“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. [...]
Category Archives: Artists
“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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
“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 [...]
Roadtrip
March 3, 2011, 6:23 am
It was a remarkable afternoon. In the balmy temperatures of a Thursday in the midst of February – a sixty degree day not a week after we had endured cold in which the daily high did not rise above minus eight- I stood in one of the galleries at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, [...]
Native son
February 8, 2011, 8:26 am
“…it is the complex, flesh and blood man who has been removed from sight, while his all-too-familiar imagery has remained uncannily resistant to change. If we are to summon Grant Wood from behind that darkened Gothic window, we will see this painting— and all his remarkable work—- deepen before our eyes.” – R. Tripp Evans, [...]
Winter weather
January 21, 2011, 8:13 am
I’ m going to be brief. 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 [...]