2008

Feb/Mar. 08
Santa Fe:
When the Old Meets the New
HOLIS WALKER
American Craft

For much of the 20th century, the art scene in Santa Fe, New Mexico, was synonymous with cowboys and Indians. Tourists expected-and found-Western genre paintings of wranglers on horse-back, oil portraits of Pueblo Indians in native dress and traditional Native American pottery and textiles. While visitors can still find all those things in the “City Different,” over the last two decades Santa Fe’s artscape has changed dramatically-including a sharper focus on contemporary craft by non-native makers.

Craft has always played a key role in Santa Fe’s art market—which is the nation’s second largest, after New York City’s, in sales. This town of less than 75,000 is home to some 250 galleries and six major museums, four of which emphasize craft-related artworks. The city’s largest annual juried visual art events, all held in the summer, also celebrate craft: Indian Market, the world’s preeminent sales venue for artwork by indigenous people;
Spanish Market, where artists working in the 400-year-old Spanish Colonial traditions of New Mexico show their work; and the International Folk Art Market, which features artists of all kinds from across the globe.

The market for fine native craft in Santa Fe continues to grow. While many contemporary Indian ceramic artists make pottery using traditional designs, others are forging new territory. Virgil Ortiz’s kinky figurative works combine the visual patterns of his native Cochiti Pueblo with that of tattoo art. Young artists such as Ira Lujan and Robert “Spooner” Marcus, have left behind ceramics for glass, but incorporate the imagery and forms of Pueblo ceramics into their work. Figurative ceramist Roxanne Swentzell’s works are in such high demand they’re now sold by her gallery, Hahn-Ross, through a lottery system. Similarly, artists who work in the Spanish Colonial tradition, like Luis Tapia and Arthur Lopez, now address political and social issues in their work as well as religious themes.

But since the mid-1990s, non-native contemporary craft has come to play a much larger role, and several new craft galleries are flourishing. Part of that is due to the increasing market for contemporary art of all kinds, acknowledges Ivan Barnett, who with his wife, Allison, started Patina Gallery in 1990. “The organic nature of Santa Fe as a place fits craft; we are a place of textures,” he says. “Craft makes sense here; it’s about the surface.”

Jane Sauer, an internationally known fiber artist who since 2005 has operated Jane Sauer Gallery, believes the craft market in Santa Fe has grown because the categories separating art forms have become blurred. Craft and fine art are intermingling-even in her gallery. Though it focuses on fine craft—especially ceramics and textiles-in May she’ll exhibit paintings alongside glass works, both by Noel Hart, an Australian artist. Another example Sauer cites is the work of ceramist Jun Kaneko (who shows at Chiaroscuro Gallery in Santa Fe). Once considered “craft,” it now fits firmly into the “fine art” realm, she points out. “I think Santa Fe, appropriately, is a bit ahead of the game in terms of not being restrictive.”

This is illustrated by the many long standing fine art galleries that have always shown craft. Ken Marvel, co-owner with Robert Gardner of LewAllen Contemporary, one of the city’s largest fine art galleries, says their craft department is one of its fastest growing. “We see a sophisticated collector base that views a diversity of materials as enriching, and craft as yet another variety of fine art,” he says. “Our passion for art does not end with canvas and paint.”

Nor does it end with New Mexico’s borders. While some of the city’s craft galleries focus on local artists, many show the work of artists from elsewhere in the nation and from other lands .Though Santa Fe is home to many talented and recognized craftsmen and women, the art market here—as everywhere—has become globalized, attracting artists and collectors from throughout the world.

Spring Summer 2008
Buisness Profiles
Trend Magazine
Maggie York-Worth

Design Vocabulary

At Patina Gallery, owners Ivan and Allison Barnett are interested in the surface of things. Even the name reflects their devotion to “beauty over time,” says Allison. The couple have displayed jewelry, wood and clay sculpture, and textiles in their downtown space since 1999, when they wanted, says Allison, to fill the “void in the [fine] craft venue” in Santa Fe.

Now the two show what they consider “soul-stirring” work. The phrase has become a business conviction reflected in the couple’s sense that a deeply refined personal aesthetic can also stir others with the glories of what can be made.

Says Ivan, “We do not pick based upon marketability; we pick based upon what we like.” The pair emphasize the intensely thought-out work of every piece they show, chosen from a cadre of artisans at the top of their fields.

The gallery is a light space that has been designed to encourage circulation and proximity to a variety of types of craft. Precisely arranged cases offer dialogues between, for example, an Atelier Zobel bracelet with a dazzling gem and a Harold O’Connor brooch whose calligraphic surface quality expresses pristine workmanship. On shelves, clay and turned-wood vessels draw the eye upward; textiles impart a warm note. The work and its display are meant to evoke “a peaceful and very satisfying space,” says Allison.

This July, German jewelry master Michael Zobel will curate a “triptych” of events for the gallery tentatively being called Adornment for the 21 st Century. Forming such important associations marks out the Barnetts’ niche.

The ease of the couple’s repartee translates to their united vision ofwell-crafted objects that nevertheless reflect specializations like Allison’s knowledge in jewelry and Ivan’s years of experience as a sculptor. Says Allison, “We’re yin and yang: He’s more of the thinker and the writer, and I’m more out in the visual world.” Adds Ivan, “Design is a sacred word for both of us.”

131 West Palace Avenue, 505-986-3432, patina-gallery.com

April/May 2008
Art Previews
The Santa Fean

Michael Bauermeister: Steeped in Color Patina Gallery, 131 W Palace, 505-986-3432, patina-gallery.com April 4-27, reception April 4, 5:30-7:30

Inspired by the work of Martin Puryear and David Nash, Michael Bauermeister creates wooden sculptures by combining minimalist design with painstaking craftsmanship to deliver pieces of tremendous presence. Bauermeister's signature columnar pieces— some more than eight feet tall—are built up out of layers of wood, their fluent contours achieved through a variety of woodworking techniques, both traditional and power-driven. The artist then adds color to surfaces already inflected with the inherent vibrancy of linden wood, suggesting the forest where he works, near the banks of the Missouri River. Steeped in Color includes sculptures and wall pieces, all keeping the flow of the artist's past work; yet some, such as the tentatively titled Damascus Layers, point in a new direction. By building up dozens of layers of alternating white and black lacquer and then sanding through the layers, Bauermeister creates, from a simple piece of wood, the appearance of laminated steel.—RL

June/July 2008
City Different
Art deco-ration: Jewelry
Santa Fean

The signs of a major shift are many: New York's American Craft Museum changed its name to the Museum of Art & Design six years ago; museums are adding studio jewelry to their permanent collections; and art-world pundits are debating whether the word craft should be used anymore when speaking about jewelry as art (or art as jewelry). "Only in the last two or three years have there been major museum exhibitions that focus on studio jewelry," says Ivan Barnett co-owner of Patina Gallery with his wife, Allison. The pair have been showing metal-and-gem creations as bona fide art since the gallery's inception ten years ago a choice he compares with the workings of the debate, 50 years prior, about whether photography was art "I think art jewelry is not unlike that;" he says, adding that in this century, the increasing acceptance of contemporary art has helped jewelry gain respect in the art world. To this end, Patina presents Soul-Stirring Works: Adornment for the 2ist Century, a series of three contemporary jewelry shows, including a global range of works curated by Charon Kransen, opening June 6; and European designs selected by Michael Zobel, opening July 11 (receptions 5:30—7:30 PM). "A wearable piece can have all the components of a painting or a sculpture," says Barnett. "In the end, it's about the materials; it's about the aesthetics."

Patina Gallery, 131 West Palace, 50S-9S6-3432, patina-gallery.com—Bibi Deitz

2007

April 2007
Fostering the Sacred
Patina Gallery
The Santa Fean

April 6-May 6, reception April 6, 5-7 Texas artist Clay Foster has a bit of the loner frontiersman in him—inclined more to doing and less to talking about it. The little that he’ll say about his salvaged and carved tree sculptures is that they are meant to evoke a reverence for “the endurance of common things.” Common, however, is not the word for the intricate turned wooden bowls he crafts and places atop his tree-sculpture plinths. Foster calls these works “fonts,” and they do indeed call to mind ancient cleansing ceremonies. An anthropologist of the soul, Foster’s theme is the sacred, and he prompts us to revisit its role in our everyday lives.—KMD

For What Lies Beneath
LESLIE CLARK
Ornament Magazine

For What Lies Beneath, her first curated and thematically / organized exhibition held May 4-June 3, 2007, at Patina Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, owner and metalsmith Allison Barnett invited fifteen jewelry artists to contribute a single brooch/pendant. She asked them “to explore the theme of layers, dimension, depth, and the mysteries therein.” Like thoroughbreds put on their mettle, prize-winning metalsmiths from across the country and even as far afield as England and Germany ran with Barnett’s idea, hitting their stride in a spectrum of interpretations ranging from quixotic to metaphoric. Some even departed from usual forms and practices to create something singularly new in their heir repertoire. The exhibit, handsomely lit and arranged in groups of twos or threes in wallcases, each piece displayed with an accompanying artist’s statement, brilliantly achieved its purpose of showcasing the conceptual creativity, originality and state-of-the-art craftsmanship in studio jewelry today.

The ringleader of the exhibit, and indirectly its inspiration, was a ring—not a brooch/pendant—from Atelier Zobel. A massive hemisphere of pale green beryl barely tethered in a brushed matte eighteen karat gold setting, its audacious size stopped short of rampant blingdom by a combination of finely judged proportions and the soft opaqueness of the stone. “The ring is like an atmosphere,” Atelier Zobel’s statement read. “On the outside, it looks rather plain. When you look inside the stone, you find the universe.” Peer into the depths of the beryl, and suddenly a diagonal row of diamonds emerges in the green mists, set in a rough gold strip. “One of the artists who explores the idea of layers repeatedly and thrills me the most is Atelier Zobel—Peter Schmid, the proprietor, made the ring, though he frequently collaborates with Michael Zobel,” Barnett says. “They often take a translucent stone and set diamonds or metal behind it. I love the confidence of their pieces.” Andy Cooperman, another metalsmith intrigued with the theme of layers, designed Polls, a brooch/pendant built in the whirlpool shape of a paper wasp or hornet nest. Thin, delicate layers of textured, dark gray sterling with broken edges wrap around an unexpectedly bright golden core, a shining diamond nestled within. While celebrating nature’s ingenuity, the piece also calls attention to the suppleness of the metals and the artist’s skill in executing a technically complex piece.

