July 8 – 13, 2012

Level: Open with basic drawing/painting skills
Tuition: $495|Lab Fee: $25

On the Campus of Western Carolina
University, Cullowhee, North Carolina

I’ll be teaching a workshop at Cullowhee Mountain Arts the week of July 8-13th. The workshop is called “Expanding the Palette” and I have been excitedly planning five days of sharing what I’ve learned about using gold leaf, texture and collage elements in paintings. Here’s the course description:

From the imprints left behind from the hairs of Rembrandt’s brush to the paint tube caps hidden in a Jackson Pollock canvas, paintings come to life unexpectedly when they incorporate traces of the physical world. This workshop will allow participants to explore and create with a wide range of materials. We will explore both traditional and contemporary mixed media additions to 2D painting, creating presence in unexpected ways. Exercises will include using texture as a drawing element, techniques from the decorative arts such as stenciling and gilding, and physical additions to the paint itself.

For more information and to register, go to www.cullowheemountainarts.org or give them a call at 828.342.6913.

Classes will be held on the campus of Western Carolina University- not too far from Asheville, NC, the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, and the site of the fabled Black Mountain College. I hope you can join us there!

I am encouraged by this project and what it represents– a collaboration between contemporary art-making and Anabaptist history and practice as embodied by the congregation at Germantown. There is room for good work here.

The GMMAP website describes the project this way:

The Germantown Mennonite Museum of Art & Peace was established in 2011 as a project of Germantown Mennonite Church and seeks to promote visual creativity and ideas of peacemaking and social justice with a public program of changing exhibitions and projects that interact with the Church’s meeting space.  Dating back to 1683, Germantown Mennonite Church is the oldest Mennonite congregation in North America, and has consistently been at the forefront of the Anabaptist traditions of peacemaking and social justice.

If you are in the Philadelphia area before the end of this year, stop by and take a look. I’ve got two new paintings in this show along with a selection of other work- go and you will be among the first to see them. Hours and directions are on the GMMAP website. Send them an email at office@germantownmennonite.org to set up an appointment to see the work in this special context.

And– if you are another artist to whom this project might be of interest– the project is actively soliciting submissions.

Once again this year, the doors of the studio will open for the Dumbo Arts Festival.

Hours this year are Saturday, September 24th 12-8 pm and Sunday, September 25th from 12-6pm. Stop by during those hours and you can preview some of the work that will be going to the upcoming show at the Germantown Mennonite Museum of Art and Peace in Philadelphia, including a couple of new paintings and a complete set of the new digital prints.

More info is available from the festival’s official site. There’s a page with a map showing our location and even an iphone app. Hot transportation tip– get here by using the new East River Ferry.

Here’s a sneak peek:

Work in progress in the studio, September 2011

Wine Reception for Migration

Saturday, September 17, 7-9pm
543 Union Street (at Nevins)
Brooklyn, NY 11215
718.243.1572
Directions for getting there

Proteus Gowanus bills itself as an interdisciplinary gallery and a reading room. I would add that it is an example of genius in the fully unpacked meaning of the word: brilliant and complete unto itself, the project is also very much of its place and generous of spirit. It is worth the trip. Go visit and be nudged, inspired, and informed.

There will be fifteen artists participating in this exhibit, along with an artist-in-residence, several correspondents, and a new blog called Proteoscope. Take a look around the Proteus Gowanus website for more information about the many avenues by which the Migration theme will be traveled.

You can see how the light changes in the studio during the work day, and how I like to move the painting around. But mostly you see how funny it all looks speeded up!

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’ll have two paintings in this show this week in lovely Nolita, NYC. The opening reception for the show is Thursday evening, May 19th, 2011, from 6-10pm, and you are invited. The show is open for two additional days- Friday, May 20 and Saturday, May 21 from 10am-6pm. But that’s it! There are just three days to catch this renegade/pop-up event.

The two paintings I’ll have in the show are “Brim” and “Transfigured”.

Here’s where:

Evergreene: The Artists and Their Art
Old School
233 Mott Street, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10012

So what’s this show about?

Evergreene is the name of a leading architectural arts studio here in Manhattan. Working there for several years after moving to New York taught me a few things graduate school simply could not. I quickly learned how to work collaboratively on huge paintings with a group of highly skilled artists from all over the world. I made many artist friends, and gained experience with a whole range of techniques. A highlight was working as a restoration technician on a several landmark murals, including the lobby ceiling of the Chrysler building. After spending many hours cleaning old varnish and dirt off these beautiful paintings, I realized that my artist education was coming full circle. By learning to work gently back through the layers obscuring an old mural, I had finally learned to paint backwards.

It’s going to be fun to share the walls of this exhibit with some wonderful artist peers and friends. I hope you will join us Thursday.

Evergreene has put together a tumblr blog of all the work in the show.

These are unusual prints. When you see them in person, it’s obvious immediately. They are shiny. Like silver-leaf shiny.  They shimmer. When you reach out to touch one, they suddenly reflect the color of your own hand. When the sunlight streaming through the skylights here at the studio is interrupted by a passing cloud, the change is startling. Words fail, so here’s a video:

How’s that possible? Well, because these prints are made over aluminum leaf. The entire image area of each piece is covered with aluminum leaf by hand before they are printed with an archival, black-ink only digital image. Aluminum leaf  is great because it doesn’t tarnish rapidly like genuine silver leaf would. And we use a black-ink-only printing process because we’re a little bit Amish like that.

