Category: Fine Art

Chelsea Steinberg Gay: In One World or the Other

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Chelsea Steinberg Gay is a sculptor, welder, artist, and creative soul. She received a BFA in Sculpture from SUNY Purchase. As she explains, “In the last three years I have been focusing on my own ancestry: generations of Jewish European immigrants, Holocaust victims and survivors, and life-long New Yorkers. I often work from my memories of growing up Jewish, in the city. Against this background of Jewish themes and issues, my most recent work has been an inquiry into the culture and religious practices of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day saints into which I married and converted. I examine orthodox Mormonism through the lens of the secular, socialist Judaism in which I was brought up, never fully immersed in one world or the other.” Gay lives in New York City.

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Tell us about your evolution as an artist. I started taking art classes regularly around age 12, in Brooklyn, New York, where I was born and raised. I learned from friends’ parents, from hanging around movie sets where my dad was working as an electrician, where I shadowed scenic artists, and from public school art teachers. I went to the Brooklyn museum for classes as both a toddler and a teen. I was accepted to LaGuardia High School as an art major, and from that point onwards I was making art full-time, both in studio classes at school and whenever I had a spare moment. I started welding classes at age 15 and made a little steel sculpture that got me into the art program at SUNY Purchase. When I wasn’t on campus there I was making sculpture in my parents basement and taking classes at the Art students league or the Compleat Sculptor. I tend to forget how much formal art training I’ve had over the years, when I was hunting for MFA programs I was sort of stunned at how poor many really notable schools facilities were; Purchase really spoiled me, especially when it came to bronze casting. I learned all that I know and do now at Purchase, I owe those professors a huge debt of gratitude. My bronze castings keep my lights on, which in turn allows me to do whatever I please in my studio. I used to scavenge for weird or unusual objects, and I really like thrift shops and consignment stores. My grandfather is a bit of a hoarder, and I made some of my first sculptures on his farm in South Carolina when I’d visit, since he had mountains of every conceivable bit of fascinating trash, from cast glass perfume bottles in the shape of ladies in fancy dresses to a full-size school bus that was inhabited by countless hornets, decaying on the side of a dirt road near where he kept his goats. His cows ate out of a giant abandoned tire, which held their feed amazingly well. I think that the urge to find and use some kind of relic or prop, or to make something that feels like such an object is at the root of a lot of what I do. A professor once told me that I’m an object-maker at heart, which I think is essentially true. I also like installations and performances, but on a day-to-day basis I tend to make objects. Beauty is crucially important to me. Another professor taught me that your art has to strike at the gut—hit the primary impulse first, the secondary, cognitive, impulse second. If something is visually appealing, not necessarily cute or pretty, but satisfying to look at I think of it as successful. I’ve evolved from someone who had no particular direction, to someone who works towards an idea of making something that satisfies certain requirements, that it is visually provoking, stems from a genuine place and has a strong sense of self as an object – if an object can have that sense…I like the finished works to have a kind of personality, to be true, even if that truth is only in the act of yearning to be true, or of the truth inherent in questioning to reveal something genuine.

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You once wrote, “I am working to create a visual language, which makes Latter-day Saint symbolism more accessible to others.” I wrote this for a failed application to a graduate school program, then I put the whole thing on my website because I liked the way it flowed together. That is just one of the aims of my work, but it’s probably the most convoluted. I suppose the question I might get from people would be why even bother? The Church goes to great lengths to make its concepts very simple and clear. As an international organization that does significant work in developing countries, this simplicity is paramount. The symbolism I’m talking about has been represented in countless ways – take my “Righteous Priest” Masks (above). Literally, you could represent the idea of the priesthood with historical paintings or images of men – or women – giving blessings. But that’s not really the kind of visual language I’m talking about. The best creators of new languages take you away from the familiar into their own realities – Joseph Beuys and his visual language, for example, where each material he used was imbued with a special symbolism that was connected to an origin myth that he created, or Anthony Burgess, who created the language used in the film Quest for Fire, or in his book A Clockwork Orange. These were artists and writers who sought to speak their own truth by pulling their audience out of a literal space and into a symbolic one, and to my thinking that makes their work all the more rich and thrilling, albeit demanding and sometimes alienating. So, to look at my “Righteous Priests” through that lens of a visual language, what is there now? African mask references, men’s dress shoes, (worldly claim to authority, where one stands, where one is grounded), a hierarchy of materials… everything this represented symbolically, visually, the concepts are virtually all LDS. In terms of the reference to African masks, there is the issue of race and the priesthood, and the inexcusable history of the church barring men of color from holding the priesthood. As it happened, the church is inextricably tied to Africa for me, as that is where my in-laws served a mission, it is where my husband works as a humanitarian aid professional, and it is where I found myself seeing the church’s humanitarian work, which broke down some of the barriers in my hardened, acerbic little heart. The challenge of creating a visual language that makes LDS more accessible to others is all about how successfully the piece is executed. Ideally, a beautiful or fascinating object will draw a viewer in, and have them asking questions, in a way that a literal or figurative work of art can’t always do. The work doesn’t have a goal to bring people to any one perspective, but to take these concepts – a priesthood on earth, laden with all the complications of being humans on the earth – and to hold up a prism to the ideas, allowing them to refract and allow for people to bring in their own perspectives on the subject, to find their own way in to the concept at the heart of the work.