The natural world took a starring role in many pieces— radiant rose quartz, simply wrapped in a handmade eighteen karat gold bezel in Petra Class’s Mi Corazon necklace; and the ink drop agate and rutilatecl quartz, framed in a hand-fabricated eighteen karat classic pocket watch case of Phil Poirier’s Timeless Locket Watch—both paid tribute to the aesthetic beauty of natural stones in themselves. Pat Flynn’s unnamed but impressive brooch/pendant of blackened iron dusted with twenty-four karat gold offered a more ironic commentary on cultural values and the power of nature. The rectangular piece, in three irregular rows of folds, intimates a hidden strength heaving up beneath the surface. “In building the piece, I was interested in geologic tensions—the pushing and pulling of plate tectonic forces ...distilling these forces into a jewelry scale,” Flynn states. Only a second glance reveals two rows of tiny diamonds glimmering in the iron folds. They seem to suggest that only the earth itself can yield diamonds, while asking us to ponder what is truly more awe- inspiring: the majesty of nature, or the cut and polished art/artifice of stones socially encoded as “precious.”

A joyous ode to nature and the sea is Harold O’Connor’s unfilled brooch, made from olivine and a stone found while walking along a New Zealand beach. The piece flows with the visual rhythms of a tiny shoreline, granulated gold eddying like foam on the green water rimming a gritty tawny-gray coast. A small magnum opus, the composition and interplay of textures merge in a timeless serenity. The sea again figures in Sandra Enterline’s brooch/pendant. A white gold wire mesh encloses a thin curved abalone shell, like a fisherman’s net cast into the water and bringing back a living treasure. The piece diverges from Enterline’s more familiar work, of a perforated surface that invites the viewer to peer inside and glimpse a contrasting interior. Here, Enterline says, she was interested in the shadows cast on the surface of the shell, and in “elevating the kitsch of the mass-produced abalone piece into something unexpected.” Despite the quiet palette of white metal and shell, the piece has a sculptural mass to it; as adornment it would dominate, but it answers perfectly to contemporary minimalist sensibilities.

Two artists who had the most good-humored fun with Barnett’s concept, Sam Shaw and Tod Pardon, created bold pieces, hopefully for a gregariously inclined wearer. Nature reigns once more in Shaw’s long eighteen karat gold chain cast from twigs, and in the gold twig structure of the nearly three-inch-long microscope pendant. A gleaming glass lens at each end beckons the viewer to look closely at a mud opal and a quartz crystal suspended back to back in the middle. “When we look in, it is the same as looking out,” Shaw states about his clever construction. “Thus, I have made a piece with two lenses to symbolize in and out, and to help release the beauty that lies beneath.” Tod Pardon’s gamboling figure, Blood Sky, fabricated of sterling silver, pigmented glass, onyx, and fossilized ivory, more frankly expresses his idea of the duality of the human condition, pirouetting between a veneer of composure and what he describes as the “inherent anxiety” that underlies modern life. Below a shock of beaded wire strands of hair and staring, cartoonish eyes, a body split in half between a slick sterling surface and a side containing wildly colorful abstracted shapes unites in a naked red protrusion above long tapered legs. At seven inches in height, the largest brooch/pendant in the exhibit, Pardon’s piece speaks to our vulnerability with wit and compassion, a master artisan’s candid, humane take on the theme of what lies beneath.

These works of art, Todd Reed’s superb architectonic brooch/pendant built around a mouthwatering sixty carat natural mirror-faceted aquamarine, and pieces by Gill Galloway-Whitehead, Barbara Heinrich, George Sawyer, Alexandra Watkins, and Jeff and Susan Wise conclude Patina Gallery’s excellent show.

2007
RIGOROUS and FORMAL
KATE MCGRAW
The Journal

Ivan Barnett’s constructions take a new-old direction

Ivan Barnetts fourth show at Patina Gallery, where he also is gallery director, is going back to the future. That is, the artist known for his two-dimensional , collages and mobiles is showing purely ‘ sculptural pieces at Patina for the first time. These pieces are “constructions” of wood and found objects from Mexico.

Although these are the first constructions Barnett has shown at Patina, they are by no means the first time he’s worked in this concept. Many of his earlier pieces (he’s in his fourth decade as an artist) were constructions — but those works featured a toothy, rusted steel that imparted a graininess to applied pigments. These new works are composed of found wood shapes, sawn and altered and painted.

‘Wood is a more flexible material. I can use it much more loosely,” Barnett said.

He’s become enamored of using found objects and wood and energizing them with dynamic geometry and design.

“I love the idea of taking something common and distorting it so that you don’t recognize it,” Barnett said. “I have an affinity for the common. It’s grounding — less removed. And I love surprises. There’s this thing that people have walked past, but I can take it and. ‘ give it a new meaning.”

Formal training

Barnett’s training in fine art was rigorous and formal, which is reflected in his aesthetic and in his immaculate craftsmanship. A graduate of the Philadelphia College of Art, Barnett was drafted into the U.S. Army, where he worked as an illustrator at the Pentagon. Once discharged, he pursued his own career. By the mid-^Os, he had risen to prominence with a series of weather vanes based on early American vanes found throughout Lancaster County, Penn., his home. Barnett is one of the few living artists whose work in included in the Alexander Girard Collection of Santa Fe’s Museum of International Folk Art.

He and his wife, Allison, also an artist, live in Santa Fe with their 3-year-old daughter, Grace. The Barnett’s fresh curatorial aesthetic has guided Patina Gallery since they created it in 1999. Currently Patina Gallery represents more than 112 American and European artists in contemporary jewelry, textiles and sculptural objects in metal, clay and wood.

Strict standards

Barnett is thoughtful when discussing his artistic process. It is at all times governed by strict standards of design and composition, he said, but there is freedom in the process, too.

“For me, who works in such a methodical way at the gallery —I like the ability to be spontaneous,” he said. “I like change and I have an obsession with proportion and spatial relationships. It’s what I do. It’s what I do pro-fessionally.”

Barnett normally works in his home studio, but many of the 12 “Tonal Constructs” pieces were created in a friend’s more spacious studio. They range in size from “Return to Emma,” which is 12-by-48-by-3 inches, to “Uno,” which is 5 inches deep by 25 inches wide and 58 inches, or nearly six feet, long. Most of the rectilinear works are between two and four feet in length. All reflect his self-described “obsession” with proportion and space.

“I think great art is ‘great for certain basic, classical reasons. ‘Art for arts sake* is not where I’m at,” Barnett said. “Rodin is great for a reason. Great works... are great because of universal principles of composition, of light, of movement, of pro- portion, of scale. These are the same principles that determine greatness in music, poetry and architecture. I don’t compare myself to great artists, but I aspire to great work.”

September 7, 2007
Gallery Wise
CRAIG SMITH
The New Mexican

Ivan Barnett understands wood, metal, and paint. He ought to. He’s worked with those materials for more than three decades, and that’s long enough to have learned to feel their possibilities within his heart—and to shape those possibilities into something .” tangible that begs to be touched. The results are vivid and enticing: metal hand pins, picture and mirror frames, and decorative assemblages that suggest ancient cities as well as dream landscapes.

Tonal Constructs is an exhibit of new work consisting of found-object constructions. Colors, patterns, materials, and meaning ‘join together in a physical and creative layering. It is as if imagination has been baked, sliced, sandwiched, and frosted. An opening reception takes place from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 7; the show remains on display through Sept. 23.

October/November 2007
Lost and Found 2: Missing in Plain Sight
JON CARVER
Santa Fean Magazine

Over the past three decades in Central and South America, thousands of people were, for political reasons, “disappeared” by dictatorial governments. Systems of oppression, however, exist regionally as well as globally, and as an application of the theme, Patina Gallery’s latest exhibition seeks to explore issues of sociopolitical visibility and invisibility here in New Mexico. For a show that could speak as a focused, local perspective on the wide-angle view given by Santa Fe’s major art institutions to The Disappeared Collaborative Project gallerist Ivan Karp sought the curatorial hand of Kathryn M. Davis for Patina’s Second Annual Community Art Exhibition.

Davis, a local critic and arts writer, chose five prominent artists and asked them to choose five more—one found” artist each. The heavy hitters include Meridel Rubinstein, Bob Haozous, Marie Romero-Cash, May Stevens, and Kirn Russo. Together with their invitees— Kimberly Hargrove, Heidi Brandlow, Delilah Montoya, Ann Gaziano, and Tom Miller, respectively—this makes for a mix as multicultural and diverse as the Santa Fe scene. In Missing in Plain Sight, the 10 artists present work in a variety of media, from photography to painting to sculpture, and deal directly with ideas of gender equality, radical freedom, cultural identifiers, polysexualism, workers without papers, seeing and not seeing, knowing and not knowing, the truth, and history. It’s fitting, then, that one of the show’s photographs—Rubinstein’s shot of the Unidos car club: Los Unidos Burned, from her Lowriders series—nearly disappeared itself. The negative was caught in an Oakland lab fire in the eighties but miraculously escaped untimely death, gathering only a perfect corona in its passage through flames. In history as well as in content, this documentation of local Hispanic car culture, like the rest of Missing, shows us a Northern New Mexico in which we are asked to wonder: Who is visible here, and who disappears?

November 2007
LOST AND FOUND 2: MISSING IN PLAIN SIGHT
RICHARD TOBIN
THE MAGAZINE

Lost and found; In Book 19 of Homer’s Odyssey, the poet describes a touching domestic encounter. The returning Greek hero, having barely survived his epic sea voyage from Troy and now forced to pose as a stranger in his own home, submits to having his feet washed by the unsuspecting household servant, in keeping with ancient customs of hospitality to guests, The servant Eurydea was the hero’s childhood nurse. On seeing his youthful scar from a boar’s tusk she instantly recognizes her long absent master, Odysseus restrains her cry of joy and presses the old nurse to keep silent. An affecting scene, but whats striking about this appearance in the poem of a character clearly outside the ruling class is its rarity in the Homeric epics, even more so in the later, classical tradition of ancient Greco-Roman literature as a whole. Even here, the nurse’s role is simply to serve (literally in the role of a servant) a narrative of the life and feelings of dramatis personae from the ruling class. Erich Auerbach begins Mimesis, his classic study of “the representation of reality in Western literature,” with this episode from The Odyssey, in which “we see how the quietly depicted, domestic scene of the foot-washing is incorporated into the pathetic and sublime action of Odysseus’ home-coming.” Homer completely subordinates the nurse’s existence to the elevated narrative populated only by members of the “heroic” class. Beyond that purpose, the poet has no interest in the personal life of the servant. To Odysseus and his peers, and hence to the poet, the commoner simply doesn’t count. The servant is virtually invisible. Auerbach retraces the subsequent evolution of later European literature to show that only with its integration with the Judaeo-Christian world view do we see this classical Greco-Roman literary style gradually expand its narrow conception of “reality” to embrace the middle and then the lower classes—eventually admitting women, servants, slaves, the mentally ill—in short, the disenfranchised.

