Monthly Archives: July 2015

Clark Goldsberry: Brothers + Sisters

July 10, 2015Garrick Infanger

Clark Goldsberry is an artist, photographer, and teacher. He explains his project Brothers + Sisters. “I backpacked from London to Istanbul and photographed over 600 strangers. While planning my trip, I remember worrying that I wouldn’t have anything in common with the people I encountered overseas. We were separated by nationality, race, religion, creed, tradition, culture and language, and I worried that these barriers would be insurmountable. The camera became a tool, or an excuse, to explore these barriers, and I soon realized, as I met and talked with strangers, that we had everything in common. They were woven as threads, with me, into the complex, ever-stretching fabric of the human family. These images, for me, are an affirmation of our interconnectedness.”

How did you get started as an artist? I had a high school teacher that rocked my world. My teacher, Dan Barney, was so passionate and so encouraging, and he gave us assignments that forced us out of our comfort zones, shook our pretensions, and challenged us to look at the world in a new way. That classroom gave me a sense of identity and purpose. It made me want to live creatively and curiously. I got a BFA in photography and graphic design, and I’m currently a graduate student at BYU in art education. I was just hired at American Fork High School as a full time art teacher, and I’m excited and terrified for my first year, starting this August.

Talk about your Brothers + Sisters project. In 2012 I left America for the first time—a backpacking trip from London to Istanbul. Before landing in the UK, I remember looking down at the Atlantic ocean and wondering how I would ever connect with people on this foreign ground. These people came from a different continent, had different nationalities, languages, races, religion, traditions, mannerisms, customs, etc., etc., etc. I worried that I would feel distant, detached and alone. And I did. At least at first, because I was so focused on the differences separating us. After a few days, though, I decided to suspend my suspicions and I began asking strangers if I could take their portraits. I was surprised, every time, at the unique exchanges that followed. Often my approach would be a combination of charades and a poorly pronounced hello. Many of my exchanges were entirely non-verbal, yet surprisingly intimate. I was invited to sit with people for tea, to hold babies, walk dogs, and feed pigeons, I was invited inside strangers homes for dinner, I ate some sort of animal that had been cooked on a pile of charcoal in the middle of a cobblestone street, an old white-haired Italian woman fed me homemade chocolate cake, I played soccer on the beach with children, and an old bearded man held my hand as he spoke to me in Hindi.

Over the course of my two-month backpacking trip, I photographed over 600 strangers. Those fears I once had about not having anything in common with other people quickly evaporated. I realized that we have everything in common. It was a tremendous human experience. I realized that we all have hopes and fears and hungers. We’re all trying to love a little more and be a little better. We all wonder about the world and our place in it. We all wonder what will happen after we die. We all hope we will make a small ding in universe. All the differences I had once seen suddenly became entirely superficial, and I felt that we were all woven together, somehow, in the intricate fabric of the human family. And for me, an only child with no brothers or sisters, feeling connected to these strangers and sharing these fleeting moments was a tender, beautiful thing.

Visit Clark Goldsberry’s website.

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Design

Eric Roberts: An Architect’s Sketchbook

July 9, 2015Garrick Infanger

Eric Roberts is an architect from Las Vegas, Nevada with a penchant for sketching daily. The sketches in this post all come from his sketchbooks on his many travels. He is a proud member of Urban Sketchers and his favorite architect is another sketch artist, Renzo Piano.

What do you like about getting outside and sketching? Sketching is something akin to meditation for me. In all the chaos of the world that we live in as parents, spouses and employees I look to sketching as a refuge from the uncontrollable. There is solace to be found in the delicate control of a line, or a tone and the way that a composition comes together. I started a Las Vegas chapter of the UrbanSketchers because I found that I was only taking the time to sketch when I was out of town. This left me with a great sketchbook full of places around the globe, but no real knowledge of my own city. I love getting out and sketching a new place, each time that I do I learn something that I didn’t know about that locations. Sometimes when I am sketching my hands and my brain are separated and doing different things; for instance, my mind may be working on a troublesome problem from home or work while my hands interpret what my eyes are seeing. Sketching on location is also a way to triage our environments. A sketch is a single selection of many personalities that any specific building or place may choose to portray. As a sketcher I like to go back and look at the work that I did and remember very clearly why that view was selected or why a certain color palette expressed the feelings that I had about the place.

