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Last Days of Summer
August Newsletter |
Greetings!
 As the last fleeting days of summer slip away, and the kids prepare for a new year of school, the hectic preparations for fall can make us forget about the wonderful memories so recently created by gradualtions, vacations, family reunions, and quiet strolls along the beach.
Those memories are unique and precious. Don't allow those photos to sit negelected in the closet. Now is the time to frame those memories and protect what they represent for the years ahead.
FrameStore has been helping southern Californians take care of their photos, artwork, and mementos correctly for over 35 years.
Stop by one of our stores this week to have one of our Art and Design experts help you to turn those precious memories that will only come once into lasting and lovely art that will bring joy for decades.
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Monthly Spotlight -
The Conejo Valley Art Museum
Opening Exhibit Event
The Conejo Valley Art Museum is a private non profit, 501C-3 that was established in 1978. It is run entirely by volunteers. It has served the Conejo Valley and vicinities with many quality art exhibits of contemporary, ethnic and of historical origin on donated space by the City of Thousand Oaks, or by the Janss Corporation in the Janss Mall.
The renovation of the Janss Mall took place in 1995 and the Museum had to vacate the premises December 30th. In the meantime, Bill Janss sold the building and it was hard to get a donated space. The Conejo Valley Art Museum Board of Directors decided to keep the Museum contents stored and to concentrate on a permanent building and endowment fund for the museum. With "ArtWalk" the main fund raiser of the Museum, the board was building up the funds for the Building and Endowment but with earnings not doing as good as they once were, the Board came to a decision that we could no longer just depend on ArtWalk. To prosper, the Conejo Valley Art Museum had to be visible and alive to the public. Opening could also help in our request for donations, but could work only on a donated space.
We are happy to announce that the Museum will again be opening its doors to the public on August 24th. at the Janss Market Place. Our first exhibit will be some of the works in the Museum's collection consisting of serigraphs. Many of the silk screen artists showed their work on September/October 1985 in the exhibit titled "Serigraphers of the 50's and 60's" while the Museum was in the Wilbur Building. There will be also works that have been donated to the museum over the years.
Please come and view the works by serigraphers, Bob Click, Miriam Haworth, and Howard Bradford ( the most prolific of the three, including two local artists, Ginger Osgood Worthley and her husband Freeman Worthley. Some works that have been donated to the Museum will be shown as well.
Where : Conejo Valley Art Museum
Janss Market Place
275 N. Moorpark Rd., Suite 193C
Thousand Oaks, Ca. 91460
When: August 24, 2011, Wed. through Sun.
12:00-5:00 p.m.
Information: (805) 373-0054, (805) 492-8778
www.cvam.us
Contact: Maria Dessornes
(805) 492-2147
www.dessornes@earthlink.net
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The Getty:
Luminous Paper:
Watercolor is regarded as one of the most challenging artistic techniques. Its liquid nature is capable of extraordinary effects of luminosity, but is often challenging for an artist to control.
This exhibition presents works of the 1700s and 1800s by some of the greatest British masters of the medium, including Thomas Gainsborough, J.M.W. Turner, and William Blake. It explores their innovative working methods, and looks at the sketching and study of the period. It includes many masterpieces that were recently acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum in an ongoing initiative to build a representative British works-on-paper collection. Also accompanying this exhibition is an installation of three contemporary watercolors by British artist David Hockney, bringing the tradition of the watercolor into the present day.
In the image above, Thomas Girtin painted a dramatic view of a medieval cathedral and castle from the bank of the River Wear in northeastern England. He famously used a wide palette with many more tints and subtints than other artists, visible here in the range of blues and greys of the river.
In the early 1700s, watercolor painting was seen as an amateur pastime unworthy of true painters. Toward the end of the century, however, British artists started to make watercolors designed to compete directly with oil paintings. They were bigger, with stronger colors and dramatic compositions.
As the craft developed a new confidence, watercolor artists felt underserved by the Royal Academy of Arts exhibitions that were dominated by oil paintings. They seceded to form their own society in 1804. The "exhibition watercolors" produced at this time attracted new audiences of collectors and produced technically complex and powerful works.
In the above image, Turner displays his characteristic experimentation with techniques and materials. The tempestuous sky and gray storm clouds in the distance were created with broad applications of color over still wet areas. This is known as the "wet-on-wet" technique.
