Philadelphia Open Studio Tours East 2012

Philadelphia Open Studio Tours East of Broad Street 2012

Philadelphia Open Studio Tours always feels like the big kickoff of the Fall art season with artists readying their studios for visitors. This year Philadelphia Open Studio Tours was separated by a week with POST West of Broad Street on the weekend of October 6th & 7th and POST East of Broad Street October 20th and 21st offering a nice break in between art crawls. The annual event is huge with artists all over the city from Manyunk to West Philly to Frankford and Fishtown to South Philly – there’s really no way to see it all. This year DoN stayed within walking distance for Philadelphia Open Studio Tours East and visited studios in the Rittenhouse Square area. Philadelphia Open Studio Tours West was a short drive to South Philly to visit several good art friends at Jed Williams Studio and Da Vinci Art Alliance on Saturday and a nice tour of Old City with Katy the ArT DoG on Sunday with a final stop at 1241 Carpenter Street to see Stella Untalan Gassaway.

Saturday started a little rough with a famous Philly artist doing the South Philly Slide through the intersection of 11th and Bainbridge to grab a parking spot, it was a hard to not be mad with the adrenaline rush from the near miss so DoN just flipped him the bird, Philly style, and headed to Jed Williams Studio  to see printmaker Barbara Gesshel‘s show. Jed Williams is a wonderful artist and entrepreneur, his own work is a mix of abstract and expressionist still life paintings but he offered the front gallery to Gesshel, a master printmaker with a vast knowledge of techniques gleaned over time. Some of the work spans decades but the serene woodcuts of plants strung on the gallery’s sunny wall were enthralling. Gesshel can make a simple print of a houseplant look abstract yet representational, mixing metaphors and styles with ease. Barbara Gesshel currently has an exhibit at the Old City Jewish Arts Center.

 

Barbara Gesshel planted herself near the front window and happily painted watercolors while visitors popped in and out off of Bainbridge Street. DoN gave friend Shoshka a virtual tour using Skype since she wasn’t feeling well enough for the art walk-a-thon giving her a chance to meet Gesshel and Jed via cyberspace. Gesshel is an accomplished artist, teacher and muralist and the intimate show at Jed Williams Studio offered a fine start to the sunny Fall day.

 

From Jed Williams Studio it’s a short walk to Da Vinci Art Alliance where DoN visited Michelle Post’s Tronies show, the interview was fascinating and can be found on the old DoNArTNeWs Philadelphia Art News Blog, www.brewermultimedia.com. While Michelle and DoN were chatting there was a loud banging coming from upstairs, thinking it was Executive Director Dave Foss working DoN climbed the stairs to find another printmaker, Rebecca Gilbert hammering away at a slab of wood. DoN had just seen Rebecca Gilbert’s Shine show at 110 Church Gallery and it was a real treat to see her workspace. DoN was unaware that there even was studio space on the second floor of the venerable South Philly artist club so it was a nice twofer to get a chance to talk with the artist and learn a bit about printmaking.

DoN blabbed, “You’ve got to be going crazy with all this happening at once? A show at 110 Church and a move to your new studio.”

Rebecca: “It’s been really crazy and you know I was actually also have a solo exhibition up at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia right now where I went to undergrad. I graduated there in 2000. And I was invited back and so I have twenty works there including a few pretty large scale installations. And at the exact same time, the solo exhibition in Old City and I have four pieces in New Hampshire in a show called Printability. Oh, and then I just took a piece down in Trenton, so all of that happened at the exact same time. It’s a really good thing I’m a printmaker with lots of multiples but then I was like a little concerned I wouldn’t have enough.”

 

DoN dumbly said: “I didn’t realize they were prints! They have such a real sense of the hand.”

Rebecca: “You know, a lot of people – well, let me show you some of my woodblocks – everything at 110 Church Street Gallery and almost everything today are woodcuts. And even printmakers are people that work in woodcut say that they didn’t realize they were woodcuts because they don’t look typically woodcut.”

DoN: “How did you get involved with Da Vinci Art Alliance?”

Rebecca: “I’ve had a studio at 9th and Federal where I rented the whole building with a storefront/studio and then apartments upstairs which I lived in and sublet. But I wanted to move in with my fiance and I was tired of playing landlord. It was great because it made it possible to have this amazing studio but it was stressful. And being responsible. I don’t have trouble being responsible but I have trouble being responsible for other people. I search around for months and they were either too far away, I go to the studio almost every single day, so it’s important that it’s pretty close. And I live one block from here.”

 

DoN: “So, tell me what you’re working on today.”

Rebecca: “When you heard the banging I was showing Naren (her super cute fiance) how to make marks with less traditional ways. Obviously, you can carve wood with knives but the great thing about wood is that you can rough up the grain with a wire brush, but you can also hammer into it. So these are intended for hammering into leather. Or you can just use a hammer to dent the wood. This was done with a knife, just cutting, this is a roofing hammer – I don’t know why it’s like this for roofing but it makes these fabulous marks. So, that’s what all the hammering was about.”

 

Rebecca: “So, it was really great moving in the midst of this flurry of work, it seemed kind of insane to do it. To move when I knew I has all these shows just about to happen but I’m not the kind of person to worry will this fit? Or will I have time? I have some new ideas that I’m really excited to start on and see where they go, they’re not very plotted out. A woman contacted me from Baltimore that is curating an exhibit in a mansion that has huge gardens and art spaces. And she had seen a piece on my website that she wanted to include in a show this month but when she went through my website she said, ‘Wait, I’d rather wait til the Spring and have a feature show.”

