mysterious.
“People don’t recognize paper,” Beels says matter-of-factly. “They wonder, ‘Did you make it out of sticks? Or rawhide? Or parchment?’ It flummoxes them.”
A hands-on purist, Beels uses materials as basic as her sculptures’ organic appearance suggests. “Fiber and water; that’s it,” she explains. A single plant, flax, is her medium of choice. Broken down and beaten in a machine for up to eight hours, the raw fiber arrives as liquid pulp in a bucket. After draining it through screens and pressing it into sheets, Beels folds the moist paper like pie dough over a steel armature, which she has hand-formed using pliers and wire cutters. Left to dry in the air, the paper becomes surprisingly strong and durable. Even canoes have been made from flax, Beels readily points out.
Because it looks simple, the artist frequently hears another question: Why hasn’t anyone else thought of this? “The answer is they have thought of it,” she responds with a weary smile, adding, “It’s a fairly easy and ancient process, but it gets complicated.”
Whether done mechanically or by hand, standard papermaking involves cooking and bleaching to stabilize the fibers for everyday use. Beels skips both these steps. Her technique allows the paper to shrink and stick to itself without any need for adhesives. But it also makes the process more difficult, requiring an understanding of how much and in what direction the material will shrink to become taut without ripping, how it can pull and distort its wire support and how much allowance or reinforcement is needed so that, she says, “the two things work together and have flex.”
Seated at the kitchen table in her Adams Morgan home, the artist has a striking, Earth Mother presence. Her swept-back, silvery hair frames a broad, open face and brilliant blue eyes. Over the span of her career, she has returned to this skylit kitchen to make smaller pieces, process pulp on the deck outside or cook and grind seaweed and daylily leaves to create a natural pigment used in some of her pieces.
Beels reflects on the many roads her journey has taken. “I don’t think I would be a paper artist if I had started out of college,” she observes. Focused then on traditional textile techniques such as spinning, knitting and embroidery, “I was interested in just getting it right, following the rules,” she recalls. “One of the freeing things about paper is you have to let it go. You have to give leeway for the paper do its thing, and I let it.”
While studying art history at Harvard, Beels worked on many theater productions. Involved in painting, building sets, making costumes and acting, she discovered her favorite job was stage manager. “I loved when things would go wrong and I had to jump in,” she says. The lessons served her well. “Being a paper artist is all about how to solve problems,” she notes. “Every piece involves combining an idea and structure, and working out how to get there.”
Five years after graduating, Beels went on to earn a master’s in Early American decorative arts at Winterthur, a historic museum in Delaware. Studying furniture, pottery, silver, rugs and paper on a path to becoming a curator, she discovered, “I spent a lot of time watching the conservators. I became more interested in finding out as much as possible about the materials, learning how things are made and accumulating techniques.”
Continuing her craft exploration, she moved on to bead weaving, becoming absorbed in the process of building complicated structures from tiny beads. Then, in 1998, on a lark she took a class in sculpting paper at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine. Six-months pregnant with her second child, Max, she had thought the excursion would be “a great way to have a two-week last hurrah. Instead,” she says, “I became addicted. Flax sculpture overtook me.”
She started getting her hands wet in paper pulp while helping out artist Ellen Mears Kennedy in Silver Spring, toting her son’s crib along. Two years later she was on her own. Her art has evolved along with a fascination with disease and biology, interests she attributes to family influences; her father was a doctor, her grandfather a renowned physicist.
About half of Beels’s recent work is based on scientific themes. The largest piece, “Pass It On,” covered a 10-foot-wide wall at “Pulse: Art & Medicine,” a recent exhibition at Strathmore Mansion in Rockville. The group of five spidery mobiles, ornamented with gold leaf and mirrors, was inspired by neurons related to Alzheimer’s. In the staggered, suspended row, moving parts cast dancing shadows and reflections across the white wall.
In her ongoing quest, Beels has landed on a convergence of method and meaning. “The beauty of science is both its incredible complexity and its incredible simplicity,” the artist observes.
“If you can find a material that conveys both, that’s the sweet spot. And in a way, paper does that.”
Tina Coplan is based in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
For more information, visit Jessica Beels’s Web site at jbeelsdesign.com. Beginning September 10, Waverly Gallery in Bethesda will present Beels’s smaller pieces among those of regular exhibitors; displays will change each month for a year. In January 2014, Beels’s sculpture will appear at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Art Gallery in Washington. Abstract works will explore the theme of melting Arctic sea ice, a collaboration with DC artists Ellyn Weiss and Michele Banks.
