News

ELLYN WEISS

Home

GessoHead - Blog

GessoHead

Ellyn's Blog

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

I am Ellyn Weiss, aka Gessohead. 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.

If you'd like to be notified by email when I've added an article to the blog, click on the RSS icon above.

Margo Humphrey at the David Driskell Center

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

February 7, 2010

Margo Humphrey at the David Driskell Center

The David Driskell Center at the University of Maryland has mounted a show of the work of Margo Humphrey that must be seen by afficionados of the art of printmaking and anyone else who loves vibrant in-your-face color and the energy of art that reflects a richly idiosyncratic personal vision. It’s that good.

The Last Bar B Que

This is the first time that I have ventured so deep into the territory of the University of Maryland campus at College Park and I have to say that Ms. Sondra and I came close to giving up after an hour’s crawl through rush hour traffic from DC, followed by a frustrating search in the dark for the location. Note to the rest of you: 1) do not go in rush hour; 2) the Driskell Center is in the same building as Cole Field House. When you’re asking directions, no-one knows the former but everyone knows the latter.

The Red Bed

But I am so glad we persevered, because this is a terrific exhibit. Margo Humphrey has been making prints – mostly stone lithographs, a difficult and dying technique – for more than 40 years. While she is academically credentialled with a BFA from California College of Arts and Crafts and an MFA from Stanford, plus a faculty appointment at the University of Maryland, her work has the immediacy and subjectivity characteristic of the naïve, or “outsider”, artist. Nor does it for a moment seem forced. This is the work of a woman who has been able since childhood to access and express her individual world and lush imagination. Each piece is teeming with fecund (I love that word) imagery, thick with figures, objects and designs, pushing through the edge of the picture plane.

We managed to arrive just as Ms. Humphrey was beginning her discussion. She’s the person you wished you had for your favorite auntie and the person who had to make this work: animated, energetic, full of life and without pretense. She said that her objective is to "give things a soul and make them come alive" and I would have to say that she has accomplished that goal in many of her prints. So what are you waiting for?

Some new work from moi

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

January 27, 2009

Here is some of my newest work - it's all encaustic on board. I wish I took better pictures.

"Paperworks" at Pyramid Atlantic

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

January 23, 2010

There is a little gem of a show now at Pyramid Atlantic, the fabulous printmaking/papermaking/letterpress atelier/school/gallery in renascent Silver Spring. It’s called, appropriately enough, “Paperworks” and the works include a bit of everything on paper, from etching to drawing to cut-outs to photography.

me taking a bad picture of Ress's piece

Beverly Ress contributes three entrancing pieces that feature tiny, delicate drawings and cut paper marooned on full sheets of paper. In less sensitive hands, the elements could easily have seemed random, but Ress combines and places them with sure-handed elegance. (My picture utterly fails to show anything about her piece, regrettably, but it does have a reflection of me taking the picture, which I kind of like.)

Jake Muirhead's Broken Windows

Sikorska's grid

I was also drawn to Jake Muirhead’s work, particularly the etching titled “Broken Windows,” which is appealing in an entirely different way. It’s dark and dense, evoking urban decay, perhaps the detritus of our once-proud industrial infrastructure. Elzbieta Sikorska’s grid of drawings on rice paper hang suspended about a foot off of the wall. I love the drawings of imaginary animals but, I gotta say, the suspended grid format is beginning to feel like a gimmick for her. Time to cut the cord, m’dear.

Jessup at Adams Bank and Jenne at Civilian

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

January 17, 2009

There is perhaps little that unites these two shows except for the fortuity that they opened on successive nights in DC and as I think about, they could be argued as bracketing the current art scene.

Georgia Milld Jessup

one of the original eight in the Vogel collection

The first, at the Adams National Bank on 17th St NW, is a modest show of a small portion of the work of Georgia Mills Jessup, but it comes with a terrific story. Ms. Jessup, a descendant of the Pamunkey Tribe of Virginia, is now in her gorgeous, vibrant 80’s. She is one of 18 siblings of a large DC family of many artists (including my friend and her niece Adrienne Mills, the well-known local photographer). After earning a BFA from Howard and an MFA from Catholic U., she went on to teach all kinds of art to DC pubic school students and to oversee the art curriculum for the entire system – back in the day when every public school kid had art and music classes twice weekly.

And there’s much more to the story: One day in the early 60’s, the young artist and teacher arranged to rent a home in DC from Leonard Vogel. When she met him to conclude the agreement, they began to talk. (Having spent just ten minutes in discussion with the engaging Ms. Jessup, I can imagine this conversation.) When he learned that she was an artist, he asked to see her work. She packed 8 paintings onto the roof of her car and drove it over to him, whereupon Mr. Vogel said he would buy them all and that she would not be a renter because they would constitute her down payment on the purchase of the house.

a new piece - the view from Jessup's deck

Those eight paintings constitute the core of the current exhibit, supplemented by a few of Ms. Jessup’s recent work. The exhibit has been arranged by Mr. Vogel’s son, Kenneth, as a tribute to both Ms. Jessup and his father. And so it is.

