Cane, Murrini, Incalmo Oh MY!

a post by Pringle Teetor

This is a description of how some of the more complicated pieces in my current HGA show are made.

Making cane starts with picking up a piece of color bar that has been preheated to almost 1000 degrees on the end of a steel rod, then heated and shaped. This is the center color of the cane. While one person is doing this, another is preparing another chunk of color in the same way to cover the first color in an “overlay”. Then, by heating and shaping the glass on the marver, the second color is distributed to cover the first color, then one or two gathers of clear glass are added to encase the color. After the second gather, the glass is heated and shaped to set it up to be pulled into cane.

 

When pulling cane, one person prepares a 'post' on another steel rod to attach to the mass of colored glass. When the glass is at the right temperature, the post is connected to the end of the glass and the two people walk away from each other, stretching the glass like taffy. When the glass has been stretched to the diameter needed, the cane is held tight for a few seconds to ensure it's straight as it hardens. It is then set down on the wood boards to cool. Once cooled, the cane is cut into lengths to be incorporated into work.

Murrine (common pluralization murrini) is an Italian term for colored patterns or images made in a glass cane (long rods of glass) that are revealed when cut in cross-sections. Murrine
can be made in infinite designs—some styles are more familiar, such as millafiore To make the murrini, I make a color core in the same way as described above, then roll up cane around the core. The cane is heated on a plate in the glory hole by an assistant, then pulled the same way as cane.

Once cooled, the bars are sliced up on a diamond saw. In pieces where murrini is used for patterns, much of your time goes into planning and preparing to make the piece before you even start the actual piece.

INCALMO - is a technique invented in Murano in the 16th century, to create vessels with distinct bands of color. Two or more cylindrically-shaped blown objects of different colors are made then attached while hot on the blow pipe, and blown further to create a vessel. The joining of the two vessels takes great precision and careful measuring to ensure that the pieces will fit correctly and stay joined. Each piece of glass that is to be made into one is blown separately and must be the same width at the base or top where it is to be fused to another piece of glass. This second piece must be placed directly at the edge of the first piece and fit perfectly so there is no overlap with the edges.


Here is a picture of me working on a vessel when glass artist Ed Schmid was visiting from Washing State. The center part is a murrini roll up, which I previously attached to the vessel on the pipe, and now Ed is attaching the bottom vessel.

Murrini roll ups and incalmo pieces are something I  would like to do more of in the future. However, these are not pieces I can do alone. Towards the end of this past season, I was fortunate to be able to hire an assistant, Matt Decker, who blows glass for Corning Museum of Glass, to work with me on the pieces in this show. These pieces take careful planning, extra time (and money) to produce, and my hope is to have more of this type of work in the future.

Pushing the Envelope

Le Jongleur by Mirinda Kossoff

a post by Mirinda Kossoff
www.jewelrybymirinda.com

Recently, I've been experimenting with combining jewelry and mixed media work; both are abiding passions without which I wouldn't be me.  I'm finding this new exploration to be both fun and fulfilling, regardless of the end product.  I try not to focus too much on outcome, because it's the process that's most important.  If the process is right and my heart is in it, the end product will be satisfying.  And I hope others will find it so as well.

Here's a new mixed media piece that resulted from just playing around with various gel mediums and acrylic paints.  As I worked, using some sgraffito, the colors and layers suggested shapes and forms, which then suggested the title:  Le Jongleur, which is French for "The Juggler."  Working intuitively allows stuff to bubble up from my unconscious, and I find there's playfulness in that place - as well as the darker stuff.  I suspect that the juggler image came up because I juggle jewelry along with my mixed media work, along with being an adoring grandmother, wife, reader, writer and traveler.  I love all the special people and activities in my life.  Working everything in sometimes is a challenge.  I need a 48-hour day.  The ones I have go by all too quickly.  When I'm absorbed in making a jewelry piece or other art, I have no concept of time, and when I come out of my state of flow, I find that time has fled.  That's a good space to be in.

I'm playing around with patinas on copper and finding other new materials for jewelry, since the price of silver is going back up again.  In the earrings shown here, I patinated copper donuts that I had cut out and then sandwiched a graphic ad from an old Ladies Home Journal between the two copper donuts.  I riveted the pieces together with brass rivets.  The vintage paper is preserved with resin.  I'm hoping to do more of this with my jewelry.  The prospect is intriguing, like visiting a new country.

Will a juggler reappear in my next mixed media piece, or abstracted in a piece of jewelry?  Maybe.

