Priscilla’s Blog » Campbell Steele Gallery, Marion, Iowa

Talk in the MUD with Andy Gemmell

November 29, 2011, 11:25 pm

“You can’t talk about these things!” an artist replied in exasperation to a question I posed to him at the beginning of a three-hour panel discussion about portraiture. He then proceeded to talk about the issue for next 5 or 6 minutes, which afforded me ample time to frame an appropriate response to his response. Acknowledging the irony of talking about a visual experience, I hastened to add that it is true that discussion can heighten the viewers’ awareness of the qualities that make a work of art- whatever it is- distinctive. Additionally, information about materials used in a piece, and how an artist handles his or her materials certainly deepens our appreciation of technical processes and challenges, and, possibly, connects us to long traditions in humanity’s attempts to capture beauty, emotion, and ideas in an object.

It is this belief in which “Talk in the MUD” is firmly rooted (pun totally intended). Andy Gemmell is just about the nicest young man you could hope to meet. He loves doing his work (ceramics), and he’s going to be doing it here (turning pots on a wheel), while I distract him with questions about “What are you doing NOW!” I’ve learned that I have a happy talent for asking the obvious, and people seem to be tolerant of this behavior, so I press on.

“Talk in the MUD” is attended only by nice people. You can enjoy a glass of wine (or whatever). And, you’ll leave happy that you’ve learned why people go on and on about the importance of functional pottery. Join us! Folks arrive around six, and it’s a cozy edifying atmosphere that you’ll tuck in to. Promise.

Posted in Andy Gemmell, Events, Marion | Comments (1)

“What was still and dark and wakes up”

October 20, 2011, 7:25 am

I retrieved information about Laura Young’s first exhibit at Campbell Steele from a metal filing cabinet in the basement. Pulling a yellowed newspaper page from the folder, I marveled that The Gazette had devoted more than 25 square inches, in the Sunday, May 16, 1999 “Arts Section” to a color photo of the artist’s painting, “Candy-Man”. Not only does The Gazette no longer even have an “Arts” section- “Accent” and “Hoopla” have displaced the straightforward nomenclature of the newspaper of more than a decade ago, but the appearance of photos of works exhibited at private galleries almost never happens.

But this post isn’t about that. This post is about Laura. I met Laura soon after she and her husband, Tom Aprile, moved to the Midwest. Maybe it was 1995. Both were on faculty at the University of Iowa. Laura still is. “Candy-Man” was a painting from a part of her career in which hard edges, vivid color and broad, gestural strokes and drips of pigment vied for attention on large canvases. The painting was purely abstract.

It would be speculation on my part to describe why such a confirmed abstract artist would then spend fifteen years laboring in the realm of representational painting. Merely speculating, however, has never deterred me from pressing on to wonder why people do what they do. At some point, I recall Laura remarking that she wanted to be confident of her drawing skills. I understood this to mean that she wanted to be assured that she could draw and or paint credible images from observation. And, through the years I saw still life and landscape paintings that proved that indeed she could do that.

Dark Sea XL by Laura Young

Then, shortly after visiting a show of Tom’s work in the galleries at Kirkwood Community College, I learned of his sudden death. I thought to send a note to Laura, but I felt oddly shy of intruding on her grief when an entire arts community seemed to be rallying around her. So I waited, and last spring, in the university’s faculty exhibit, I came upon the first of her “Dark Seas” drawings. These early charcoals, and a trove of pastel drawings that followed, miraculously distill the artist’s experience. Broodingly abstract horizons yield to delicately rendered light in each drawing, and with alchemical grace the artist has created beauty in the face of great loss.

Dark Sea XXIII by Laura Young

It’s an honor to present the work of Laura Young in our show that opens today, Thursday, October 20th. Please join us.

A postscript borrowed from Wendell Berry:

“…The dark again has prayed the light to come down into it, to animate
and move it in its heaviness.
So what was still and dark wakes up,
Becomes intelligent, moves…
Walks, swims, flies, cries, calls, speaks or sings.
We are all praising, praying to the light we are…”

Posted in Artists, Events, Laura Young, Priscilla Steele | Comments (1)

In the dark

September 26, 2011, 9:13 am

Imagine being in absolute darkness. Your arms stretch out from your sides and you start tentatively moving with steps that don’t leave the floor in search of a surface that might lead you to light. Then you realize that there is no pathway – that you’re enclosed in the darkness. You start to feel along a wall. Perhaps you push on the surface of the wall to learn whether there is any give there. You find a small spot where your fingers feel they can penetrate, and you start pushing and pulling that away. This is a lot like what I think making good work is like–moving in darkness with all of your senses alert–focused on finding something not fully known, but desperately desired.