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The nest and the obelisk are recurring images in your work. What reverberates with you regarding these? The nest is pretty literal for me. I made the first of my nests to cope with transitioning into motherhood. I had a lot of people telling me I was at the end of making art, since I was going to be a mom now. Those people were idiots, but I was scared enough of losing myself in motherhood that I started to make nests, trying to think about the concept of being the head of a family, of being a parent, of managing a household, and how the women before me had done it…I had no idea, but it was a good way to kill a bit of time before the baby came, and in the end people responded really strongly to the nest. A friend of mine makes them also, for the same reason – people like them, they sell…everyone’s got to pay the bills. On a deeper level, though, how many mother-artists are there, really? When you look at the impossibility of being an artist, and then dump being a mother on top of that, it’s a lot to manage, and many people don’t make it work. Many do, also, but they’re often mum on how it’s done. So the nests are about mother-anxiety, about home making, and puttering around and finding balance…until the nest is done, and the babies fly and you get a cat. As for obelisks, I really fell in love with them because of Edward Gorey. My parents house in Brooklyn is a block away from Greenwood Cemetery, and there’s obelisks in there too. Something about them is deeply satisfying, visually. I did some homework and found out that the obelisk predates the cross, that they’re originally from Egypt, but are also in Ethiopia, which I visited years ago with my husband, and fell madly in love with, and that there are also plundered obelisks amidst sunken ship wreckage at the bottom of the sea. They’re staggeringly beautiful in person, and the concept behind them is the ascent to God. The line draws your eye up to the heavens. The cross was the intersection of that vertical infinity of God and the horizontality of human death. I like the former concept, also, as a Jew I struggle with crosses a bit. I may have converted to the LDS church, but I’ve never been able to help being a Jew, just look at the first part of my surname, it’s my ethnicity, being a native New Yorker only exacerbates it. The obelisk feels ancient in a way that is thematically safe, in a pre-Christian way. Suffice it to say, I’m more comfortable in my Jewish-themed work than I am in my Mormon-themed work.

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What’s next for you? I do very little showing, maybe twice a year in very unglamorous circumstances, because I’m fortunately swamped with commissions or children most of the time. I spent a couple years looking through all these graduate programs for fine artists, and when I finally thought I found a great fit, they didn’t accept me. Once I started chatting with MFA students regularly I realized that I wasn’t really into the idea of a fine art graduate program, I mean, I’m not desperately in need of studio art classes, and I’ve been working consistently for well over a decade, what I needed was to be better researched on my subjects, lucky me I got accepted to a grad program in Jewish Art and Visual Culture at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. I began a series a few years ago on my paternal Ashkenazi lineage, on being a New Yorker, and a Jew and all the complications of that, I made Emet – my golem – based on an old legend out of Prague, but when I went to further my research to make new work I hit upon a series of barriers, the least of which was language. JTS is getting me through those barriers and giving me fuel for the next thing, which is not only to continue examining the Jewish/Mormon intersections that I find so interesting, but also to dig deeper into my Jewish roots. If it wasn’t for the sense of a loving God that I found as a Bat Mitzvah student and Camp Kinderland kid, I’d never have joined the church in the first place, and if I hadn’t joined the church, I doubt my yearning to understand my mother religion and culture (well, one of them, my mother is Southern Baptist, descended from Scotch-Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch immigrants,) would be nearly as strong. So I’m getting my MA, and I’ll be taking my family with me when I do my internships at museums, hopefully one in Tel Aviv and one in Prague, and I’m going to keep making art all the time, it’s been just about 20 years of me making art, I’m not really interested in quitting now, God willing, I can keep it up, and maybe show and sell a bit, too.

Visit Chelsea Steinberg Gay’s website.

Donate to Gay’s husband’s non-profit (Engage Now Africa) to raise money for the women and children they are helping to escape from slavery and human trafficking in Uganda, Ethiopia and Ghana.

