Julia: Sketching Life

Discussion of excellence in the arts.

2011-11-28T07:14:00.000-08:00

This blog post is a repost from the Herron School of Art FB page. I found this discussion of excellence in the arts interesting and thought provoking. I also found that it helped me to read it at least twice! I haven't been able to react to the comments yet.

http://www.postartblog.net/2011/11/high-and-low-what-is-excellence-in-arts.html

What are your thoughts about the subject?

My "Start with Art"

2011-11-26T16:20:00.000-08:00

What is the germ of a life in the arts? Lots of us love art, love making art, love owning original art, but really very few of us decide that we will choose art-making for our career. Everyone who does has a unique story. Exposure to making art that I can remember started in grade school. Every Friday, we had an art lesson taught by Mr. Wilcox, a small, antiseptic man of about 45, with an Errol Flynn-like moustache, who lived with his mother in a house with a big wrap-around porch catty-cornered from the Catholic Church. He also had a small, antiseptic voice. Mr. Wilcox would come bursting into our classroom, tape the example of the art that we would all make to the blackboard and begin passing out materials. I always loved the class in spite of the big obstacles I had to overcome. First, my last name was Zollman, so I sat in the last seat in the last row of the class of about 30 kids. Second, I was near-sighted, but nobody had discovered that yet, and I certainly did not know. I thought everybody couldn't see the blackboard very well. Third, I was left-handed.

Art lessons were taught step by step and the object was to make a picture that looked like the teacher's picture. Somehow, I could end up doing that. It was a lesson in following directions, not why we were making art. But at that point, I didn't question it. I just loved making things. We all cut at the same time and we all pasted at the same time. Imagine, if you will, me sitting in the back of the room, squinting at the black board, poised with my (of course, right-handed) scissors in my left hand on the bottom of the right corner of our project nearly standing on my head waiting to be given the signal to "cut". How can I ever forget one of Mr. Wilcox's famous lines--"Now tell me in a whisper, where do we start?" as he cuffed his hand behind his ear and a classroom of 30 fourth graders all together whispered back, "At the fold!" Oh, it was thrilling to be making art!

Here is one of my grade school art projects that is still hanging around every holiday.

From my sketchbook: Cambodian atrocities

2011-11-23T10:25:00.000-08:00

I have been catching some of the news of the Khmer Rouge tribunal taking place now in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Last winter, we visited a museum there commemorating the atrocities carried out in the 1970's by the Pol Pot regime. Nearly 1/4 of the population was wiped out. The museum is a somber place with signs throughout the building that say "No Laughing". Schoolchildren are forbidden to laugh or run on the grounds when they visit.

From the museum, our guide took us to the nearby "killing fields". He described what we would see and gave us the history, but refrained from entering the area, as it is still too upsetting after all these years.

Stutz Holiday Show time again

2011-11-15T07:42:00.000-08:00

A busy week getting ready for the Annual Stutz Artists Holiday Show. Bigger and better! More fun, more art, more music, more art, more food, more art. Come down.

The Stutz, 212 W. 10th Street, 2nd floor, Indianapolis (enter from 10th Street on Bearcat Alley)

Various shapes, sizes, price points for all of your shopping (you do shop for yourself, too, don't you?) This year, a few items will be on display in the big room on 2D Hall, and, we can take guests to our studios for a little tour of the art that didn't fit into the big room allotted space!

It's a Mini-Stutz Show!

See you there.

Painting My Mother

2011-10-04T10:34:00.000-07:00

“I Have Loved Every Decade”

Painting by

Julia Zollman Wickes

2011

I feel pretty lucky to be a painter. I feel lucky to follow in the footsteps of artists Alice Neel and David Hockney, who painted their friends and family members.

For the second year, I am an exhibitor in the StutzARTspace Gallery’s October show, “Women of a Certain Age”. This year, with the show’s theme being “The Skin We’re In”, I decided to respond to that theme by painting a portrait of the woman who has shown me, by example, how to be very comfortable “in the skin that I am in”--my mother, Maxine Zollman.