A domestic episode from The Odyssey might seem an odd start to any critical reflection on Missing in Plain Sight, Patina Gallery’s recent group exhibition curated by Kathryn M. Davis. The invited artists were asked to explore the “themes of visibility and Identity In northern New Mexico”—in concert with concurrent exhibits at several Santa Fe art venues focusing on desaparecedos, named for those who fell victim to various Latin American countries* death squads from the 1970s and 1980s. The premise of Missing is “that ongoing societal tradition has forced millions of ‘illegals’ to become Invisible—in fact, to ‘disappear’ themselves for their own safety”—the salient tip of a larger reality in which those of different ethnicity, economic class, religious belief, sexual orientation—any divergent subset of mainstream culture—are “invisible” by tacit choice of a society that chooses to not “see” them.

Theme-driven group shows mapped by curators often yield mixed results. An artist’s choice of a pre- existing piece to match the theme may fall wide of the mark, while a predetermined theme can overwhelm a new work commissioned to fit it. The challenge is heightened in Missing by the exhibit’s powerful themes of identity and invisibility. Marie Romero-Cash’s KOY-OH-TEH (El Viaje. El Coyote, y Libertad) is on the mark. The toy-like character of this carved and painted wood tableau captures the immigrant child’s point of view, underscoring the immigrant’s vulnerability and dependence during the fearful and dangerous border crossing. The torch of the Statue of Liberty beckons beyond a wall that belies its promise, blind to the immigrant’s plight. In Meridel Rubenstein’s Los Unidos, from her 1980 Lowriders series, the arc or corona over the image of the negative retrieved from a lab fire in 1982 Is an apt metaphor of a subculture’s refusal to be “invisible”—what the artist describes as a symbol of the “secular and sacred passion and desire that these cars embody.” The photo images of the Arizona-Sonora desert of Delilah Montoya’s C-print triptych (Humane Border) document the perilous journey of the Mexican immigrant. The beauty of its vast desert panoramas masks the danger of the journey. The visual anchor of the show is Bob Haozous’s twelve-foot carving of a Healing War Club. In a postmodern parallel to the” swords into plowshares” conceit, the globe that replaces the weapon’s head evokes the biblical image’s reference to a time when “nation will not lift up sword against nation.”

Missing in Plain Sight underscores a critical role of literature and the arts: it compels society to recognize what it otherwise could not—or would not—see. That’s a lesson that even history cannot teach.

2007
What Lies Beneath
‘Lost & Found’ reaches deep to give presence to those who otherwise might be invisible
HOLLIS WALKER
JOURNAL NORTH

In his 1952 book “Invisible Man,” author Ralph Ellison’s character, an unnamed black man, aptly summed up the disenfranchisement of out-siders to mainstream society in his description of himself: “I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber. and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”

“Lost & Found 2: Missing in Plain Sight,” an exhibition at Patina Gallery curated by Kathryn M. Davis, addresses the invisible in our society, “some because they are ‘illegal,’ others because they are different — different in race, economic status, sexual preference, religious belief, ideology,” Davis writes. The concept arose in affinity with “Los Desaparacidos,” the current multi-institutional exhibit about the political activists who were “disappeared” by the brutal regimes of Central and South - America in the 1960s-1980s.

Davis invited five well-known area artists to participate in the exhibit, and each of them; in turn, invited an artist who has had less exposure. The resulting’ small exhibit, mounted in the back of the gallery, nevertheless packs a powerful punch.

May Stevens’ contribution comprises a painting on handmade paper. The heavily sand-textured ground with small pebbles stuck to it, in a murky conglomeration of dark browns, greens and reds, is intended to evoke the harsh desert through which undocumented, Mexican immigrants must travel to .”teach the Promised Land. Hand-printed names fade in and out of the background. In its center is a collage of a large: section of ripped paper on which Stevens has painted hands reaching out of this morass. In an artist’s statement, Stevens said the hands were meant to represent the mutilated remains of bodies buried in the sand. Stevens has often tangled with issues of human suffering in her work, and always unflinchingly. This is not a pretty picture some tourist will take home to hang over the couch; it is the kind of painting that sucks away your breath, that calls you back after you’ve walked away. Placed as the first of the wall-hung works/it sets a high bar for the other artists. It effectiveness derives in part from ‘Stevens’ choice of paper as its foundation, as a fragile surface under which hides the ugly truth.

Delilah Montoya’s “Trail of Thirst” triptych of long, horizontal color photographs hung one above the other is appropriately placed next to Stevens’ work. Desert scenes shot in southern Arizona along a border crossing path, they reflect the stark reality of what most of us have only imagined. “Human Border Water Station” shows three blue metal tanks, marked “Agua,” on a metal stand, with a tattered makeshift flag marking the spot. The fading sunset and majestic mountainscape in the distance reinforce the fact that this ugly scene is, in fact, a lifesaving oasis for the desperate immigrant. The centerpiece “Power Line Trail,” extremely narrow, is framed by two wooden power line poles in the foreground (a metaphor for the duality of the border, and the immigrants’ futures) and the dusty track between them; giant metal electrical towers march into the distance. Finally, “Migrant Campsite” includes just the detritus of migration — plastic water jugs, an abandoned pink child’s backpack, a denim garment, a single woman’s boot. Two dark areas on the ground suggest human shadows—human beings who are there, but not there, just as they will be if they make it to their destination: identity-less, culture-less, invisible.

Kimberly Hargrove’s “Lost Voices” is a giant white pinata head with gold carved wooden details. Mouth open in a silent scream, golden eyes concave and empty, the calavera-like head is surrounded by gold fins that suggest the corona of La Virgen de Guadalupe, The happy symbol of children’s parties is now a sad and monstrous creature, hanging dead from a meat hook as if bleeding out.

Two other pieces are particularly notable. Kim Russo’s delicate watercolor triptych illustrates a lesbian couple (those frightening perverts next door!) engaged in the ordinary activities of life: cleaning house, gardening, going to the dentist. Simple in execution and concept, “Married Couple” nevertheless makes its point quite well.

Tom Miller’s “After St. Christopher,” a new work in his “Everyman” series, is a gorgeous gray and white image with relief carving into the paint. The ubiquitous white plastic milk jug becomes a subtly graceful form here, and Miller’s two silhouetted images of his “fallen man—here the invisible Anglo, rather than the migrant—is a poignant reminder that all who are. Lost are not those we might ordinarily think of as the dispossessed.

The only real disappointment in this exhibit is Marie Romero Cashes “ElViaje, El Coyote, y Libertad (The Journey, The Coyote, and Lberty),” This is a tableaux carved and painted in the contemporary Spanish Colonial tradition of northern New Mexico, including a depiction of a real “coyote” (as the people-smugglers’ of the border are called) bearing migrants in his belly; a Statue of Liberty figure; a sign bearing the Emma Lazarus poem that is on Liberty’s plaque (“Give me your ‘ tired, your poor ...”); and a base painted to represent a map of the Southwest. While I appreciate-the concept, it’s all a bit much, and the individual elements are unconnected spatially. I have been a great admirer of Cash’s work in the past; this is not her best work.

December 7, 2007
Grace and wood works
CRAIG SMITH
The New Mexican

If you see Robert Cardinale walking along and call him by that name, he’ll answer. He’ll cheerfully respond to Roberto, Bob, or Bobby as well. But he’s always happy if you call him an artist, because that’s what he is. His show of new work opening at Patina Gallery on Friday, Dec. 7, provides proof, if any were needed.

“I was born Roberto, and that is my art name,” Cardinale said. “My parents, they changed it to Robert, then Bob. I grew up as Bobby. But the Roberto sounds better in the art world.

“I grew up in an Italian family, and I’ve lived in Sicily. I loved it in Sicily. They’d go, ‘Eh, Roberto!’ English speakers just don’t do it the same way.”

Cardinale has led an eventful life. He left college just short of graduation to become a Benedictine monk and study ecclesiastical architecture and sculpture. Later, after leaving the monastery, he enjoyed a high-profile arts-administration career on the East Coast, in Texas, and in Santa Fe. These days, he sells real estate.

Artistically, he expresses himself through handmade wooden sculpture that depicts churches, synagogues, and towers he’s seen around the world. His inspirations have included Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, the tower of a Cistercian monastery in Europe, and the Panayia Chrysopolitissa Church in Paphos, Cyprus. But he regularly pays tribute to New Mexico missions and churches, among them the Loretto Chapel, the Santuario de Chimayo, San Felipe Church at San Felipe Pueblo, and San Francisco de Asis in Ranches de Taos.

“It started in the mid ‘80s,” Cardinale said of his artistic passion. “It was the Santuario de Chimayo. I’ve always loved that church. We got engaged in Taos in the mid ‘60s” — he was speaking of his wife, PJ. — “and that was one of the places that we visited around Taos and Santa Fe and Chimayo. It has an incredible spiritual presence there. Whether you’re Catholic or not, you can feel that.

“There’s another church over there to the left of the little general store. A private chapel. On the wall outside that chapel, there are two handmade churches, models of the Santuario, made of adobe and wood. Very primitive.

“They were so inspiring that I said, ‘I’ve love to have one of those.’ I was tempted to liberate one, but you wouldn’t want to steal a church. That would be bad karma! And my wife said, ‘Why don’t you sculpt one?’ That’s where it started, and it has evolved into pretty complex pieces.

“I’m trained as a sculptor, so I consider these things sculptures,” he stressed. “A lot of people call them models, but they’re not. I really study the form. I take photos. I look at historic photos. I make a few sketches. Then, I start out directly on the wood. I don’t do measurements. I do it by feel and by eye. I look at it the way a sculptor would, not a model renderer.”

Cardinale uses soft white pine wood almost exclusively, because he likes how easily and cleanly it can be cut with a matte knife or bandsaw. Now and then he’ll use redwood for one of the bigger towers. He gets his wood at the Spotted Owl sawmill. “They only cut the ‘right’ trees,” he said. “They’re very careful and environmentally conscious. They’re very nice, and they save their scraps for me. I use pretty small pieces, overall.”

Each of the churches or towers takes a lot of those small pieces. For example, the Loretto Chapel sculpture consists of more than 500 individually carved pieces. “That was kind of a masochistic work, but I loved doing it,” he recalled. “It’s totally different from the churches here in New Mexico that come out of the earth. It was inspired by Sainte-Chapelle.

“That’s the only two-story Gothic church I have ever seen,” he added, remembering the Paris treasure. “It’s stunning to walk up that stairway and have those [stained glass] windows open up to you. People back then must have thought that they were going up into heaven.”

When assembling his wooden pieces into larger elements, which then are combined to make a sculpture, Cardinale calls on that timeless carpenter’s friend, wood glue. He uses Titebond, which he described as “stronger than the grain of the wood itself. If I have to break something apart, the wood will break, not the glue.” Considering he may put 200, 300, or 400 pieces of wood into a sculpture, that’s a lot to break.