Soon after our family moved to Cedar Rapids, I met Michelle Fischer. We had in common our experiences in the graduate program at the School of Art and Art History at the University of Iowa, so immediately we had much to talk about. That was in 1986. Since that time, our paths have crisscrossed, through a succession of sometimes triumphant, unfailingly demanding, and predictably demoralizing phases in the pursuit of “working artist” status.

I recognize in Michelle a keenly self-critical tendency that is as essential to making good work as it is potentially disabling. I also know her to possess a strong intuitive understanding of abstraction. And, I confess to being more than a little exasperated in the face of her self-doubt over the years- perhaps because I know the price of self-doubt all too well. So, it’s a true pleasure to write about her achievement in a new suite of “foil-imaged” metal panels. Stripped down to the sinews of stark geometric compositions, the lustrous richness of foil-stamped surfaces contrasts with boldly drawn lines of vivid color and deep black. Fischer has deftly balanced the qualities of her medium with the potency of deeply felt abstract form in this most recent body of work. In short, she has found that small space that yielded to her persistent search and pushed through to the light.

While writing this early this morning, a snippet of a remembered Wendell Berry poem came back to me. It’s aptness sent me searching for the exact words:

“To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark.
Go without sight
And find that the dark, too, blooms and sings…”
- Wendell Berry, “To Know the Dark”

Michelle’s latest suite of work is now installed throughout the gallery. Please visit when you can!

Posted in Artists, Foil stamping, Michelle Fischer | Comments (0)

A late afternoon walk

September 7, 2011, 7:06 am

Drawing with Giant

It’s Labor Day weekend. The holiday doesn’t remarkably change my work schedule- I’m happily drawing away in my studio. It’s true that this particular weekend says “the END of summer” like nobody’s business. That said, it has allowed some serendipitous activities that happen only when I enjoy a sense of briefly unstructured time. Some people MAY do wildly outrageous things when beset with a bit of unaccustomed free time. I’m contemplating making potato salad, and going for a walk. I just bought a new book of poetry, so I will complete the picture of the prosaic nature of MY free time by reading some.

Under the category “Simple Pleasures”: I would be hard-pressed to recall a more delightful hour spent outdoors in Cedar Rapids than the late afternoon walk that I shared with Craig in Noelridge Park on Sunday. Carefully tended garden beds are at their most glorious with abundant blooms. A vast range of plants in all colors, sizes and shapes grow side by side in a lively array of contrast and harmony.

The joy of this hour spurred a thought: as the year’s growing season wanes, it would be wonderful and informative to learn where others find the reassuring beauty of the natural world in their metropolitan area.

Coming blog posts will be taken up with “What I Did this Summer”, and the intersection of my small world with the larger visual art community, but for now, I’m interested to learn of readers’ favorite places, so that I might explore. What a nice challenge to initiate a season of fruition and harvest.

Oh, and coming soon, Michelle Fischer, Sylvia Schuster, Laura Young, and me- watch out!

Posted in Asides, Holidays | Comments (1)

Zero to Sixty at the Speed of Steele

August 3, 2011, 8:33 pm

Starting at zero

On the sauna-like evenings this past week, Craig and I dug out our bathing suits and went off to the Marion Municipal pool. Initially, we both admitted some predictable trepidation – worries over exposing all that imperfect flesh and our merely adequate swimming skills, but all that dissipated with the first restorative plunge into the pool. Since then, while swimming, I’ve found myself also watching and envying people diving, cannon-balling, and just jumping from the diving boards at the deep end of the pool.

Small, eager me

I recall being six or seven years old when my father taught me to dive, not from a dock or the side of a pool, but from a board. While there was good reason for a small, timid girl to fear instruction from the sometimes reckless, thrill-seeking Bud Steele, never did that fear seem more justified in my young life than when I stood at end the spring-y, narrow plank of a diving board that extended eight feet out and six feet above the murky depths of Tabor Lake. But, having been coached to “tuck my chin, point my toes, and arch my back”, I dove. There were the requisite number of painful belly flops, before I mastered the skill of “diving head first”, but there was also, finally, an unalloyed thrill when I dove perfectly, with a fish’s streamlined silhouette, into the lake.

At work in my studio

I write this in the week that I will turn sixty years old. This has been a year in which I concluded my teaching at Coe- not to retire, but rather to get to work. Indeed, I’ve worked all my life to be able to walk into my studio and work all day. It remains that there is, by plan, the serious business of running the gallery. I share that responsibility with a team of wonderful people with the goal of keeping me AT WORK IN THE STUDIO. Since January, I have created several figurative, botanical and collaged artist-book projects that I anticipate exhibiting here, in West Des Moines and Omaha. There’s more planned. And, there have been a few belly flops, but that trepidation about diving right in… is GONE.

