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The Women of Iceland

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

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

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

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

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

June 29, 2008

This car practically steers itself

The Studio Show at PAAM

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

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

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

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.

Evolution of a Painting

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

June 25,2008

Day 1 - happy painting

Day 2 - Blue Painting

Day 3 - Tar Painting

Now I'm putting it out on the deck to weather.

The Fine Arts Work Center

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

June 20, 2008

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A portion of the Fine Arts Work Center

The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown was founded in 1968 by a group of artists, writers and patrons, including Fritz Bultman, Salvatore and Josephine Del Deo, Alan Dugan, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Motherwell, Myron Stout, Jack Tworkov, and Hudson D. Walker. The founders wanted to preserve the place of the arts in P-town by nurturing a new generation of young artists and writers. FAWC offers fellowships to ten visual artists and ten writers each year, who spend seven winter months at the Center doing the work they choose.

FAWC Summer Program office

The Motherwell press

FAWC's summer program of weeklong workshops in writing and visual arts are taught by some of the most accomplished and generous artists in their fields. Students are serious and a pleasure to work with and learn from. I love FAWC - I've worked independently in the printshop on a press once owned by Robert Motherwell, and taken various workshops for almost 10 years.

Ellyn's nerve cells

This week I did a workshop in drypoint, a printmaking technique involving drawing into a metal of plexiglass plate with very sharp tools - no acid involved. It was taught by the lovely and very talented Betsy Garand, a professor at Amherst College. We did small work, which has the great advantage of being easily portable and, since we were digging into metal, a little easier on the hands and arms. I did a small series based on images of nerve cells, which I plan to continue through the summer.

Welcome to Provincetown

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

June 18, 2008

Gentrified Provincetown

Pre-Gentrified Provincetown

If you drive to the tippy end of Cape Cod, your last stop before Greenland is Provincetown, one of the most storied, historic and truly bizarre towns in the US. The Pilgrims landed first in Provincetown (second at Corn Hill in Truro, less than 1/2 mile from my house, where they stole the corn the Indans had left there). They and their descendants proceeded to very quickly denude the Cape of all of its trees, which they burned for fuel and to boil salt from the seawater. After that, they proceeded to do the same to pretty much the rest of the whole country.

Spank the Monkey -iconic tourist P-Town

Anyway, for a couple of hundred years, fishing was the main economic activity in P-Town, mostly done by Portugese immigrants, who still make up the backbone of the family life in town, although the fishing fleet is a tiny fragment of its former glory. In the 20th century, art became important in P-Town, as the Cape Cod School of Art was founded early in the century, training hundred of primarily landscape artists. Beginning shortly after WW II, Hans Hoffman taught and inspired a generation of abstract expressionists at his fabled summer classes. Artists who spent significant periods of time in P-Town include Marsden Hartley, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Willem DeKooning, More about that later, when I talk about the Fine Arts Work Center.

Provincetown today is a crazy, welcoming, lively mishmash - a gay mecca, an artists' hangout, a tourist trap - surrounded by some of the most amazing scenery on the continent.

Truro and the Amazing, Incredible, Truly Astonishing Flying Squirrel Condo

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

June 16,2008

Flying Squirrel Condo

I am so woefully behind in my blogging, but it's been a busy busy week. We managed to get to Beautiful Truro, here at the raggedly ass remote end of Cape Cod, at six in the morning after driving all night from NYC. On this score, I must give all glory to Mr. Weiss, who did a great imitation of the Energizer Bunny right up until the end when he almost took us off the road about 10 miles from our house. But we caught it in time (Luckily, this happened during one of my few moments awake, so I screamed like a crazy woman and woke him up).

Now, anyone could post gorgeous pictures of the dunes and the marshes and the glorious limpid Cape light. I, however, have posted a horrible picture of the amazing flying squirrel condo that awaited us in the basement. During the winter, the squirrel family took up residence in a cardboard box that had two styrofoam inserts for packing small pieces of stuff. They brought in some insulation from another house and little pieces of vegetation and some string and little stones and all kinds of stuff and made nests in the styrofoam compartments. They had left by the time we arrived (maybe they go to Florida in the off-season?) but left us this truly impressive artifact.

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