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Wayne Thiebaud: Calorie Rich Paintings

Wayne Thiebaud  is a talented painter made famous for a lifetime of calorie-rich images of cakes, pies, ice cream, cupcakes, and other savory treats. Thiebaud (pronounced like Tim Tebow) is arguably the most decorated Mormon fine artist in history having received numerous awards and accolades including the National Medal of Arts from President Bill Clinton. He grew up in a Mormon home and his mother’s family came from Brigham Young era pioneers. Thiebaud explained to the Smithsonian,  “My father, coming from another religion – Baptist, I think, if I remember – joined the Mormon Church, and was eventually an enthusiast, or was a- it’s a lay ministry, Mormonism, and he finally became a bishop. So I was a bishop’s son. But the Mormon community is very, very inter-supportive. And- and so it was a very nourishing environment. I was what you’d call today, I think, a spoiled child.” Thiebaud turned 95 last month and lives in California.

***Note: The Krakens was asked to pay for the right to use the Thiebaud imagery or be forced to take down the images. Our policy is to not pay for image rights so, unfortunately, you will have to Google Image search Thiebaud’s work like everyone else on the Inner-web.

Visit the Paul Thiebaud Gallery website.

Excellent profile of Thiebaud from CBS’ Sunday Morning (below).

Jordan Daines: Impasto Protein

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Jordan Daines is an adept painter primarily working with oil on wood panel or canvas. It has been written that, “Her thick painterly style and love of color lends itself to bold renderings within a gradient of semi to overtly representational work.” Daines and her husband recently moved from Los Angeles to Utah.

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Tell us about your evolution as an artist. I have wanted to be an artist since I was in 3rd grade when I made a ceramic pig. I was so proud of that pig–I immediately knew my calling! I earned my first ‘art set’ in fifth grade by practicing the piano (which I somehow don’t know how to play anymore) and I would paint in my spare time as a hobby. As a teenager I won the National Art Education Association Student award and was also chosen to show in the Congressional Art Competition in Washington, D.C. That positive reinforcement kept me dialed in and kept me dedicated to work and stress with my art. I went on to receive my BFA in painting at Utah State University. I learned a lot about the craft of painting in school, but I have continued to try and involve myself with theory and develop my content more and more in the decade or so since graduation. I actually credit my husband for a lot of my evolution. He is an architect and a keen observer of contemporary art. He is my #1 critic; no painting is finished until we are both happy with it. His input is invaluable to me. Every artist needs a trusted cohort to honestly critique their work.

Some of your work is like a more protein-rich Wayne Thiebaud. I’ll accept the comparison to Thiebaud! His work is definitely a significant precedent for me. He was known as a ‘happy artist’, which I feel an attachment to as well. I find great pleasure in coming up with new color combinations and interesting subjects. I have a large range of content that I paint, but the meat does stand out. It’s not that I’m a huge carnivore, and there is really no significant critique attached. It’s color, texture and organic nature is quite abstract, but it is also recognizable as a banal item of life, which I suppose Thiebaud concerned himself with as well. My impasto application of paint also lends itself very nicely to meat. I use oil paint only. No thinners or mediums. Over the last 10 years I have transitioned from brushes to knives. Brushes frustrate me. Knives are so much more candid in their application. I used to mix with a knife and paint with a brush, however, over time I decided to just cut out the middleman… or the end man rather.

What’s next for you? Right now I am working on a series of large abstracts for a solo show in May 2016 at the Wall Gallery in Dallas, TX. Getting ready for this show has been a great experiment for testing my painting efficiency and brain power in regard to the scale of my work. With the nature of my process of mostly wet on wet paint, I have to work fast and focused. If the paint dries just a little it gets tacky and disrupts the whole feel of the painting.

Visit Jordan Daines’ website.

Follow Jordan Daines on Instagram.

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Richard G. Scott: Walking Toward the Light

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Richard G. Scott served for 38 years as a leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He may be more well known for his work in nuclear engineering, but he was avid painter and liked to work in watercolors. He was born in Idaho, grew up in Washington, D.C., and also lived in Tennessee and Utah. He passed away in September of this year.

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Jeanene Walking Toward the Light (above) is based on a photograph taken at Adam-ondi-Ahman, Missouri. He painted the scene after his wife, Jeanene, died in 1995. Scott told the Deseret News that it is a reminder to him that she was ahead of him on the path walking toward the light.

Scott’s son explained, “My father loved painting. We would be driving down a road and he would stop, pull over and say, ‘Look at that; that would be a great painting.’ Then he would take three or four photos. He saw the physical world through the eye of an artist, always looking for light, shadow and interesting themes. He loved painting.”