To gather motifs and material for their work, British artists of this period often made sketching trips in Britain, throughout Europe and beyond. Equipped with sketchbooks and portable boxes containing dry cakes of watercolor pigment-and by the 1840s, moist versions and tubes-artists could conveniently capture the elements and effects of nature in color.
This work depicts a salt marsh near Trouville, a seaside resort in northwestern France. It was a beloved sketching place for many artists, including Richard Parkes Bonington, who spent most of his short career in France.
The low viewpoint emphasizes the open blue-tinged sky, and includes the calm, mirror-like water of a salt marsh. With its delicate attention to the gradations of color in the landscape, combined with use of loose brushstrokes, Bonington's work adds an important dimension to the work of British artists of the period.
The abandoned historic city of Petra, in present-day Jordan, was known through ancient texts, but remained unexplored by Westerners until 1812. The British traveler, topographical artist, and writer Edward Lear was an early visitor.
Shortly after his arrival there, a mob of local tribesmen sought money from Lear and roughed up members of his party. Lear was forced to leave, but made this view of the remains of an ancient theater before he did so, and recalled in his journal: "I had not long to devote to my drawing...yet how vivid and enduring are the memories of that half-hour!"
To accompany the exhibition is an installation of three contemporary watercolors by British artist David Hockney, who is best known for his California-based paintings and photocollages. A visit to the Yorkshire countyside of his childhood inspired him to make these colorful and personal watercolors. He compared the landscape of his mother country to the wide vistas of the American West.
In this depiction of a lush valley, Hockney paints a road curving into rolling green hills dotted with trees. His lively palette and exuberant brushstrokes add a fresh spirit to the strong tradition of British watercolors |
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MOCA:
Cy Twombly Tribute:
A Scattering of Blossoms & Other Things
August 6 - October 2, 2011
About
Cy Twombly (b. 1928, Lexington, Virginia; d. 2011, Rome) was one of the masters of postwar painting, and his work has played a critical role in the international development of contemporary art. This exhibition, featuring works from the Broad Collection, spans the six decades of his career, tracing the evolution of his unique and highly personal visual language. When Twombly began painting in the early 1950s, Abstract Expressionism was the dominant aesthetic. Interested in cultivating the legacy of that movement, unlike contemporaries such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, he pursued a style that combined elements of abstraction, drawing, and writing and privileged the physical gesture of the artist's hand over the representation of objects. "Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history," said the artist. "It does not illustrate-it is the sensation of its own realization."
Twombly came to New York in 1950 to study at the Art Students League, where he met Rauschenberg, who encouraged him to attend the small progressive art school Black Mountain College. Twombly enrolled there in 1952, working alongside artists including Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell as he continued to cultivate his expressive "handwriting" style. He began to integrate chalk, pencil, and crayon into his works, blurring the line between drawing and painting. Twombly was also employed by the United States Army as a cryptologist during the mid-1950s, and his interest in codes and symbols is evident in the development of his mark-making, which is often calligraphic, at times resembling an accumulation of graffiti.
In 1957, Twombly moved to Rome, where he resided for most of his life. There, his work began to bridge literary and painterly sensibilities, linking contemporary art to a rich cultural past of antiquity and Romanticism. Paintings of the 1960s, such as Untitled (Rome) (1961), made after the birth of his son, and Ilium (One Morning Ten Years Later) [Part I] (1964), are suffused with references to poetry, Mediterranean history, and mythology. In 1971, Nini Pirandello, the wife of Twombly's Roman gallerist Plinio De Martiis, died suddenly. In tribute, Twombly painted the elegiac Nini's Painting. Over the last decade, Twombly began revisiting the heroic scale of his 1950s works, making a body of paintings, including Untitled (from Blooming, A Scattering of Blossoms & Other Things) (2007) (the exhibition's title references this work), which is among the most gestural, immersive, and explosively colorful in his career.
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LACMA:
Possible Worlds:
Mario Ybarra Jr., Karla Diaz, and Slanguage Studio Select from the Permanent Collections July 2, 2011 - September 25, 2011
About
Possible Worlds: Mario Ybarra Jr., Karla Diaz, and Slanguage Studio Select from the Permanent Collections connects a residency site in Watts, California with the LACMA collection and campus.
In collaboration with LACMA and the Watts House Project, an artist-driven urban revitalization project centered around the historic Watts Towers, Ybarra, Diaz, and Slanguage, the artist's team of collaborators, participated in a residency at the home of longtime residents of Watts, the Garcia family.