Closing in on 60

In an inimitable gesture of celebration to mark my birthday, Craig has created the event: “Zero to Sixty at the Speed of Steele”. If you’re around this Sunday between 4 and 7, and you’re reading this right now, please join us! Jules cake (carrot and champagne), bounteous cheese plates, fresh bread, great wines, excellent beers, and refreshing sodas and juices will abound. Don’t bring anything but good spirits and wishes.

Oh. This past week, I walked to the end of the Marion Municipal pool’s diving board and executed what I would describe as a perfect dive. Excelsior!

Posted in Announcements, Events, Priscilla Steele | Comments (7)

A lesson from Jerry Kessler

July 19, 2011, 5:35 am

I have had the stoneware pieces that I own by Jerry Kessler sitting on my desk for over a week and a half, as if somehow they would inspire some profound thoughts about the significance of his death.

Craig and I have known Jerry and Deb Kessler for thirty years. We met in Omaha when we were all young and working hard to be the best at what we had chosen to do. Deb and Jerry were living in a beautiful area in the Loess Hills of northwest Iowa, where they worked as a team. Jerry threw pots, created new forms, perfected his own glazes; and Deb kept all the practical details of his studio work humming along. Her sweet nature was a perennial counter-point to his fiercely self-critical, artistic temperament, and their marriage was solidly informed by a devotion to each other’s greatest strengths with forbearance in the face of their mutual flaws.The last time I spoke with Jerry his only care was his deep sense of frustration in lifting Deb’s spirits as she dealt with breast cancer. He fretted that he became impatient with her inability to be optimistic, when all that he wanted to do was help her in every way that he could. So, when Deb called to tell me of losing him, I struggled to find a trace of anything good. Honestly, it’s a hard reality.

Back when Craig and I were supporting our growing family with income from art fairs, I remember Jerry making fun of my use of a styrofoam cup for the coffee that I was drinking. We were setting up our booths- somewhere in Iowa or Nebraska, or Wisconsin. The unspoken wisdom behind Jerry’s derision for my coffee cup lay in the fact that I could have chosen a cup made by an artist- a cup in which form and function were fluently crafted into a one-of-a-kind art object. Possibly that cup would have cost me a one-time expense of $20. And, its purchase would have infused a banal, daily activity with a timeless bit of beauty from a ceramic tradition spanning thousands of years.

I write this now as I pour my morning coffee into one of Jerry’s mugs. Steam curls from the top, and I relish the rich bitterness of this moment with gratitude for what I learned from Jerry.

Posted in Asides, Jerry Kessler, News | Comments (9)

19th annual Marion Arts Festival!

May 19, 2011, 7:32 am

I confess that I burst into tears when I drove past a billboard in downtown Cedar Rapids heralding the first Marion Arts Festival. Hard won, the product of a Herculean effort on the part of an intrepid core of believers, the festival had become a reality. Since 1993, during this week in May, I have awakened on Monday morning and listened with no small measure of trepidation to the week’s weather forecast. In 1993, that forecast predicted rain. Nonetheless, the morning of the first annual Marion Arts Festival dawned fair, and though attendees were dancing in rain by the end of the day, they realized a small town event of unprecedented quality had occurred.

That’s the way it is. And, the 19th Marion Arts Festival goes on, rain or shine, this Saturday, May 21st from 9 – 5. Of course, we always hope for “shine”, but if the weather gods do not favor us, we’ll pack an umbrella and walk between the raindrops as artists from across the country converge on Marion’ s Uptown City Square Park.

Our indomitable director, Deb Bailey, with an unwavering eye for excellence, has shepherded the festival to its present premier status- best in the country for its size-for the past six years. “It’s about the art” has been her mantra throughout every phase of planning. All of Uptown Marion is proudly groomed to welcome visitors, and a host of volunteers and I urge you to join us this Saturday- rain or shine!

Posted in Events, Holidays, Marion, Priscilla Steele | Comments (0)

Angels could do no better

May 5, 2011, 12:27 pm

This has been a great month. Our youngest, Willa, learned that she has been accepted into Yale’s graduate program for midwifery, we’ve had several animated phone conversations with Charlie describing the scope of his travels and research in Munich, and I received a marvelous letter from Maggie and Charlotte.

“Dear Mom / Winky,
Charlotte suggested that we write a letter to you about the moon. Since that is so much more interesting than the ins and outs of potty training, trips to the playground and how busy I am, that ís what we’re going to do! We keep our eyes peeled for the moon every night, and Charlotte has an eagle eye for even the tiniest sliver of the moon”…

As I reached the top of the stairs, I looked out onto the soft night that was enveloping the world outside our window. There, with the appearance of the first, pale stars, was the slimmest crescent of a moon. I called to Craig to come see how beautiful it was. Neither of us can not think of Charlotte and her mother peering out into the night, almost as one, searching for the nocturnal return of the moon and its mystery, when we look at the night sky.

