Interview Archives - Page 3 of 4

An Interview with Featured Artist Carolina Rodriguez

December 1, 2013 by utpress Leave a Comment

By Cynthia Reeser with Carolina Rodriguez

Le Désert de Mon Coeur

CR (TROn): Your artwork is wildly imaginative. Where do get your ideas? What inspires you?

Rodriguez: Well, I use everything that surrounds me, the places I go, the people I talk with, the plants, the bugs, the water, the fire, the space, the stars, the galaxies and comets, the constellations, the stories I hear, and sometimes, the feeling of being bored or sad.

The Clouds Will Explode

CR: Please talk about your development as an artist.

Rodriguez: Everything began around ten years ago when I was fifteen, influenced by movies, comics, and Japanese artists. From there I decided to use digital media as my [primary medium], mainly because I don’t like to clean my brushes. I got into a visual arts career, and since then, I’ve been trying to improve my drawing and learn the programs I use a little better.

The Childish Voice

CR: All of the work in your online portfolio is digital art. Have you ever tried your hand at any other mediums—painting, drawing, etc.?

Rodriguez: Of course I have. I still draw a lot in a sketch book; I love colored pencils and I try to use them as much as I can. I’m also part of a graphic workshop called “Taller Trez” that involves woodcut and etching techniques.

Painting with fine strokes that it appears dreamlike. A lone male figure, his back to the viewer, wears boots and a reddish cape that moves. The figure appears to stand on ice. His shadow casts elongated before him. There is mist creeping behind him along the bottom of the frame. Grayish mists and thin fog around the corners, sides and top of the upper frame.

Oblio

CR: I notice a lot of texture working in your pieces. For example, in “The Clouds Will Explode,” the background of the wall has a texture similar to that of oil pastels, yet in the window, the images are highly detailed. There is also a transparent quality to some features in the lower third of the image, which contrasts with the objects in the light. Do you consciously create a variety of textures?

Rodriguez: Sometimes I’m just sloppy and mix up things without noticing, but I do like the feeling of messy textures on my paintings. The result is always different, but I really try to apply a lot of things that I learn over the process in previous works. It’s fun every time, but sometimes I get [frustrated when] something is not working. But I understand that even if it doesn’t work, I learned something new.

CR: Many of your pieces are very detailed. Could you talk about your process a bit?

Rodriguez: I’m kind of neurotic; I love detail, even if people can’t see some of the things I include in an image because it’s too small to see. I [need the detail] to be there. My process varies, but I always start with an idea, then form a color palette and create a sketch. Then on the computer I redo the lines, paint underneath them, and from there, it’s chaos—anything can happen. I go crazy and do whatever I feel like. It’s definitely fun.

What’s next for Carolina Rodriguez…

Carolina Rodriguez will be exhibiting her work at the Pontifical Xavierian University at the end of January 2014. For more information on this artist and for news of upcoming exhibitions, go to https://www.facebook.com/TALLER.TREZ

Visit Carolina Rodriguez on the web at: http://morbidtea.daportfolio.com/

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Carolina Rodriguez is a native of Bogota, Colombia and attends the Pontifical Xavierian University (Pontificia Universidad Javeriana) in Bogota. View her art online at http://morbidtea.daportfolio.com/.

Cynthia Reeser is the Founder and Publisher of Aqueous Books, and Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Prick of the Spindle literary journal. She has published more than 100 reviews in print and online, as well as poetry and fiction in print and online journals. Her short stories are anthologized in the Daughters of Icarus Anthology (Pink Narcissus Press, 2013), and in Follow the Blood: Tales Inspired by The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew (Sundog Lit, 2013). Cynthia is currently working on a literary short story collection inspired by fairy tale lore. Also a senior editor for two association management companies, she lives and works in the Birmingham area and attends the University of Tampa in pursuit of her MFA in Creative Writing (fiction). Visit her on the web at www.cynthiareeser.com.

An Interview with Featured Artist Amy Bernays

November 1, 2013 by utpress Leave a Comment

By Cynthia Reeser with Amy Bernays

Cynthia Reeser (Tampa Review Online): Where do you find inspiration?

Amy Bernays: At the traffic lights. I’ll look over at a girl and guy walking to lunch. Her tender touch on his arm, his distant stare. Or at a bar, seeing a girl look anxiously around the bar for her friend to join her. Like a lone spindly gazelle sipping from a crocodile waterhole.

