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Welcome to the second edition of the WASAA Quarterly Newsletter created by and for the Artists of the Western Avenue Studios Artist Association. Each edition will contain a bit of general information, news from your neighbors, reviews, stories, tips and more. So sit back, relax and enjoy.

Heidi Jackson finds inspiration for her art in just about everything that crosses her path. The latest are microscopic images of bone and tissue from her anatomy class at Northern Essex. “I catch myself going from the microscope to the sketch pad, right there in the lab,” Heidi laughs. To help herself study for final exams, she made flash cards of various parts of our anatomy. They turned out to be beautiful compositions and designs which are informing her current work of “sprays”.

Sprayed object prints are scattered on the floor of Heidi’s studio (# 325 which she shares with Glenn Szegedy). Heidi lays anything from old scissors, keys, strips of paper, leaves and sticks or rusty chains onto Stonehenge paper, or glass, mirror or canvas. She then covers everything with spray paint. “I’m playing around with composition and how to work with negative space,” Heidi says. “I’m always experimenting, then the big surprise comes when I take the objects off.” She repeats the process, using as many as five layers of spray paint, and sometimes throws gold dust into the wet paint for good measure. There’s a soft edged quality to the prints that gives a beautiful ethereal sense to common shapes and forms.  One of Heidi’s primary inspirations, sculptor David Smith, also created “sprays”.

The other body of work she’s creating right now is large figurative drawings, also inspired by her anatomy class. Working with a model, she makes lots of quick drawings, none more than seven minutes in length. Again, she’s creating layer upon layer, with ink, charcoal, crayon, old coffee.

Yet Heidi is first and foremost a sculptor. She majored in sculpture at the Art Institute of Boston, and has worked with bronze, clay and lost wax, wood and stone. Always ready to acquire new skills, Heidi took a blacksmithing class so that she could make her own tools for stone carving. She also knows how to weld! “But I’m not ready to do sculpture right now,” Heidi says. “My spraying and drawing is a way to solve some artistic problems. Then ultimately I want to sculpt again.”

And the anatomy and other pre-nursing classes at Northern Essex will eventually serve her sculpture as well. “People ask me why I’m going into nursing and the answer is, I want to do more art!” Nursing, she explains, is flexible and you can do it anywhere. “So the nursing will fund the art. Plus I like people,” she adds with a smile.

You can learn more about Heidi and her work at heidijackson.com

In this documentary film from 1955 director Henri-Georges Clouzot (apparently a major French director, pre-new wave) over the period of several weeks filmed his personal friend, Pablo Picasso at work. Clouzot’s interest lay in showing us the mind of the artist. What he did succeed in doing was to film how this particular artist at this particular point in his career “performed” under this particular set of constraints. And it’s well worth 75 minutes of your time.

There is virtually no dialog (though the DVD does include 2 art historical commentary tracks). Instead, the movie is underscored by an overly melodramatic and lush score. The film shows Picasso creating 20 paintings. The first portion is shot in real time with Picasso using inks to paint on a translucent surface and the camera catching the image from the opposite side. These pieces are not particularly interesting to me, rarely rising above the level of a doodle and confirming the opinion of a fictional Einstein that it’s, after all, just a formula.

Far more intriguing are the later pieces. Here the artist uses oils on canvas, the painting occurs over hours, and the process of the painting is shown via stop-motion camera work. My favorites: Goat Head and Reclining Nude with Book.



What do I find interesting about this second portion of the film?

A hundred pair of sneakers and sandals and boots and shoes are hanging from the wire fence, twirling in the wind.  

A sign on the fence, “Fresh Jerky 34 miles ahead”.

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Heading south from Van Horn, Texas on Rte. 90, the land is populated by cattle and antelope.  Just outside the tiny town of Valentine, a small store appears on the deserted road.  “PRADA” says the sign. 

!!??!! 

I drive a mile before I turn around to check it out.  No one is on the road.

It is an art installation by an artist from Marfa, TX about 50 miles further down the road.

“Closed”.  The store door had no hinges or knob; there was no back door.   It would never be open.

Displayed shoes and handbags were from the Prada 2005 Collection; clean and bright sitting on shelves and pedestals.  The store windows looking out a field of grazing cattle across the road.

Beside the store, another fence with posted and twisting sneakers.


To see more of Jack's work visit his website.

by Liz Smith, Studio A305

"I have been working with polymer clay for 20 years. I am self taught, picking up new techniques over the years through experimenting, books and online tutorials. Polymer clay is a plastic clay that hardens at low temperatures in the home oven. It is available in many colors and can also be mixed. I mix a lot of my own colors to avoid that "straight out of the package" look like you can get with paints. I use polymer clay to make beads, pendants, barrettes and egg ornaments.
 
I put together this demo to show an overview of making a "cane", and though I don't detail every step involved, I think it shows in general how my designs come together. I love answering questions and discussing techniques so feel free to stop by and have a chat sometime!

 




See more of Liz Smith's work and technique here.