At our window

As a young mother, I often struggled with the conflicts of time and desire in my work and our family life. An on-going distracted state was the inevitable and exhausting result of ambition colliding with devotion. My own mother had set an impossible example of “doing it all”. She was beautiful and witty. She achieved so much in her work, and I loved how wonderful she was- always. I resolved that I would do the same, and I made some of what I now know were her mistakes as well. This doesn’t make her less dear to me, but it certainly makes her more real.

It was so interesting, then, for me to see a card on Maggie’s work-table that she had created bearing a saying that my mother often used, “Angels could do no better.” I take from my mother a keen sense of self-appraisal. And, because she knew no one could be a sterner judge of my efforts than myself, when I despaired over the outcome of a project, “Angels could do no better”, would be her affirming wisdom to me.

All in an instant, at the top of the stairs, gazing out at the moon, I smiled at the arc of love and wisdom that was traversed in a moment’s thought.

“See? The sun’s light can get past the earth, and is reflected by the moon.”

Hopes for our children are sent out into the night and, when we’re lucky, the steadiness of time, work, and love transcends a lifetime to illuminate the depths of the heavens for us.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Posted in Holidays | Comments (4)

“This is who we are.”

April 12, 2011, 7:45 pm

As I talked with John Beckelman about the arrangements for a hands-on demonstration to be given by artists from the Ceramics Center during the upcoming gallery tour, we laughed at the shared memory of an audience member in a gallery talk that John gave many years ago. This woman had the bravery to verbalize her confusion confronting the term: “throwing a pot”. “Do you actually THROW the clay—like at a wall?” Well, of course, the audience all laughed at the innocent, COURAGEOUS, ignorance of the inquiry. Honestly, those laughing likely didn’t know any more about the actual process of “throwing a pot” than she, and this is precisely why I thought the demonstration by the Ceramics Center people would be marvelous.

So last Thursday night, in the pool of light that Craig had focused on their activity, Ben Jensen and Kelsey Schroeder from The Ceramics Center alternately worked at a potter’s wheel, turning vessels before a mesmerized audience. The atmosphere could not have been more perfect. Though the evening was chilly, and a fitful rainstorm came and went throughout the night, the opportunity to watch two young artists up to their elbows in clay- working the clay- created a charmed, teaching moment here at Campbell Steele Gallery. Folks attending the CR Metro Gallery tour enjoyed sitting at tables, sipping wine, watching art being created before their eyes. And, they were talking about art- something that in the social distraction of an art opening, ironically, is all too rare. All the loftiness and intimidation factor of “Art” met rich reality, here. Turning to me at the end of an evening notable for its straightforward presentation of beautiful new work before an appreciative circle of art lovers, Craig commented, “This is who we are.”

Work by current Ceramics Center artist-in-residence, Kelsey Schroeder

I want to thank the Marion Arts Festival for sponsoring the demonstration here by the Ceramics Center during the CR Metro Gallery Tour. And, I want to praise Ben Jensen, director of the Ceramics Center, and resident artist, Kelsey Schroeder, who together made the art of what they do, accessible. What a great night! For more information about classes being offered by the Ceramics Center, please visit their website.

Posted in Artists, Events, John Beckelman, Marion | Comments (0)

American art

March 22, 2011, 8:57 am

Paul Revere by John Singleton Copley, 1768

“American art did not exist until 1945.” Thus, in what can certainly be described as a “sweeping generalization”, one of my art professors consigned a legion of artists to fine art purgatory. And, in one of the most egregious lapses of critical thinking in my adult life, I pretty much adopted his thinking as my working philosophy. Well, I’m here to tell you, if you are a disbeliever in the riches that can be gleaned from art in America prior to the mythic deluge of Abstract Expressionism, go to the new American wing of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Walking from the neoclassical core of the original museum toward the monumental glass-walled entrance of the brand-spanking-new wing, visitors are greeted by the incandescent John Singleton Copley portrait of Paul Revere. The silversmith gazes directly at the viewer. One hand cradles the curve of his jaw, while the other encircles a silver teapot of his own design and making. Then, in a dazzling array, Revere’s actual silver is ranged around the portrait. Bold and sensitive decisions made throughout each of the new wing’s galleries create active visual relationships amongst pieces that are strikingly distinct, so that finding intersections of color, scale, media, or subject is an exhilarating intellectual and visual adventure.

Wink & Charlotte at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

We are refreshed from our epic journey visiting our grown children (all living east of us), galleries, and museums from Cincinnati and New York to Boston. Our children are each embarked upon interesting lives. And, Craig and I traveled well – a feat that can’t be minimized between two such contentious people. It was as we were walking with the irrepressibly sunny, seventeen-month-old Charlotte Campbell-Raw between us in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden that Craig looked over to me and said simply and slowly, “This is like heaven.” and he was right.

Posted in Art History, Asides | Comments (3)