Kari Minnick’s lyrical abstractions cast a shimmering haze over the concept “clear as glass.” Broad brushstrokes sweep across diffused areas of color in her luminous works. From a distance, the flat wall panels hanging in her studio could be mistaken for paintings. Those panels and curved variations, standing on a table nearby, are predominantly opaque—blocking much of the light, but none of the beauty, associated with the allure of glass.
“I wanted a richness and intensity. Letting in tons of light can wash that out,” Minnick explains about her unconventional approach, which channels light selectively. She likes to embed a sliver of transparent glass, sending a blast of light through opaque designs, like a sorcerer controlling nature and art.
“That’s the magic of glass,” observes the artist, whose enthusiasm remains undiminished after two decades working with the medium. “It’s exciting to have transparency and opacity in each piece. And shiny, matte and tactile choices too. The nice thing about glass is you can have it all—or at least a lot more than with paper or canvas.”
Minnick knows about those media as well. After studying painting and drawing at UC Davis, she was a painter for a dozen years. “I love that I can return to my roots and get that extra dimension in glass,” says the artist, who draws on her arsenal of tools and skills in recent work, which she happily refers to as “paintings on steroids.”
The new pieces take shape in her loft-length studio in downtown Silver Spring. On a worktable up front, she composes designs from a dizzying selection of manufactured glass sheets, spaghetti-thin rods (“stringers”) and chunks and powders (“frits”). Before glass particles or imagery are applied, she brushes a loose wash of black or white paint over sheets of clear glass. Once arranged, the composition is fired in one of five electric kilns at the back.
If pleased with the results, Minnick fearlessly proceeds to cut up the sheet, arranging selections with others measured from solid glass sheets as in a collage. The composite design is returned to the kiln. If Minnick finds any stage unsatisfactory, she repeats the process, and often ends by using a hand cutter or saw to reduce large sheets down to one or more smaller compositions. The outtakes, saved in a bin, may be retrieved for use in future work.
When Minnick began experimenting with paint six years ago, she wanted to achieve a painterly look entirely with glass. To do this, she sifts glass powders onto the glass surface, then pushes the particles around or runs a palette knife, a comb or even a piece of paper through them to get a brushstroke effect. Working with stiff particles to produce a fluid appearance can prove daunting, as she learned. “I’ve gone from being a total purist to using paint in a minimal way,” she says. “Finding the right balance has the best outcome.”
Most pieces are built up in three layers: a designed sheet, plus one or more opaque and transparent sheets in solid colors. The entire process requires at least four firings, each overnight. Controlling the temperature is critical, as successive firings must integrate and fuse the latest step without undoing the ones before. The hottest temperature comes first (1400 degrees Fahrenheit), gradually lowered until the final surface texture is applied (1300 degrees). In a secondary process, Minnick sometimes shapes, or “slumps,” the corner of a panel at still lower heat (1200 degrees).
Every new series involves a battery of preliminary technical tests. “Five degrees in either direction can make a difference,” Minnick points out, adding with a grin, “There’s a certain mad scientist aspect to it.”
The maximum size of a single work is limited by the dimensions of a kiln shelf (20 by 40 inches). However, Minnick assembles larger compositions from small designs, especially in commissions such as “Chain Letter, ” a wall sculpture that joins six parenthetical shapes in a 45-inch-long row. The artist also groups related works, as in the diptych “Careen.”
That pairing was drawn from Minnick’s first series of abstractions. The artist’s slow evolution away from representational images culminated in 2010, after she attended her first artist residency at North Lands Creative Glass center in Lybster, Scotland. While others in the program sketched local buildings and interiors, Minnick became absorbed with an abandoned boat, turned upside down next to a pub.
“I was taken with the paint peeling off and how many layers there were, the wonderful staves and curves, and the way everything went together,” Minnick remembers.” It seemed an opportunity for a painterly and architectural treatment. She took many photos and made lots of drawings, but wasn’t sure what to do next.
Back in the studio, the “eureka” moment hit when she viewed the images on a computer screen. “I zoomed in and found the most beautiful compositions,” Minnick recalls. “It was a way of taking the information and distilling it, breaking it down into parts. Instead of a literal homage to a boat, I took sections and made panels of them.” As she soon recognized, “Abstraction opens up a whole new world!”
Tina Coplan is a writer in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Photographer John Woo is based in North Bethesda, Maryland. Kari Minnick will exhibit at the Smithsonian Craft Show from April 25 to 28, 2013. For more information on her work, visit kariminnick.com.