The exhibition component of this residency takes at its point of departure the legacy of Simon Rodia and the impulse to create alternative or possible worlds out of unconventional materials or according to unorthodox impulses. The installation features assemblage, folk art, vernacular graphics, images of the Watts Towers and art from the LACMA collection selected by Ybarra, Diaz, and the Slanguage Studio, as well as a newly commissioned sculpture by Ybarra that connects the public art works done at the Watts residency site with the LACMA campus. |
Art Theory 101:
Elements of Art :
Principles of Design
Composition
An orderly arrangement of elements using the principles of design.
The principles of design help you to carefully plan and organize the elements of art so that you will hold interest and command attention. This is sometimes referred to as visual impact.
In any work of art there is a thought process for the arrangement and use of the elements of design. The artist who works with the principles of good composition will create a more interesting piece of art it will be arranged to show a pleasing rhythm and movement. The center of interest will be strong and the viewers will not look away, instead, they will be drawn into the work. A good knowledge of composition is essential in producing good artwork. Some artists today like to bend or ignore these rules and therefore are experimenting with different forms of expression. We think that composition is very important. The following will assist you in understanding the basics of a good composition:
Elements Of Design
Line - is a mark on a surface that describes a shape or outline. It can create texture and can be thick and thin. Types of line can include actual, implied, vertical, horizontal, diagonal and contour lines.
Color - refers to specific hues and has 3 properties, Chroma, Intensity and Value. The color wheel is a way of showing the chromatic scale in a circle using all the colors made with the primary triad. Complimentary pairs can produce dull and neutral color. Black and white can be added to produce tints (add white), shades (add black) and tones (add gray).
Texture - is about surface quality either tactile or visual. Texture can be real or implied by different uses of media. It is the degree of roughness or smoothness in objects.
Shape - is a 2-dimensional line with no form or thickness. Shapes are flat and can be grouped into two categories, geometric and organic.
Form - is a 3-dimensional object having volume and thickness. It is the illusion of a 3-D effect that can be implied with the use of light and shading techniques. Form can be viewed from many angles.
Value - is the degree of light and dark in a design. It is the contrast between black and white and all the tones in between. Value can be used with color as well as black and white. Contrast is the extreme changes between values.
Size - refers to variations in the proportions of objects, lines or shapes. There is a variation of sizes in objects either real or imagined. (some sources list Proportion/Scale as a Principle of Design)
These elements are used to create the Principles of Design. Principles are the results of using the Elements. When you are working in a particular format (size and shape of the work surface) the principles are used to create interest, harmony and unity to the elements that you are using. You can use the Principles of design to check your composition to see if it has good structure.
Elements of Compositional Design
The principles of design are the recipe for a good work of art. The principles combine the elements to create an aesthetic placement of things that will produce a good design.
Center of interest - is an area that first attracts attention in a composition. This area is more important when compared to the other objects or elements in a composition. This can be by contrast of values, more colors, and placement in the format.
Balance - is a feeling of visual equality in shape, form, value, color, etc. Balance can be symmetrical or evenly balanced or asymmetrical and un-evenly balanced. Objects, values, colors, textures, shapes, forms, etc., can be used in creating a balance in a composition.
Harmony - brings together a composition with similar units. If your composition was using wavy lines and organic shapes you would stay with those types of lines and not put in just one geometric shape. (Notice how similar Harmony is to Unity - some sources list both terms)
Contrast - offers some change in value creating a visual discord in a composition. Contrast shows the difference between shapes and can be used as a background to bring objects out and forward in a design. It can also be used to create an area of emphasis.
Directional Movement - is a visual flow through the composition. It can be the suggestion of motion in a design as you move from object to object by way of placement and position. Directional movement can be created with a value pattern. It is with the placement of dark and light areas that you can move your attention through the format.
Rhythm - is a movement in which some elements recurs regularly. Like a dance it will have a flow of objects that will seem to be like the beat of music.
The Principles of design are the results of your working with the elements of art. Use them in every piece of art you do and you will be happy with the results.
Copyright @ Ken Schwab
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We here at FrameStore hope you enjoy the warmth and sun of summer while building a lifetime of memories, filled with love, family and lots of colour!
Sincerely,
Chuck Mitchell
FrameStore |
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