After the clamped-together wood pieces dry and the final assembly is complete, Cardinale-as-painter emerges. He stains the piece reddish brown or brown, lets it dry, then rubs paraffin into the surfaces. Then he brushes off the excess liquid until the surfaces are smooth.

Once the paraffin coat dries, he starts to paint. He uses one brush but dips it in two, three, or four colors of latex house paint at once. He likes the resulting complexity of color.

“After a couple days, when it’s really dry, I scrape it with a blade from a utility knife — I don’t sand it — till I get the surface I want. Then I go back and paint in details, like around the windows and doors. Then I scrape that again. Then I’ll work graphite into the entire surface. Then I brush it all down and burnish off any little paint flecks still sticking up. It really takes on a nice patina.

“One of the fun things that I like is that painters like my surfaces a lot. That’s a compliment, I think.”

Cardinale has many new pieces in the show, including towers ranging from 15 inches to 7 feet high — what he calls “literally, a stretch. There are four of them between 6 and 7 feet high. I’m really curious; I’ve never worked in that scale before. So I’m interested to see what kind of response I get.”

Even though PJ. and Cardinale visited Northern New Mexico for more than 40 years, they’ve only lived in Santa Fe for 17. “For years, I worked as an arts administrator and a dean and professor of art,” he said. “I was a dean at Boston University, then president of the San Antonio Art Institute. That’s what got me up to Santa Fe — I raised a lot of money down there and got brought up here to be head of the Museum of New Mexico Foundation.” But, he said, “The politics were too hard for me. I resigned.

“We really wanted to stay in Santa Fe, so I started doing real estate, and I found I can work all day at it and still have energy to work in the studio for two or three hours in the evening. I’ve had a studio at home 17 years. I make about 20 pieces a year. Some are smaller — they take less time — but a big church like Chimayo will take me maybe 60 or 70 hours of actual work.

“Every now and then, my wife will see one piece and say, ‘That’s not leaving the house.’ I think we have about four in the house now. I’m pretty fortunate, because most of my pieces sell. I have a gallery in Scottsdale as well as here. It’s a similar gallery to Patina, but they’re not quite as craft oriented.”

While many people like and buy his work, Cardinale said he hasn’t noticed a lot of purchases for religious reasons — say, someone intending to use a piece as a shrine. That holds true even for the few pieces that open up completely, and which EJ. carefully finishes inside as shrines or church interiors.

“It’s very interesting,” he said. “I don’t get much response from the Catholic Church in any sense, but I do have a lot of collectors. A lot of Jewish collectors seem to like and purchase my work. In that case, if they want, I’ll replace the cross on the roof with a weather vane, so they feel more comfortable with it.”

2006

On Metal
LYNDA MCDANIAL
American Style Magazine

Metal is versatile and durable, qualities that attract both artists and collectors. “People respond to the lasting nature of metal,” says Ivan Barnett, co-owner of Patina Gallery in Santa Fe, N.M., and a metal artist working in oxidized steel. “Consider the work of Alice and Jack McLean—elliptical bronze wall sculpture and tiles. Their work will hold up for many lifetimes, even more than stone, which is more sensitive to pollution.”

Dcinpsy Calhoun is drawn to the great plasticity and forgiveness ot metal for his sculpture, architectural elements and functional designs. He’s currently exploring creative new surfacing techniques—including driving over metal sheets with a truck and bulldozer. Joseph and Georgia Pozycinski have mastered mold making, lost wax casting, toreutics (metal shaping) and patination for their bronze vessels, mirrors and sculpture.

While metal’s origins arc in function and durability, today’s artists are utilizing its strength in surprisingly delicate designs. LeeAnn Mitchell, central office executive director of the Artist-Blacksmith’s Association of North America, saw this trend at the association’s summer conference in Seattle, Wash. “Artists are using the art and craft of blacksmithing to make fine art and sculpture, while others continue the more traditional side of the craft,” she says.

Technology feeds this innovation, as artists have new tools to fuel their creativity. “Artists now work with laser-cutting and technical-casting processes previously unavaiable. They can test designs through digital imaging before they build them,” says Greg Kucera, owner of Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle.

And technology offers new educational opportunities for collectors. Enrique Vega, who has been producing wrought metalwork for more than 20 years, has documented all his processes on his website. “This lends credibility to my work and gives potential clients a better understanding of what they can expect from me,” Vega adds.

Metal is bold, electrifying, long-playing (dating back to 3500 B.C.) and often heavy. Come to think of it, those search-engine results had a certain logic to them after all.

CRITTERS
Metal artist to show garden sculptures at Patina Gallery
DOTTIE INDYKE
The Journal

Like folk art, Ivan Bamett’s steel garden sculptures are fanciful and imaginative. Essentially metal collage, they are made up of oxidized steel cutouts of foxes and fish, moons and stars. In them, figures fly through the air and ride upside down on the backs of painted deer, exuding glee and sparkle.

Unlike a folk artist Barnett is schooled in anatomy, perspective, mechanical drawing and lettering, the formal education he received from the Philadelphia College of Art. To his seemingly carefree pieces, he brings a sophisticated eye and an understanding of art history. Yet Barnett, whose early pieces were collected by Alexander Girard, gravitates to indigenous styles.

“I got very interested in folk art in the mid-70s,” he says. “It had a huge connection for me and still does. There’s nothing more wonderful than things that have such a pure- sense of design you can’t believe the artist isn’t trained.”

Beginning this evening Patina Gallery, which Barnett co-owns with his wife, Allison Buchsbaum Barnett, presents 30 garden sculptures, which have their origins in early American weather vanes.

After college and a stint as an illustrator in the Army, Barnett moved to rural Lancaster County, Pa., where the combination of the burgeoning arts-and-crafts movement and Pennsylvania German folk aesthetic of the region worked its magic. He took a year to travel the country, researching folk art collections in various museums, and began making simple weather vanes out of wood and metal. From weather vanes he moved to mobiles, collages and garden sculptures, which contained many of the universal shapes he continues to develop today.

Early on, his work attracted the attention of fine craft galleries.

When Santa Fe’s Museum of International Folk Art opened in the late ‘70s, Barnett came for a visit and was shocked to see his pieces in the Girard collection. The experience, he recalls, was “absolutely beyond flattering.”

Over the years he abandoned wood and settled exclusively on oxidized steel. The surface of the metal has a “tooth,” he — explains, that allows water-based paint to be directly applied. With a contemporary spin, his compositions employ recognizable shapes in the service of semi-abstract designs.

Each sculpture is composed of hand-cut pieces attached with iron rivets using a traditional blacksmithing technique. To the steel hands and bodies, Barnett adds subtle personal touches, such as torahs and stars of David that symbolize his Jewish heritage.

In his Santa Fe garden, there are 30 or 40 of the garden pieces, some of which are more than 20 years old and have aged with the weather.

THE INNER LIFE OF OAK
ELIZABETH COOK-ROMERO
The New Mexican

Every engineer, architect, and woodworker knows that strength is not brittle. If skyscrapers and large bridges don’t sway in the wind, if furniture joints don’t expand and contract with changes in humidity, they break. For thousands of years, people have exploited the paradoxical nature of wood — its supple solidity—for architecture, furniture, and shipbuilding.

Wood-turner Liam Flynn’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather practiced the craft of joinery and house-building. “As a very young child, I was playing with blocks of wood, sticking them together, and , making crude furniture,” Flynn said during a phone interview from his studio in County Limerick, Ireland. “I think I look at wood a little closer than people who haven’t interacted with it as much as I have. It’s a living material.”

Flynn’s art is about capturing the resilient life that resides in freshly cut logs. His shapes can easily be mistaken for vessels, but they are not functional vases or containers. “They have an opening because they are made of green timber, and if they were left solid, they would split open and crack,” Flynn said. “They have to have an opening to relieve the pressure from the inside.”

Flynn works in oak, which is rich in tannin, a chemical compound used for softening leather. (The modem word tannin conies from the ancient Celtic term for oak.) On Flynn’s lathe, oak becomes malleable; an inner life seems to press gently from the inside, pushing the wood into fluid forms. “I go for as clean a line as possible,” Flynn said. “I’m not using the natural defects or grain patterns as much as other wood-turners. I go for the essence, the flowing line of the tree.”

Because Flynn works with green wood, his forms warp as they dry. “The trick is interpreting what the timber — what the tree — is going to do,” he said. “Designing starts at an early stage, while I am actually cutting the wood out of the log.”

As Flynn’s forms dry, carefully crafted circles turn to ellipses. Tall works lean off-center. Round, squat shapes twist. Asymmetry has the authority of living entities. Look at any human face; our lopsided heads give us character.

A few of Flynn’s works are usually on display in Santa Fe at Patina Gallery, 131 W. Palace Ave. When most wooden items are moved from a climate as wet as Ireland’s to one as dry as ours, there is danger they will crack. “Because my shapes are so thin, there is little wood in them,” Flynn explained. “They dry out quickly, and once the wood is reasonably dry, it is stable.”

Flynn’s technique is a tightrope walk between control and chaos. He shines bright lights inside the green oak while he is turning to make the wood translucent. This helps him keep the walls of his sculpture the same thickness throughout and prevents them from cracking. “I still have failures because I push them too thin,” he said. “It usually happens as the piece is about to be finished. I am doing the last few cuts on the bottom and it explodes. It can really be fun sometimes.”

The lathe and his cutting blade, Flynn explained, become extensions of his own hands. He feels a fluidity that tells him the turning is going well. “I like to cut,” he said. “When I’m removing the waste in the center of the piece, I want to do it in as clean a way as possible. Some people nowadays can use equipment that is more aggressive, and that would probably be a lot quicker. But the method I’m using helps to define the shape because I’m using flowing cuts, all the time moving outward.”

Irish oaks can live for 800 years and grow 40 feet tall. By the 18th century, most of Ireland’s hardwood forest was gone. “I can get oak logs locally, if you consider 50 to 60 miles away local,” Flynn said. “I have a few contacts for felling trees, but getting logs is getting increasingly difficult. A lot of good- quality oaks are exported for veneer.”

Some of Flynn’s turnings have a double lip. It’s a way to get people to look at the work from above, he said. From some. angles, the inner rim looks like the edge of a smaller form nestled within a larger shape. Flynn places the inner opening slightly off-center within the larger outer opening. The lack of symmetry is not overstated, and the slight differences in height and centering energize the entire shape. A few works stand on tiny feet that continue the line of Flynn’s convex Curves.

If the grain of the wood is subtle, Flynn flutes the outside with a carving chisel. It’s a slow, meditative process that leaves grooves that become distorted during drying. The tannin in the oak lends itself to fuming with ammonia and ebonizing with a mixture of acid and iron filings, processes that give Plynn’s turnings rich tones, at times approaching black.

This June and July, he is one of seven residents of the International Turning Exchange at the Wood Turning Center in Philadelphia. Each year, four lathe-turners, one furniture-maker, one scholar, and one photojoumalist live and work together at the center. Collaboration comes easily among most wood-turners, who tend to think of themselves as artisans rather than as fine artists, Flynn said.