I like painting because it is a pretty slow process for me. First I have to get the concept in my head. Then I have to loosely plan the work. Often this involves sketches--of the subject, of the composition ideas, and after talking with my subject, a story begins to form. Painting my mother provided me the opportunity to do all of the preliminaries and to think a lot about her as I

attempted to bring my image of her to life. As I put the paint on the canvas, I thought about her big blue eyes and how our daughters have them, too. I thought about her slender frame and how she was a skinny kid who always liked tap dancing. Painting her fingers reminded me of how she still plays “Stardust”, her favorite song, on the piano as many times as you want to hear it.

Like almost all girls and their mothers, we did not always agree! And we still wrangle over

politics and other topics, but it doesn’t really matter. She has shown me how to be a dreamer, a business woman, a community participant and donor, a good friend and a loving family

member. As a young woman, she made her way to Chicago to become a nurse so that she could join the Army Nurse Corps in World War II, but when the war ended before her schooling did, she headed to Minneapolis to grad school to study Public Health. Married life in a small town gave her a chance to work as a nurse, own her own business, serve on her community’s

committees and start a fund to assist needy families. She said she gained a lot of confidence from observing her mother-in-law, a beautiful, stylish, but painfully shy woman who was often stepping outside her community’s notions for ideas. My mother and my grandmother set the stage, by example, for me to enroll in art school at age 48, and feel sure that such an

unconventional path was still right for me.

Even today my mother sets a wonderful example for me to feel good about “the skin I am in” and to feel confident that I will be able to tackle the obstacles that are put before me. I am lucky to be her daughter and to get to know her just a little better, as the painter of her portrait.

“I am comfortable with where I am in my life and the way I do things, as a rule. Many women struggle to be “up to date” and I don’t worry about that. Life keeps bringing me new challenges. I take each thing as it comes and try to deal with it and I have loved every decade.”

-Maxine Zollman

9/11-An Artistic Response, the next step

2011-09-16T12:18:00.000-07:00

After spending a few days looking at pastel squares hanging all around my Senior Studio, I noticed that I had a few empty bottles in a box in a corner. I decided to just paint those. It wouldn't take much effort or thinking and I would be painting again. As I did these paintings in a box, I realized that I was forming a landscape for them to sit in and that the bottles themselves had taken on a figurative look. It even struck me later that I was giving viewers a glimpse of a scene and that there was more in there than we were seeing. Each painting was taking me up to 3 hours to complete even though there wasn't really much to the image itself. Making decisions was almost impossible. Colors? Which bottles? Where to place them? Why did this need to be so difficult? In the end, just doing these paintings helped me get my energy to create things back again. There is a feeling of isolation there. I called the series "Beyond the Edge".

9/11-An Artistic Response, continued

2011-09-12T11:51:00.000-07:00

A few days after 9/11, I returned to classes and my senior studio at Herron School of Art. I spent most of the day sitting around or walking around looking at what others were working on. I felt empty and unable to paint as it all seemed irrelevant. Finally, I got started and painted 20 squares of 20x20 inch papers--one each day for 20 days. I tacked them up all over the walls of my studio and called them the "Hotel Paintings". (???) I am not sure whether I had nothing to say or too much to say.