Washington painter Freya Grand hears the call of wild, remote places. In search of nature untamed, she has traveled to the rocky coast of West Ireland, the smoking mouths of volcanoes in Ecuador’s Andes Mountains and the boundless horizons of Botswana and Namibia. “I return to places that I know will present me with something powerful and maybe startling,” says Grand, who journeys each year to gather raw material for her landscapes.
Whether hiking up mountains veiled in mist or balanced on a rocky rim washed by waves, the painter seeks to portray a world beyond travelogue snapshots of specific sites. As she describes her internal quest, “The forces of the natural world trigger an emotional conversation. It may be about terrifying beauty, unbelievable vastness, darkness or hope. The place is the catalyst.”
Grand’s atmospheric universe is on view in an exhibition of her paintings and drawings, “Freya Grand: Minding the Landscape,” at the National Museum of Women in the Arts through May 5. The mysterious dynamism of her work leaves interpretations open. “The first time I saw her paintings I was so intrigued,” recalls Kathryn Wat, chief curator at the museum. “Was it real or fantasy? Close up or far away? It’s about her experience and evoking an experience in the viewer.”
On the road, the painter travels light. Slender and fit with close-cropped hair, Grand focuses her thoughtful eyes on any mesmerizing scene that may come along. She carries a small sketchbook, watercolors, a camera and a travel diary to record her impressions. All equipment fits in a backpack, unlike the elaborate provisions of early landscape painters, who arrived with easels and extensive supplies required to complete an oil painting on site. “It sounds like a great idea,” Grand notes, but it’s one she has never attempted.
The real development of her paintings happens after she returns. In her Dupont Circle studio, a long table is spread with sketches torn from a notebook, her travel diary and photos to prompt recollections. “In a sense I’m going back into the journey,” she observes. Pencil in hand, she starts consolidating forms in drawings on paper. The shapes and tones that evolve may suggest ideas from previous trips, or perhaps a poem she has read. “I receive impressions from a lot of sources. Everything gets digested,” says the artist. “Paintings are amalgams of impressions.”
After creating ten or 12 pencil studies, Grand moves to a front room to paint. Tacking up working drawings on a white wall, she glances from these to a blank canvas and begins blocking in large, flat shapes in shades of gray-violet, gray and sienna. With long, muscular strokes in bolder colors, she builds up the surface of the canvas. The fluid images extend around the edges, a surface she leaves exposed. Grand uses only oil paint, which she prefers for its flexibility, applied in thick slabs or thin glazes for subtle development of the surface. And sections of a painting can be reworked over the month it generally takes to complete a large canvas.
The canvases typically measure four by five feet, a size that fills her whole field of vision. “Landscapes like this should be big; you should be able to travel into them,” she explains. Recently, she has worked on small panels, just six- or eight-inches square, condensed versions of her larger canvases.
Grand, who received a degree in fine arts from the University of Wisconsin, decided to take up landscape painting about a decade ago. On a trip to Peru shortly after her father’s death in 2001, the painter relates, “I remember looking at the unbelievably powerful, craggy peaks of Machu Picchu and thinking ‘This is it. This is what I need to do.’” Her father had loved mountains and she had a passion for the outdoors. For two years, she had lived in a cabin without running water or electricity in the woods of British Columbia.
Before turning to landscapes, she built and painted shaped canvases and standing screens that blended images of nature and manmade objects such as walls, fences and architectural fragments. Her earlier work focused on what she calls “emotionally charged interiors” with skewed perspectives, void of people or furniture.
When Grand decided to change direction, she found an immediate affinity for the shapes, forms and weather of the natural world. Clouds drifting against mountains, waves hitting rock—what Grand describes as “the force meeting the object”—she finds infinitely eloquent. “I can see why many artists have spent their lives painting the sea,” she says.
The solitary, primal worlds and grandeur portrayed in Grand’s paintings may seem at odds with the sounds of trucks rumbling and construction crews clanging on the streets outside her studio and near her home, not far away. The artist views it differently. “I live here, but my work doesn’t have to do with where I live,” she says. “It’s carried back with me from other places.”
Writer Tina Coplan is based in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
“Freya Grand: Minding the Landscape” is on view through May 5 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1250 New York Avenue, NW, Washington, DC; nmwa.org. Another exhibition, “Works by Freya Grand,” will run June 19 to July 21 at Gallery Plan B, 1530 14th Street, NW, Washington, DC; galleryplanb.com. For more information about the artist, visit freyagrand.com.
