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: Marion
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 [...]
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 [...]
Uptown Marion is abuzz!
June 3, 2010, 8:44 pm
Periodically I am reminded that I share Uptown Marion with an assemblage of personalities who are all laboring in a universe roughly parallel to my own. Sure, the variables change, but they too ponder hours and staffing. They fret over display, and delight in sharing their goods with their customers.
I had one of these moments [...]
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 [...]
Bittersweet
November 10, 2009, 10:18 am
Aunt Iva
Craig’s Aunt Iva went to her grave without divulging where she found the bittersweet that she decorated her home with every fall. I love bittersweet as well. An invasive, parasitic, and noxious vine which is strangling trees in the Northeast, bittersweet is somewhat rare around here. And, in large measure, its odious qualities are [...]
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 [...]
Gateway to Marion
July 29, 2009, 8:03 pm
I really didn’t want to give up the studio time I knew it would require to draw Craig’s idea. After the Fourth of July, the loosely conceived projects of summer are subjected to their first deadlines, and time reclaims its irrevocable, dictatorial pace. But, when Craig described to me an idea that he felt needed [...]