Looking out at an audience of happy faces, however, I found myself intimidated by the thought of sounding too serious in a moment that demanded a casual, but authoritative sharing of information; and I squandered the perfect moment to speak about work for which I have an unalloyed admiration.

Near Fort Dodge / Oil on Canvas / Thomas Agran

You can, in fact, look at this young man’s aerial landscapes and see passages that are brushed in with a confident facility for line and gesture contrasted with frenetically painted areas exploring form, or with boldly brushed expanses in which the rhythm of marks and luminosity of paint lift the viewer past the artist’s sweeping horizons to the radiant margins of his paintings.

It’s an odd, oxymoronic exercise to talk (or write) about the visual experience. But, it’s also true that well-chosen words can enrich our ability to “see”. Frankly, during Thomas’ opening I did not want to diminish his achievement with the wrong words- and I seemed to be on an unprecedented roll with the “wrong words” as I flippantly referred to him (too often) as a “latter-day Monet”.

With 20/20 hindsight I would allow that the scale, love of fluid, painterly form, and aggressive embrace of abstraction in Thomas’ work evoke the brilliant series of water lily paintings of Monet’s later life. But, it’s important to add quickly that those qualities are refracted through the prism of twentieth and twenty-first century experience. Abstract Expressionism, belonging to a generation that has learned of global warming from its earliest memories, globalization, and the inter-net, together, have all forged the conceptual and visual aesthetic of Thomas Agran.

Perhaps it’s excessive to describe him as a “prodigy”- but I think not. I hope that you’ll make it a point to visit the gallery while we exhibit this remarkable young artist’s work. For those of you who may have wished that I had ventured these thoughts during Thursday night’s opening, I offer my apologies- they just weren’t there yet.

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.

Ours was a glorious, if brief, summer’s idyll this past Sunday. Taking a route to Des Moines that threaded around or parallel to Route 80, Craig and I drove through countryside that was ridiculously, lushly fertile and green.

Ancient Forest by Deborah Butterfield at the Pappajohn Sculpture Park (photo by Rodney White / Des Moines Register)

Alternating between walks through the Pappajohn Sculpture Park and the displays of artists participating in the Des Moines Art Festival, we found favorites and friends: Deborah Butterfield’s bronze horse, “Ancient Forest”, in the sculpture garden was powerful to see in person. We were also reminded of her husband’s (John Buck) relief prints exhibited last year at CRMA.

Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum mug by Amanda Barr / No Tengo Miedo Clay (photo by Amanda Barr)

We purchased work from a delightful “emerging” artist, Amanda Barr, who explained that she was lately and happily single as well as “emerging”. Craig Lossing sent us away with new, exotic wood vases. And, George Lowe did not let us leave his booth empty-handed. We chose the most cunning small pieces from an array of his sensitively crafted ceramic vessels.

One of Craig Lossing’s beautifully delicate turned wood boxes

BTW, George’s parents, George and Alyce Lowe donated the land on the north edge of Marion for the creation of Lowe Park. It is there that my pup, Buddy, and I have most recently been doing our morning run. I am currently working on drawings of the wild flowers that bloom in the tall grass prairie tracts that surround Lowe Park’s Arts and Environmental Center. The generosity of the Lowe family and the work of dedicated volunteers have made this park an incomparable escape for our community!

Running with Buddy at Lowe Park

If you have visitors for the Fourth, I hope that you’ll stop by while Carlos Ferguson’s “Suspended Worlds” are still being exhibited. Delights await you.

Happy firecracker day!

Drawing my amaryllis

With the summer solstice just past and the Fourth of July hard upon us, there is a delightful proliferation of festivals of all types. One treat of summer in which sand, ants and sun block do not figure prominently, is the Iowa Summer Rep presented by the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Iowa. I’ve enjoyed many productions from the Summer Rep, and I’m pleased that my own botanical drawings are installed in the theatre lobby throughout the Rep’s month of productions. Three shows by playwright Theresa Rebeck are being presented through July 25th. Plan on attending!

This weekend, along with thousands of others I’ll travel to the Des Moines Art Festival to check out artists and, as importantly, visit the lately completed Pappajohn Sculpture Park.

And, coming right up on the Fourth of July, you can view the restored and re-installed Grant Wood stained glass window at Veterans Memorial Coliseum. Precede that visit with a stop at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, where curator, Sean Ulmer, has dramatically exhibited the life-sized drawings that Wood executed in preparation for the window. I could go on.

Summer’s activity is at a fever pitch, and the fall seems far away right now. Go on, get up, get out and enjoy!

I had one of these moments this morning. Craig had commented to me that Dori Vogel, the owner of The Dreaming Bear right around the corner from the gallery, has a fun web-site and blog. So, as I sipped my morning coffee, I treated myself to a peek.

Dori’s blog positively bursts with excitement about what’s new with her work, enlargements of studio space and on and on with loads of fun photos of funky stuff.

I felt shamed. Why wasn’t I busily assembling photos of Deb Martin’s long-awaited stoneware delayed by a succession of unfortunate events, or Louise Rauh’s new beautifully formed aluminum floral pendants?

May Apple in progress in my studio

A day in my life includes work on some new drawings for one of my favorite long-time customers, helping Craig lift the “History of Orthodontics” into the van for eventual installation, finding the perfect place for Ben Jensen’s wood-fired ceramics amongst Marck Nystrom’s substantial plates and bowls, taking down Kim Nalley’s posters in the wake of her marvelous concerts this past weekend. Tana Acton is in this morning at nine- more about that soon.

