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Varujan Boghosian at PAAM

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

July 30, 2009

The Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) is hosting a major show of the work of Varujan Boghosian. Boghosian, who taught at Dartmouth for many years before his recent retirement, has been called an artist of the found object but is to my mind an artist of the selected object; he has assembled an enormous collection of evocative, weathered, heavily used artifacts by haunting dumps and junk stores, as well as looking around himself with an always observant eye. All of this stuff is stored on shelves and other visible spots inside his working space so that his eye can constantly assess the possibilities of combination and construction. When the eye and mind reach a decision, a piece is made – always from the available material, nothing new added. The resulting pieces are redolent of past times, often of the constant use of people now gone, of a time when everything was made by hand and had a functional purpose.

The PAAM show, rather than a career retrospective, is made up almost entirely of work completed within the last couple of years, which I find hugely moving – a testament to the brilliant vitality of a man whose life has been spent in the making of art.

The Maskman Cometh

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

July 30, 2009

Ron, Sondra and a squashed penny

The mask

Maskwoman, actually, but that does ruin the reference, not to mention the meter. Ms. Sondra Herself, and her faithful accomplice, Ron, spent some time with us on the beautiful Cape. Usually, we do mad amounts of printing while she’s here, but this time she brought along the mask she is working on for a fundraiser for women with head and neck cancer. Each participant was given an actual patient’s unique mask – they use them for the therapy – and began with that. Ms. S has spent prodigious amounts of time and thought on this project and she finished it up here. The mask is based on an African nkisi nail fetish, used by Congolese to protect people, to destroy evils spirits and prevent or cure illness. It is fierce, frightening, potent, a thing of concentrated power. All of the 100 masks made for this benefit will be exhibited at the Katzen Center in September.

Sinel and Farrell at Wohlfarth in PTown

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

July 25, 2009

GessoHead has been a woefully neglectful bad bad girl and needs punishment. Do I have any volunteers?
It has been a freakish year meteorologically (try saying that one a few times) on beautiful Cape Cod, as I gather it has been most other places as well. Cold rain – on July 24 it was wet and down in the 50’s – punctuated by tragically infrequent days of sun. I feel positively soggy, like I need to be wrung out periodically. BUT, I do digress.

opening reception at Wohlfarth PTown

The proud proprietor, Vinnie Wohlfarth

Soggy notwithstanding, I have been to see some art. First, appropriately, the PTown branch of Wohlfarth, the eponymous gallery run by Vinnie Wohlfarth with a longtime location on 9th Street NE in Washington’s Brookland neighborhood. For many years, Wohlfarth up here was largely known for the lush American impressionist work of the Cape Cod School and its modern landscape progeny, but 2009 has brought a big and interesting change. The gallery has moved to a new location in the East End of PTown, closer to some of the good contemporary galleries, and is featuring a small group of diverse contemporary artists, including Ellen Sinel and Lisa Farrell from DC.

Ellen Sinel and work

Lisa Farrell and work

Ellen (whose studio, I must reveal, is so close to mine that I could throw a rubber chicken into it on a good day) is showing some of her gorgeous trademark Truro grasses, along with a large and impressive painting of birch trees shining in the sun that I watched her develop over the winter. Alas, for you fans, that one has already sold.
Lisa has several large, dense black and white landscape drawings, wintry and prickly and looming. It's just really nice to see a little outpost of DC thrive up here, so you go, Wohlfarth.

Tabitha Vevers at the Provincetown Art Asso. and Museum

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

July 15, 2009

Tabitha Vevers is the scion of Provincetown artistic royalty Tony Vevers and Elspeth Halvorsen and she grew up in the house once owned by Mark Rothko, but she has a distinct and entirely individual voice. She has a large and stunning show ongoing at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.

Vevers’ work is shaped in contrast: grotesque and exquisite, heavenly and monstrous, serene and violent. The technique is Renaissance in detail and refinement, the subjects are on their face timeless, women like Boticelli’s, scenes even a bit reminiscent of religious paintings. But look closer and the subject matter is often shocking: rape, disfigurement, genetic mutation.
These paintings are the product of a mature and thoughtful artist, with the highest level of technical skill married to thoughtfulness and intelligence.

Provincetown: the good, the bad and the just strange

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

July 8, 2009

Provincetown Harbor

There is no place quite like Provincetown – the end of the road, where everything that didn’t adhere elsewhere comes to roost. There are lots of places all over the world where breathtaking natural beauty butts up against the most crass of commercial touristism – Carmel, Capri, Aspen, just to name a few. But there aren’t so many where the scraggly folk and the artists and the wildness of the protected dunelands manage to somehow continue to overcome, or at least to maintain a fragile balance.

Pilgrim Monument

Spank the Monkey

Each year there is a new threat to the edge of the Cape, from mansionizers, commercial developers, price craziness, even the weather. There are endless meetings of endless commissions and boards, demonstrations, letter screeds to the editor. It changes, not always for the better, but it endures, so far.

