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ELLYN WEISS

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I Forgot About This

April 16, 2008

piggie

Today I was unpacking some work on paper - part of the endless job of moving into the new studio - and found this collage from a few years ago. At the time I was painting those barber poles on everything. Don't know where they came from, but they hung around a year or so. Even now they make the occasional appearance. I was also working with dress patterns. I discovered a big pile of them in the Swap Shop at the Truro dump. That's where people contribute items otherwise bound for the trash pile that someone else might be able to use. The good stuff never even makes it into the building. There are regulars who hang around outside and pounce.

Anyway, notice the little piggie in the lower right corner? That summer I was using the printmaking shop at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and someone noticed that I was incorporating bits of old dress patterns into my monoprints. I came in one morning and found an envelope full of a bunch of little animals and flowers from old applique patterns, including the piggie that I used as a template for that guy. The anonymous donor wrote that she hoped I would enjoy using them, which I certainly have.

Pray for the Warehouse

April 15, 2008

Molly Ruppert

This smiling person in Molly Ruppert, doyenne of the Warehouse on 7th Street NW in Washington. The Warehouse, right across the street from the new and very very large Washington Convention Center, occupies two funky old buildings that have been in the Ruppert family for many years and is one of last remaining outposts of funk in a neighborhood on the verge of touristifying into boutique hotels and fusion restaurants.

The Warehouse is, sadly, on life support. Until a few months ago a bustling gathering place with its cafe, theater and gallery, home to art and theater whose only requirement was that it tickled the idiosyncratic taste of Molly, the Warehouse is over the next few months hosting its final art shows. (The current terrific show, The End of Nature, is discussed below.) Molly, Cappy, Paul and other assorted assorted family members have been true friends and supporters to the DC arts community. Many was the Sunday evening when Molly could be found serving her home-made chili, with Cappy and Paul's help, to artists collecting their work from the show coming down that evening

The Rupperts have been looking all over town for alternative space where they can reconstitute the Warehouse spirit. As it turns out, this has been an extremely difficult task. Mid-town is just too expensive for anything but the most upscale of ventures and neighborhoods are afraid of any use that attracts people at night, even on their commercial streets. It makes me so sad I want to cry. Doesn't anyone have a place for the Warehouse??

New Encaustics at Nevin Kelly

April 13, 2008

Morning Becomes Electric

I just delivered these three encaustics to the Nevin Kelly Gallery, 1517 U St. NW, DC, where you can see them and even bring them home with you.

Oxford Avenue

They speak to me of the season and are done in much higher key colors than I used all winter. Like I said, the sap must be rising.

The Secret of My Every Fleeting Thought

Blogosophy

April 13, 2008

No, I don't like all of the art I see. Far from it. But I will not generally write about shows that don't interest me (or worse) with a couple of exceptions: if the artist is prominent and and I think they are just phoning it in, or if a show is hyped and seriously disappoints. In those cases, I think they should be called out. Other than that, there is more than enough good art out there and I just want to let you know about it. Life's too short to waste time on the rest.

At The Warehouse: The End of Nature

April 12, 2008

crayola flowers by Herb williams

The End of Nature is a terrrific group show that opened last night at the Warehouse (more about that beloved and endangered institution and its first family, the Rupperts, later) Inspired, I assume, by Bill McKibben's book of the same name, the participating artists consider what a globally degraded and overheated future holds. The thirty or so artists come at the subject from very different angles; some, like Herb Williams, who fashioned flowers from crayolas, even find a lightly humorous take. Perhaps surprisingly, the show mostly succeeds in avoiding the scream-in-your-face style in favor of the more subtle, which is far more difficult to bring off. Most of the work is aesthetically engaging as well as thematically.

Monkey Paws by Jonathan Prull

Renee Shaw's jars

There is a lot of good work here; I'm not sure who did the curating, but he/she/they deserve much credit. I loved Jonathan Prull's monkey paws and Lynda Byrne's plastic nests.The piece I find myself most thinking about this morning is Renee Shaw's front window full of jars of pickled life. Each one contains a beautiful, frightening, slightly stomach-turning collection of what looks like bits of things once alive floating in vegetable oil, which imparts a luminosity and reflective quality that enhances the effect. It's like the window of a crazed Chinese herbalist.

Janet Wheeler at Touchstone

April 12, 2008

Janet and a totem Janet Wheeler's solo, "Totems and Spirit Boxes," opened last night at Touchstone on 7th Street (two blocks down from the Verizon Center, which hosted the first playoff game of the Caps at the same time, making for quite a human and vehicular tsunami. But I digress.) Janet's work has for many years drawn on the emotional power of ancient ritual objects. Never based on specific objects or particular religions, they evoke universal icons. This show further develops the theme and the work is both moving and mysterious.

HeArt of the City: DC City Hall Collection

April 11, 2008

Two years ago, the DC government appropriated a generous sum for the purpose of filling the renovated District City Hall, the John A. Wilson Building, with a collection of the work of local artists. Ably administered by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, curated by my dear friend Sondra Arkin, and juried by a panel that included some of the most prominent museum curators in our area, the collection that was assembled is truly remarkable. It contains work from a broad cross-section of artists, from the nationally prominent (e.g. William Christenberry, Sam Gilliam), to the rest of us, and the living to the not so. I have the distinctly distinct distinction that my piece, "Twelve Linear Feet" is the biggest in the collection.

Twelve Linear Feet

The sad part is that most people don't know about this unique resource. You can see the work during any working day at the Wilson Building,1350 Pennsylvania Ave, MW. Make sure to pick up a copy of the map that shows where each piece is hung from the reception desk. Even better is to go on one of the guided tours that are given every month or so. To find out when they are, get in touch with Beth Baldwin at the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Their website is http://dcarts.dc.gov.

John A Wilson Building

New Work

April 10, 2008

new encaustics

Here are two new encaustic pieces, made of beeswax, resin and oil paint. They are 12" x 12" on board. The colors are a bit of a departure from what I had previously been up to. It must be the sap rising. I also delivered some (if I say so) good new work to my gallery in DC, Nevin Kelly at 1517 U St.NW. They have excellent pix on their blog - go to www.nevinkellygallery.com, or even better, drop on by.

Spring is Always a Surprise

April 9, 2008

Eastern Avenue April 9

I pass this splendor every day on my way to my studio. It's not a tourist spot or anything special - just a line of cherry trees about a quarter mile long planted on a grassy strip in a part of town that the Cherry Blossom Festival goers will never get near. There are many places like this. Every year I am astonished by what happens in April.

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