When Leslie Bowman-Friedlander presents her bold, abstract wall quilts at craft shows, a passerby occasionally comments, “I could do that.” Many others, drawn by the vibrant colors to look close up, admire the expertise and admit, “I tried making a quilt once…”
“It looks simple,” says the self-taught quiltmaker, who has spent more than two decades smoothing out the wrinkles of her minimalist fabric art. She hand-dyes the cottons, designs the patterns and hand-stitches the perfect squares, turning humble cotton into contemporary art that appears effortless.
From her studio overlooking what used to be farmland in Reisterstown, Maryland, it is easy to imagine the early days of this venerable craft form, when women at quilting bees came together over their sewing. “I love taking tradition and giving it a twist,” says Bowman-Friedlander.
Pulsating color brings a modern edge to her work. Early on, she ruled out cute calicoes and familiar florals in favor of solid fabrics. But finding strong colors proved more difficult than expected. Salespeople told her, “We don’t do solids. We do tone-on-tone,” which prompted the artist to start dyeing her own.
For two or three weeks each summer, Bowman-Friedlander can be found outside on the deck of her home, next door to the studio, dipping pima cottons and muslin into tubs of water mixed with procion, a chemical dye. Fabrics are laid out to bake for several hours in the sun while the heat intensifies their hues. It often takes three or four repetitions—dyeing and washing each time to eliminate added fixatives—to achieve the earthy, saturated oranges, ochres, mossy greens, rich reds and blues that she prefers.
“It’s like painting, but painting with color,” the quiltmaker says. “This way, you get wonderful colors all your own.” Careful formulas and record keeping are not part of her routine. “It’s one of the fun parts,” she adds. “I’m not going to get exactly the same color twice.” Happy accidents also happen when she irons and stacks fabrics in random color combinations that later find their way into compositions.
Inspiration may strike anywhere. Abstract artist Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square studies influenced her Windows and Rooms series of small geometrics. Mosaic tiles discovered on a visit to Turkey fired her imagination, while motifs in an American Indian blanket resurfaced with brighter hues in her series, Navajo Steps. “If I like the way the colors work, I’ll think about how I can translate that into fabric, and I’ll just start playing,” she explains.
In her studio, Bowman-Friedlander stands by a wallboard covered in white flannel. Small squares sewn from cut-fabric strips are tacked to the board in a trial composition. She shifts these basic blocks around, assessing the color balance, adjusting one here or there, filling in with additional strips to conform to her standard-sized wall quilts, typically 50-inch squares.
This evaluation is repeated over several days, or however long it takes. Her rule of thumb: “If I haven’t moved anything for a week, then I’ll sew it.” She positions the squares beside one of four sewing machines, then chooses from a stock of hundreds of cotton and silk threads to match or contrast with the fabric. Sewn together in strips, the composite becomes the top of a three-layer quilt sandwich, which also includes a cotton-batting core and backing.
The artisan’s long, nimble fingers, like those of a pianist, are able to produce seven or eight running stitches at a time. Hand-stitching proceeds in straight rows in the time-honored way, but in her recent work, threads bend and sway, shaping their own decorative element. She leaves the traditional grid design behind in Pickup Sticks, for which she sliced through fabric and inserted narrow strips in asymmetrical designs that, she says, “keep people’s eyes moving around.”
Like her quilting predecessors, she exercises economy by recycling leftover fabric into colorful 16-inch pillows and other functional accessories. Her quilts vary in size, starting at six-by-12 inches and reaching up to 90 inches square in commissioned works.
Tall and lanky, wearing jeans and a ready smile, Bowman-Friedlander is surprised by the turn of her career. She started out studying creative writing at Johns Hopkins University. After graduating with a degree in art history, she went with a friend to a papermaking workshop and ended up making paper sculpture and cut-paper quilts for seven years. Her paper quilts evolved to incorporate photos and fiber, until only the fiber remained.
“I was the last person anyone thought would be sitting at a sewing machine,” she reflects. “I was the girl who rode horses and played outside with the dogs.” Gazing out of her studio’s wide windows at picture-perfect views, she talks about the satisfaction of creating work recognized by the public and of having earned a Maryland State Arts Council fellowship.
“If I ever stopped enjoying it, I’d stop doing it,” this fortunate quiltmaker concludes.
Writer Tina Coplan is based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. For more information, visit bowmanfibers.com, or contact Leslie Bowman-Friedlander at [email protected] or 410-526-0120.
Elegant bugs may seem like an oxymoron. But in the refined world of Oleg Konstantinov, nature's lowly creatures inspire awe. Meticulously hand-built of sterling silver, each beetle, cricket, frog and butterfly flaps, pivots, bends or flexes just like the real things.