The images in the prints were generated while working on one drawing over a period of about a year. Each “state” is a kind of snapshot of this one drawing at a point in time. As time progresses, the drawing gets darker. So the progression through the five prints is a progression into a twilight of sorts. To nudge that idea a little further, two of the prints contain additional touches of gold leaf. State 3 has flecks of gold that roughly correspond to the position of stars in the night sky surrounding the constellation Ophiuchus, or the serpent bearer. The last print in the suite, State 5, is accented with a thin crescent of gold– the final sliver of a waning crescent moon.

The aluminum-leafed image area of each print measures 6″ by 8″ and the outside dimensions of the paper are 8″ by 10″. It’s the perfect size for looking at up close. Each state is part of a very limited edition of fifteen prints. The nature of the hand-applied aluminum leaf means that there are small differences between each of the 15 prints of any given edition. I think you’ll find that these imperfections are lovely and add value.

Each individual print is detailed in the work-on-paper section of this website. There you can find more side view snapshots of each print along with a little bit about why each state is special.

The prints. Click to enlarge:

Here’s what’s exciting about this show:

1. We all get an excuse to visit Charlottesville for the opening on April 1st. I’ll be there. If you stop by, we can say hello in person!
2. Showing with three talented fellow Virginians makes me happy (yes, I live in Brooklyn, but I will always be Virginian).
3. There will be a poetry happening during the opening.
4. Bill Bennet, one of the fantastic teachers who encouraged me in the first place, will have his Byron’s Telescope interactive sculpture outside the gallery for opening night.
5. It’s a show about celestial stars. Think about it: stars are the most distant thing we can sense with our bodies. Very, very old light. Faint, beautiful. Perfect turf for some refreshing visual art.
6. And being about the heavens at night, we get to mention the Dark Sky Association. If you don’t yet know about the fight for lighting practices that promote human health, benefit wildlife, and turn back the tide of light pollution– check out the trailer to the new documentary City Dark, which just premiered at SXSW last week.

And one more little thing: I’ve been working on a suite of new prints. Smaller this time, but really special. I’m printing over aluminum leaf. Seeing this in person is the best way to really understand. They glint in the dark. They will be in this show. Come see. And click on this progress snapshot to see a little bit closer:

Here’s the text from the announcement with the gallery info:

Bill Bennett * Barbara MacCallum

with Kathryn Henry-Choisser and Randall Stoltzfus
in The Passage Gallery

April 1 – 30, 2010
Opening reception Friday, April 1, 5:00 – 8:00

Chroma Projects
418 E. Main on the Mall
Charlottesville, VA 22902
434.202.0269 | 434.589.3117
www.chromaprojects.com

In this case I’m referring to an obsolete 24″ Epson Stylus Pro 7500 that I picked up for free about a year ago. Once a commercial printer sporting 5 colors plus black, it’s still a sturdy machine, if a little cranky and low-res by today’s standards.

But this printer has been set up to do something that was never intended. The original inks have been replaced with a set that I mixed up myself, using examples others have posted online, and using special software created by an enthusiast. This custom inkset is made using a commercial carbon black ink that has been diluted with a home-made base solution to create five shades of grey. The result can only print in black and white– but the output is very light-fast and chemically stable. And since the printer can now use shades of grey instead of dithering to to make a printed area less dark, the effective resolution has gone way up.

How’s that Amish? Well, a little background: A few generations ago, one part of my family was Old Order Mennonite. If you saw them, you’d call them Amish, as they dressed plain and drove horses and buggies. But if you looked carefully you might have noticed that they used tractors on the farm, instead of just horses. Gasoline tractors were just becoming widely available, and promised better quality of life. So they were allowed– with a restriction: the tractors could only use steel wheels. You see, steel wheels worked fine on the farm, but were unwieldy and slow on paved roads. And this clarified the the difference between a gasoline tractor and the automobile, which already symbolized all that was “englisher” or outside to the plain Mennonites and Amish. The steel wheeled tractor was a way to adopt a technology while maintaining their emphasis on small communities and separation from the world at large.

So for me, there’s a funny resonance in crippling this old inkjet printer by replacing it’s bright color inks with grays. There’s a separation from the world at large– I can no longer go and buy ink cartridges from the store if I run out. Instead I have to mix dilutions of ink and refill the ones I already have. And in a virtual sense, a community is reinforced, as I learn from the group of people who have made this same conversion and who share their successes and frustrations via the internet. And I’m working to produce prints with carbon pigment and quality cotton rag paper, true archival materials. In art market terms, that’s kind of like the moral high ground that my ancestors thought so important. And it feels right.

Of course, as with any technology, this is all changing very rapidly. The specific church that I refer to here has split many times, as new decisions had to be made and things got murky. I’m sure that my decision to use this particular set-up in my studio will be just as unclear in the long run.

But for now, I’m just excited to see what it can do!

An experimental print of the painting "Bear-lithia" using carbon ink