9/11-An artistic response

2011-09-09T11:23:00.000-07:00

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was just getting to my studio space in the senior painting room at Herron School of Art in Indianapolis, Indiana, when I received a phone call from my husband. He said he had just had a call from our daughter, Katie, who lived and worked in Manhattan. She said that a plane had just hit one of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and that she was ok. Katie's office was 14 blocks from the WTC. At that point, we had heard nothing about this incident. I called her immediately and her words to me were, "Mom, Mom, go home. Turn on the TV. Mom, this is big. Mom, people are running through the streets." There was a TV in someone's studio so we all gathered around and were unable to leave the spot. The teacher came by and told us to turn off the TV and get back to work. (I always wondered if she realized what she did that morning--but who could have known....) Students started leaving and I headed to the bookstore downstairs where there was another TV. By now, the second plane had hit. It was beginning to dawn on me that this was an attack on our wonderful city and our people and that my daughter was so close to this tragedy. (By this time, she had left her office and run all the way to her apartment in midtown from lower Manhattan.) A numbness had settled in and upon returning to my studio, I prepared to leave for home. I spotted a gessoed piece of paper tacked to the wall and in about 10 minutes I put down all my emotions of what I had witnessed on TV and on the phone with Katie and made the above painting. We were among the lucky parents who heard from their child before we heard the news ourselves and she was ok. I have thought so much about those parents and spouses who heard the news and couldn't get through, who had someone trapped in the building, or who never heard at all.

Cairo on My Mind

2011-02-11T10:49:00.000-08:00

There is no doubt where my thoughts are today and where the thoughts of much of the world are today. Cairo. How could you miss what is happening there? Life changing for Egyptians. Life changing for the middle east, no doubt. This painting came from my sketchbook. As we drove through Cairo, I made drawings of all of the mosque domes I could. Such interesting designs and no two alike.

This painting, "Cairo Rooftops" was entered in the annual IDADA (Indianapolis Downtown Artists' and Dealers' Association) show. It was featured in the Indianapolis Star, our local newspaper. It won first place in the show and also was purchased at the show. High quality archival prints are still available.

Danza #4: Singin' in the Rain

2011-02-11T10:20:00.000-08:00

This painting, "Singin' in the Rain" has been finished for a few months, but my interest in the the Haitian misfortunes continues. Will Hatians ever get a break! The music, Danza #4, by LaMothe, continues to provide the inspiration for my reactions to the regularly-unfolding dramas that plague everyday life on the island. This painting talks about the mudslides that are expected on the stripped-bare mountains. Not a result of the earthquake, but just something to compound the difficulties for people who have been left homeless by the earthquake. The series, except for the first painting, is on display in my studio at The Stutz-B-335. High quality prints are available for all the works, as well.

Food for Thought-Eating Sushi

2011-02-11T09:53:00.000-08:00

One painting had to speak for me at the Food for Thought show in November 2010. The exhibit was held in the StutzARTSpace Gallery in the Stutz Building and a venue for the annual Sprit and Place program. The show centered around artists who use sketchbooks and who would be willing to display their sketchbooks. For some artists this proved to be a too personal territory. The focus of my sketchbook was "Food as Memoir", a subject that I frequently return to in my work. So many memories of so many people in my life center around food! Grandmothers, the old great-aunts, my mother, the children--great stories about all of them and they have stories about me, too! But this piece was different. The subject is still painful. This painting is a tribute to my friend, Lynn, who died suddenly this past year. Lynn was of Japanese heritage and our friendship had grown for over 25 years. We both loved food, exchanged recipes and were crazy about sushi!! Lynn was my sushi-eating buddy. We would go out to eat sushi together, make our picks--some old favorites and always something new, and always wrap up the meal with a bowl of green tea ice cream. One bowl, two spoons. It was fun and we talked a lot about anything and nothing. In the painting, I have tried to represent Lynn's esthetic of simplicity. Just a little to say a lot. I miss her.

Searching...

2010-08-10T13:19:00.001-07:00

I have spent several days in a row working in my sketchbook preparing for the November exhibit at the StutzARTSpace Gallery entitled "Uncovered: Food for Thought". I have been trolling my old sketchbooks where, from time to time, I park my brain 1) to hold that idea, 2) to develop an old idea, 3) to play around with parts of old ideas, 4) to read old lists of things or series I was going to paint. These books are my treasures. Some ideas will never come to fruition, but some remind me that I had some good plans, but got distracted.

What has really caught my attention, though, are old class notes from my Herron days---not that long ago. Remember, I am a 2002 Herron grad, therefor a Young Painter. I poured over old class assignments from one of the best painting and drawing teachers in the universe-Mark Jacobson. The assignments are detailed and thoughtful and totally helpful today. Then there are the comments about many completed series. They remind me of my strengths and weaknesses, which, by the way, are what I regard as my strengths and weaknesses today - (although, I would like to think I have made a little bit of progress). Constantly, Mark was urging me to SEACH. Search for the line, search for the depth, take my time, search for the form, and pursue these things with a passion.