My Week at Camp FAWC

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

July 7, 2009

The printshop busy at work

Rebekah Tolley, the instructor, with students

I’ve just come up for air after an exhausting and productive week at the Fine Arts Work Center (FAWC) in Provincetown, at the very ragged tippy end of Cape Cod. I have lauded FAWC before, so will be brief: the week-long workshops in the visual arts and writing are intense, the staff – most artists themselves – are remarkably helpful and attentive, the faculty are top-flight, the other students generous and serious, and the overall experience immersive and often exhilarating. (Guess that wasn’t so brief.) But I am really fecking tired.

my output at weekly exhibit

another Weiss print

I learned photolithography and I’m still not sure why. The fundamental principle of lithography, of course, is based on the incompatibility of oil and water, which means that one has to use an oil-based ink to print, which means one has to use solvent, and my own printing studio up here is non-toxic and solvent-free, being that it’s about 10 feet from my bedroom. So I won’t be doing any photo-lithography in my own studio. But I might do it other places, so I guess that’s the answer to my question.

and another by moi

why stop now?

And it has some terrific features, prime among them being that you make the plate by exposing a computer printout or a photocopied image directly onto a thin aluminum sheet that’s been treated with a light-sensitive coating. So you can create imagery on the computer and make a plate out of it – no fuss, no muss.

Mark Planisek

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

June 24, 2009

Mark and his boxes in Virginia magazine

I want to pay tribute to Mark Planisek, a DC artist who died yesterday. Mark was hit by a car while on his way home from the opening of a show of work by his collective, Sparkplug, at the Arlington Arts Center. Mark was one of the 30 or so artists, including me, who had studio space in the late lamented Millennium Arts Center in DC, where I came to know and love him.

The late-lamented Millennium Art Center

At times like this, one tends to revert to cliché, but everyone lucky enough to know Mark knows how true this is: in addition to being talented and hard-working, he was a thoroughly decent, kind, generous, genuine and sweet sweet guy. He made everyone smile and a day was always better for his presence. He supported his friends, came to each of our openings and was a strong presence in our community. He loved working with Sparkplug and inspired many younger friends.

one of his political photo-collages

Mark was an artist with broad interests, but most of his work had photography at its base. In the past several years, he had much success with his photographic boxes. He started making these during our fight to stave off eviction from our studios at MAC, photographing our individual studios as well as most corners of the huge shambling old building, in and out, documenting the ecology of the artists’ colony at the Millennium Art Center at the edge of extinction. He gave me a box of my studio that hangs in my new studio and now I have two things to cry about whenever I look at it.

Herb and Dorothy

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

June 20, 2009

Provincetown has a film festival every year in mid-June, which was begun as a way to get people to the outer edge of the Cape at other than high season and has grown into something quite unique. In addition to the fare that can be found at other festivals, there is always a good selection of gender-bending films, some contribution from John Waters, as well as some art-related movies, tributes to the special character of this part of the world.

Herb, Dorothy, etc. after the movie in the Payomet tent

Last night we saw “Herb and Dorothy”, a documentary about the lives in art of Herb and Dorothy Vogel. The Vogels, who look to be in their 80’s and who attended the show and did Q and A afterward, spent their lives collecting art on the salaries of a librarian and a postal clerk. Childless and living in a tiny rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan, they haunted the studios of emerging NY artists and bought compulsively and presciently from those they loved, could still afford, and could fit into the apartment.

The Vogels in their apartment

The film contains interviews with some of the most prominent artists they collected, including Chuck Close, Pat Stier, Sol Lewitt, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Robert Mangold, Richard Tuttle, Will Barnet, Lynda Benglis all of whom attest to the Vogel’s eye, their incredible energy – they saw everything everywhere – their persistence and their sheer love for the work. For most of these artists, the Vogels were among the first who appreciated and bought their work, even at miniscule prices by today’s standards, and they continued to give them special deals to allow them to buy after the work was otherwise well beyond their budget. They never sold a piece after acquiring it.

The Vogels' name has been inscribed at the top of the benefactor's column in the National Gallery

In 1991, the Vogels agreed to have the National Gallery inventory their collection with a view towards donating all of it. The art movers packaged every painting, drawing and sculpture crammed into the apartment, under the furniture and piled to the ceilings and filled five jumbo moving trucks with the booty, which added up to over 4700 separate pieces of art. The Vogels would accept only what is described as a “modest annuity” to provide them some measure of security as they aged. As the film shows, however, they’ve used it to buy more art, once again filling the apartment.

with part of their collection in Washington

The National Gallery determined that it would be able to assimilate only 1000 pieces, so the Vogels and the Gallery have designed a program called “50 Pieces for 50 States”, designating one museum in each of the states that will receive 50 pieces from the collection. The museums have been selected and the collection divided and the program will be officially kicked off very soon.

As you can imagine, the Vogels, who have received lots of media and art world attention over the years, are aften asked why they picked a particular piece or artist. They never say much more than that they love it, or that it speaks to them - this about a collection that includes a lot of minimal and conceptual work that is generally considered "difficult - and they utterly refuse to issue the usual art world verbalisms with which they are no doubt familiar. I found this their most endearing quality.

I'm on the Cape

Latest News and Thoughts from Ellyn Weiss

June 14, 2009

Driver and navigator - I'm the one taking the pictures

Beautiful Truro

We are here in beautiful Truro, MA, after a heroic slog as follows: 1) leave DC in heavy ass rain; 2) stop for family party in Bucks County; 3) more and heavier rain; 4) stop in Poughkeepsie NY to pick up the spawn’s car (it's a long and sordid tale); 5) rain rain rain as we now drive two cars all the way to Cape Cod – and all in one day! My tush was numb and my right leg was throbbing.

Coast Guard Beach

But it was worth it. More to come.

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