Freeways of Glendale

I draw. I want to understand. Not just features, not to put onto paper what things and people look like. That is for cameras and iPhones, I draw intentions, thoughts, conversations, and gestures.

CR: Please talk about your process.

AB: It was rainy in east London where I had my studio. I was soaked through, having just cycled back from a life drawing class in Hackney. I was pissed off. The model was an old man; long ago he had broken his arm; the fine pencil drawings looked crocked. He was haggard and ugly.

It was night and the boarded-up pub on the corner was open. A large bouncer smiled at me as I chained up my bike. I could feel rain dripping down my back and I felt thoroughly intimidated as a group of young beautiful people gushed past me and into the club. I followed.

The Language of Long Lingering Looks

Like a wildlife documentary on the mating habits of the adult male, in the din were all the true gestures of human interaction. The lean in, the pausing benevolence, the overt arch of her spine as she slid down to pick up a tip. I scribbled frantically in the dark, catching the real gestures, fleeting glances and dominant glares. I was an anthropologist in my soaking coat and wet hair.

I wanted it to be beautiful and feminine, but it was seedy. Where I was interested in the bodies and movement, I was lost in the selling of sex. I moved to drawing people in bars and clubs and out at dinner. I want to catch in line that essence of people.

The language of long, lingering looks is an amalgamation of sketches. The paint striations beneath are like music paper, the daubs of paint and line like notes on the page.

Just a few decades ago society adhered to Susan Sontag’s belief that there is no thought without words. More recently, Temple Grandin has been explaining how she and other autistics think. She mentioned “linear thinkers.” They would have done well for the past few thousands of years. Knowledge was in books, long wordy ones with no pictures, the kinds of texts I would get lost in. “Image thinkers” remember people and stories. And there are the “pattern thinkers”; they are great at making things and backing cars. I think in patterns and connections. When describing something, I gesture wildly, sketching in the air my thoughts as I translate those thoughts to words.

With my painting I wanted to gossip about a night out, all the excitement of flirting and boys, but in my language.

CR: How do you feel your art interacts with the world at large; is it a push and pull, or more of a synthesis, or something else?

AB: Making art and selling art are different things. I make art to discuss these lofty ideas about the human condition. I use my painting to bash out ideas, like talking to myself. And it talks back, and the conversation is as varied and dense as any lifelong relationship. The look of these conversations changes. Sometimes my works are sweet nighttime whispers, sometimes an anecdote, a long and winding description of my drive home, or a flaring argument.

But to sell a painting it must also be “hangable.” To get people to listen to these strange and sometimes difficult-to-understand concepts of image-making, the end product has to be something that you want to look at, that is the right size for the wall and goes nicely with the couch.

She’s Done This Before

From what I can glean from the elusive gallery system, to be a bankable artist I should choose my most successful works and make more like that. I should be dependable and return to my style. They want to be able to recognize me in each of my works. I can see the similarities in my painting, but I know my other half very well. It takes a lot of looking to hear my accent.

Visit Amy Bernays on the web at: http://www.bernays.net/

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An anthropologist of sorts, a painter and writer, a mother and a creator, Amy Bernays comes from London and has lived in California since 2001. She attended the Chelsea School of Fine Art and Central Saint Martin’s Fine Art program. With two toddlers in those magical preschool years, she paints quickly. Amy is currently represented by New Blood Art, London, UK.

An Interview with Featured Artist Regina Valluzzi

October 1, 2013 by utpress Leave a Comment

By Cynthia Reeser with Regina Valluzzi

Dr. Regina Valluzzi has always pursued art in tandem with her technical achievements in Nanotechnology and Biophysics. She is a trained scientist, with a BS in Materials Science from MIT and a PhD in Polymer Science from University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has spent years as a researcher in the Chemical, Physical, and Biological Sciences. Dr. Valluzzi’s scientific experience is evident in her approach to painting as both an art and a science. She has been able to conduct systematic experiments with artistic media. For many years her science has revolved around the topics of polymers and optical phenomena, and these twin fascinations are present in much of her art. Her paintings are very much about the properties of polymer-based paints and manipulation of those properties.