What do you take with you on-location and what do you add when you get back to your desk? My on-location kit has evolved over time. I have attached a picture of the sketch materials that I carry with me every day… it is probably more than I need. My kit includes: 2 sketchbooks, portable water color kit and water containers, two “art kits,” one kit for pencil and the other kit for ink and water color. I prefer to sketch and watercolor in one setting, so it is nice to have those materials with me on site. Oftentimes, however, I will complete a sketch on site and then apply the color at another time. Regardless of where the color is added, I can never leave a sketch and say it is complete without getting all the shadows and light properly located on the sketch. I suppose that is a little bit of OCD. Some of my sketch materials are for methods that I have learned from viewing other sketchers and trying to replicate a technique that I really enjoy from their work. The red markers and white gel pens are for a technique I learned from a sketcher in the Philippines.

Explain Urban Sketchers. Urban Sketchers is a global community of sketchers that endeavors to experience the world one sketch at a time. I was introduced to Urban Sketching by one of my professors at the University of Idaho. He was on the original group that started the organization and he teaches at the annual conference every year. His philosophy was to draw something every day – to draw the best composition, no matter where that composition could be found. It wasn’t until I was a college student that I really caught the bug for sketching the world that I was experiencing. Now I have sketchbooks full of material and it has really become something I look forward to every week.

Follow Eric Roberts on Instagram.

Fine Art

Mary Sauer: The Pressure of Perfection

July 8, 2015Garrick Infanger

Mary Sauer is a painter from my home state of Kentucky who went on to receive a BFA from BYU and further study with William Whitaker, at the Art Students League of New York, and at the Grand Central Academy of Art. She has been featured on the cover of American Art Collector Magazine, in Southwest Art Magazine, and in International Artist Magazine. Sauer and her husband David, an operatic tenor, are currently enjoying a one-month-old baby. Amazingly, Sauer is legally blind, but she adds, “Luckily they have perfected contacts and glasses to where they don’t need to be an inch thick anymore—the glasses I had as a kid were huge.”

Talk about your creative process from idea to finished piece. My ideas begin by jotting down ideas. I am more visually motivated than conceptually motivated by work. For example, if I see a painting that is executed with beautiful brush strokes and paint quality, that tends to be what reaches out and grabs my attention first thing. Seeing something that visually inspires me really gets the creative process going and makes me excited to get into the studio. This has often happened when I look at a painting my John Singer Sargent or Abbott Thayer. I am different than a lot of artists because many times I will make a piece based first on what visually am I excited about putting on the canvas and secondly what the idea conveys. I was told in Grad School that many people work this way, but that you should keep it a secret so that the conceptual meaning doesn’t feel surface level or shallow. I think the more time I spend painting, the more meaning that I can assign to a piece as I go. Often times, I’m not even fully aware of an image’s potential to convey a message until after it’s finished. That being said, I am aware of jotting down emotions or body language and color palettes before I begin the process and why a model might be in a certain environment.

You paint almost exclusively women and some children. To me, the experience of painting a women is closer to my experience of life. I tend to paint people who have personalities or struggles that I understand or who are experiencing similar life events. It’s a way for me to tell my story through others. In fact I’ve been told that my portraits of women don’t feel sometimes like those particular women, even though there likeness is exact. I’ve been told that the portraits feel more like me. I am sharing my experience, but they are telling the story. I am also really interested in color palettes that typically feel more feminine and in painting softer forms. Children have the best faces for painting soft forms.

You talk about the ‘pressure for perfection’. How does this relate to artists in an age of social media? I think we are constantly looking at social media and what other people are doing with their lives. It’s easy to take an amalgamation of what a group of people are doing individually and compare that to what you are experiencing in life. When everyone shares the best parts of their lives, it’s likely that your own life will feel like it doesn’t seem to measure up. My piece Expectations (top of post) examines the shedding of the pressures that we place upon ourselves to be what we think others expect us to be. For me it specifically had to do with the decision of when to have children and how many children to have which I struggled with for many years until I eventually found freedom in accepting that it was okay to let go of others expectations and instead create my own for myself. The looseness of how the paint was handled and the allowance of imperfections in the painting like the dripping of medium help to show an abandonment of control.

What are you working on next? I will always be interested in women and children in environments be they interiors or outdoor spaces. I think the next thing will be based on my own inner struggles, whatever that may entail. I am hoping to be able to continue loosening up and pushing the painterly aspect of the work as well.

Visit Mary Sauer’s website.

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Design

ChadMichael Morrisette: Mannequin Man and Window Guru

July 7, 2015Garrick Infanger

ChadMichael Morrisette is a fabulous SoCal artist and designer made famous for designing some of the world’s most visual and controversial display windows. Morrisette grew up in a Mormon household in Alaska and left both the faith and the 49th state when he was 15 to start his design career in the Los Angeles area. His work has appeared in the windows of Saks Fifth Avenue, Madison, Robert Ellis, and Roseark. He owns a collection of some 450 mannequins he started collecting six years ago. “My first one was a Rootstein. It’s like a Ferrari or a Bentley; they set all the trends. Now I have a collection of all the current makers, and makers that are long-gone; things from the ’50s and ’60s and ’70s and ’80s that no longer exist.”

