I’m very excited about my two-person show with Alan J Klawans, “Curves and Colors”, which opens tomorrow (Friday, April 8, 2011) at Artists’ Gallery in Lambertville, NJ. We’re hosting an opening reception on Saturday, April 9, from 2-6pm and I hope to see you there! Full details are available here.
Center of Narrative Gravity #12, acrylic on aluminum, 12x12
It’s just two weeks until my show with Alan J Klawans, “Curves and Colors“, opens at Artists’ Gallery in Lambertville, NJ. The opening reception is on Saturday, April 9, from 2-6pm, and the show is up from April 8 through May 1. I hope you’ll be able to make it! Complete details, including a printable PDF page for your refrigerator, can be found here. If you’re not familiar with Lambertville, I’ve put together a quick summary of where to stay and what else to do while you’re visiting.
One of the paintings in the show is this one, entitled Emergent Materialism #2.
Emergent Materialism #2, acrylic on panel, 30x24
I’m happy to report that one of my paintings, Continuum, has been accepted into the Mercer County Artists 2011 group show at The Gallery @ Mercer Community College. The exhibition runs from March 8 through April 7, 2011, with an opening reception on Wednesday, March 9, from 5-7:30pm.
Continuum, acrylic on panel
Art Exhibit: April 8 – May 1, 2011
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 9, 2011, 2-6pm
Center of Narrative Gravity #6, acrylic on panel, 20x20
Lambertville, NJ, February 25, 2011 – Abstraction takes a turn in April at Artists’ Gallery in a show featuring the work of Alan J. Klawans and Andrew Werth from Friday, April 8, through Sunday, May 1, 2011. A reception with the artists will be held at the gallery (18 Bridge Street, Lambertville, NJ) from 2 p.m. – 6 p.m. on April’s “Second Saturday,” April 9, 2011.
Andrew Werth’s paintings in this show comprise a body of work he calls “Centers of Narrative Gravity” where swirls of color interact with thousands of individually hand-painted marks to create interactive paintings whose appearance changes depending upon where you stand.
“I’m using a combination of color theory and metallic and reflective acrylic paints so that you’ll see something different up close than you will from far away or from an angle. The paintings read differently even as the light changes over the course of a day,” Werth says. He explains the show’s title, “Just like in physics, where a center of gravity is a useful abstraction even though it doesn’t exist in reality, the Center of Narrative Gravity is a useful metaphor for The Self – we are the centers of the stories we tell about ourselves.”
Alan J. Klawans’ work is the result of his observations on contemporary life. Decorative elements of buildings, ships, commuter trains and construction sites, as well as imagery from science and current events, make up the visual toolbox from which he draws. “The visual aspects of my environment, especially in an urban area, are constant sources of inspiration for me,” says Klawans. “The use of wood, metal salvage, and waste paper – in the form of digital shapes and textures – are my alternatives to the traditional artist’s materials of paint and canvas.”
Klawans’ is an award-winning artist who brings his long experience as a design professional and instructor to his artwork in the form of graphic watercolor paintings, ink drawings, and now in limited edition, original digital designs. His work is included in the collections of many prominent institutions including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the Pennsylvania Historical Society, and the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Klawans lives in Willow Grove, PA.
Andrew Werth received degrees in Computer Engineering and Information Networking from Carnegie Mellon University and has studied art at various schools in New York City including The Arts Students League, The School of Visual Arts, and The New School. His paintings have been exhibited at many tri-state venues from Philadelphia through Hudson, NY. Werth lives in West Windsor, NJ.
About the Gallery: Artists’ Gallery is located at 18 Bridge Street in the heart of historic Lambertville, NJ. The gallery is open every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from 11 a.m. – 6 p.m. and by appointment. For more information about the gallery, visit www.lambertvillearts.com. For more information about this exhibition, contact Andrew Werth.
###
This month at Artists’ Gallery I have two paintings up in the group show, Love That Art, which runs from Friday, February 11, through Sunday, March 6, 2011. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, February 12, from 4-7pm where you can meet the artists, check out all the art, and partake in some delectable treats as well.