In the meantime, grab a cup of coffee and check out Dori’s blog at The Dreaming Bear.

Blowing on dandelions with Charlotte at Squaw Creek Park

Other than play with Charlotte, I think that one of the most enjoyable things that I have done of late has been to host the artists’ talks here at the gallery. Last Thursday night, Carlos Ferguson showed us how he made boxes with “little worlds” inside them. The worlds can be viewed through lenses placed on either side of the box, after pulling each box to eye level from a counter-weight system suspended from the ceiling. The boxes are magical. Seldom have I seen people look at art with such a sense of delight.

Carlos Ferguson speaking about his little worlds at Campbell Steele

And Peter Feldstein talked about shooting at least two photographs each of all the residents of Oxford, Iowa- twenty years apart. The Oxford Project, the book that he produced with Stephen Bloom, marries photographs with text that absolutely and unsentimentally portrays the humanity of each individual, and penetrates to the core of life’s experience- anywhere.

Carlos’ and Peter’s works remain at the gallery, and I hope that you’ll stop to see them. Our next artists’ talk is June 10 and features Marcia Wegman and Gordon Kellenberger.

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!

I have done a lot of crazy things in a lifetime lived as a “working artist”. Pair that status with a lifetime spent with Craig (easily the most outrageously creative person I have ever known), who seems to have an inexhaustible supply of great ideas, often, (but certainly not always!) executed by all the talented, hard working people with whom he surrounds himself, and you come up with how I spent my winter. And, how I spent my winter accounts for the deafening silence from my blog.

Hard at work, with Giant - my constant companion - on my lap

I’ll try to make this quick! Since January, my activity has been singularly focused on completing a commission for the orthodontic office of Dr. William Olin, the man responsible for the beautifully straight teeth of two of Craig’s and my three children. (Praise be to God that Maggie came WITH straight teeth!)

The clamped up frame, drying; the frame, assembled; polishing the frame up with steel wool

As it happens, Craig had conceived the idea that, in addition to the art that Dr. Olin had installed in his remodeled office, he needed a mirror in which his patients might check their teeth while coming and going from their regular orthodontic appointments- and not just any mirror. Craig made an elegantly crafted walnut frame for a large, beveled-glass mirror. Surrounding the mirror he created twenty small, framed openings. In these openings are now twenty paintings that whimsically portray how tension exerted in a variety of ingenious ways on a variety of subjects’ teeth, in a Rube Goldbergian fashion, will straighten said teeth.

Hard at work on one of the 20 panels

I never thought I would ever do anything like this, and now, well, I’ve done it! This weekend we’ll be installing the paintings in the frame, and then, away it goes! So, if you’re at all curious about the enforced silence from my blog, perhaps you’d like to stop by and see a mirror worthy (I hope!) of the unexcelled talents of Dr. William Olin.

Chickadee / Stan Fellows / 9″ x 12″

Stan can paint anything, and his facile handling of watercolors lends to the birds that he often depicts a life-like immediacy that has won those pieces an enthusiastic following. In an artist’s talk that we’ll be hosting on Thursday, March 4, Stan will discuss his work and paint right there while we’re talking!

In the “It’s a small world” category: Marvin Bolotsky, a New Yorker and former photographer for the United Nations, provides to me an exquisite array of etchings by Eastern European artists. A connoisseur of intaglio prints, Marvin got into a conversation with an artist at a print show, who was showing some beautifully developed etchings of birds and trees. He encouraged Ladislav Hanka to “get in touch with Priscilla Steele in Marion, IA.” At that point in their exchange, Ladislav responded that he had been raised in said Marion, IA, after his parents emigrated from Czechoslovakia in the 1950’s. Adding that he “has fond childhood memories of his Iowa upbringing”, Ladislav described how his parents found work in Cedar Rapids’ Czech community.

Nesting White Throated Sparrow / Ladislav Hanka / Intaglio Etching

We exchanged e-mails in which images and exclamations about curious coincidences overshadowing our artistic experience flew back and forth. And, this past week, a generous selection of Hanka’s etchings arrived. His delicately drawn, but bold compositions combine evidence of the action of the acid on a metal plate in tandem with sensitively observed subjects from nature. I thank Marvin for dropping this former Iowan back into his hometown, and hope that you’ll stop by to see Ladislav’s marvelous intaglio work.

There are few things more vivid in memories of my childhood than that giddy rush of fear and exhilaration elicited by speeding down a snow-packed slope on a sled. So, it was a joy of remembrance that flooded my heart as the happy whoops of whole families rose above the snow in the early morning quiet of the Iowa winter. Visions of my father’s robust strides through drifts of snow as my brothers and I trudged with him to a preferred sledding site over fifty years ago came readily to mind. We would stay out sledding until dark or until our feet were just too cold to continue.

These memories were further stirred by the small gems of pastel drawings that Sharon Burns Knutson delivered to me just a couple of days ago. Musing that she loved them for the brilliance of the blue of the skies, Sharon pulled out one small drawing of snow-laden trees and countryside after another, and covetously, I looked to see which I would claim for my own before I would hang them in the gallery.

They’re just little pieces. You might miss them if you’re focused on just finishing your Christmas shopping list. So remember, part of this season, surely, must be about seeing the small items that evoke the magical power of memory in each of us.

“And I heard him exclaim ‘ere he drove out of sight, ‘Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!’ “