John Armstrong Wields His Alternative Path through Printmaking

John Armstrong is a master printer and printmaker(there is a difference, folks)who hails originally from Laurel MT, but has resided in Phoenix, AZ for many years.  He will be one of a dozen invited artists from across the United States to participate in MONOPRINT 2013, which is being held May 31-June 6, at University of Wisconsin at Steven's Point. http://www.uwsp.edu/art-design/monoprint/I first met Armstrong at the first MONOPRINT symposium in 2009. Over the course of a week, I watched as Armstrong banded together some mysterious materials, mixed some of them together, waved his magic printing hands over the plates and voila!, there were prints all over the place. Honestly, they sprung up like rabbits jumping out of a magician's hat. With a little bit more cutting and collage, he'd amassed quite a striking group of works. 

The thing about the symposium, is that people from the community are welcome to come into the shop and see artists at work. During the week when I worked alongside Armstrong, he was quite the teacher, inviting people to try some of the techniques he was doing and extended the collaborative part of printmaking to include their suggestions and collages with his work. It made the experience more enjoyable for them and de-mystified the printing process. Armstrong's a generous instructor and gives his time and energy wholeheartedly. His inventiveness in the printmaking field is endless and the work is pretty incredible, too.

Armstrong was raised in a large family in Montana, and since receiving his MFA from University of Montana, he's been settled in the southwest in Phoenix for some time. Throughout his varied career, Armstrong's always brought integrity, creativity and energy to his projects, whether it be in museum administration, or in art education, exhibit design, or curating a private/corporate art colleciton. He and his wife, Joan Prior, operate Armstrong-Prior, Inc, a multi-facted business in the arts. Through it, he has worked as a master printer with several internationally acclaimed artists, including Rudy Autio, Jun Kaneko, Matin Mull and Don Reitz.

As for Armstrong's imagrey, I am enamored with it to the extent he breaks from traditional printing techniques, and doesn't fuss about cutting and collaging the shapes which have familial ties with the work of artists Arshile Gorky and Willem DeKooning. His lines ebb and flow throughout the compositions, and they embrace the edges of his shapes, which are sometimes bold with flat color, or transclucent letting co-exist underlayers of line and shape. I head a video once where Armstrong was talkng about his work, and the jazz music playing in the background was a perfect match for the way these images sing. His prints can be incredibly spatial or tightly composed, but in any case one is pleasantly surprised at the large and small aspects of his images. I was not able to get more images of Armstrong's work to better illustrate my point, but you can find more of his work at johnarmstrongartist.wix.com/art where one can also find examples of his paintings, sculpture and prints. Overall, one can see his sensitivity for color and line and Nature. If you are able to be in the Stevens Point area next week, drop by and see Armstrong and the rest of the artists working at the MONOPRINT 2013 symposium. You might even get to work with Armstrong on one of his pieces......

Armstrong now works in his own studio, often collaborating with other artists. Here is a video where Armstrong talks about his work. http://vimeo.com/55539874

Contact: john@armstrong-prior.com Tel: 602-253-5784    

Ray Gloeckler's Gotcha Truth in Politics

When one looks at the the United States's political system, it is comparatively unique to other countries. At least that's how the rest of the world sees us, and they may be right. When we came to this place over two centuries ago, we looked at other civilizations' forms of government, discussed their merits and settled upon this Democratic methodology that we still deal with today. Working with a basic two political party system, (Yes, other parties can and do exist, but it's basically the Republican and Democratic parties that people gravitate toward in our elections) we manage to captivate the world with our candidates' quatri-annual noble and childish antics disguised as 'debates'. People from other countries marvel at our system and wonder how we can go through this parade of candidates every four years. We do, too, for better or for worse.

With our upcoming presidential elections in the fall, it seems appropriate to discuss the hard-hitting, scathing commentary that Raymond Gloeckler's astute artistic eye puts forth in his own satirical prints. I have known of Gloeckler's work for a long time. His printmaking program at University of Wisconsin, and I would say that because he and his colleagues created a really strong printmaking program in Madison, which continues to be one of this country's best. There, Gloeckler worked with the direct and unforgiving relief medium, building a body of prints over the years that he describes through his animal and character subjects as mostly a self-portrait. His no-holds-barred approach spreads over into politics as we look at a couple of his pieces that seem in tune with our current situation.