Mark writes, "Your work is strongest when you have gone through a process of wrestling with it and the effort of that struggle comes through in the works which are closer to your art spirit...I generally prefer the works which you fought harder for..."

I have definitely not lost my fighting spirit, but don't we all yearn for that critique from our old instructors and don't we all remember how much we learned from our fellow students? How do you find a substitute for those things? Who will notice whether you are wrestling hard enough or digging deeply enough and resolving some of the problems that your work presents? Who will show up and push you?

It's hard to be a grown-up painter.

Eating on the Road

2010-07-19T13:53:00.000-07:00

Eating on the Road...

Well, not really sitting on the road and eating or not roadside eating, either....

Question: "What should the focus be if you are driving the backroads from Denver to Indianapolis?" After googling this and that about Nebraska and Kansas, and after stopping to see Willa Cather's girlhood home in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and following the old Oregon Trail for a bit, we decided that what grabbed our attention the most was Road Food. In Homestead, Nebraska, I had my first encounter with

Watermelon Pie!

and so I had to turn my experience into ART.

You can even make some pie for yourself.

Drawing Happens to be a Passion of Mine

2010-05-06T13:15:00.000-07:00

A First Friday is different from the annual Stutz Artists Show which just happened. On a First Friday, the studio is still a working place but we hope you will drop in to see what's going on or just to have some conversation. It's much quieter. It might be messy around here. And there's time for some thoughtful conversation.

Then, you can stay for the opening reception of the current StutzARTSpace gallery show. I am in charge of the food, so I hope it's good! and that there is enough! Come early.....I am bringing along some of your favorites, such as "Devils on Horseback" and that spicy Mexican cheesy dip. Tasty. Those go fast.

But most important (oh, yea...)is the art. Come and see my series of 3 drawings featuring my good friend, Lorraine, who modeled for me. Actually, almost of my subjects are people whom I know pretty well.

The gallery will be open all afternoon as well as the studios (just no food at the gallery in the afternoon. So what's the point!) There are so many lovely drawings to see in the show. 11 artists. What a great way to start the weekend!

Looking forward to seeing you.

Art and Life

2010-03-08T12:12:00.000-08:00

This weekend I witnessed two of life's greatest mysteries.

I met our little granddaughter, Chloe Maxine Conovitz, when she was only 30 minutes old and was totally enthralled with this little new life. As she stretched and gazed quietly around the room, we were all filled with the greatest hopes and dreams for her. These were the sweetest, sweetest moments.

During this time, our little doxie, Lola, was struggling from a serious disease. She was not going to get better. We had to make the painful decision to put her to sleep to keep her from suffering too much. We had to say good-bye to our little companion, a sweet, loving, gentle soul who had made her way into our hearts.

The glorious beginning, the heartbreaking end. In life, we are witness to both. We have wonderful memories of Lola and are so thankful that she came into our life. We learned from Lola the qualities of unconditional love, that each new day has such promise, and to be thankful for the small things (like a spoonful of cottage cheese to start the day!).

We turn our energies to Chloe Maxine and the great life she has ahead of her.

Danza #4: First Impressions

2010-02-26T10:52:00.000-08:00

The finished art--"Danza #4: First Impressions"

will be on exhibit at

Indianapolis Arts Garden

Circle Center Mall

Indianapolis, IN

during the month of March

and at

Central Library

in downtown Indianapolis

during the month of April.