Although members of his family have worked with wood for at least four generations, Flynn said, he is the first wood-turner, but his sculpture is influenced by architecture. He used to make the traditional joinery he learned from his father; then 20 years ago he worked with a lathe for the first time. “I kind of neglected all the other aspects of wood after that,” Flynn said. “I was hooked.”

2006
Lost and Found
RINCHEN LHAMO
THE magazine

Who knows why, but this show featuring thirteen local artists gives a special joy to the
people who live here. The opening reception provoked an intense sense of community and was graced by the warm, expansive presence of the curator, Mary Bennett, and her handpicked artists, each of whom showed single works that collectively encompassed a novel variety of media. All the pieces shared a single, qualifying element to be included in the exhibition. That is, Bennett had asked the participants to incorporate a found object in their artworks, and even the way in which certain artists extrapolated from the word “found” gave opportunity for creative license. For example, Rebecca Bluestone’s Untitled #90 is a tapestry whose design elements make use of the Fibonacci progression of numbers, a mathematical sequence that is “found” in nature. The artist honored the essential meaning of found in the context of this show—an openness to seeing the possibilities of reusing something that already exists—and wove the concept into the design. When you know the facts, you look again and think about things like self-existing, random order, the implacable elegance of numbers, and the transference of their abstract existence onto visual design.

Madelin Coit used painted, die-cut paper and aluminum to produce Clamped Eights #25. At once severe and poetical, the construction is a clean and confident statement, with just enough thoughtful complication in its design to hold the viewer in his or her tracks. Sculptor Tom Emerson made a chair that was fashioned from an old, turquoise-colored Grumman industrial HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning—in case you didn’t know) unit, with contrasting dark gray steel side panels. Set on stationary rollers, the chair has a terriffic swoopy profile. The world has room for only one chair like this, called the Grumman, and I mean that as the ultimate compliment.

According to Jennifer Joseph, her “acupuncture needle series is an to move energy in those who encounter it.” Series 5000 is a soaring, those needles, strung on wire, inaccessible to would-be viewers unless) your gaze upward—not a bad habit to cultivate, come to think of it. Similar to the sword of Damocles, their soaring presence is an absolute gift, insofar as both sword and needles inspire an alert and awakened sensibility. There is a difference, of course, since the needles are a wholly benign and curative presence, their beauty amplified through repetition, and “threatening” only to the parts of the psyche that remain dull. Kate Joyce’s piece is in 2 parts: one a composite photographic image; the second, a drawing that deftly draws on the image but only in oblique ways that will be cusom fitted to the individual viewer. A bit of grapevine has been secured in front of the drawing, its positioning evocative of an elongated arabesque pose.

The conceit of this show worked well, as the single obligation that each artist had to honor instigated an approach that linked all the works, however disparate the individual inspirations might have been.

Gallerywise
CRAIG SMITH
The New Mexican

For years, Patina Gallery has been known for its exhibitions of superb work by master craftsmen — everything from pottery pieces, woven baskets, and hand-turned wooden bowls to handcrafted jewelry. Patina explores the misty border where art and craft meet, mingle, and change each other.

The gallery further examines that intersection in Lost and Found, a show of 13 local artists who at the time of the show’s organization were without gallery representation. Curator Mary Bennett has assembled a collection of pieces by artists who mix inspiration, media, and technique to excellent effect. In the show, each artist features a work using a found object.

The roster includes weaver Rebecca Bluestone, mixed-media mavens Colette Hosmer and Zachariah Rieke, collage artist Charles Greeley, bead artist Marcus Amerman, painter Beverly Ashe, ceramist Isabella Gonzales, and photographer Kate Joyce. Mixed-media artists Madelin Coit, Steven Deo, and Jennifer Joseph; sculptor Tom Emerson; and painter Marietta Patricia Leis are the other members of the baker’s dozen.

Lost and Found opens with a reception from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 6, and hangs through Nov. 5.

Summer 2006
“MICHAEL ZOBEL”
PATINA GALLERY
ELLEN BERKOVITCH
Metalsmith Magazine

That to wear jewelry corresponds to an assumption of physical mastery expresses itself at a glance in the dazzling, talismanic objects from Michael Zobels Constance, Germany, atelier. The exhibit showed 224 objects and required putting the rest of the gallery inventory into the vault for five days. About three-quarters of the work dated 2005; a fourth was from 2004. It represents the production of about five bench jewelers at Zobel Atelier, where Zobel remains creative director and vision-heir, as he now passes the business reins to protege Peter Schmid.

A student in the early 1960s of the late German master, Klaus Ullrich, at Pforzheim’s Fachhochschule, Zobel has for more than 35 years been operating at a border that marries jewelry making to technical marvels, and jewelry- wearing to a fundamental, pre-linguistic urge. Earthbound minerals and gemstones express color, texture, and form kinesthetically. Take, for example, a conch shell ring whose shank is pierced, as if by the plunging action of a pear corer, with a perfectly smooth hole. Are you meant to turn your finger and hold the ring’s flare to your ear? The brown-and-white shell shank announces, as forms do in nature, unimaginable complexity. Pink as a baby’s tongue, the ring’s flower is glass-smooth. It nests an exquisite conch pearl, which was found in the shell.

Wrapped where the cup is deepest is a spray of platinum sheet. Three pinprick diamonds glister in it. The object, like a bracelet that sets a 37-carat fire opal with its jagged edge breaking the edge of the cuff, is a landscape in which jewels function as relief objects in metallurgic textiles lacquered and patterned as landforms.

The message is that artifice can improve on nature—mine, yours and its—if, by improvement, bold conjecture is implied. Picture, now, Zobel, who designs the layout of his own shows and, this year, used eight-foot-high panels of fashion photographs to drape jewelry like bored models His daughter, Yolanda, posed for the red catalog that reminds all viewers how brut the German aesthetic can (still) be. Zobel’s clearly is an art brut that knows the alchemical properties, even divinatory ones, assigned to gems and metals. And then pushes all that slightly to one side in favor of a polish that is graphic, commercial art.

The jewelry can be quite large: how does it pinion or free bodily motions? Perhaps Zobel zooms a loupe for a better look at the mineral content of a gem, or refines a telescope at the surface curtain that expresses the sky’s dot matrices. He must study myth. His material choices hybridize geology, astronomy, fashion, graphics, and carnival. Zobel exaggerates the implication that material unfolds from sources bitterly cold, brutally rough, extracted by surface rent.

The exhibition featured luminous, cragged pendants, in shapes suggestive of Maltesecrosses (Zobel, born in Morocco, grew up in Barcelona), hung on the wall. A large heart, sprayed with champagne diamonds on platinum and overlaid by an echoing shape in rubelite, could be worn at ear or throat. The street-facing display window used its span to reveal to passers- by the epic smallnesses of jewelry: the way, for instance, that surface metals alloyed separately and applied in lacquers can be tablets for calligraphy that is as individualist as a finger’s whorls. Jungendstil exploded by Aztec sun. Soft amber trapping diamonds.

The Zobel mark vocabulary is distinctive: nesting spirals, patterned animal stripes, blisters from the smelting, and, often, tracks of constellations zipping across fused planes.

Ullrich is often cited as the force that influenced the move from soldering to fusing, and encouraged artists coming of age in the era of painterly abstraction to exalt the mark that located their body in the gesture. For jewelry, this was shape-shifting stuff. Befittingly, Zobel’s stones, so essential to what he does, often communicate in their placement a sense of group dynamics, as if to say they are alone here by the merest chance. Released into chaos, they could be re-ordering a landslide.

Overall, this exhibit conveyed mobility and the trajectories of creativity, emboldened by the money to buy and use glorious stones. Zobel helps to remind us that the jeweler’s golden rule must be animation. These objects effect a surface jolt, creating a disturbance in the mind.

2006
Pottery and Beyond: A Short Walk Through the Ages
MARY LOMBARDO
Posh Magazine

Long before there was written history there were crude tools, fire, the wheel, and there was pottery. In fact ceramics, the art of making things in clay and baking them, is one of the oldest arts. Probably the ancients began by sun baking hand fanned pots and bowls made from mud and then discovered, when they tried to cook in them, that fire hardens clay. We really don’t know how the first ceramics were made; much of our knowledge of early potters comes from the clayware that was placed into tombs to help ease the way from this life to the next. We know that, for many centuries, potters made strictly utilitarian pieces, cups and bowls to hold, cook, and store food, and they made them by hand. It wasn’t until a much later era in history that aesthetics took the lead over usefulness.

In the southwestern United States, Pueblo Indians began using clay pots instead of baskets around 200A.D. and, about four hundred years later, began decorating their pottery. Some in southern New Mexico around 1000AD. Through the centuries, the people of the pueblos, developing their own form and decoration to express their unique beliefs and traditions, have shaped pottery by hand, baked it on outdoor fires, and polished it with a polishing stone that is handed down from generation to generation, practices that, for the most part, continue today.

On the Tracks of Discovery

It wasn’t until the railroad came roaring through the southwest that Native Americans realized the commercial value of their beautiful pottery. It was then that outsiders became acquainted with the artistic skills of the American Indian and, once discovered, there was no looking back. Many Indian potters, mostly women, such as Maria Martinez, became famous, and their creations are still sought by collectors. They passed their techniques and talent down to their descendants who carry on the craft today.

The Great Southwest Pottery Company on Rio Grande Boulevard in Old Town, Albuquerque, is the place to see beautiful displays of authentic Pueblo pottery. Gorgeous pots from each of the nineteen pueblos are featured. From the stunning black and redware pottery of Santa Clara Pueblo to the famous white clay of Acoma Pueblo, each piece is individually created by a pueblo artisan. When you enter the Great Southwest Pottery Company you can watch Stephen DePriest, owner, buying assorted vessels directly from the artists. Visit with Stephen, who has over 30 years of buying experience, and you will discover that each pot has its own unique story!

Another famous name in pottery comes from south of the border. Mention Talavera and an image of brightly colored eanlicnware pops into mind. Authentic Talavera comes only from Puebia, Mexico, where there is an abundance of quality clay. In the 16”’ century, Spanish monks taught the natives how to use the potters’ wheel to make the tin- glazed pottery and, at that time, allowed only blue and white tones although green, mauve, and yellow were added in the 18’11 century. Talavera is the oldest tin- glazed ceramic in the Americas and is still made with the very same 16th century techniques.