Hillsborough Gallery of Arts Hosts Preview Exhibition for Orange County Artist Guild Open Studio Tour

AS EVENING FALLS by Lolette Guthrie

The Hillsborough Gallery of Arts (HGA) will host a preview event on October 26^th, featuring the work of many of the artists participating in the Orange County Artist Guild (OCAG) Open Studio Tour.  Among the more than 70 artists on the tour are eight Hillsborough Gallery members: Linda Carmel,Garry Childs, Chris Graebner, Lolette Guthrie, Marcy Lansman, Eduardo Lapetina, Pat Lloyd and Pringle Teetor.

Linda Carmel, an experienced tour participant, says,  "I love welcoming guests to my studio and having an opportunity to show more of my work and explain my process."  Carmel shares her studio space with glass blower Pringle Teetor. “Our work shows well together,” says Teetor. “Some people come to see my work and enjoy meeting Linda and hearing about her process and some come to see Linda and her work and are pleased to see my glass and hear about something they are unfamiliar with. We make a good team.”

 Chris Graebner will be on the tour for the second year in a row. “Last year I enlarged my studio, which meant that for the first time, I had enough space to be on the tour,” Graebner says. “I wasn’t sure what to expect. Some people just wanted to come and look, others wanted to talk. I enjoyed answering questions and talking to visitors about my work or their own. I’m always happy to share what I’ve learned over the years and to learn about new materials and techniques from other artists or beginning artists. Painting is a lifelong learning process – each canvas teaches you something new.” 

Lolette Guthrie, whose abstract and landscape paintings have many devotees, says, “I’ve been a member of OCAG for four years and have participated in the open studio tour each year. I find it an exhilarating experience.  I am constantly amazed and humbled by the great number of people who are willing to travel long distances to come on the tour, by how interested they are in what I do, and by how knowledgeable so many are about art. It’s especially gratifying to meet other artists who are so willing to share their knowledge.”

Eduardo Lapetina says his open studio this year will feature his color-field abstract paintings, which he says he creates with techniques he’s worked out himself.  Using those techniques, he starts a painting without knowing what the end result will be.  

Marcy Lansman, whose watercolors are well-known to HGA visitors, says, “my studio is my living room. I love having people come by during the Studio Tour. I feel they get a better sense of who I am as an artist by seeing my paintings in their native habitat.
For the past several years, I have shared my "studio" with Dale Morgan during the tour. She paints realistic and fanciful animals; I paint flowers, mushrooms, and leaves. We feel that our work is complementary.”

For HGA wood turner Pat Lloyd, the tour provides an opportunity to introduce visitors to the art of wood turning.  She says of her visitors, “there are so many questions: where do you get your wood; how do you get it so smooth; what finish do you use; how long does it take; how do you do "that" (fill in the blank)? Throughout the four tour dates, my husband, Wayne Peterson, and I will be turning wood and spraying wood shavings while we demonstrate the process of converting a tree into a finished bowl for your dining room table. In addition, we have a gallery that will be filled with the latest crop of finished turnings.”

HGA will host the preview reception for the Studio Tour on Friday, October 26^th from 6-9 p.m. The Hillsborough Gallery of Arts is located in the Mercantile Building at 121 North Churton Street, in Hillsborough, NC.  For more information, visit the gallery Website at www.hillsboroughgallery.com.  

The 18^th Annual Open Studio Tour will be held November 3^rd and 4^th and November 10^th & 11^th from 10am-5pm Saturdays and 12 noon-5pm Sundays.  

Tour brochures with maps will be available at the Hillsborough Gallery of Arts as well as many other locations across the Triangle.

HGA Painter Ellie Reinhold Exhibiting in Raleigh Show, "Curio"

Ellie Reinhold, a painter and founding member of HGA, will have work in "Curio,” an art exhibition sponsored by the City of Raleigh Arts Commission, that runs from Oct. 4 to Nov. 13 at the Miriam Preston Block Art Gallery, 222 W. Hargett St. This is the fifth exhibition of the Block Art Gallery 2012 Exhibition Series.

 “Curio” includes paintings by Reinhold, as well as Chance Murray and Christina Preher and glass work by Lucartha Kohler. The theme linking the artists' work is an exploration of the fantastical through inventive characters, narrative, emotions and archetypal imagery.  Reinhold focuses on the importance of color, symbolic imagery and emotion in her paintings.

An opening-day reception will be held on Thursday, Oct. 4 from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the Block Art Gallery.  Tuff Love in Dub will provide the music for the opening.  Ellie encourages all her friends to attend, saying, "I'll be lonely without my peeps!"

