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ELLYN WEISS

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Ellyn's Blog

I am Ellyn Weiss. I live and work in Washington, DC and in Truro, MA during the summer. I use this blog for my news and to comment on the art I see in and around both towns. That includes the galleries, studios and alternative spaces that sometimes get lost amidst the art-industrial complex of institutional Washington and official Provincetown.

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Jen Bradley at Schoolhouse Gallery

July 2, 2008

Jen Bradley

I love this work, at the Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown. Jen Bradley starts with toile. Never heard of the stuff? Well, if you were not in Barbara Bush's class at Smith or are not a devotee of haute WASP Upper East Side interior decoration, you may be excused. Toile (that's "twahl", since it's French) is a pattern found in fabric and wallpaper, often in blue and white, featuring images of 18th century upper class women and occasionally men in romantic pastoral settings or refined drawing rooms. So Bradley starts with these and quietly inserts images of gorillas in exactly the same tone and color, as if they were just coexisting in the same space. So you have the hyper-refined ladies (swoon) confronted by their evolutionary ancestors. To me, the message is that we are less separated from the gorillas than we would like to think, but there are other possible ways to look at these, too. Are they a comment on the artifice of art? (It's no coincidence that the two words share a common root.) On the thinness of the veneer of civilization? Your thoughts?? And by the way, Barbara never graduated from Smith (my alma mater,I will confess) - she dropped out to marry W's father. What a throwback.

A Regular Painting

July 1, 2008

Desparately in Search of Title

This is the closest to a regular painting I've done in many moons. Meaning, it's oil paint on canvas, with a few embellishments like shredded cheesecloth, but that's tame by current standards. As you can see, I have been infected by seaside colors, or maybe I just like blue and green and sand color.

Ellyn at the Left Bank Gallery in Wellfleet

July 1,2008

Left Bank, Wellfleet

My work at Left Bank

I belatedly got over to visit my work at the Left Bank Gallery in Wellfleet, the next town down the Cape. The Small Work Gallery on Main Street is one of three on the outer Cape owned by the redoubtable Audrey Parent, who manages to make it work even in hard times. Running a successful business out here where the season is about 12 weeks long, is a real accomplishment, so hats off to Audrey and let's all go buy art!

The Women of Iceland

June 29, 2008

Those Iceland gals clean up good

Among the other artists painting with me at Castle Hill last week was a foursome of women from Iceland who I just loved to pieces. Two of them have studios in an old 40-artist building that reminded me, as too many things do, of the late lamented Millenium Art Center. Every year they do an art trip - last year was Florence and this year Truro. And what could possible come after Truro? Anyway, we did some trading of art at the end of the week and I invited them to our hovel and they invited me to come to Iceland where they promised to show me "a really good time", (which I'm sure has entirely different connotations to non-native English speakers.) Anyway, Iceland sounds pretty terrific and I'm definitely going to take them up on the invitation. No joke, folk. Next June in Reykavik!

A week sniffing glue at Castle Hill

June 29, 2008

Title anyone??

I just finished a week painting with odd and toxic substances at Castle Hill Center for the Arts in Truro, our fair city. Bonney Goldstein, a terrifically brave and free spirit, encouraged shredding, tarring, shellacing and otherwise beating the crap out of canvas and board. One of them is now out on my deck so that I can see what happens as it weathers in the elements for a couple of months. I haven't really painted painted in about 5 years, so I thought it would be fun to get those muscles working again. The piece here is made primarily out of tar, with the addition of solvent and shellac. Yummy! I had to take it home in my car and by the time I got here I'm pretty confident that the fumes were in brain damage territory.

Dog is my co-pilot II

June 29, 2008

This car practically steers itself

The Studio Show at PAAM

June 28, 2008

Blanche Lazzell white-line print

Michael Mazur, prominent printmaker and teacher, Board member and one of the most hardy spirits behind the Fine Arts Work Center, has curated a show at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) that I found both heartwarming and heartbreaking. The show, which contains small pieces of work from most of the best of Provincetown’s historic artists along with pictures of the artists’ studios – often the artists in their studios – reminds us of how many men and women of great talent and heart produced work in this beautiful and soulful place, often under conditions that we would find impossibly primitive today (e.g. heated by coal stoves, without plumbing, without insulation or even reliably roofed).
Supported by the local fishing community who rented them cheap studio space ($50 a year after WWI) and exchanged paintings for food in tough times, they represent a roster of some of the most important American artists of the past 100 years: Charles Hawthorne and Harry Hensche, founders of the Cape Cod School of Art at the turn of the century, Blanche Lazell, who came back from Europe in the 20’s to popularize the white-line woodcut, or Provincetown print, Marsden Hartley, Charles DeMuth, Hans Hoffman, (teacher of a generation of abstract expressionists), Fritz Bultman, Robert Motherwell, Jack Tworkov, Franz Kline, Ross Moffett, Peter Busa, even Mark Rothko. And more…The photos collected by Mazur show them at work in spaces both meager and more grand.

So where is the heartbreak? I can’t help but feel that in the seriousness of their endeavor, the dedication they showed to their work, the community they created both among themselves and with the town, they created a standard that we do not now come close to meeting. Not that I put myself even remotely in the rarified company of these artists, but the relentless focus now on the prices paid for art and the stratospheric sums paid for those favored by the international art fair crowd is nauseating and utterly un-connected to the joy of making art. It seems completely impossible to think of every getting back to the directness of these artists in their studios.

Gallery Night in Provincetown

June 27, 2008

Holly Hughes' One Hundred Suns Rose

During the summer, most of the P-Town galleries change shows every couple of weeks and every Friday night is chock full of openings. My favorites last night were Vicky Tomayko and Jen Bradley at Schoolhouse Gallery and Holly Hughes and Bert Yarborough at ArtStrand, both of which are housed in the same East End building. Tout le monde de P-Town artistique passed through and there were hugs and kisses all around for a couple of hours.

Vicky Tomayko is a Truro resident who has lived, taught and worked on the Cape for many years. She creates an entirely fictional world peopled by generally benign if charmingly grotesque creatures and living machines. Their adventures are entirely familiar to humans, especilly those, like many of us, groping our way through life. Her printmaking technique is impeccable and innovative, combining watercolor, drypoint, collage, always in the service of making the image more immediate.

Holly Hughes' is a professor of painting at RISD. Her current work comes from a Sabbatical spent in some of the leading ceramic factories of Italy. She has adapted the ancient techniques to create ceramics and gouache paintings that tell complex stories with dense imagery in gorgeous colors and forms.

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