Paul Ruppert and Phil Barlow at Civilian

Ms Civiian, Jayme Maclellan

Civilian Art Projects recently moved to 7th Street across from the Convention Center, in one of the buildings that until recently housed the Ruppert family’s Warehouse theater/gallery/café complex. I love the location, which is still redolent of those days and the space has not been scrubbed antiseptically clean.

the sick boy scout

George Jenne is a Brooklyn artist who supports himself by making props and models for tv and movies. He is showing in DC for the first time at Civilian. “Don’t Look Now” is billed as an installation, a “multi-media environment reminiscent of a movie set.” I don’t know if I buy the installation as a coherent whole, (e.g. the graphite drawings are pretty great-looking but what’s their connection with the skewed movie posters and the props?) but there are a couple of terrific objects definitely worth the visit. My favorite is a deeply disturbing boy scout with a furry monster head, scuffed-up bloody knees and other obscurely allusive parts.

Fowler, Ben-Achour and Manley at Gallery Plan

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

Jan. 13, 2010

Heidi Fowler at the opening

Bravo to Gallery Plan B’s Paula Amt and her crew, who continue to show strong regional artists in the 14th Street corridor, economy be damned. The current offerings are Heidi Fowler’s and Anne Manley’s paintings and Sabri Ben-Achour’s ceramics.

Ben-Achour's work

Fowler's work

I was immediately drawn to Ben-Achour’s macho ceramics; the best are muscular and aggressive in their prickliness. Which is in substantial contrast, actually, to the sweet young guy who made them.

Sabri Ben-Achour

I also love Heidi Fowler’s work. In her paintings, the most stark elements of modern industrial architecture loom over cities and landscapes. They are done on fairly subtly textured surfaces that enhance a quality of transience that is quite evocative.

Kick Start?

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

Jan. 13, 2009

I seem to be suffering a bout of creative lassitude. So I taped a big piece of paper to the wall and this is what happened. Papersmoke? Maybe it's the germ of something new.

Photography @ CHAW

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

Jan. 11. 2010

Linda Hesh

The Capitol Hill Arts Workshop (“CHAW”), is a non-profit community institution that lives in a gracious old school building at 7th and G Sts. SE which houses art classrooms, a dance studio, gallery space, a ceramics studio an open darkroom, and more. The gallery is currently showing the group’s fourth annual juried photography show and the opening Saturday night was jammed.

Tripplaar's Galveston

a happy Tim

The work selected constitutes a pretty good survey of the photography world today, ranging from the essentially abstract to the self-consciously arty to the political, with landscapes, portraits and what can only becalled snapshots included. I was attracted to Kristoffer Tripplaar’s color pictures of neglected and apparently abandoned places made in Galveston in 2008, likely too late to be Katrina damage but why else the abandonment? Have the colors been muted or is everything so bleached out and arid? The pictures effectively pose the questions.

half of Goslee's self-portrait

Pat and Simon

I also love Pat Goslee’s dyptich and tryptich digital prints on aluminum. Her two-paneled “self portrait” is all light on dark, barbed wire fencing and what may be light waves, tough, prickly and protective against light, high-spirited and delicate – not a bad representation of the yin and yang of a real personality.

Michael O'S. and Ms. Arkin discussing

Sculpture Now 2010 at Edison Place

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

January 9, 2010

Faith Flanagan and Brigitte Reyes conferring

I'm back in town and seeing my first new art of 2010. The Washington Sculptor’s Group holds an annual juried show that, as the name suggests, showcases the selected current work of members. As in past years, this year’s version is housed in Pepco’s open and expansive Edison Place Gallery at 8th and G Sts. NW.

attention to Holtsman's "Twelve Squares"

The juror, Ryan Hill, has, he says, chosen work that “draws on our longing for a passing ideal of wholeness, our ways of making fragments cohesive…” I like the idea and the elasticity of the construct; we do constantly strive at both the conscious and unconscious levels to make visual and experiential sense of fragmentary information and as a contemporary organizing principle in the time of whizzing bits of data, it is very apt.
The show, however, seems a bit sparse on the ground, with the often small pieces set adrift in the large galleries and, with the exception of John Simpkins-Camp’s hanging monopoly-money dirigible, no use is made of the fabulous space created by very high ceilings.

Leila Holtsman

I love Leila Holtsman’s “Twelve Squares”, a wall-mounted “painting” of acrylic ink on weathered steel. Her use of hard yet vulnerable materials creates an elegant surface where the painted grid seems about to slide off in dissolution.

Elena Patino has contributed a collapsing cube of translucent white gridded plastic tubing connected with thread and monofilament. She calls it “Cuadricula (Long Live Sol Lewitt)”. It is a vulnerable and lovely object that makes good use of the shadows cast by the deteriorating cube.
The piece with the most stage presence is no doubt Karen Bondarchuk’s five-foot dead crow made of scavenged roadside tire scraps. There is nothing more dead than scraps of old tire; the perfectly inert blackness sucks up light and the piece makes an effective if ambiguous statement about the human effect on nature, given that the crow is a pretty nasty scavenger of death.

Kerry O. Furlani's piece

Just to prove that I don’t respond exclusively to decaying stuff, I’ll also call out Kerry O. Furlani’s two wall-mounted slate pieces and Alice Yutzy's stoneware plinth "Emergence". They both won me with the impeccable nature of their craftsmanship and the evocative quality both artists achieved by the smooth feminine curves in juxtaposition with architectural shapes. Are they battlements? Sexual or military?

Finally, I must do a mini-rant here; I am discouraged by some work that is badly made, sloppily constructed and unlikely to last intact much beyond the month-long duration of the show. One sees that too much in contexts where it can’t truly be said to be driven by conceptual dictates. It usually feels like a childish insult to me.

<< Start < Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next > End >>

Results 1 - 9 of 222