Beyond Clay to Metal and Wood

While clay pottery is timeless and will always be valued, today collectors look for a variety of art objects in many different mediums. Nainbe, 1’ounded in 1951 just north of Santa Fe, is famous for its sand- casted metal creations that are both decorative and useful. The simple yet unique vases, bowls, candlesticks, and other products are made with a metal alloy that is as lustrous as silver, making them a visual treat. They’re also as strong as iron, so they can be used everyday because they will not crack, chip, or tarnish. To create the signature metal pieces, 15 craftsmen mold, pour, grind, polish, and buff to achieve a high quality finish. In the past few years, Nambe has added full-lead crystal and porcelain creations to its line. Many of the artists who design Nambe ware are famous in the design world, and they are given free rein to create as the spirit moves them.

Wood, of course, is and always has been a basis of beautiful art. Whether carved into statues, totems, vases, bowls, baskets, or furniture, there is nothing else that quite captures the look and feel of the soft, glowing quality of wood. Patina Gallery, in the heart of the art center in downtown Santa Fe, is the place to view some very unique wood an pieces including an arrangement of delicate baskets of all sizes. Art lovers come from all over the world to visit the gallery which represents about one hundred artists, artists who are considered the best in their field in the whole world. When asked about what medium is most popular today, Ivan Bamett who, along with his wife, Allison Buchsbaum-Bamett, owns the gallery, says, “We don’t follow market trends. We represent the best of the best in fine craft, artists who do certain things and do them well.” Along with the selection of innovative works in wood, you can see works in clay, sculpture, textiles, and jewelry that are on the cutting edge of contemporary art.

Glass, the Magic Medium

Pottery comes from the clay of the earth; wood art from the trees that the earth sustains. But what of glass? It also comes from things of the earth, but not until two elements are mixed, sand and the ashes from plants and trees. It’s rather a magical product, isn’t it? Mix those common every-day products, melt them, and, out of the molten glob, come so many useful and beautiful things.

Natural glass has existed since the beginning of time, probably occurring when heat from volcanoes or lightening melted certain rocks. The earliest man-made glass objects are from ancient Egypt: non-transparent glass beads that date from 3500 B.C. We can only wonder how the Egyptians discovered how to make glass. Maybe a fire was laid in a sand pit and the materials fused and made glass.

Around 50 BC, the Romans discovered glass-blowing, and archaeologists have found evidence, from the many glass drinking utensils placed in tombs, that the Romans produced a great deal of glassware.

The next great discovery in the glassmaking story was the development of crystal in the 16th century by the Venetians who had long held a monopoly on the art of glassmaking. Their crystal was extremely delicate, however, and it wasn’t until the 17th century that an English glassmaker, George Ravenscroft, created a formula for glass that included lead, giving the world glass objects that were both beautiful and strong.

Today there seems to be resurgence of interest in glassware. While collectors seek to restore sets of Carnival and Depression glass from the early twentieth century, new forms and designs in glassware are catching the art lover’s eye. Just as Venice was the center of the most valued glassware in the 15th and 16th centuries, the Czech Republic is the important source of the most Gallery) beautiful art glass today. For a look at some exquisite glass creations, the Some’ Gallery in Albuquerque’s Old Town can’t be beat. It carries a large assortment of art glass, in all sizes and prices, from artists all over the world including several from New Mexico. The gallery and its sister gallery on the Plaza in Santa Fe also carry hand-made furniture and jewelry and a variety of paintings of artists who show their work exclusively at Some’.

It’s hard to believe that not too many years back, glass products were only for the wealthy. Today we look through glass windows of all sizes and shapes, and we can buy glass ornaments, dishes, glasses, vases, all sorts of glass products at prices that vary from low- budget to high-end.

Pottery, metal, wood, glass, whatever art medium is your favorite, you will find a profusion of it, in both traditional and contemporary creations, in the many galleries in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and smaller cities of New Mexico. Local artists, as well as artists from around the world, bring their work to exhibit here in this state that is an artist’s and an art-lover’s paradise.

2005

What do you think?
Artists Selling Crafts Online?
Crafts Business

Ivan Barnett, director and artist, Patina Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
www.patina-gallery, corn

Technology is changing the gallery business. We’ve been through big changes before. We managed to hold our own when craft shows were so popular. Galleries felt competition then, too. But these are different times. Today, anyone can send an image and a price quote instantaneously, to anywhere in the world. Because artists tend to live at a survival level, many succumb to temptation. They override their galleries by selling directly to the client. They want to show in the major galleries for the visibility and prestige and be their own independent brokers through the Internet.

There are no clear answers at this junction, but a new kind of agreement will likely emerge. Galleries will have to demonstrate a very high standard of commitment to their artists and the same will be asked of artists. Artists and galleries will need to work closely to develop a system for managing sales. Galleries cannot continue to serve as showplaces for an artist’s work, advertise, promote, sponsor exhibitions and then watch as clients leave the gallery and contact the artists directly for the purchase. If an artist wants representation, galleries will insist that artists refer clients back to the gallery.

The Internet is a powerful business tool but there is a difference between a piece of fine art and a flat screen TV, between acquiring artwork and shopping. Today’s professional galleries employ myriad techniques to promote an artist’s works. If an artist competes with the gallery for the sale of the same works, the gallery has little choice but to represent only the artists who understand the value of high quality representation. Artists who wish to remain free agents may run the risk of having no agent down the road. But as a team working together, the artist and gallery can be very effective promoting work and cultivating collectors to the mutual benefit or both.

2005
ART TRENDS
An exerpt of “The Significance of Shape”
HOLLIS WALKER
The Santa Fe Catalogue

The Western notion of shape, or form, has its genesis in the Greek concept of eidos, which originally meant something like, “the look of a thing by which we recognize it,” according to Grove’s Dictionary of Art. Like color, line, and texture, shape is one of the primary elements of art, and for some artists — and art patrons — it is the primary element.

“When I’m in the studio, shape comes first,” says Ivan Barnett, who creates metal collages he shows at Patina Gallery, which he owns with his wife Allison. Barnett designs his pieces first and only then experiments with color. Like many artists who use the same shapes over and over again in their art, Barnett has been using the shape of a hand in his art since 1978.

Initially influenced by the German folk artists of Pennsylvania, where he once lived, Barnett said he started to look at the iconography of other cultures and discovered the hand appears almost universally. What does a hand symbolize? Welcome, blessing, generosity, peace, protection — when we see the shape of a human hand we somehow know what it means.

In fact, the human response to shapes is at least in part a universal one, psychoanalysts say. Infants begin to recognize shapes as early as five months, and soon thereafter begin to associate meanings and feelings with those shapes. A toddler who sees a drawing of a circle may ideate ball, sun, or moon, and may likely feel happiness in regard to circles. As we grow up, the image of a circle may prompt larger, more abstract concepts, like union, wholeness, timelessness, Self, God.

Eventually, of course, the process works in reverse, for example, when we think about fertility or creativity, and an egg shape comes to mind unbidden. Some of the meanings we associate with shapes are culturally specific (as Americans, we may think of the flag and country when we see a five-pointed star) and some can be very
personal (if you grew up at the beach, you may associate a sense of family with wave forms).

But many of our interpretations of shape derive from what C.G. Jung called the collective unconscious — the innate, internal sort of global database we all share, Jung believed all humans inherit this body of knowledge, harkening back to ancient cultures, and including images and concepts he called “archetypal.” We need only look at the similarities in pictograms in early cave art of Western Europe, the petroglyphs of Southwestern Native American ancestors, and the hieroglyphs in ancient Egyptian tombs to see that exemplified. Children, “outsider” artists and isolated tribal cultures of today intuitively use the same images.

Mainstream contemporary artists use them consciously and unconsciously in their work as well. Likewise, art patrons respond to shape from different levels of consciousness. While we may sometimes consciously be aware that we like — or don’t like — an image because of its shape, at other times a shape may inspire certain feelings without our even being aware of it.

Art therapists and psychoanalysts who use art as a tool say clients’ responses to shapes do reveal certain things about the individual. While it’s impossible to generalize about shape in the psychology of the artist or viewer, Dr. Rosvita Botkin, a Jungian-oriented psychoanalyst and art therapist, said it is quite common for a client to have an affinity for a particular shape, for example, the bell. Then one day the bell the client visualized or dreamed of so frequently suddenly disappears, and in its place is, perhaps, a crescent. While the particular significance of such a shift might differ drastically from person to person, the shift itself is always important, Botkin said. When the newly popular shape is the polar opposite of the shape to which the client previously was drawn, a particularly powerful psychic change may be underway.

Men and women tend to be attracted to different shapes, said Botkin. While there are exceptions, “men like more linear, angular shapes, women the rounder shapes.” (Botkin was wearing a scarf with petroglyphic spirals on it during the interview for this article.) But, she noted, at one time she worked with many academics and found a higher than usual percentage of women preferred linear and angular shapes. Botkin believes that deviation in preference was a reflection of the male-dominated, male-structured university arena in which the women worked and lived. But, “here in Santa Fe the women lean toward the round, and of course many of the men are more round, too,” — perhaps a reflection of the strong focus on self-actualization in our “New Age” community.

But Latven, a wood sculptor who shows at Patina Gallery in Santa Fe, has been turning wood on a lathe for 30 years. His work is all about shape, including the negative space created by carving out segments of his forms. Latven has noticed over the years that women are more attracted to open vessel forms than men. But he did one series of vessels with thin stripes that male bankers and lawyers collected like crazy. Unconsciously, the men were drawn to a visual image common to their everyday lives and Latven, recognizing that, parked tongue in cheek and began calling the vessels “pinstripe bowls.”

Artists often explore their affinity for shapes through those evident in Nature. Jeweler Britt Gusterman of Gusterman Silversmiths said shapes that are natural and simple, “that just come to me,” are the most successful. Her designs for rings, bracelets, pins and other objects of adornment are almost all organic, fluid and irregular. Looking at the work around her in her shop, she noted, “everything I make is round,” echoing Botkin’s description of the female affinity for the shape. “There are some nice industrial shapes,” Gusterman conceded, “but I never think to make them.” Even her work with gemstones reflects her appreciation for the roundness of things; she rarely uses faceted gems, almost always selecting cabochon stones.

Many artists use multiple shapes and symbols as a consistent visual “vocabulary.” Kevin Tolman, a painter who shows at” Karen Ruhlen Gallery, often includes numerous iconic shapes in his abstract canvases. One recent piece featured spirals, circles, ovals, cones, infinity symbols and polygons. The paint is richly layered in brilliant colors, and the canvases include interesting sgraffito-style markings, but it is these pictograph-like forms that energize the work and draw the viewer’s eye.

Excerpt from The London Times
2005

...Equally fetching but not indigenous, the luminous Patina Gallery on West Palace Avenue specialises in
international jewelry, wood work, ceramics and textiles. Look for Michael Zobel’s flamboyant, dramatic
precious jewelry, and Danish artist Marete Larson’s finely turned wooden vessels. ...