Gelid Seascape

Relief, texture, opacity, and surface finish are as integral to her work as form, composition, and subject (abstract). Many of her paintings involve juxtapositions of colors with very low contrast or rhythmic patterns of evolving color. Others play with metamerism, arising from spectral properties of pigments. In others, color is intensified through careful choice of layered and nearby hues and pigments. Dr. Valluzzi has shown in several juried exhibitions, and her work is included in private collections in the U.S., U.K., Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Bulgaria, and Malta.

Logic

Cynthia Reeser (TRon): One thing I find especially exciting about your work is that you achieve a cohesion of both art and science, rendered pictorially. I think of many of your pieces as representations of what one might see under the microscope, but on closer inspection, I think there is more to your work than simple representation. Can you talk about your approach to your artwork, as both a scientist and artist?

Regina Valluzzi: It is interesting that you mention microscopes. I spent my PhD in a group that worked primarily with electron microscopy, and used advanced microscopies for many years after that in my scientific research. In general, artists are advised to paint what they know. Most of the big-name famous artists started with realism, then applied their creativity. The evidence of natural forms is still visible even in their highly abstract work (look at Mondrian, for example). In my case, I’ve spent so much of my life looking at data, analyzing data, developing images that help people mentally map complex scientific data, and illustrating and visually communicating scientific concepts that it’s almost inevitable to see science even when my work is not expressly science-themed. There is also a secret visual semiotics of science that one first encounters in graduate school. It serves an important function, but the rules are so arbitrary. Now that I’m doing the art thing, I like to honk the sciences’ semiotic nose when I can.

Heterotroph Hypothesis

CR: Is there a point at which science and art meet for you—be it color or texture or someplace else?

RV: There are a lot of scientific ideas that are inherently very abstract. The sciences have one set of rules for portraying these ideas, but the cost of clarity is often oversimplification and loss of some of the most intriguing little bits. So in some cases, the switch from technical illustration to art is simply a rules change for me. There are also a lot of very basic forms and color juxtapositions that are not found in everyday life unless there are big, fancy instruments in one’s everyday life. I incorporate some of these forms, derived from data, into much of my work.

Atmospheric

Another meeting is simply in my approach to media. Experimental scientists like to experiment, and we become pretty adept at making sure our experiments go somewhere and give us knowledge to build upon. I experiment with paint and media and use my understanding of phenomena like viscoelasticity, refractive index, spectroscopy, etc., to build up a knowledge base of techniques from those experiments. I’ve also learned that it’s generally better to just DO low-risk and low-cost experiments than to spend hours talking about why they might or might not work. Art experiments are low-cost. The materials aren’t terribly expensive (and some can be repurposed), and a failed experiment doesn’t blow up the lab (seen that) or release a toxic gas cloud (seen that too) or have any other potentially dangerous and terrifying results. So why not try it, take some notes, and learn something?

Above and Below

See Regina Valluzzi’s work in the following upcoming exhibitions:

“Aesthetic Experiments” Solo Exhibition, Remis Gallery, Governor’s Academy, Newbury, MA
February 5 – March 7, 2014; Reception February 7, 2014.

Red Wall Gallery at the Contemporary Art Fair, Javits Center, NYC, NY, October 25 – 27 2013

Visit Regina Valluzzi on the web at: http://nerdlypainter.wordpress.com/

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Dr. Regina Valluzzi has always pursued art in tandem with her technical achievements in Nanotechnology and Biophysics. She is a trained scientist, with a BS in Materials Science from MIT and PhD in Polymer Science from University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has spent years as a researcher in the Chemical, Physical and Biological Sciences. Dr. Valluzzi’s scientific experience is evident in her approach to painting as both an art and a science. She has been able to conduct systematic experiments with artistic media. For many years her Science has revolved around the topics of Polymers and Optical phenomena, and these twin fascinations are present in much of her art. Her paintings are very much about the properties of polymer-based paints and manipulation of those properties. Relief, texture, opacity, and surface finish are as integral to her work as form, composition, and subject (abstract). Many of her paintings involve juxtapositions of colors with very low contrast or rhythmic patterns of evolving color. Others play with metamerism, arising from spectral properties of pigments. In others, color is intensified through careful choice of layered and nearby hues and pigments. Dr. Valluzzi has shown in several juried exhibitions, and her work is included in private collections in the US, UK, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Bulgaria, and Malta.

An Interview with Featured Artist Sandra Gail Teichmann-Hillesheim

September 1, 2013 by utpress Leave a Comment

Cynthia Reeser: Could you talk about your development as an artist?