One of my paintings up this month is Intentionality, whose central figure seems appropriate for this month. The term intentionality is one used by philosophers to describe the way that minds can have thoughts which are about something and intentionality is often called “aboutness”. When philosophers of mind and linguists think about how the thought of a rose might refer to a specific rose in the real world (or to some other abstract rose), they’re thinking about intentionality.
acrylic on canvas, 36x36
Also up this month is a painting from last year entitled, “Time’s Texture”, about the seemingly variable nature of time and the interesting reality that what we experience in our head as “now” actually occurred in the world a few milliseconds earlier.
acrylic on panel, 36x24
My next featured show at Artists’ Gallery in Lambertville is coming up soon and I’m hard at work finishing a whole new body of work for the exhibition. The show runs from Friday, April 8, through Sunday, May 1, 2011. Alan Klawans is my exhibition partner this year and we’ll be holding an opening reception on Saturday, April 9, from 2pm – 6pm at Artists’ Gallery, 18 Bridge Street, Lambertville, NJ 08550. Mark your calendars today to reserve the date if you’d like to attend!
Many more details to come, but for now, here’s an image of a recent painting that will be included in the show:
acrylic on panel, 24 x 24
As with several of my recent paintings in this series, getting a single photograph to capture the painting is challenging. I’m using various metallic paints that reflect light differently depending upon your angle of view, and so this piece will look quite different if you move a few feet to the side or catch the work in a different light.
My wife and I headed down to Washington, DC, for a long weekend to participate in Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity. I’m a big Jon Stewart fan and wanted to be a body in the crowd to show support for sane discussions and “non-extremism” in politics. We didn’t get to the mall early enough to have an up close seat: arriving at 10:30am (an hour and a half before start time) we were so far away that most of our view of the show came from the video monitors. This, however, I took as a good sign as it meant that Stephen Colbert’s early “fear” that nobody would show up for his rally, like most of his other fears, was misplaced.
The day before the rally, getting close was easy
This was our view of the stage
As is the case for every event I’ve ever participated in that was covered by the press, when I read about the event later on it seems that the media gets so many things wrong. For just one example, I saw reports that “the crowd was mostly young”, which simply isn’t true or is at best misleading. Perhaps up at the very front of the rally (by the press corps), where you had to arrive by 8am to get a spot, the crowd might have been mostly young people. But where I was standing (and we did have to stand the entire time), the crowd was thoroughly mixed with plenty of gray hair and ages that ranged from perhaps 6 months to at least 75 years. At my hotel in Bethesda, the early morning breakfast crowd was entirely full of rally-goers with a similar diversity of ages.
Panorama looking around from our spot, © Andrew Werth 2010
The weather was fantastic, not too hot and not too cold, as long as you were reasonably bundled up. The show was excellent. Some of the musical selections were a bit slow or out-of-genre for my taste, but one of the highlights was the dueling locomotives of Cat Stevens’ (now Yusef Islam) soft “Peace Train” against Ozzy Ozbourne’s demonic “Crazy Train”, brought together in synthesis by The O’Jays’ “Love Train”. Stewart and Colbert really nailed their part of the show. Everyone in the crowd seemed to be having a good time, even as our limbs wearied after five plus hours of standing. Stewart’s final comments at the end were, to me, nearly pitch perfect: he understands who he is and what the expectations are and how his rally might be covered, but he wants to make important points and, dammit, if the “serious” press isn’t going to get it right then somebody has to explain what’s going on.
Panorama looking forward from our spot, © Andrew Werth 2010
The crowd was huge. From my vantage point, it was literally as far as the eye can see. The one problem with having such a huge crowd is that, well, it has to go somewhere once the event is over. It was a long, slow slog through the crowds as the mall emptied out onto the surrounding streets in DC. The Metro line was over-stressed and jam-packed as we waited, packed first like sardines in the train station and then in the subway itself as it took us another hour and a half to get back to our hotel. But at least it was a very “reasonable” crowd — by definition, I suppose — and so it wasn’t really a problem at all.
Leaving the rally, walking up 7th St towards the Metro
There were tons of great signs along with quite a few goofy ones. Here are a few that I liked and managed to get photos of.
Cogito ergo hic sum?
Tea... The New Kool-Aid?
And perhaps my favorite…
Hyperbole is the Worst Thing ever
Thanks, Jon and Stephen, for drawing attention to the need for reasonable discussion and for providing a way for moderates to stand up and be counted.
