Opening June 1: The Clearest Way

Groveland Gallery is pleased to present a unique exhibition of paintings, prints and sculpture by three Minnesota artists. Inspired by elements of the landscape—both natural and urban—artists Abigail Woods Anderson, Clara Ueland and Cynthia Rae Levine seek to cultivate a balance between representation and abstraction. Their title is based on an excerpt from John Muir’s journals: “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forested wilderness.” This passage echoes the shared artistic approach of Anderson, Ueland, and Levine: their art-making is defined by their conceptual processes, resulting in a compatibility of subject matter, light-filled and detailed compositions, and simple yet sophisticated forms.

Science continues to inform Abigail Woods Anderson’s paintings and prints. Her most recent collection of compositions are inspired by the effects of Dutch elm disease on the shady boulevard near her childhood home in Minneapolis. Using tracings from the stumps leftover from the impact of the disease, as well as scientific knowledge of the boring beetle that carries the fungus from tree to tree, Anderson has created paintings that pay homage to the trees, while drawing attention to their demise. The artist explains: these paintings are embellished with patterns derived from the elm tree’s natural history and Dutch elm’s disease’s pathology. I scavenged and restyled images from botanical illustrations and figures, entomology databases, micrographs, and art history, especially landscape paintings and studies by John Constable. The resulting works are a meditation on ecology, contemplating the entangled fates of four organisms: the elm tree, the beetle, the fungus, and humans.

Raising my glass to . . . podcasts

This weekend's painting benefited from non-stop podcasts. It was a delight to discover the conversational wisdom (and humor) of "Dame is a 4-Letter Word" & "Science... sort of."

Cheers to the podcast hosts! Slàinte!

Description of Scolytus multistriatus

Entomologist as poet?

... frons of male is flat, oblong and hirsute; frons of female is weakly convex, weakly hirsute and sometimes glabrous; pronotum is densely punctate on upper surface; triangular scutellum densely hirsute; elytra dark red-brown, oblongly oval and bluntly rounded apices; grooves on elytra are dense, deep and sharply punctured; narrow interstices are densely punctured

Source: ForestryImages.org

Erik Satie's Helpful' Hints to Performers

These Gnossiennes of 1890 were the first pieces in which [Erik] Satie did away with bar-lines and both key and time signatures. They were also the first to contain the 'helpful' hints to performers such as

Postulez en vous-même (Wonder about yourself),
Ne sortez pas (Don't leave), 
and Munissez-vous de clairvoyance (Be clairvoyant).

Source: Peter Avis, 1988 (Liner notes, Erik Satie, Anne Queffélec piano, Virgin Classics Ltd)

Oh Delight!

A day in the studio, sunlight pouring over my table, listening to Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Working on the surface treatment pictured below (detail, in progress).

This is it. This is how time is spent. This is how paintings are painted.

A lot of my time is spent like this. Colonizing paper continents with micro-mark-making while listening to podcasts, audio books, and online audio programming. Here I'm listening to a Dharma Talk by Mark Nunberg, guiding teacher at Common Ground Meditation Center.

Found Drawings

The windows of my workspace. Found drawings composed of shadows and traced contours.