Volume 45                                                              Issue 2

 

Next Meeting – February 11

At Tri Lakes Center for the Arts - social hour 9:30 a.m., business meeting at 10:00. Program information, see below. Refreshments will be provided by Ann Neal and Shirley Hawkins.

On the Agenda

Winter Show at TLC

PLAG Membership

February Meeting

It was decided at the January meeting to hold our February 11 meeting again at Tri Lakes Center and thus avoid having to make last minute emails and phone calls.

 

February 11 Program

Marcia Edwards wants to know

Please bring in something you have done recently that you consider a "success" and share it with the rest of us. It does not have to be a sale, a commission, or a show, but rather some point of learning that you have finally mastered, or nearly mastered, or just finally got the hang of...  Please bring in that particular piece of art, whether it is a polished masterpiece, a sketch, a first successful attempt at just about anything you've attempted art-wise. This will be a fun way to encourage each other and encourage stepping out of our comfort zones.  This will be completely informal, so those who may be a little shy of public speaking need have nothing to fear.

 

How do you feel about the programs at the meetings?

Would you like the programs to continue?

If so, what kinds of programs would you like to see?

Do you know of anyone who would like to do a program (self included)?

 

Please think about these questions.  Marcia will pass around some 3 x 5 cards to gather up your thoughts and ideas.

 

J  Happy Birthday!  ¯¯

Karen Sparling, January 19

Jan Cashman, February 2

Jan McGrath, February 26

[If your birthday isn’t mentioned, please notify

Mary Krucoff, (719) 488-8101]

 

Member News

j         Karen Sparling earned two prizes in the September/October Pueblo Art Guild’s Southwestern show. She took 1st prize in the non-professional water media category and 3rd prize in watercolor. Congratulations, Karen!

j         Kathleen Krucoff reports: One of the plates from my Aspen Branch series is featured on my kiln manufacturer's website.  It is at the bottom of the page for the kiln model I have (The Paragon Fusion 8).  Arnold Howard, with Paragon, told me they were adding more color to their web site and would feature one of my pieces with my kiln model.  I'm just delighted! Here's the direct link to that page:http://www.paragonweb.com/FUSION8.cfm

j         Gloria Williams reports the El Dorado Fine Art Gallery miniature art show entry deadline is April 13. Entry costs $8 per item up to 5 entries. For an entry form contact Gloria at (719) 391-1720 or email robertgloriawilliams@msn.com. Also, Meininger’s is having a big annual sale – up to 70% off on paints, canvas, etc. Sale ends 2/22/09.

The Ultimate “Tree Hugger”?

Emily Carr (1871-1946) was a Canadian painter who studied in San Francisco and Europe but became discouraged by her lack of artistic success and returned to British Columbia. She came close to giving up art altogether until her contact in 1930 with the Group of Seven (a group of artists who rebelled against the prevailing Canadian bias for traditional European art and promoted local artists). She specialized in scenes from the lives and rituals of Native Americans and showed her awareness of Canadian native culture through works representing the British Columbian rainforest. She lived among the native Americans to research her subjects. Many of her Expressionistic paintings represent totem poles and other artifacts of Indian culture.

Carr experienced an ecstatic identification with the spirit of nature. Trees are the central subject of her work, both as metaphor and form, centering and grounding most of her paintings. In 1935 Carr spoke before a literary society in Victoria about her art, a talk later published as "The Something Plus in a Work of Art." That "something," Carr explained, was what characterized great works of art - a kind of spiritual connection between the artist and an ideal; "the transfusion into the work of the felt nature of the thing to be painted". Carr was receptive to principles and practices of Asian art: the felt nature of the thing being its essence, its distinguishing core. For a painter whose chief subject was trees, “treeness”, and the expression of it was her life's work.

Carr, it seems, had already seen the dangers posed by unrestrained tree cutting, a cause she would champion all her life. Trees, she suggests, possess a life of their own and should not be wantonly felled. It was an idea that was rarely popular in British Columbia, where the logging industry yearly consumed ever more of the virgin forests. Carr spent years investigating the forest, absorbing all she could of tree existence. Her journals are full of her communion with trees, her admiration of them, and, ultimately, her close identification with them. Typical are her remarks "Trees are so much more sensible than people, steadier and more enduring" and "I ought to stick to nature because I love trees better than people."