Sandra Gail Teichmann-Hillesheim: I guess my interior world, whether I am conscious of it or not, turns within the realm of what we label as art. Maybe it began with being what my mother called an over-sensitive child—fascinated with words, along with form and color and line as well as compositions within a confined space, justice and injustice, and the whys of how the world around me did and didn’t work. As a shy young adult I took refuge behind the lens of an SLR camera followed by hours in the darkroom where I delighted in the black and white images and ideas revealing themselves in a developing tray. From there it was to art school for the basics of drawing, painting, color theory, sculpture, printmaking, art history, performance art, conceptual art. I think it was the conceptual art that got me reading and writing more poetry, completing an MFA, after which I took a PhD in creative writing, and ultimately accepting a professorship in creative writing. All along my work has been informed and shaped by intellectual query and an intense personal relationship with the visual coupled with the rhythms, echoes, and silences affecting me and the spaces around me.

CR: Much of your work is abstract, rather than figurative. Is this a conscious choice you make, regarding the representational aspects of your work?

SGT: I don’t begin a work with intent of making a representation of anything. My mind is elsewhere as blank and as open as the canvases I approach. Even in my Wednesday morning life drawing studio, I never work for realism. Rather the hours of drawing are filled with lines, movements, tensions, ideas, emotions, play, what ifs, exaggerations, fancies, delusions, chaos, exhaustion, boredom, but always an absolute being in and of the moments of myself and the subject. In the end, if a representation of something or someone appears, it is always a bewilderment that such should exist on the canvas at which my hand has been having its say.

CR: Who have been your greatest influences as a visual artist?

SGT: I think people are often driven to the open spaces of art by negative aspects of the lives they try to live within this world’s society and with personal others. I am no exception to these griefs, but there have also been positive influences. My greatest has been the late Louis Cicotello for his life lived as and within art, for his uncompromising high standards, for his courage in taking the risks art does so insist on, for his belief in art as process, and in the end, for his belief in me and my work.

CR: You work in various artistic media. Once you choose a subject for a new piece, how do you select which medium or media to use? And is your choice of medium directly informed by the subject, or by some other method?

SGT: I don’t think I ever choose a subject unless it might be required for a particular exhibit or journal, and I must say I hate doing such. Most often I am drawn to one or more medium and there I am physically, emotionally, and intellectually engaged with the materials, a process which can be insistent, long, and agonizing. I work until I sort of get a feeling that something is coming, and then maybe there it is: the process revealing a cohesion that is compositionally pleasing to my eye and my heart while at the same time offering me at least a glimpse of a new idea, new understanding, new perspective of the world I move through. When I start a canvas or a writing I never give up, I rework it endlessly until the mediums release the wonder.

CR: What is most important to you as a visual artist?

SGT: I think I may be trying to challenge my need for systems, traditions, orders, and beliefs that categorize. Perhaps it is as my friend, Fred Dunn, quotes from Carl Jung, “Order and meaning are things that have become and are no longer becoming.” To help me understand the organic whole and defy the predictable, I try to keep in mind, when painting and when writing, the six intrinsic shapes of nature: the oval, the wave, the meander, the honeycomb, the branch, the spiral (yes, I know, yet another set of controls, but perhaps, if I have these basic forms in mind when approaching paper or canvas, I might note and save a complex passing moment, save a shadow, or even a new clarity). In both writing and painting, my purpose is to take joy in the moment, merge with the medium while knowing each piece holds the past as well as possibility for another beginning, all an intricate and delicate dance. Perhaps of greatest importance is that I never lose my curiosity, my open mind, and that I ever have a ready supply of blank canvases and paper, brushes and pens, paint and ink awaiting my attention.

What’s New and Upcoming for Sandra Gail Teichmann-Hillesheim…

Sandra Gail Teichmann-Hillesheim is the featured artist for the Summer 2013 issue of Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women. See her artwork on the cover and within the issue.

Upcoming exhibit: A selection from the Back Garden Series in the “Extemporary Contemplations Show” at Buttonwood Art Space, Kansas City, Missouri, Dec. 6, 2013 – January 31, 2014.

View the artist’s website at: www.sandragailteichmann-hillesheim.com

An Interview with Featured Artist Neverne Covington

August 1, 2013 by utpress Leave a Comment

Cynthia Reeser (TRon): Could you talk about your development as an artist?

