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!

Ocean Park 17 by Richard Diebenkorn / 1968 / 80 x 72 in from the collection of the University of Iowa Museum of Art

Pausing in front of Ocean Park, #17, I recalled a student’s observations about the work of Richard Diebenkorn. I had shown images of his work to my Drawing I class. Reverentially turning the over-sized pages bearing color reproductions of the California painter’s art- I attempted to share my admiration, only to look up to a circle of nonplussed expressions. A year later, one of those same students wrote about seeing Ocean Park, No.17: … “I never understood what was so great about his (Diebenkorn’s) work… my thinking changed when I saw this painting…” This young woman described perfectly what the moment of seeing an art object rather than a reproduction can yield: “subtle, atmospheric blocks of layered color…dematerializing in some spots- adding an exciting element to the entire painting.”

Kimberlee Rocca’s foil stamping

You can’t beat the real thing and the rich, material evidence of its facture. Layers of paint, the gliding, stabbing, or staccato mark of a pencil tip across paper, and the deeply embossed lines of an intaglio can be our most direct connection to the thoughts of the artist. Campbell Steele is the only gallery in the region that exhibits original work exclusively. Today, as I look around the gallery taking in Kristin Quinn’s complex, vibrant paintings, Kimberlee Rocca’s T-A-L-L, foil-stamped sheets of aluminum, and the radiant surfaces of Gerald Patterson’s glass platters are all a testament to the power of the art object.

Gerald Patterson’s glass platters

A stalwart and really friendly crew will be here to greet you while Craig and I visit (the real thing!) our kids in Cincinnati, Brooklyn, and Boston. We’re on abbreviated hours: 12- 4, Tuesday through Saturday until March 17th.

Kristin Quinn’s complex, vibrant paintings

Try a road trip yourself, and see the fantastic presentation of the University of Iowa Museum of Art’s collection in the galleries of the Figge Art Museum. Ta-ta-for-now!

It’s important to remember that complaining about weather – however hot, cold, icy, rainy or snowy – is pointless. In direct defiance of repetitious weather advisories forecasting ungodly cold, I have installed new work by Marcia Wegman and John Beckelman; displayed new pots by Sarah German; surrounded myself with blooming, or about-to-bloom, amaryllis plants; and, I have spent the past five days drawing their spectacular flowers.

The contrast between John’s richly textured, contemplative abstractions and Marcia’s naturalistic drawings of the southwestern United States heightens an appreciation of their distinct qualities and their coloristic harmony. The delivery of all of the work left in her studio heralds the move of Sarah German from Iowa to Austin, Texas. Pots and paintings all look fabulous in the front gallery, while I’ m pretty certain that I look a bit silly amidst all the nodding blooms of my studio amaryllis plants. Leonard Cohen’s evocative lyric that describes “the cave at the tip of the lily” always comes to mind as I use charcoal to explore the tonal beauty of these flowers’ heavy blossoms.

Amaryllis drawing, in progress

That’s it. There are so many reasons to visit Marion’s Uptown, and Campbell Steele is just one of them. Bundle up, and come on over!

I lied. That’ s not quite it. Craig has likened my early morning studio garb to that of a Taliban fighter. All that I lack is a gun – this, despite recent efforts by Marion City Council to assure my 2nd amendment rights. My fashion choices will change as the cold moderates.

Working on amaryllis drawings in my studio

I remember instructing Thomas Agran to look for a small, gray-haired woman at the Grinnell College’s Bucksbaum Center for the Arts opening for the summer of 2009’s exhibit.

I had a few pieces in the show, and I wanted to meet Thomas and visit his studio during the same trip to Grinnell. I felt more than a bit lame using such a generic description that would easily apply to a third of the women likely to attend the event. I don’t remember how Thomas described himself to me so that I might recognize him, but I did pick him out rather quickly in the crowded gallery. He has a shock of very dark brown hair that shoots out at dramatic angles framing his affable features.

This meeting had been machinated because Victoria Brown, a tenured history professor at Grinnell, had encouraged me to contact Thomas. She believed his work to be “remarkable”. Victoria’s is not an opinion to be taken lightly, and I contacted Thomas very shortly after our conversation- making arrangements for a studio visit.

I wasn’t disappointed. Craig and I viewed work from Thomas’s senior thesis show. It’s scale, painterly fluency, and conceptual punch gave the work all the power Victoria had described and more.

A year out of undergraduate work, Thomas has continued an exploration of aerial landscapes on colossally sized canvases. I’m so pleased to announce that an exhibit of this exciting young artist’s work will open to the public at Campbell Steele Gallery next Friday, June 16. Thomas has said that he’ll attend the Music in the MUD events next weekend- might be just the time to meet a fantastic new artist to the gallery and enjoy an evening of visual art and musical performance.

