“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.

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…”

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!

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!

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.

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!

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.

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!

Grant Wood, Portrait of John B. Turner, Pioneer, 1928-1930, oil on canvas, 30 1/4 x 25 1/2 in., Collection of the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art

I must have walked past Grant Wood’s sallow-faced portrait of John B. Turner hundreds of times at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art before I stopped and genuinely saw the intensity of the old man’s gaze. It was a “Whoa!” moment. I recalled that confrontational portrait while I considered the truth in R. Tripp Evans’s quote.

The demands of the holiday season had subsided in the gallery, and I had allowed myself to start the book that had been a Christmas gift. A day later, I finished it. For me, it was simply riveting. Since then, I have spoken with many people who have questioned the validity of the author’s homoerotic interpretations of Wood’s imagery, and I don’t dismiss their skepticism. I, however, enjoyed the frank insight of Evans’s writing. From his depictions of the child in an isolated rural household, to a man sharing a tightly knit family circle with his mother and sister, and eventually as an uneasy academic in an unlikely marriage, the author endows this familiar artist with a depth of humanity that matches the ambiguity which makes American Gothic or Woman with Plants the oddly compelling works that they are.

It’s Grant Wood’s birthday this Sunday, and Bonnie and Roger Schmidt and Craig and I are hosting a brunch at the gallery to benefit the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art that will celebrate the imminence of Valentine’s Day and the birth of this native son.

There are still a few tickets left. Did I mention that we have some delightful jewelry, pottery and glass that we’ll gift wrap – just for your valentine? Read on!

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