Our careers are a series of steps–many forward and some back. Did you have a ‘big break’ along the way? I did, many. And I think they will continue to happen for me. My first big break was at 16 years old when I was hired by Nordstrom. It was a very young age to be hired to the visual team. It was where I received a lot of my training in visual display. On the job training. About a year later I was recruited by Saks 5th Ave. also a big break for me. In 2005 meeting Michael Zadowicks was another huge step forward. He introduced me to the amazing world of mannequins and their incredible history. My first freelance client in West Hollywood was where I met Michael. That client opened many many doors for me. And I am very lucky that they were the beginning of where I am now. I firmly believe we create our own worlds and all my “breaks” come to me because I strive to be a good person and always do what’s right. So hopefully….they keep coming.

Walk us through an engagement. How much time do you have to brainstorm? Shop? Design? Install? Tweak? Ha! That really depends on each project. Two weeks is a good amount of time to produce an installation. But an installation can take anywhere from 1-3 days. While having 2-3 people working on them. They take a lot of time and focus. The brainstorming is the easy part. Inspiration comes from all over the place. But sourcing and making is where all the time is spent. Some concepts I have a solid idea of how it will go while others are sometimes very by the seat of my pants. Very creative and go with the flow. Each project and each client/brand is different. Thankfully. It keeps me on my toes.

SoCal is paradise and all, but what do you miss from your childhood in Alaska? Nothing really. I went home for the first time in 19 years last month. I’m very grateful I was raised in Alaska. But my life in West Hollywood is wonderful and gets better with each day. Alaska is a very extremely and harsh climate. I much prefer the Los Angeles sunshine and culture. It was incredible to see my childhood friends while I was there though…I do miss them.

Visit ChadMichael Morrisette’s company website.

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Sculpture

Alex Rane: Sculpture in the South Bronx

July 7, 2015Garrick Infanger

Alex Rane is a sculptor working in the mediums of bronze, clay, and his main focus marble. He graduated with a BFA in sculpture from the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts where he studied anatomy and the figure. Upon graduating, Rane shifted his focus to figurative sculpture with an emphasis on marble. He was selected to compete in the National Sculpture Society Competition as well as the LDS International Art Competition–where he received the People’s Choice award for his bronze figure of John the Baptist (below). Rane feels that carving with marble has allowed him to find a voice he was not able to express through any other medium. Rane and his wife currently live in New York City and will be leaving later this year for Italy.

Where did you grow up? How did you get started in sculpture? I primarily grew up in Oregon, which is where I met my wife. I’ve always had a strong connection to New York though as I was born here and would make frequent trips with my family growing up. My dad is a painter and so we would always stay connected to the culture that New York had to offer. But my interest in sculpture didn’t begin until college when I went on a study abroad to Italy and saw the great Michelangelo sculptures for myself. Up to that point, I had only thought of art as painting.

You worked as a property handler at Sotheby’s. What did you learn? I started working at Sothebys shortly after graduating from College. My College training was fantastic at Lyme Academy College of fine Arts, But it was very traditional. Everything was about anatomy and representing the figure in a classical way. That’s exactly what I was looking for in a college. I wasn’t exposed to the contemporary art world until I moved to New York and started working at Sotheby’s. This was great for me, but at the same time I have also been witness to a side of the art world that as an artist I think I would rather be ignorant to. The business side has much less to do with art as it does with money and prestige.

What’s your best Sotheby’s story? When I first started working at Sotheby’s I remember un-framing a Degas charcoal drawing and pulling the glass away from the front and just thinking it was the coolest thing ever. After that, even moving around a $50 million Warhol is not that exciting.

You went out on your own as a figurative sculptor in 2012. Describe your experience. Starting your career as an artist is by far the hardest part. There is no time for a learning curve. You have to experiment, and find your voice and make money but not do anything to damage your career. There is no one there to tell you what your next step should be. What I’ve found to be the most important thing is to be patient and take it slow. When you get out of school you want things to happen immediately. Fortunately, or unfortunately I was forced to take it slowly. I had no money after moving to New York, so like so many artist, I got a job as an art handler just to get by. As frustrating as it is to not be making art all the time, I actually think I’m better off for it. As my thoughts on art continue to develop, I would hate to feel like my art was trapped.

Visit Alex Rane’s website.

Follow Alex Rane on Instagram.

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