Ellen C. Caldwell | ECLAIRE.me

Susan Logoreci captures that feeling beautifully in her drawings. In this Process of a Painting, we are looking at her detailed hand behind the creation of U.S.C. (Urban Swarm Contemplated), 2014. Using colored pencil on paper, she creates a wonderfully and surprisingly rich and bold palette, while exploring an equally intricate subject.

Inspired by a book of photos from 1911 when Niagara Falls actually froze over, Rebecca Bird’s exhibit explores this natural wonder beautifully. Some of her works seemed totally abstract at first glance. Just glancing from painting to painting, I could see a myriad of crystals forming, with stalactite-like formations, dark purple and blue ice caves shrouded in mist, stunted waterfalls, and scenic hints of humanity on the landscape’s horizon in the distance.

It’s not often that I get to interview an old friend, whose artwork I love and spirit I admire. But Craft & Culture’s Ledger Magazine recently gave me the opportunity to do so with my junior high friend, fellow art lover, and former running buddy Ela Boyd. You can buy hard copies here, and read the […]

Kenny Cole is about one quarter of the way through creating a 450-panel series called “Flood.” His medium is gouache, paper, and verbiage, taken from both the Bible and the comments section from an online article. With humor and a keen intelligence, Cole’s work challenges viewers to consider the flood of imagery, verbose interactions, and daily struggles to find humanity in this growing digital age.

In “Sweet Broken Now,” Rebecca Farr’s third solo show at Klowden-Mann, Farr made Manifest Destiny her subject of inquiry and aimed to capture the complex history arising from the ideology and religious fervor that justified white westward expansion during the early 1900s.

An interview with artist Edgar Arceneaux about sci fi, incongruities, serendipity, MLK, iconicity, Tupac, and Kermit. Arceneaux’s “A Book and a Medal: Disentanglement Equals Homogenous Abstractions” opened at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects earlier this month. Challenging and compelling, the show is a triple threat of musts (must-see, -feel, and -experience) all in one.

Ni Nyoman Sani welcomed me to her Balinese home, to Mother Art Space (then called Seniwati Art Space), and to her family’s shared creative workshop and gallery Muja Art Studio. Sani also helped to arrange multiple interviews with talented female artists ranging from internationally known painters like Mangku Muriati to younger emerging artists like Emy Triani and Ni Ketut Ratnasih.

In his examination of self, Rashid presents a rich body of work and an enticing series of questions about the same topics that haunt the Frenglish Empire – the role of influential and pejorative stereotypes, racism, capitalism, and imperialism. Here, we see Two Feathers as Rashid and the reverse – something Rashid described as a “trompe-l’œil effect of Two Feathers without the long extensive narrative story.” In that sense, Rashid replaces the epic historical narrative with a more personal, contemporary American narrative – though I would argue that the Frenglish and American worlds and messages are far more similar than they are different.

Gyre: The Plastic Ocean is open through September 7th. If you want to learn more or use content from the exhibit as an instructional tool, their educator’s page created by the Center for Alaskan Coastal Studies contains a wealth of resources, lesson plans, and activities. The exhibition book is also rich in content and well worth the small price.

As many of us in creative fields know, artistic inspiration is always something of a process. As artists, we are constantly pursuing new creative styles, mediums, subjects, narratives, and voices. Through this process of searching for ourselves, we get used to the circle of finding our grounding, losing our footing, and continuously rebuilding our foundations.