Thomas Agran, working in his 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 [...]
Category Archives: Events
Introducing Thomas Agran
July 8, 2010, 7:09 am
Sunday in Des Moines
June 30, 2010, 7:54 pm
“You have a magic carpet
That will whiz you through the air,
To Spain or Maine or Africa
If you just tell it where.
So will you let it take you
Where you’ve never been before,
Or will you buy some drapes to match
And use it
On your
Floor?”
- Shel Silverstein
Ours was a glorious, if brief, summer’s idyll this past Sunday. Taking a [...]
June’s bounty
June 23, 2010, 1:06 pm
What is one to say about June, the time of perfect young summer, the fulfillment of the promise of the earlier months, and with as yet no sign to remind one that its fresh young beauty will ever fade. ~Gertrude Jekyll
Drawing my amaryllis
With the summer solstice just past and the Fourth of July hard [...]
Steve Lauterwasser + Talk in the MUD
June 8, 2010, 3:14 pm
“… John Preston and Steve Lauterwasser who sometimes paint together on god-forsaken roads have the big sky thing down…” James Duncan, Des Moines blogger
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 [...]
Artist Talks: Carlos Ferguson & Peter Feldstein
May 21, 2010, 6:40 am
I found myself laughing out loud all this week when I recalled how Charlotte, our seven month old granddaughter, would squeal as loudly as she could, until she turned red in the face, to see how excited we would be by her antics.
Blowing on dandelions with Charlotte at Squaw Creek Park
Other than play [...]
18th Annual Marion Arts Festival!
May 12, 2010, 7:54 pm
It was over eighteen years ago now that Craig sat with the Marion Small Business Committee and suggested that the creation of a high quality, juried, fine art fair might be a great tool for generating a bit of a buzz about our town. We have had several great directors who never wavered from that [...]
Ladislav Hanka & Stan Fellows
February 22, 2010, 4:17 pm
Though there’s a light, fresh blanket of snow, water is running in the streams. There are frequent snippets of bird song as Buddy and I run along the creek each morning. And, that’s the sun sending shafts of light through the bare trees- just a bit earlier each day. There’s nothing like an Iowa winter [...]
Larry Welo / Talk in the M.U.D. / November 5
November 2, 2009, 2:45 pm
The thing about Larry Welo being consistently winning is that when I prepare to write about him, the same adjectives spring right to mind. With work that is informed by a dry, self-effacing humor and a dash of romanticism that plays out as poignancy, Larry Welo is one of the stars gleaming brightly among the [...]
Talk in the M.U.D. with Dean Dunkel /October 22
October 21, 2009, 6:17 pm
“Talk in the M.U.D.” started this fall to explore, quite simply, why artists care about the things that they do, and why we should- or shouldn’t care. It’s free and open to the public.
Pit-fired stoneware vessels, Dean Dunkel
Trying to wrestle the mythic, transformative “power of art” to the ground in casual conversational terms is the [...]
Carlos Ferguson / Tiny Circus
September 24, 2009, 6:11 am
I’ll tell you a story.
I first met Carlos Ferguson in the summer between his junior and senior year at Grinnell College. He was venturing into the fabled printmaking program at the U. of IA, where I was a graduate student. My hours at that point in my life were ungodly. I got up at 4:30 [...]