My painting, Connections, has been accepted into the Absolutely Abstract juried show at the Philadelphia Sketch Club. The exhibition runs from August 27 through September 18, 2010, and there is a reception on Sunday, September 12, from 2-4pm. The Philadelphia Sketch Club is located at 235 South Camac St, Philadelphia, PA.
Connections, acrylic/panel, 30x24
I’m very pleased to announce that one of my paintings, The Reality Problem, has been accepted into a juried show at Muse Gallery in Philadelphia. The show runs from August 6 through August 29, 2010. The first day of the exhibition is Philadelphia’s “First Friday” when galleries in the Old City part of town stay open from 7-9pm. There will also be an Artists’ Reception on Sunday, August 8, from 1-4pm. Muse Gallery is located at 52 North 2nd Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106. I hope to see you there!
The Reality Problem, acrylic/panel, 24x24
I recently returned from a 10-day trip to Hungary that included a brief stay in Budapest followed by a visit to the southern Hungarian city of Pécs (pronounced variously like “Peach”, “Paych”, or “Paysch”). Aside from making a nice vacation to a place I’d never visited before, the purpose of the trip was to attend Bridges 2010, a conference that “brings together practicing mathematicians, scientists, artists, educators, musicians, writers, computer scientists, sculptors, dancers, weavers, and model builders in a lively atmosphere of exchange and mutual encouragement.” I’ll keep this blog post focused on the conference, but hope to eventually add some more information about the rest of my trip.
View of Pecs from our hotel
This was my first time attending the Bridges conference and I only learned about the gathering a few months ago while randomly searching the web for something or another related to art (tessellations, I think). One of the more interesting subtexts throughout the conference, though seldom explicitly part of the presentations, were the ideas of “What is art?” or “Is that art mathematical?” So, a painter who was fully engaged in the art world might look at a visual representation of some complex mathematical construct and wonder if the computer-generated image “counts” as art. On the other hand, some of those more focused on the mathematical side of things wondered whether paintings or photographs that aren’t explicitly based upon equations of some sort were appropriate for the conference. Fortunately, most of the crowd seemed to be open-minded about and interested in both art and math — thus the apropos appellation “Bridges”.
The best of the talks (formal paper presentations) were fascinating and stimulating and had me writing down topics to explore in the future, tools to track down, and ideas for further reflection. I’ll highlight a few of the talks here.
Early on the first day, Christopher Carlson kicked things off with an excellent presentation about using the powerful tool Mathematica to interactively explore visual designs such as for corporate logos. Recently, I had been thinking about Douglas Hofstadter’s ideas about “knob-twiddling”, where he says that, “Making variations on a theme is really the crux of creativity.” (Hofstadter, 1985) Carlson’s talk was a perfect example of “knob-twiddling as creativity”. He starts with a basic logo modeled in Mathematica (a tool that he made look incredibly simple), figures out what the “knobs” should be (i.e., how to parametrize the logo), and then starts twiddling. If you pick the right knobs, you end up with an incredibly powerful way to explore a visual space of logos and find things that would probably have been too difficult to design from scratch.
Later in the morning, Joel Varland, a professor at Savannah College of Art and Design, summoned another author whose work I’m fond of, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Craig Kaplan gave a talk about Parquet Deformations, another topic made popular by Douglas Hofstadter. Parquet Deformations depict a kind of metamorphosis (a la M.C. Escher) where a tiled pattern varies slowly across space into a different pattern. They’re fun to look at, hard to draw manually, and Kaplan explained the tools he’s built to help explore the possibilities (more knob-twiddling!).
On the second morning of the conference, Bih-yaw Jin from National Taiwan University explained how he and his students were able to string together some beautiful molecular structures out of ordinary beads. Focusing on “fullerene” structures (roughly spherical carbon molecules), he explained how by looking at the “sprial code” of a particular molecule, you can learn how to string the beads together such that each bead only needs to be “strung” twice to construct sturdy models. In his constructions, the beads represent bonds between atoms, not the atoms themselves. I was fortunate enough to be one of the early birds to his talk and received one of his sample C80 molecules, which has inspired my wife to explore bead stringing designs herself!