2005
Santa Fe restaurants, arts sites boost tsunami relief
JOHN ARNOLD
Albuquerque Journal North

SANTA FE — There may be too many cooks in La Casa Sena’s kitchen on Wednesday. And that’s just fine with general manager Jack Baudo. After all, the chefs crowding his cocina will be some of Santa Fe’s finest, and they’ll be preparing a nine-course feast for a good cause.

Nine chefs from eight Santa Fe restaurants are donating their talents for the Santa Fe Chef’s UNICEF Tsunami Relief Dinner. Organizers are asking for a $120 or greater donation; the restaurant is taking reservations for 80 people, who will enjoy a plethora of culinary delights paired with complementary fine wines.

Among the chefs’ contributions: Passed Hors D’ Oeuvres, White Anchovy Stuffed Prawn, Cold Smoked Salmon, Thai Curry-Butternut Squash Soup, Pomegranate Glazed Quail Salad, Prickly Pear & Jalapeno Granita, Red Mullet, Mixiote and Andacia- style chocolate cake.

The spread is one of several cultural benefit events being organized to help victims of the Dec. 26 Asian tsunami that has claimed more than 200,000 lives and destroyed the homes and villages of countless others.

“Of course we’re going to go on with our lives, but there’s so much devastation and so much more we’re finding out every day of what’s needed,” said local musician Busy McCarroll, who is organizing a Feb. 12 benefit at the Awakening Museum.

McCarroll’s event will feature several musical acts, including the Ron Hellman Quartet, Jo Shawn Davis, George Adelo and McCarroll’s own band. The Ambassadors of Pleasure. Also on hand will be Santa Fe photographer, Jennifer Esperanza, who was visiting an Indian ashram — a spiritual retreat belonging to the international humanitarian Amma — when the tsunami hit.

“We were evacuated,” Esperanza said in a recent phone interview. “Fifteen thousand were in the ashram that day, and no one was hurt. But right outside the ashram, people died; babies were torn from their mothers’ arms; houses were destroyed.”

Esperanza documented the event with thousands of photographs, a number of which she will present in a slideshow at the benefit. Admission to the event is $20, $15 for students.

Patina Gallery is also pitching in with a benefit. The gallery is adding a silent auction to its annual Valentine exhibition of heart-themed jewelry. Pieces in the show range from a set of $8,690 emerald and diamond earrings to a $19 steel heart pin. They can be viewed at www.patina-gallery.com, and visitors can place bids in $5 increments by calling the gallery at (877) 877-0827.

The silent auction was conceived after artists had already submitted their work with the understanding it would be sold. That means artists will be compensated for their jewelry, according to project organizer and gallery staff member Barbara Marburger. A minimum bid, or reserve price, has been set for each entry. Ten percent of the reserve will be donated to UNICEF’s relief effort, and 100 percent of winning bids above the reserve will be donated, Marburger said.

Bidding is open through Feb. 7, and winners will be notified the following day.

2004

Little Sculptures
Jewelry artist’s new nature-inspired pieces share a Zen Buddhism theme
Dottie Indike
The Albuquerque Journal

Harold O’Connor is a jewelry artist who doesn’t like jewelry. “I don’t like glitzy stuff,” the Coloradan flatly stated. “I consider myself a person who makes little reliefs in sculpture that can be worn.”

For 40 years, O’Connor has been perfecting his smithing techniques, inspired more by sculptors like Noguchi and Brancusi than jewelers. After the Rochester, N.Y., native graduated from the University, of New Mexico with a degree in anthropology, he took off for Europe to study in the place where metal work originated and where, he says, it is done best.

Now a veteran of his craft, he has taught workshops in 15 countries, written five books (including the popular “Jeweler’s Bench Reference”) and been celebrated with work in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian. Metropolitan and Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Beginning today, Patina Gallery presents brooches, rings, earrings and necklaces that O’Connor has created using the theme of Zen Buddhism.

“I usually work on a theme,” he noted. “I did one in which I converted old, large mining machines into miniature jewelry forms. When my father was dying, I had the idea for these little watches that didn’t tell time.”

For the past decade, beginning with visits to Denver’s Japanese garden and leading to trips to Japan and Korea, O’Connor has explored the simple, nature-inspired and orderly aesthetic associated with Asian culture. His work incorporates gold and silver, stones and bones, wood and gems such as spectrolite, sugilite and lapis. The materials hearken back to his days as an anthropologist.

One of the many techniques that he has mastered is granulation, a process perfected by the Greeks and Romans in which tiny silver and gold beads are adhered to metal without soldering. O’Connor handcrafts each bead and groups them to create glittering forms, cascades, outlines and other effects. The granules are especially beautiful when set against old wood and bone.

Though the jewels have an austere, cryptic quality, their genesis is often quite modest. The brainstorm that led him to bones, for instance, came straight from the leftover meat at a backyard barbecue.

“Every series has a new challenge, both in design and technique,” O’Connor said. While many jewelers work a technique to death, I design and then figure out how to make it.”

2004
ONE STEP BACK, TWO STEPS FORWARD
TERRY MARTIN
CRAFTS ARTS INTERNATIONAL NO. 61

OBSERVERS of the “wood art” phenomenon will know that it has developed an increasingly schizoid identity. Its early success was founded upon the wood turning revival and many collectors built their collections around turned work. One result was that many artists who might not have identified themselves as wood-turners were tempted to include turning in their work to help sales.

As competition grew, attempts at interpreting the turned form became increasingly outlandish, delighting the radicals and upsetting the purists. Now that wood art has gained a degree of credibility, increasing numbers of artists have abandoned the restrictions of the lathe to create totally free-form sculpture.

With all this in mind, I looked forward to seeing the exhibition “One Step Backward, Two Steps Forward”, curated jointly by Robyn Horn and Patina Gallery in the heart of Santa Fe. New Mexico, a city with hundreds of galleries and which is reportedly the second-largest art market in the US outside of New York. The gallery is spacious, high-ceilinged and airy, an ideal venue for contemplating the wood art that the owners, Ivan and Allison Barnett, have dedicated themselves to over recent years.

The exhibition was die brainchild of Robyn Horn, a long-time wood artist and patron of the arts, who explains her rationale for the show: ‘Most viewers who are not makers have little concept of the evolution artists go through in making work; To highlight this evolution, Horn’s idea was to show photographs of early work by 25 artists, juxtaposing where they have come from and where they have arrived.

Two of Robyn Horn’s pieces confirm her own evolution away from the lathe. Her She-oak Geode was made in 1987 when her main tool was obviously the lathe. Fanfare, however, is typical of this artist’s recent work. It is a lurching, chain-sawn arch of wood, raw, with no attempt at fine finishing. Full of self-confidence, the piece reflects the equipoise of She-oak Geode, but without [he slightest echo of the restrictions of the turned form.

Stoney Lamar has been stretching the limits of the lame for years and is regarded as one of the world’s most innovative sculptural turners. His Circus Boy, however, shows no evidence of having been anywhere near a lathe. This may not seem an elegant simplicity. It catches light in beautiful lines which lead the eye to further exploration.

David Groth’s Manitu 2 is rather angular, yet curved and convoluted at the same time. Made from one piece, this sand-it-fine school of wood art is in distinct contrast to the work of someone such as Jack Slentz, also in this exhibition, who has made a virtue of crudity. Groth is one of the few wood art glitterati who would not be out of place with famous wood sculptors of any era –Hepworth and Moore included.

There are still totally turned works in this collection and Christian Burchard’s enormous burl Basket is probably as good as lathe-turned work gets. The degree of control required to make work this large and thin is extraordinary. Also for the purist turners, British artist Richard Hooper’s Galaxy is a cool exploration of simple geometry. Made of laminated plywood, it has a big slice taken out to show that it’s part of the swirling vortex of a galaxy. Hooper holds an interesting position, somewhat on the fringe of the wood art firmament. Unlike many of the self-taught artists in this exhibition, he is an academic with a strong design background, and this is evident in the analytical nature of his work.

Hayley Smith’s Square Dance plays with the notion of circle-square-circle. It is another of her signature wall pieces which, on die one hand, impress me with their careful craftsmanship and application of colour, but, on the other hand, leave me with the feeling of an over-clinical graphical exercise.

Virginia Dotson’s Vanishing Act is a new direction for this artist. It is reminiscent of the recent work of Betty Scarpino, also in this exhibition, following her tendency to move away from the purely turned form. Dotson used to start with plywood vessels formed on the lathe that were then cut away to intriguingly reveal the layers of plywood. This piece reveals the same layers, but in tapering forms which have nothing to do with the lathe. Apart from the obvious perspective leading to the draughtsman’s vanishing point, it is tempting to read more into this. Is the purely lathe-based artist a disappearing life form?

Grant Vaughan’s Enfolded Form #4 is a pair of interfacing vessels that resemble elegantly cupped hands. American collectors tend to view Vaughan as a newcomer to the field, yet he’s been exploring the sculptural vessel for as long as anyone. From the 1980s, his beautifully carved vessels were an inspiration to a whole generation of Australian wood artists and it is good to see he has achieved the kind of international status that he deserves. Clay Foster has been imbuing his work with ritualistic overtones for many years. His pieces invariably reflect his interest in the spiritual, and Temple Bowl continues this theme. Rooted in stone, it is both baptismal font and offertory vessel.

Hawaiian Derek Bencomo’s work is an evocation of the Pacific environment. Ocean Harmony, 24th View might echo rolling breakers crashing on a distant beach, or sand-scoured shells washed up on the shore. It’s one of those “might-have-been-turned” pieces which used to be the subject of so much debate. Did he turn it? Or did he carve it? Fortunately, we have now progressed to the stage where it’s no longer an issue. It is excellent work, regardless of how it was done.

In a field where the word “pioneer” is often overworked, Bruce Mitchell can lay claim to being one who is bona fide. He was making wood art before most of the current crop of wood artists were born. He has always [ended to create monumental work and my only regret about his Cuivilnear Angularity is that it is not four metres tall. It is a very simple form, but one which drew my eye repeatedly in the gallery. Unlike many of the works, it does not rely on gimmickry, but works because of a strong sense of woodiness, luring the hand to caress and tempting the face close to test if the wood smells as sweet as it looks.

Todd Hoyer’s typically robust work was represented here by his Ring Series. In many respects, Hoyer’s work represents the finest of the field, toying with our ideas of what can be done with wood. He snaps off what he doesn’t need, winds wire around the piece and leaves it to weather and rust outdoors. But this seeming aggression is in fact self-confidence gained from years of learning just what the material will allow him to do. It is the mark of an artist in full control of both his medium and his vision.

Micheal Bauermeister’s Vase of Drawers delightfully pokes fun at the identity of wood art. The vase reflects the long-time obsession of the field with the hollow vessel, but the unexpected drawers tease the viewer. If it were a chest of drawers, we might know what to expect, but a vase of drawers? It is bound to be full of surprises. His broadly carved textured surface matches the out-of-proportion vase and his use of paint is masterly.