Indeed, I know for a fact that Steve does have the “big sky thing down,” so to speak. When he lined his latest paintings up against the gallery’s baseboard, my first thought was that I could almost feel the intensity of the sun and hear the late summer drone/buzz of locusts. My fellow gallery worker, artist Karen Hoyt, commented with the objectivity of a seasoned art teacher, “I admire the restraint of the palette.” She then rejoined with the UN-restrained farm girl’s observation, “That looks just like the ditches on my dad’s farm!”

This immediate identification with the land is a natural response to Lauterwasser’s works. He paints in fields as well as the aforementioned god-forsaken roads, and captures an unsentimental view of the rural landscape. Ditches and expanses of weedy pastures cresting at hazy horizons push the viewer to find poetry in what is commonplace.

Lauterwasser is participating in our artist’s talk on Thursday evening at 6:30 with two additional landscape artists, Gordon Kellenberger and Marcia Wegman. I’m genuinely intrigued to learn about the distinctions and aesthetic kinships of their work.

The customary pot of soup, fresh bread and Irish oatmeal cookies will be laid out for any and all takers for as long as they last. I hope that you’ll join us. This event is free, in case you were wondering!

Craig and I spend a lot of time discussing what gallery hours should be; far more than you would imagine! Almost all of our “traffic” happens on Fridays and Saturdays and during events, but we also want to be available to you and open as much as we can be. We’re only two people, though, and two very busy people with several irons in the fire, at that.

As of June 1, we’re starting with new summer hours! We will be open on Wednesdays from 12-4, Thursdays from 11-9, Fridays from 11-5, and Saturdays from 11-5. And, though you may not have known this – we are open by appointment any time. Just give us a call if you’d like to stop by! (The photo above bears testament to the reality of this statement.)

And, of course, the gallery is open for business during all of the events that we host as well. It’s a pleasure to work with each of you, and please don’t hesitate to call with any questions that you may have!

Violet

“These will be so great for a Mother’s Day post!” Maggie crowed after I sent her my first drawings of some spring ephemerals that we hope to use for a collaborative project. In short, I’ve done the drawings and the plan is that Maggie (and Charlotte) will produce letterpress cards from them.

I was genuinely excited to get to these drawings after finishing a commission that had dominated my time. (I’m not complaining.) First, the “spring ephemerals”–those most delicate and stalwart of flowers that are the first to show their faces in the woods—were just about to be past their brief, blooming peak. Second, few things delight me more than to find these harbingers of the change from Iowa’s punishing winters to glorious spring.

Dutchman’s Britches

I did many drawings. The Dutchmen’s Britches were the most problematic, and caused me to conclude that it was best to render of each plant only as much as you might furtively pinch off in a woods that is not your own.

Oh, and Mother’s Day is BEFORE the Marion Arts Festival. Our jewelry, pottery and glass make particularly wonderful gifts that no other mother but yours can receive!

That same self was jerked to life this past Saturday. Seventeen years has taught me that there is much wisdom behind the statement: “The customer is always right.” I have engaged in many conversations with such an attitude and learned much about a specific customer’s view-point that
was couched in sound, logical thought, that was not my own. A respectful divergence of opinion was established.

That said, when I was confronted by a customer ridiculing a piece in the gallery, I accepted his remarks and replied that he wouldn’t care to have a casual conversation with me about the piece. He persisted, laughing that the piece looked like a “drop-cloth”. I suggested that he might like to go on to my neighbor’s shop and make fun of her inventory. Undaunted, he went through the gallery looking at our holiday exhibit, and returned to apologize for his remarks. I smiled and responded, “It’s easy to make fun of things you don’t understand”.

The woman with whom I work was appalled by my comment. I thought only that I was never rude, though I was truthful. If you’re still reading this, I’ll add that, the more art you look at, the broader your tastes will become. Academic education doesn’t have to have anything to do with this process- sensitivity is everything. Responding to color, line, form, composition, distortion, texture and content will reward you whether you’re looking at the world about you or an art object. Try it!

To that end, I’m initiating a daily series that will last up ‘til December 23rd. I’ll pick out one piece of art each day and hopefully provide some comments that won’t be hopelessly obvious, but which may focus right in on why a piece “works”. You may or may not agree with me, but if you read and look, I’ll provide you with a leg up in gaining a greater insight into the art we exhibit.

#1, for the first of December

Steve Maxon’s “Baby Hammerhead” takes parts of two familiar objects that would not normally be paired. When they are, the result is a laughably absurd hybrid. Steve’s humor resides in edgy terrain. He and his wife, Doris Parks, cast their own work, and that of sculptors throughout the country at their studio in Kalona, Iowa.