Gloeckler's charming portrait of President Obama speaks to his high idealism, and his optimism for America's future. With one finger pointed up, he addresses a point of government policy and looks like Socrates, asking his listeners to aspire to a  moralistic code of ethical life, truth and political practice, which we all know doesn't occur very often in the political arena. The other hand, also with a pointed finger, ready to be raised, or maybe more to illustrate the point at hand in 2008 and again in 2012, that what comes up, can also come down. There is no middle road to take. We are either going up or down, but if President Obama is smiling, then I hope it is up. There has been much commentary made about a young politician running a political system with naive idealism, but the country did elect this man to the presidency because they were tired of the old political system and the state of affairs the country had been brought to bear. Like it or not, Gloeckler's image shows, in the simplest of ways, the country's willingness to try out a new set of ideas and try to find its way through the muck it found itself in.

The image that got my attention moreso was Gloeckler's "Gotcha", where the US bald eagle hovers above the, for lack of better phrasing, Butt-Kicking, the Democratic and Republican animals seem eternally engaged in 'doing to the other'. Their animated gestures and the terrific glee and pain with which these two symbols of US political strength 'go at it', is humorous in the same manner other satirical artists have candidly spoken their opinions. Gloeckler give us this tour de force and we have to laugh. The crusade for domination is not always equal between these two parties, but you know it's gonna be as good as watching a Superbowl game, or a rock'em-sock'em "I'm gonna knock your block off" boxing match. They will never give up, and they will never stop tearing their opponent apart in the quest to be The Victor.  Unfortunately, they seem so entrenched in their own shenanigans that they forget the world watches this circus and must shake their heads wondering how such a political superpower can act no better than children tussling over a favorite playtoy.

While we can laugh when looking at Gloeckler's work,  the reality is he brutally points out this country's two party co-dependent system can't break away from each other. A friend of mine once asked me, why American politics are so limited to working with only two parties? He is from India, where there can be as many as forty political parties running or in office, in one administration! We'd probably feel that was pandemonium, but it does seem to work for them. What would be novel, is if we could ever really expand beyond the two parties to embrace more opinions and hope to reach more consensus. But that idealism threatens those in 'the power struggle'. I don't portend to want to be Socrates, but I can and do appreciate the light-hearted truth of Gloeckler's work.  Here's to the next time we watch the candidates going at each other in our 'campaign circus maximus', we can think on his work and enjoy our own 'Gotcha' moment.

Mary Hood's "Twilight Hours" Prints Evoke Story-telling

Mary Hood http://hoodmary.com is an artist, originally from Wisconsin, who teaches printmaking at one of the nation's printmaking meccas, Arizona State University in Tempe. I have been familiar with Hood's work for over a decade, and have watched her artistic and technical growth span several subjects, all with some inter-connectedness dealing with time, mathematics, space and silence. Her latest subject matter has taken all that into account and has made a shift in a new direction that I find curious and welcome. 


Hood says of her newest pieces..."[they are about] luminous space between day and night, where the imagination creates images of things unseen. With The Twilight Hours I am interested in new ways of defining space...time, narrative, and experience are embodied in myth and story telling, and work to contribute to a collective cultural understanding and quieting of the mind."


The images below are from her new series called "The Twilight Hours", and they both present a subject swinging from a rope or cord, seeming to hang in the air from some larger object that can handle the object. Yet, they also ignite something else - imagination and speculation. I keep coming back to them, over and over. I am curious to know what is suspending these two subjects - the one on the left is a big, black bear that appears to be asleep as it hangs in the harness. It's not dead, and its certainly not awake. It slumbers. And as it lingers there in its physical and metaphoric limboed state, it appears peaceful, gentle, and one could almost say, endearingly sweet. 