Carr’s paintings of trees are frequently compared with Georgia O’Keefe’s since each artist searched out rhythmic patterning and movement within their structure, although there is no evidence that either painter knew the other's work before 1930. Carr seldom stretched for abstraction as much as O'Keeffe, but her 1930-31 works seem to have furthered her movement away from preoccupation with native imagery and toward a search for nature's formal equivalents. Carr's exuberant paint application best expresses her belief in the unquenchable vitality of trees.

Carr's trees developed in many moods and moments. She never seemed to exhaust their expressive possibilities, probably because she identified so closely with them. When Carr entitles a painting Laughing Forest or Happiness, we can be sure that she is projecting her own positive emotions onto the forest. The trees seem, at times, to be singing, a concept known to O'Keeffe as well. Georgia O'Keeffe wrote In 1915 of "the woods turning bright ... and the pines singing," but the words could as easily have been Carr's.

 

Excerpted from "Carr, O'Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own" by Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall.

See examples of Emily Carr’s work at www.artchive.com and www.groupofsevenart.com.

 

 

 

PLAG’s website: www.palmerlakeartgroup.com.  Add the address to your business card, tell your friends to look us up, help us advertise our group.

 

Reminder: contributions to the Newsletter are greatly appreciated. Also, please let me know about exhibits, sales, etc. Call or email: Mary Krucoff, (719) 488-8101 or emkaymonument@q.com. Deadline is the 25th of the month. Also Please Note: if you haven’t received your newsletter by the 5th of the month, please let me know. If you currently receive your newsletter via postal delivery and would be willing to switch to email delivery it would save us the cost of postage.

 

Palmer Lake Art Group

Minutes of January 14, 2009 Meeting

 

The Palmer Lake Art Group’s January meeting was held at Tri Lakes Center for the Arts due to adverse conditions at our gallery.

 

The meeting was called to order at 10 a.m. New member Sue Molick was introduced and welcomed. Margarete Seagraves and John DeFrancesco were thanked for providing the refreshments.

 

There were no minutes to approve from December since that meeting was our Christmas luncheon.

 

Treasurer Sue Jenkins was absent – there was no treasurer’s report.

 

John DeFrancesco reported that nine artists attended the January meeting of the “Paint Together” group at the gallery. The next session will be on Thursday, February 5 at the gallery. As with PLAG’s winter rules for meetings, the painting session will be cancelled if District 38 schools are closed due to adverse weather conditions.

 

Craig Mildrexler reported on the Winter Show to be held in the Lucy Owens Gallery of TLCA. He has arranged for someone to provide music (free) for the reception to be held Saturday, Feb. 7. All PLAG members who are exhibiting in the show must bring finger food for the reception. TLCA will provide a cash bar for liquid refreshments. Delivery date for art work is Monday, February 2 from 12 noon to 2 p.m. Promotional postcards will be available for pick up at that time. Marcia Edwards suggested that they should be mailed immediately since the show opens on February 6. The cards mailed by PLAG members must be stamped. The non-profit postage printed on the cards is for TLCA mailing only. John DeFrancesco suggested that we should keep our art prices low since very little is selling at this time.

 

Misc. business/announcements:

  • Joe Bohler will be exhibiting in the main gallery at the same time as our show. He will be signing and personalizing artwork at the opening on Feb. 7.
  • It was decided that the February 11 PLAG meeting will again be held at Tri Lakes Center.
  • Shirley Hawkins volunteered her home for the site of the June picnic meeting.
  • Suzanne Jenne asked if anyone would like to donate artwork to a silent auction for the benefit for a Larkspur firefighter.
  • It was agreed that our 2009 total scholarship award should again be $3000.

 

The meeting was adjourned and turned over to Jana Towery for a demonstration of acrylic glazing techniques.

 

Respectfully submitted,

Mary Krucoff, Corresponding Secretary, for Margarete Seagraves, Recording Secretary