During the heyday of the Arts and Crafts Movement, wood was often carved with simple flower motifs, which was about as far as decoration was permitted to go. J. Paul Fennell’s La Passion de Mon Pere reminds me of this kind of work. It is a simple evocation of nature which also neatly fits into the brief of this exhibition, as it is a glance back at earlier rimes when wood arc was more modest. Fennell’s De la Mer, while certainly not immodest, is much more ambitious than the earlier work. It is a complex piece of pierced carving, painstaking and delicate. They are both examples of how woodturning has evolved into carved an, bur neither seeks novelty for its own sake.

It is a pleasure to see such a range of wood art in the congenial surroundings of a gallery that allows the space for quiet contemplation of each piece. This exhibition confirms several things: that individuals make a difference (Robyn Horn, curator); that good galleries can change the image of a whole genre of work (Patina Gallery), and that there are wood artists who have successfully been working for a whole generation and who still produce marvellous work.

2004
Craig Smith
The New Mexican

There are many expressions that include the word box, but they all mean something that holds something else, as in boxed in, Pandora’s box, a box hedge. Patina Gallery has encouraged six of its artists to take on the form and inspiration of the box in a new exhibit. Women in Wiioil: Working Out of the Box, on display through Oct. 17.

Wood has been curated by Merryll Saylan, one of the first female woodworkers to gain national recognition: one of her pieces was acquired in June for the permanent collection of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. Other participants are Susan Working, Yuko Shimizu, Wendy Maruyama,Jo Stone and Tina Chinn. The six know each other well — some have studied With others or shared studios.

December 2004
In a Woven Garden
Elizabeth Cook-Romero
The New Mexican

Its easy to get discouraged by the state of the environment and believe that humans are always destructive, but weaver Laura Foster Nicholson doesn’t see things that way. She makes art about gardens and focuses on the many living things gardeners enjoy.

When Nicholson first became interested in art, she enjoyed drawing people. But after becoming a weaver, she searched for another subject. “Putting people onto the textiles doesn’t work, but gardening — man’s intervention with nature in a positive way — is a metaphor for people,” she said during a phone interview from her Chicago home. “I’m not an illustrator. I don’t think I’m going to show anyone how to think about nature, but I’m finding that I’ve done work about gardening for 25 years.”

Nicholson’s weavings, on display through Jan. 2, 2005, at Patina Gallery, celebrate balance and simple pleasures. In Spring Onions, young plants stand in a formal line, the various shades of green on their stems and leaves suggesting their just-picked flavor. In Gifts, bulbs just showing their first growth, eggs, and a teapot and cups provide a sensation of being enmeshed in and supported by the rhythms of life.

Small things are important in Nicholson’s weavings, and she expresses great wonder when representing rounded pebbles. Sometimes she uses threads with variegated earth tones, which give these stones the fuzzy look of house cats or spotted sheep. Some dark pebbles almost sink into rich-toned backgrounds, while an occasional coral-red or lapis-blue stone seems to vibrate. In some weavings she leaves natural stone colors behind and makes small orange-yellow rocks that glow like candles inside paper lanterns strung against a summer-night sky.

Nicholson uses brocade inlay, a technique that involves directly adding embroidery floss to the weft while weaving the pictorial elements. Her process is one of addition. Like the dots in pointillist paintings, the colors other threads mix in the viewer’s eye and mind. Sometimes this creates illusions of transparency; for instance, from a distance, the spring onions look as it they are rendered in thin washes of opaque watercolor,

“Color and thread [are] much more vivid to me than paint,” she explained. “I never enjoyed paint at all. 1 find it hard to work with liquid color; I don’t even dye anymore. There is a sense of three-dimensional luminosity in yarn that you don’t get with paint. I find nothing more thrilling than having the opportunity to interlace all these fine threads of color.”

Nicholson keeps her weaving coarse so each thread remains visible. She divides her backgrounds into vertical stripes a few inches wide, using variations of the same colors to create subtle shifts in perception that make the background appear to be behind the brocade inlays. “My job is to either make you aware of that division [of the stripe] or to take your mind off of that division,” she said. “The forms I work with are not really modeled to obtain an illusion of depth.”

The sense of depth that Nicholson creates this way is not as profound as the depth created using [he three-point perspective invented during the Renaissance, but this more shallow space communicates other qualities. In Equisetum, variations in the growth of slender horsetail reeds create a gently undulating pattern against straight golden-brown background stripes. Flying insects scattered about the weaving set up a hum ot gray and blue wings, and multicolored pebbles create an additional buzz. There are just a handful of elemental shapes in Equisetum, but the artful variation in those shapes strongly suggests the sound of a pond on a hot summer afternoon.

“It’s a lot like music,” Nicholson said. ‘’I love Baroque music, and many years ago when I first started weaving, I used to think that the repetition of a pattern was like information detailed along the bass line, and the variation in the pattern was in the melody line.”

Commercially woven or printed textiles have limited possibilities for setting up a visual melody because each repetition has to be the same as the one before. By setting up an underlying pattern but constantly changing it, Nicholson creates the opposite of chaos.

“It gives you a sense of calm and rhythm, but it doesn’t bore you to death,” she explained. “It expresses that mindful state that you get into in meditation — mindful attention. When I’m weaving, I’m fully attentive, but I’m not in that thinking state. It is intuition guided by intelligence. It is nonverbal.”

The controlled calm and surprise inherent in pattern and rhythm run through the history of textiles, Nicholson said: “When you look at an Oriental carpet, the real pleasure comes when suddenly you realize one of the flowers is smaller than the rest. In that moment it becomes more alive.”

Gallery lockdown
String of art thefts throughout Santa Fe has some gallery owners tightening security
Steve Babuljak/The New Mexican
By ERIKA DAVILA
The New Mexican

Recent art thefts have forced some Santa Fe gallery owners to take extra security precautions, and some say they fear the thefts will change the art community’s casual way of doing things.

The Price-Dewey Gallery this week became the latest to report a stolen piece of art, a kachina valued at more than $9,000. The doll was stolen in January, but the theft was not reported to police until this week.

The most prominent thefts were at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and at the Museum of Fine Art. A Georgia O’Keeffe painting was stolen from each museum in January and December, respectively. The piece taken from the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum was recovered, and police have charged a man who was a security guard there at the time of the theft.

Some gallery owners say they believe every gallery is a possible target.

“I think everyone in town should be more aware of the individuals walking through their space,” said Ivan Barnett, co-owner of the Patina Gallery on West Palace Avenue.

“There’s something up right now that we need to watch,” he said.

Barnett said his staff has been instructed to be extra aware of activity in the gallery. He said additional security measures have been taken, but declined to share them for fear of compromising them. Patina shows several kinds of art, including jewelry and sculptures.

Barnett said he and his wife, Allison, have owned the gallery for five years and have never had a theft there.

The atmosphere in Santa Fe — and in galleries — has always been laid back, he said, and perhaps the thief — or thieves — is taking advantage of that. “We all need to wake up,” he said.

Down the street at the Manitou Gallery, officials recently installed security”. cameras and changed locks as a result of the thefts.

However, salesman Bill Haskell said he wondered whether the gallery was a potential target because most of its art was contem-porary. Much of what has been stolen in Santa Fe in recent months is the work of deceased artists.

Karla Winterowd, director of The Karan Ruhlen Gallery on Canyon Road, said the thefts are “of great concern.”

“I think art galleries are taking a look at what they’re placing in public places,” Winterowd said.

Many of the thefts have occurred during regular business hours.

She said Santa Fe gallery owners have never been overly concerned about people who wander, inside, and that’s pretty unique for a town with a busy art scene.

“When you go to New York to a gallery, you have to be buzzed in,” she said.

Winterowd said she fears people are taking advantage of a certain openness in the Santa Fe community. “If the thefts keep occurring, this town is going to change seriously,” she added.

The thefts also have Santa Fe Gallery Association President Michael Carroll worried. Carroll, co-owner of Turner Carroll Gallery, said Santa Fe police will make a presentation to association members at the March meeting about ‘precautions galleries can take to protect themselves against theft. Still, some galleries such as the Atlermann Galleries and the Meyer Gallery on Canyon Road say extra security measures are nothing new.

John Gonzalez, a senior “sales consultant at McLarry Fine Art, also on Canyon Road, said the gallery is not overly concerned He doesn’t believe the thefts are as common as they appear, he added.

The gallery has had security cameras for three years, and any theft would likely be captured on film.

“I don’t really know what we could be doing differently,” he said.

SUMMER 2004
DAVID ELLSWORTH AT PATINA GALLERY, SANTA FE
BY DOTTY INDYKE
TURNING POINTS

As I watched David Ellsworth demonstrate wood turning in the garage of a Santa Fe student, I scratched the word Zen in my notebook. In retrospect, I’m not sure whether I meant the contemplative quality of the turning or Ellsworth’s resemblance, augmented by his silent concentration and a scraggly gray beard dotted with wood shavings, to a Buddhist monk. Either way, the notion is apt.

His recent work, exhibited at Patina Gallery, embodies a spare Asian aesthetic that has been expressed in America by sculptors such as Donald Judd and Carl Andre. Simple at first glance, the profundity of his vessels unfolds with time, much like the practice ol’ meditation. Even his approach to his art has a strong spiritual aspect. There is an aura about the man that embodies the Zen notion of “beginner’s mind” — an openness to the world around him, to the many aspiring wood turners he trains, to varied artistic influences, and the natural world.

“As a maker. 1 find myself drawn to the privacy of the interior of these forms,” he has said, “for it is here that I discover the origin of their force . . . their spirit, their pulse... elements that engender the same qualities of mystery that one finds within oneself.”

Native American carvers often talk about sitting with a stone and waiting for its intended purpose to emerge. Inherent in this philosophy is the belief in a sacred partnership between rock and sculptor. A higher power has joined the two and the sculptor’s job is to unveil the secret story of the rock. Ellsworth works similarly with wood, exercising his gift, which is part craftsmanship, part artistry, and part magic, for coaxing every ounce of beauty from a modest log.

As he demonstrates, he softly roots his legs into the ground, leans into the lathe, and gently sways back and forth. Using his legs, after more than three decades as a turner, avoids depleting his upper body. This physical centeredness expresses itself in his vessels, which are also strong and connected to the earth. They are substantial, yet open; apparently heavy, but actually feather-light.

The qualities that make David Ellsworth one of the legends in the field have been extensively covered over the years. The tiny openings in his hollow pots, which seem even too small to allow the evacuation of shavings, and which require him to turn “blind,” using only touch and sound as a guide. The paper-thin walls. His innovative designs for tools that allow working at a high level of delicacy. There is also his affinity and commitment to wood as an artmaking material, which elevated the genre from craft to fine art. Ellsworth even looks the role. Tall and slender, with an unruly head of gray hair and signature beard, he would seem at home with the Old Worl