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Images courtesy Richard G. Scott, Deseret News, and MormonNewsroom.org.

Rose Datoc Dall: A Color Universe

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Rose Datoc Dall is one of our truly world-class artists. Her touching subject matter, the creative compositions, the sheer quantity of work, and the colors–the colors! Dall, a Filipina-American, was born in Washington, D.C. and received a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Dall lives with her husband in Virginia.

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Your expert use of color is often breathtaking. Thank you so much. My art really is all about color. I had someone ask me if I would ever reproduce and sell prints of my art in sepia tones or in black and white. The answer is unequivocally, “NO!” My art without color loses its purpose. It would take away the thing which gave it any life. The genesis for every image revolved around color and if I could get away with some figures in some crazy color scheme. I heartily accept the challenge each time.

Using color to transform something ordinary into extraordinary is what excites me. I’ve had people ask me if there is a formula that I use, and the answer is “no,” not a formula per se, but a principle of visual balance. I love using complimentary colors, subtly, and boldly, consciously and unconsciously. I often let color become its own thing and just let the magic happen. A painting starts usually very carefully planned, a general vision of shapes, color relationships, and composition, but then I let it go, and hopefully it becomes an intuitive process. I am constantly nudging these color relationships as I lay down my strokes making sure as I go that everything jives correctly in the same ‘color universe’. Can I coin that phrase? I often use that term because my color universe does not necessarily relate to the natural world, but yet, I hope that the color universe created in each painting still manages to work. Moreover, it is really all about balance.

For example, a cool bluish skin tone can be balanced off by introducing a red or pinkish tone along an edge, or in the cheeks, the nose, or fingertips to give it warmth. I pay particular attention to lighting, throwing a cool temperature light on a subject, and then maybe balancing it out with a warm light coming from somewhere else if it needs it. That may be as close to formulaic as I get, but then I like to alter it, and maybe do things a little differently so as not to become old hat.

Surprisingly to some, my palette is kind of limited to a handful of dominant colors. That palette dominance may shift slightly from painting to painting, depending on the overall color scheme (for instance some paintings may be a mustard/pale blue scheme, or an orange/turquoise scheme, or maybe a crazy green/blush pink scheme) but largely I have my go-to colors. Remember, that all my color relationships MUST sit in the same color universe and let’s say introducing a color at random, that I haven’t introduced early in the process (just for the sake of riotous color) just doesn’t make sense. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. Keep with basics of form and color and shape. Keep your values, intensity and relationships of these tones in balance.

People have asked me if my pieces are watercolors. No, they are oil. But I often incorporate R&F Pigment Sticks (a buttery oil stick) because I love the color intensity in their pale tones, which can be hard to achieve when lightening up a color with titanium white or Permalba white which tend to gray or dull the intensity. Using R&F Pigment Sticks has the immediacy and effect of drawing with pastels, but rather it’s oil paint. Yummy, buttery oil. Think drawing with a tube of lipstick. (Okay, if you want to be technical, they are really encaustic pigments, but they blend will with oil paint.) There’s my nod to Edgar Degas, my first major art crush when I was age seventeen. The immediacy of which he laid down his strokes in his pastel work, his use of colors, his masterful rendering of figures, and his brilliant compositions, completely lit my fire and fueled my imagination. Henri De Toulouse Lautrec took this effect even further, and I have heartily embraced this approach to color.

What’s next for you? I guess I am always working on several series at a time, in a continuum fashion. I will continue to paint images of Christ. Having painted multiple paintings from the ‘Early Years of the Savior’ (painted over a decade, from the viewpoint of a mother, Mary), I have moved onto ‘Christ’s Ministry Years’. At least twenty new images immediately come to mind. Who knows if I will live long enough to paint them.

I also, of course paint women. Being a female artist, I relate to women. I am currently painting a series called ‘Girls in White Dresses’. These are girls and women of all ages and races. The series is about the purity of womanhood and girlhood, undiminished by stereotypes, removed from their association as sexual objects. These are real women, dressed in blinding white, in all their glory, and indomitable in spirit. With all that white, instead of exploring tonal values, I chose to use texture in a field of white on white, much like the effect of bas relief.

So what is next? What you will most likely see will have evolved from a continuum of images, and I hope new strains will emerge. And of course…. there will be LOTS… and LOTS… of color.

Visit Rose Datoc Dall’s website.

Follow Rose Datoc Dall on Instagram.

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Images courtesy Rose Datoc Dall and LDS.org.