Danza #4: First Impressions

will be available for purchase at auction at the

Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra's

Sterling Season Gala

May 8, 2010

at the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana History Center

to request an invitation

visit www.icomusic.org or call 317-940-9607

FIRST FRIDAY, February, 2010

2010-02-02T14:17:00.000-08:00

Last October, four women joined me at our home in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, for a creative retreat. For a week we made art---painting, writing, drawing. We worked at the villa, at the beach, on the beautiful Malecon, and in coffee shops, trying to meld our individual styles and visions with the lively, colorful culture of Mexico. We viewed local art at the weekly gallery openings and visited with the artists. We hired the neighbors to model for us and painted together on the veranda. At the end of the day we had a glass of wine, cooked local foods, ate in local restaurants and enjoyed meals that neighbors prepared for us . It was a time of great energy---and we all returned home with much accomplished.

We decided to exhibit our work together and the exhibit is on display through February at the Mass Ave Wine Shoppe in Indianapolis. It's a lively show with lots of color and styles and subjects set against the dark walls of the Mass Ave Wine Shoppe exhibition space. As we all used the same models and had the same view from the villa, it's fun to see the different visions and styles come through. While we could not convince our Creative Retreat writer, Susan Guyett, to display her writings from PV, we thank her for writing and distributing our press release with such professionalism and for arranging for some of us to be interviewed by Travis DiNicola on the radio show, "The Art of the Matter", which aired on the local NPR affiliate, WFYI on Friday, February 5th at 8 p.m. and again, Saturday, February 6th at 4 p.m.

Our exhibit invitation is designed by Sara Love.

I hope you will stop by the Mass Ave Wine Shoppe before the end of the month and see the work. I am happy to meet you there, show you the exhibit and talk about the joys and challenges of our experiences -- making art while living in another culture.

The Story Continues-"In the midst of it all, there was singing"

2010-01-18T10:24:00.000-08:00

Less than a week ago, a horrific earthquake, epicentered in Port au Prince, hit Haiti. Donna Lively Clark, my musician partner in the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra's Notable Arts project, is still trying to get news of a good friend who arrived in the capital last week. It is a very emotional time and an emotional subject. (update: Donna's friend has been located, living on a baseball field, having escaped the school with no means of communication.)

"Danza #4: First Impressions" was finished a week before the tragic disaster. The music piece always projected an underlying sadness to me. Listening to the music as I worked, recalling details of Donna's experiences in Haiti, and viewing photographs of the school and its students and teachers, I was moved to capture the spirit of all of these things: Haitian people, facing difficulties constantly and now, overwhelmingly, and the role that music and art plays in these people's lives. The more I lived with Danza #4, the more I was moved to express through my painting that music and the story it tells of the Haitian experience.

Today, I read news accounts of people in Haiti gathering in the open to sing together, to provide comfort.

Danza #4 inspired me to paint a story and the story has grown bigger.

First Impressions

2010-01-14T13:26:00.000-08:00

Welcome! I invite you to read my thoughts about art making (art making is much harder than people think!) and art viewing. I often wonder who stops to think about what purpose art has in today's world and why we are even making art. I welcome your thoughts, too.

So, here's what's been going on:

In the Fall of 2009, I was pleased to be invited to participate in a project called Notable Arts, which pairs a participating Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra musician with an Indiana artist. My partner musician, Donna Lively Clark, a violist with the ICO, selected and played for me music she finds inspirational--------- Danza #4, by Haitian Classical Composer, Ludovic Lamothe. Donna explained that she and other musicians from the United States and other countries travel to Haiti periodically to teach in a music school in Port au Prince and music camps in two small communities outside the city. When introducing me to Danza #4, Donna spoke lovingly of the children and adults who are involved in the Haitian music program and their wonderful spirit despite being confronted with many daily hardships. Donna showed me pictures of the Haitian school and colleagues involved in the school. Last week, I finished the painting, "Danza #4: First Impressions", inspired by Donna, her stories, and Danza #4.

I loved this project------ painting an interpretation of Lamothe's beautiful and haunting music. The music expresses Donna's experience with the music school-----the students, the Haitian adults who run the school and who teach there, the countless dedicated non-Haitian musicians who travel there to teach, the nun who founded the school and those who support it financially.

Art gave me a chance to say something and I am grateful for that opportunity.