C80 molecule in beads by Bih-yaw Jin
In several of my paintings, I’ve used a procedure that I developed in Photoshop to take an image and abstract it into what I found to be pleasing patterns of interacting positive and negative shapes. It wasn’t until Jonathan Mccabe’s presentation, though, that I learned that these patterns have been around for a long time and were in fact discovered by Alan Turing, one of the fathers of computer science. (Excitement: Turing found the same thing I did! Dismay: It’s been around forever and is apparently well known, though not by me!) Turing described a “morphogenesis” process in terms of chemical producers and consumers and hypothesized that this sort of process could be the cause of zebra stripes. Mccabe explains his model for generating Turing patterns by simulating the activator and inhibitor dynamics in a randomized grayscale image, and then shows how he can use Turing patterns at multiple scales within the same image to create complex, dynamic, beautifully biological artistic images.
A few of my paintings that include Turing patterns:
Artist James Mai gave a talk about simultaneous color contrast which started with “color theory 101″ but then moved on to his own work, paintings that are specifically about the interaction of colors and the ways in which adjacent colors affect each other in our perceptions.
On “Hungarian Day”, István Orosz explained the motivation and technique behind his double meaning and anamorphic artwork. In work such as “Durer in the Forest”, Orosz places one image within another, often “hiding” (in plain sight) a portrait of a person that the rest of the image relates to. In his anamorphic work, a geometrically distorted image is constructed on a flat surface so that when it is viewed as a reflection in a mirrored cylinder, the “correct” image pops into place. In the best of his pieces, such as in “The Raven (Edgar Allen Poe)”, the anamorphoses are composed so carefully that the image has two meanings, working well without the mirror as one image and then revealing another meaning once the mirror is in place.
Durer in the Forest, from Wikipedia
Later in the day, Ernő Rubik must have been feeling the love from the crowd and he received the full celebrity treatment in giving a talk about the phenomenon of the Rubik’s cube. With cameras flashing left and right, Rubik explained (in English, for which he apologized that he wasn’t as lyrical as he would be in Hungarian) how he struggled against those who thought the cube couldn’t be successful because it was too hard. The allure of the cube was through its combination of simplicity of concept with complexity of solution, and its TV-friendliness hit the sweet spot of 80s culture at exactly the right time.
Rubik at Bridges 2010
The fourth day of the conference was “Excursion Day”. First up were the Vasarely and Zsolnay ceramics museums in Pécs. Vasarely is one of the fathers of Op Art and the museum provides examples of his work from throughout his life. (My wife and I also visited another Vasarely museum in Budapest, but that one was a bit of a disappointment as the lighting was poor and the lady at the front desk tried to rip us off while buying tickets; if I’m generous I’d say she was just bad at math, but realistically it felt like she was trying to take advantage of tourists not familiar with Hungarian language or currency… Fortunately, mathematics is universal and subtraction is simple and we paid the correct amount.) The Pecs museum lights many of the works with perfectly aligned track lighting that makes the paintings appear to glow from within. This large, flat tapestry appeared to bulge out of the wall.
Tapestry at museum in Pecs
After the museums, we took a trip out to the town of Villány for lunch and a wine-tasting, followed by a visit to a local sculpture garden.
Traditional Hungarian lunch plate
In the wine cellar
On the final day of the conference, Henry Segerman gave a short talk that explained the causes of some interesting artifacts (e.g., the spokes and rings) that occur when you color in a “sunflower spiral” according to a Fibonacci-related metric.
Henry Segerman's Fibonacci metric coloring of sunflower spiral
A few months ago I finished a painting that also made use of a similar sunflower spiral in its underlying composition (which coincidentally had a similar color palette).
Center of Narrative Gravity #3
Nearing the end of the 5-day conference, David Reimann spoke about using Bézier curves to create interesting tilings based upon Truchet tiles. For the non-mathematicians reading this, a Bézier curve is a way to draw smooth, continuous curves (Wikipedia has excellent animations). Truchet tiles are squares divided into two triangles (e.g., one black and one white), which when laid out in a grid and rotated in various combinations produce pleasing patterns. A variation uses two curves from midpoint-to-midpoint rather than a diagonal line to divide up each square. Reimann showed how using various curves (with both one arc and two arcs per side) on tilings can create aesthetically appealing patterns (reminding me of Brice Marden paintings). This talk had me thinking about my painting, Conceptual Framework, which has a tiling of curves very similar to those of Truchet tiles.
Conceptual Framework
There were many other talks, but these were the ones that I found most interesting and relevant to my own art.
Andrew Werth’s Art Blog is powered by
WordPress
© 2011 Andrew Werth. All Rights Reserved.