Konstantinov’s engaging creations also revive a nearly forgotten art form—Jizai Okimono. This virtuoso form of small sculpture flourished in Japan in the second half of the 19th century, during a time when people were fascinated with the natural world and mechanical advances were objects of wonder.
Japanese artisans took up “the challenge to create lifelike, flexible, movable critters,” explains Robert Mintz, chief curator and curator of Asian art at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. “It was an effort, especially on the part of metal smiths, to see how far they could push their technique, to show off their incredible mastery of the material.” The museum’s founders, William and Henry Walters, collected some 30 examples of these exotic art forms, which they found more than a century ago at World’s Fairs in Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis and other American cities.
Konstantinov continues that on-the-road tradition as well. From his studio in Kensington, Maryland, he takes his articulated sculptures around the country to a handful of shows each year. He will present his work, along with older Japanese objects, at the Baltimore Summer Antiques Show (August 23 to 26). Last spring at the Smithsonian Craft Show, he was honored with a 2012 Silver Award.
A slim, quiet man with wispy graying hair and a trim goatee, Konstantinov seems an unlikely standard-bearer for the Japanese art. Without formal training, he took up the craft several years after arriving in the Washington area 17 years ago from Minsk in the former Soviet Union.
An interest in carving and small creatures followed him. Back in the USSR, he made a living carving jewelry from animal bone. Making things runs in the family. “My brother and grandfather were very handy,” he reminisces. His grandfather fixed clocks and watches. His older brother, Alexander, now an entomologist at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History, set an example, carving wood and collecting and studying insects.
As a teenager, Oleg began to shape wood, ivory and “any material that could be carved,” he says. His love of Japanese art, especially miniature Netsuke sculptures, came about on visits to museums in St. Petersburg, where his grandparents lived.
Konstantinov discovered the precision craft of Jizai while repairing early examples of the art that he continues to restore and sell. “Japanese, in my opinion, are the real masters in metalwork,” he says. “I was fascinated by it.”
In his studio, which recalls a cabinet of curiosities, his projects in bronze, wood, iron and stag antler mingle with books like The Private Life of Spiders, Auguste Rodin and Anatomy for the Artist. Among the mass of parts and pieces crowding his back work table, a few restoration works-in-progress emerge—a Renaissance-period angel sporting new wings, a Japanese fisherman awaiting his flat wood hat, a carved ivory lobster separated from its nearby claws.
Within a small cardboard box, his own sparkling treasures beckon. A visitor finds it impossible to resist reaching in and picking up each perfectly formed prototype—a dozen in all that he has created over the same number of years. A larger-than-life shrimp’s segmented silver shell suggests being bent, its spindly legs jiggling, its five delicate fins fanning out. A gentle push moves its bulging eyes and bouncing antennae at the opposite end. A gecko lizard begs to be lifted. Each of its five tiny toes on four moveable legs must be wiggled, its hinged mouth and swinging tongue inspected, before all 27 separate sections of its slithery tail are counted in amazement.
“These are basically just toys,” modestly states the masterful conjurer, who calls his studio the Objets D’art Workshop. Each of his own creations is laboriously handbuilt of individually cast parts. The shrimp is composed of 60 parts. A spiraling snake, the largest object at 25 inches long, unites more than 130 moveable parts using wires and carefully tooled mechanical joints.
Each piece is cast separately in a process called “lost wax.” Konstantinov starts by carefully carving the part from a wax block. The wax is surrounded by a plaster mold, then inserted in a sealed metal canister, which is heated until the wax melts away. Molten silver, poured into the vacant cavity, takes the form of the original carving. Once cool, the piece is removed, polished and patinated using acids to bring out its dimensional, textured surface. Konstantinov makes no more than 30 multiples for each design.
These realistic creatures, exacting in every detail, are not simply copies of nature. “Rather than being bound by a need to exactly replicate the animals he’s inspired by, his work shows a move toward beauty,” says the curator, Mintz, placing Konstantinov’s work in the sweep of Jizai history. “He starts from what was being done in Japan and builds on it. There’s a point of departure where he makes it his own.”
Writer Tina Coplan is based in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
For more information, visit olegkonstantinovmetalwork.com. Oleg Konstantinov’s Objets D’art Workshop is located at 4128-A Howard Avenue, Kensington, Maryland; 301-571-5071.
A captivating view of American craft today marks the 40th anniversary of the Renwick Gallery, a branch of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Encompassing works by 40 artists under the age of 40, the exhibition opening July 20th recognizes the boundless ingenuity, expanded boundaries and future direction of today’s evolving craft world.