Rebecca promised she’ll keep us posted about the venue and the dates.

 

So that was most of DoN‘s Saturday afternoon art crawl wanting to save energy to go to the Skybox Gallery at 2424 York Street to see the installation of Symphony in D Minor by Chris Klapper and Patrick Gallagher, curated by the fabulous Eileen Tognini, which began at 6:00pm.

 

Symphony in D Minor is a major multimedia installation by Chris Klapper and Patrick Gallagher in the cavernous Skybox Gallery. The tubes of light which swayed back and forth changed in intensity as people pushed on them and the room echoed with sounds of thunder. Dancer Kun-Yang Lin started the evening with a solo performance under the swaying light tubes accompanied by crashes of thunder and molten light. The crowd stayed to the edges of the gallery while Kun-Yang Lin moved expressively and animatedly through the space, the light softly illuminating his costume while his limbs created animistic shapes and line, magically transporting the audience to an alien world.

After the applause subsided, the audience rushed the tubes of light reaching up to touch the glowing surface, dads picked up their kids to feel the texture and we all found that if you helped the hanging structures swing higher and faster the sounds became louder and more layered. The artist statement says, “Symphony in D Minor is an interactive installation that engages the participant as both conductor and musician. Activated by touch, a recurring aleatoric composition of atmospheric sounds envelops the audience.”

 

“The large, hand cast cylindrical sculptures were inspired by the Arcus cloud, the magnificent and ominous rolling cloud formations that precede a thunderstorm.” Chris Klapper and Patrick Gallagher‘s artist statement.

The event was a mind blowing conclusion to a whirlwind day of art during Philadelphia Open Studio Tours 2012, it was hard to leave the space with children helping to swing the tubes and keep the thunder rolling. But DoN drank half a mojito and had to go and sit in the car a while before heading home for another day of art crawling.

First thing on Sunday, DoN and Katy the ArT DoG visited Marilyn MacGregor at Bluestone Fine Art Gallery in Old City. Katy laid in the sun while Marilyn MacGregor and DoN talked about art. You can read our interview at SideArts.com Philadelphia Art Blog. Then we headed over to the artist cooperative gallery, Muse, to talk with artist Nancy E.F. Halbert, who wisely chose October for her solo show, which happens every two years, to coincide with Philadelphia Open Studio Tours garnering her additional publicity and those iconic red balloons.

 

DoN talked with Nancy E.F. Halbert about her expansive exhibit of expressionist paintings.

Nancy: “The work is abstracted but still has a feeling of an image. And it is figurative as well as some landscapes that I’m starting to show more. It’s based a lot on my life as a dancer and choreographer. And this body of work was really about healing because from those years of dancing I had spine problems. And I had a spinal fusion and I had this show date and I needed the surgery so I knew I had a year to paint. And that’s so what I did this  year was heal through painting. And that’s how the works came out.”

DoN: “Do you start with a certain theme in mind?”

Nancy: “No, this whole thing began with finding black gesso as a medium. So, black gesso was put on over the white of the canvas and then I would sit back and look and see how the white and the black created positive and negative spaces and I’d work from the figure. I’d see if someone was speaking to me from those forms I created with the gesso. And that’s when I would find the lines of the body and paint the figure. Some of these are not with a model at all, from being a dancer but also from going to drawing workshops and having sketches. So working off my sketches and croqui’s that I’ve done with the figure in front of me.”

DoN: “Do you still attend workshops?”

Nancy: “Absolutely. I do and I also teach art at Main Line Art Center and Creutzberg Center campus in Radnor.”

 

DoN and Katy the ArT DoG‘s final stop for Philadelphia Open Studio Tours was 1241 Carpenter Street Studios so we could visit Stella Untalan Gassaway to sit and talk. We were exhausted and thirsty after climbing the stairs but we were greeted by the amazing artist Danielle Bursk working on one of her huge drawings. She decided to take the opportunity to work since she was obligated to stay put for the day but we headed over to Stella’s fab studio to sit a spell. When we arrived Stella Untalan Gassaway was deep in conversation with none other than Isaiah Zagar and his wife Julia, explaining her drawing-a-day project. Katy and DoN drank some water but Katy the ArT DoG became restless and started barking, apparently bored with the conversation, so we left for a while to visit Danielle Bursk.

 

Watching Danielle Bursk work is as transcendental as her drawings, she has to reach and stretch to make marks on the huge sheets of paper with a stylus and ink as she conceptualizes the abstract surfaces. Like waves or clouds or floating objects in space her drawings read so differently in person than in photos. Are they landscapes or amobeas? Waves or clouds? The density of marks goes from pitch black to translucent white creating a spacial aura that is recognizably her own style. And she’s so nice, even holding Katy’s leash while DoN took photos.

 

We finally had time to sit and talk with Stella Untalan Gassaway while Katy relaxed but frankly DoN doesn’t remember much about what we talked about. Art, politics, money, publicity, dropping the F bomb repeatedly…Stella’s business heavybubble websites for artists was responsible for the excellent Philadelphia Open Studio Tours 2012 catalog and yet she makes time everyday to draw and post on her blog. Whenever we’re together we talk a lot, one of these days DoN will do a formal interview and try to extract some of the artist’s ideas. theories and work ethics. But until next year Philadelphia Open Studio Tours 2012 was an enlightening glimpse into the inner workings of artists minds, studios, styles and art.

 

Written and photographed by DoN Brewer.

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Read more about Philadelphia Open Studio Tour West 2012 at SideArts.com