Here's a link to Ellie's interview on YouTube:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF3j8123n3M&feature=youtu.be

Nature is My Muse

a post by Jude Lobe
www.judelobe.com

Nature is my muse. I'm inspired by its qualities of rejuvenation and renewal necessary for survival. Since we're all a part of nature, I believe we need to respect the connection we have with the natural environment. In nature things change over time, evolve. And we, as individuals, also evolve and are the sum of the bits and pieces of our experiences. This idea I want to translate in my art.

Cold wax and oil lends itself perfectly to expressing this idea. It affords the opportunity to show a history of the painting by building up layers, obscuring what's beneath, and removing layers to reveal bits of past layers. It represents the history of a life that becomes an aggregation of our observations and experiences.

Cold wax was a widely used medium in Greco-Roman art beginning in the 5th century BC. Cold wax can be used to make oil colors thicker and more matte. The wax I use is Gamblin Cold Wax. It is made from naturally white unbleached beeswax, alkyd resin and odorless mineral spirits. It can be thinned to brush on or mixed 1:1 with oil paint and applied with a palette knife, brayer, or brush. It can also be used as a wax varnish over a dry oil painting. When I use a 1:1 ratio, I use a rigid support. If I used canvas or linen, the stretching and shrinking of the soft supports could cause cracking of the wax and oil. However, if you want to use a flexible support, mix the cold was with a Galkyd Gel 1:1 to add flexibility to the wax.

A nice advantage to using cold wax with oil, rather than just oil painting, is that you do not have to varnish, so you do not have to wait for the painting to cure, which could take several months. The cold wax paintings dry to touch within about a week. They would take more time to thoroughly dry, but because they don't have to be varnished you can ship or exhibit them within a week or so. I do buff some of mine with a soft cloth after a week when I want a slight shine.

I've just begun to put some of my pieces on my website. I also have some pieces exhibited at Hillsborough Gallery of Arts including the image above.

HGA's Meditations Show Opens September 24th

A Woodworker, a Painter, and a Glassblower Share a Mastery of Technique in Hillsborough Gallery of Arts’ Meditations Show

Lolette Guthrie, O’Neal Jones, and Pringle Teetor each work in radically different media but all continue pushing the boundaries of technique and inspiration in a new show titled Meditations, which opens September 24^th at the Hillsborough Gallery of Arts.

The daughter of a painter, Lolette Guthrie says she has been painting for as long as she can remember. “Painting is in my blood,” she says. “It’s something I need to do.”

Her work focuses on contemporary and abstract landscape paintings in oils or pastels. “To me the concentrated stillness of making and manipulating marks on paper or canvas is a form of meditation,” Guthrie explains. “All of my work is a kind of meditation.” Guthrie says that regardless of whether her work is abstract or representational, she tries to convey the essence of an image and create exciting, thought-provoking visual metaphors that celebrate the beauty and diversity of the world around us - and evoke a psychological reaction in the viewer.

Woodworker O’Neal Jones says he likes to explore the possibilities for artistry in wood. “While using traditional techniques for precision joinery, I use minimal latticework, also known as kumiko, to portray geometric shapes, repeating patterns, and impressionistic ideas from nature,” Jones explains. “The space within a frame, or even an imagined frame, becomes my palette. I try to portray the essential quality of an idea with the least quantity of material.” Jones says he enjoys making the simple become complex when shaping a thought with a piece of wood. “Simplicity of form and beauty of construction are important goals in each piece of furniture and wall art I make,” Jones adds.

“Working with molten glass is very physical,” says Pringle Teetor, which is part of the medium’s allure for her. “Both the fun and frustration of working with glass is that it doesn’t always do what you want it to do,” she says, adding, “a group of pieces I made, called "Chromatics," came about from a piece that went wrong in the final spin out of a bowl.” Earlier in the year, Teetor was able to get a strong assistant for a few days to help her produce complicated pieces that she hopes to do more of in future. The pieces involved rolling up her previously made murrini (colored patterns made in long rods of glass that are revealed when cut in cross-sections) into larger three-part pieces, all assembled hot on the blowpipe. The technique of assembling such pieces is called incalmo, invented by 16^th century Italian glass makers who wanted to make several colored sections of glass look like one piece. “There are several pieces of incalmo with murrini in the new show,” Teetor says.

An opening reception for Meditations will be held at the Hillsborough Gallery of Arts on Friday, September 28th, from 6-9 p.m. The Hillsborough Gallery of Arts is located in the Mercantile Building at 121 North Churton Street, in Hillsborough, NC. For more information, visit the gallery Website at www.hillsboroughgallery.com.