Neverne Covington: Even as a child, I have always loved to draw and I have never stopped.

CR: Much of your work has nature as its subject—notably, your paintings currently on display in your online portfolio at http://www.nevernecovington.com/index.html. What strikes me immediately about these paintings is your expert use of line and color. When choosing a subject from the natural world to paint, how do you make your selections?

NC: I feel as if the objects I draw and paint select me. Sometimes I will see a subject or natural phenomena which I have passed many times and I look further and it feels like I am seeing it for the first time. The diversity of our natural world and the ability of nature to transform itself capture my imagination. I am fascinated with humankind’s relationship to matter…the being of nature. At the center of my life is a love and respect for the natural world, and creating art is a way to honor and share that appreciation.

CR: Do line, form, and color figure into your selection process?

NC: Both consciously and unconsciously, they figure into my work, along with other formal elements of art: shape, mass, texture, rhythm, repetition...

CR: Once you choose a subject for a new piece, how do you select which medium or media to use? And is your choice of medium directly informed by the subject, or by some other method?

NC: Composition and draftmanship are my primary concerns when starting a painting. In so many ways I do not think of drawing and painting as inherently different. Also, scale plays a big factor in choosing my medium. Is this work a small and intimate piece, or does it need to be large to be appropriate to the formal concerns of the work? How does this work evolve?

CR: You are also a book illustrator. Could you talk about your experience working with publishers as an artist?

NC: I have had a great experience working with publishers. I have illustrated mostly for publishers who have highly skilled art directors who know what they want. That is the person I usually work with, who knows how to use my skills and imagination, whether it is just a book cover or an entire book. Although I work alone most of the time, I enjoy the collaborative process of working with an art director and an editor. Sometimes I am given free reign to design and paint the way I interpret the narrative and sometimes the composition and layout have already been prescribed. Also, it has provided me a way to continually practice my craft.

CR: Do you have any advice for illustrators who want to break into book illustrating?

NC: Work for a royalty fee if possible. I still get royalty payments twice a year for a book I finished over ten years ago. You have income ongoing for work done a long time ago.

CR: What is most important to you as an artist?

NC: It is most important for me to continue to create work that is fresh, alive, and invigorating; to constantly challenge myself; to venture into the unknown; and to commit to the work.

CR: What legacy do you want to leave behind for future generations of artists and art appreciators?

NC: Personally, I hope to leave work behind that will inspire, challenge, enrich, and nourish those who view the work. I hope that it will have made a difference.

I am not sure legacy is the right word, but I hope the value of art continues to be both revered and incorporated into everyday life and enriches the human experience. One of my students, just today, said she thought that surely, my legacy includes the places I have taught for more than 18 years: Eckerd College, Ringling College of Art and Design, the International Academy of Art & Technology, and currently, the Morean Art Center in St. Petersburg, FL. I guess I never thought of that as a legacy, but I hope I have touched the lives of those who have been a part of my teaching work.

Upcoming Exhibitions... See Neverne Covington’s work in the following venues:

The Book as Art: 21^st Century Meets Tradition When: July 19-Sept. 20, 2013 Where: Gallery at the Art Institute of Atlanta-Decatur, One West Court Square, Suite 110, Decatur, GA, 30030 The Decatur Arts Alliance and the gallery of The Art Institute of Atlanta-Decatur introduce this new visual component of artists’ books to the largest independent book festival in the country. See forty-seven juried works from artists from twenty states, Canada, and Israel. Presented by the Decatur Arts Alliance and the Art Institute of Atlanta-Decatur. An event of the 2013 AJC Decatur Book Festival.

Florida Museum for Women Artists, 4th Annual Juried Show When: July 20, 2013 – September 28, 2013 Regular Exhibit Hours: 5:30–8:00 p.m. (Free for Members / $10 Non-Members) Where: 100 N. Woodland Blvd., Suite 1, DeLand, FL 32720 Phone: (386) 873-2976  Artist Talk Saturday, September 28 3:00– 5:00 p.m. Free for Members / $5 Non-Members For more information, visit floridamuseumforwomenartists.org

Strobel Design Build
Where: 2716 6th Ave. South, St. Petersburg, FL 33712 
When: 2nd Sat. of the month, beginning Oct. 2013

Contact Neverne Covington at: neverne@mac.com
Visit her website at: www.nevernecovington.com