The image on the right is a cord of rope that is swinging. It initiates remembrances of childhood playtime down on the farm with siblings or cousins - discovering a swing in the barn loft, or one found at the neighbor's stream or fishing pond. In any case, both images pieces have subtle engagements with movement, and the pale white and blue petals or butterflies floating past them at the only relief from a nebulous space where we can see no ground or place ourselves in relation to what's happening before us. 


Are we as the witnesses to these subjects similarly suspended and swaying in space? We cannot tell, but no matter, they invite us to create a narrative - one of a simpler time, a quiet time of story-telling. In these images I sense a comradery with fellow Wisconsin artists Gail Panske and Robert Erickson, and some of the illusionary magic of renowned children's book author Eric Rohmann's images. 


Hood's neutral base for these pieces sets us in a transitional place, where reality isn't and dreams are wide open. I am quieted by the bear and want to swing closer to it for comfort. The rope is my life-line; that if I grasp it, it will bring me into the place of these suspended objects, and I can find peace from the chaotic existence of my daily life. The images are windows to some place where time and being somewhere don't matter. We can just 'hang' with these other objects and suspend and insulate ourselves from the outside world for as long as we like. I want to hang out with the black bear and the butterflies....

Ellie Honl's Coping Construct/Destructions Grab Attention at the MAPC show

Wisconsin's Ellie Honl's two multi-media constructed prints at the 2011 Fall Members' Mid America Print Council show conjure up environments filled with trepidation, anxiety, danger and something imminently unpleasant. Her "Abandoned" piece (at the top) shows a boarded-up dwelling, with slat boards and patched panels. Set amidst a swarm of thousands of starlings, the dwelling seems secure enough, but the sheer number of encircling birds make the structure's odds for survival seem slim. Also, the ground swell of color surrounding the dwelling would suggest the starlings' wave of motion has actually lifted the structure from the earth, and is swirling it up into the sky with the birds.


"Play Dead" (2nd image) shows a cluster of smaller dwellings that at one time were unified and standing upright, but now 'assume the position' of playing dead; again set against an impending storm of starlings as they approach the play dead structures. The ground is as nebulous as in the former image, but the position of the structures and sticks indicate they sit upon an open patch of earth amongst the sweeping colors. Their possum approach to survival is tenuous at best, for once the starlings swoop down upon the structures their momentum will surely sweep the fragile containers into the sky.


From her website, www.elliehonl.com/, I also enjoy her installations which compliment her 3D glass house and figurine maquettes set against the prints. In that, she is akin with the works of Jennifer Bartlett, who also broke ground in the 80s and 90s with her built constructions set against her paintings. 


These pieces come from Honl's Coping Strategies series, and she says they are about coping with change - both external and internal. --
   "In response to a chaotic, uncertain world, this body of work explores individuals’ coping strategies. Turbulent skies and ambiguous swarms threaten communities comprised of delicate glass shelters. These complex constructions are stand-ins for facets of a person’s psyche...those individuals that effectively cope with their changing environment are left stronger and more resilient." 


I get that. I get what she's talking about. The structures act as shelters and actual embodiments of the people who live on the land. In this case, Honl describes a journey through the Midwest as the source of this series and actually witnessing the incredible flying patterns of starlings. I've seen them myself and stared in wonder at their lyricism, and their rolling thunder as they fly. It is an amazing thing to witness. 


There are changes and fluctuations in life - some we can handle, some we can't.  Imminent and threatening things, which we defend ourselves against or engage in the battle to survive. It's being human. And the one thing most people who live in the open stretches of this country experience is that direct engagement with our environment: the storms, the tornadoes, wild fires and floods. We live in it, with it, survive it, and come back more resilient than ever to stay our course and live where we choose and do what we do.  


Honl's work speaks eloquently of survival - not only the physical sense, but also the internal, psychological. Her wooden and glass-like structures, though they seem in peril most of the time,  are more than capable of surviving an onslaught of little birds that could peck away the glass surface (our skins), and still leave the wooden frame (the psyche) intact.  Honl's work engages the human spirit and reminds us that life is full of surprises. She reminds us also that we must have faith to know we can weather those trials and upsets.