Orra White Hitchcock at Folk Art Museum, NY
until October 14, 2018 "Charting the Divine Plan: The Art of Orra White Hitchcock (1796–1863)" explores the confluence of art, love, science, and religion in the extraordinary art of Orra White Hitchcock, one of America’s first female scientific illustrators. The exhibition traces her development from schoolgirl projects to highly accomplished renderings of the natural scenery of the Connecticut River Valley and also includes less well-known, colourful paintings on cotton, some more than twelve feet long. American Folk Art Museum
2 Lincoln Square, New York, NY 10023
www.folkartmuseum.org
until July 15, 2018 The Good Luck Gallery partners with Just Folk for an historic exhibition of master African-American woodcarvers Elijah Pierce (1892-1984) and Leroy Almon (1938-1997). Each would use his craft to further his religious and social mission, with Pierce serving as mentor to the younger Almon. Carvings of tigers, hippos and snakes unite with bas-relief carved story panels in this timely exhibition that explores identity, community, popular culture, and religion in powerful, personal style. The Good Luck Gallery
945 Chung Kind Road, Los Angeles, CA 90012
www.thegoodluckgallery.com
Recent Acquisitions at Collection de l'Art Brut
until December 2, 2018 Acquisitions 2012–2018 invites visitors to discover a selection of works that include several pieces added to the Collection de l'Art Brut holdings since Sarah Lombardi became the museum's director in 2012. More than 150 drawings, paintings, sculptures, textiles and photographs highlight the museum's dynamism. Collection de l'Art Brut
Av. des Bergières 11, 1004 Lausanne, Switzerland
www.artbrut.ch
June 16 – October 28, 2018 "L’envol" is the final exhibition at La maison rouge, which will close its doors on October 28, 2018. Barbara Safarova, Aline Vidal and Bruno Decharme have co-curated this exhibition which explores mankind's dream of flying. Some 200 works include installations, films, documents, paintings, drawings and sculptures. La Maison Rouge
10 bd de la bastille - 75012 Paris, France
www.lamaisonrouge.org
Featuring: - Julia Sisi
- Metropolitan Museum
- Edmund Monsiel
- Kemel Leeford Rankine
- Jana Paleckova
- Josephine Tota
- Odinga Tyehimba
- Evelyne Postic
RAW VISION 97 PREVIEW
Stephen Warde Anderson: Artists in Conversation
On the opening of his exhibition at Intuit, Chicago, the Midwestern outsider artist, Stephen Warde Anderson, was interviewed by the artist, curator, writer and folk-art collector, Michael Noland
Mike Noland: How did you get started as an artist? Stephen Warde Anderson: I never thought of being an artist until I was past 30 – had no art training or education except for a 7th grade art class. I used to get books from the library and, for a time, I was checking out books on the great artists. I was already doing pencil and charcoal drawings; this got me interested in painting. With little idea of what I was getting myself into, I decided to try my hand at it.
Guinevere, 1993, tempera on shade cloth on hardboard, 34 x 24 ins. / 86.4 x 60.1 cm
Did you have any early art influences? Such as your mother’s painting. I guess I do have some art genes, at least on my mother’s side. She worked in watercolours when she was young; in later years she did coloured pencil drawings and did so right up until the time she died last year at 96. Her mother was a watercolourist as well, and her father, E. Warde Blasidell – I’m partly named for him – was a professional artist, an illustrator and cartoonist. His heyday was in the 19-aughts. He was noted for his whimsical drawings of anthropomorphic animals dressed in clothes – rabbits in top hats, bears in frock coats, that sort of thing. His style of whimsy is present in some of my own paintings, but as he died before I was born, I think the
familial art influences are mostly… subliminal. Even today, I don’t think my art is influenced particularly by anyone, even by artists I admire. It all comes from within.
Jane Austen, 1987, crinoline on hardboard, 28 x 22 ins. / 71.1 x 55.9 cm
How did you discover or invent your early technique of using tempera, saliva, a needle for a stylus and bottle caps for a palette? I was not very successful at drawing, so in the early 1980s I concluded I needed to embark upon the great painting experiment. I broke the bank and bought myself some Prang tempera – just black, white, red, yellow and blue. I was confident that I could mix the rest of the colours I might need. Tempera was too watery for me, but the paint became manageable when it dried to a pasty consistency. Once, I unceremoniously spat upon the dry paint, and, lo!, it became a paste again. The next day I reliquified the hardened paints with water, but, doggone, they became too runny again. Aha, I said to myself, it’s the saliva that makes
the paint pasty! I soon devised a technique of mixing up the paints in pop bottle caps. The next day they would be hard and I could reliquify them by spitting on them. It was great!
The Jinni, 1995, tempera and gouache on hardboard, 24 x 32 ins. / 61 x 81.3 cm
Since a brush was inadequate, I eventually found that I could make an ideal stylus from the plastic of whipped cream containers. As I developed a pointillist technique, I began to use sewing needles to dot and sometimes striate the surface with paint, often over a coat or two of paint already laid on by the stylus. I never found canvas suitable. In the late 1980s, I used strips of curtain-stiffening glued to board and then, for a long time, painted on window shade cloth fused to hardboard. By 1995 I was using gouache, then acryla-gouache, and by 2002, acrylics. This necessitated using brushes – a loathsome but necessary concession to conventionality. My painting surface became illustration board glued to hardboard and, more recently, to canvas boards.
Karen Carpenter, 1992, tempera and acrylic on shade cloth on hardboard, 22.5 x 20 ins. / 57.2 x 50.8 cm
A lot of your work is portraits of actors and actresses you admire. How did that become the theme? I think my original intention was to create pictures of my favourite actresses. Looking at movies and TV has been a lifelong obsession. I must have at least 6,500 films and have seen thousands more. There are many films I’ve seen dozens of times. You know, your favourite films and TV shows become a part of your life and you can live vicariously within them. So I get a lot of material from the cinema, inspiration for portraits and historical scenes.
Why did you do some paintings in sepia tone?
It was another idea I hit upon early on. The sepia, or burnt sienna portraits, capture some of the antique flavour of sepia photographs. In sepia the light tints are close to flesh colour and it looks semi-natural. Although I have a love for bright colours, I am periodically drawn to monochrome. It has a simplicity, and much of composing a picture involves simplification: figuring out how not to paint what’s unimportant.
Read the rest of this article in Raw Vision 97, out now! All reproductions of work courtesy of Kieth Sadler.
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