French Connections: Part III

The third and last article in the French Connections series on Touchstone artists and their links to France. Intern Emma Cunningham-Bradshaw spoke with McCain McMurray about his experience at an artist residency on the southeast coast of France. McCain was inspired by the environment there more than he usually is, and painted many pieces named after particular towns along the Côte d’Azur. He painted with lighter colors, reflective of the luminous colors around him, while retaining his signature architectural style. You can also read the other articles in the French Connections series (Part I and Part II)

This past April, McCain McMurray traveled to France for a five week long artist residency. The program is called Artists in Residence (AIR) in Vallauris, a town on the southeast coast of France, not too far from Italy. For centuries, Vallauris has been famed for pottery, and had a boost in notoriety when Pablo Picasso moved there in the 1950s. For the last 15 years, McCain has traveled to France with his husband who works for the French Embassy. McCain’s familiarity with France along with the many artists he’s fond of with connections to the country, such as Nicolas de Staël, propelled his desire to do a program there. He was looking for a small residency on the coast and found AIR which typically has only five artists in residence. They live in a building owned by the program on Place Lisnard and around the corner is the studio where they work. “We were essentially all free to do whatever we wanted. We foraged for ourselves, we had a kitchen and a living room and we were all in the studio basically every day.” 

A view of the square and chapel on Place Lisnard, Vallauris

McCain had expected to be inspired by the light and colors of the French Riviera. “I’ve done a lot of stuff that’s related to water, particularly blue ocean water, as opposed to lake or inland waters.” While in Vallauris, he frequented stops on a train that runs from Marseille all the way up to Ventimiglia, Italy, cities such as Cannes, Antibes, Nice, Monaco, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, and Menton. He also frequented Golfe-Juan, a coastal village between Cannes and Antibes. “I love that place because it’s not fancy. I’d ride the bus down there for lunch.” More than is usual for him, McCain’s work while at AIR was inspired by the cities he visited. One story he tells is illustrative of how the environment affected him. “I went to Cannes to change money, and I walked down the croisette and was so struck by how white all the buildings were. It just really blew me away.” Prior to this, he was painting with darker colors, somber blues and reds. In Vallauris, he started painting with lighter colors. “That white, the silvery color, and the lighter blues were very appealing to me. The sky is such an intense blue down there, and I would typically make that very light. So most of my colors were in the blues and the whites and I’m a big fan of silver so I use a lot of that.” One might notice this silver in the rocks along the water. “The Mediterranean is not really beachy, in terms of sand beach, it’s very rocky.” Further revealing how the cities inspired him, most of his pieces from this period are titled the names of cities along the Côte d’Azur. 

Vallauris 05

McCain was an architect for decades before fully taking on painting. He calls his work ‘geometric abstraction;’ it is strongly rectilinear. In France, he was less harsh with the rectilinear rigor in his art. “I became a little looser in terms of the way I applied the colors, the colors I used, the way I manipulated them. I didn’t overwork the pieces like I sometimes do.” McCain brought six 8 by 8 cradle panels and 12 pieces of canvas with him for the residency. He serendipitously had a squeegee (which is his preferred tool for painting) that was the same width as his rectangular panels. “I would put different colors on the canvas and then pull the squeegee through. Happenstance and coincidence would create whatever color or texture the pulling might create. Within that is not one color, it could be a variety of colors as those colors mix together. I really enjoy the spontaneity of what might come up, but within that fairly distinct medium.” His interest in water and blues has been a throughline in his work. I ask him how flowy water fits into his rectilinear style. His answer: he doesn’t see water as flowing. “In terms of geometry, the color variation of the water is very appealing to me. Water is of course, not really blue, it’s a variety of blues and greens and turquoises.” 

Despite being so inspired by his surroundings, McCain didn’t paint from photos, or even memory strictly speaking; he was always intently focused on color. “I would mix a color and like it and put it on a canvas, and then maybe I’d say, I want it lighter or I want darker, or I want it greener or I want it greyer.” He mixes colors in take out containers and keeps a lid on them so they won’t dry out. “If I want to make a blue whiter, I’ll just put some white in, or if I’ve got two different blues, I’ll mix those together, so I’m constantly kind of developing colors and reusing colors.” He often screws cradle panels together, and paints them one color over and over again to develop the surface. “It is an attempt to have a color on top of another color, so you kind of see that there is something behind it or something within it.”

Nice, France

In Vallauris, McCain had many ideas about pieces he’d like to make. In the past, he’s screwed panels together so that the pieces of wood extend beyond each other. He’d like to explore that style again and this time use wood to create layers of planes with beams supporting them. The inspiration for this came from a very practical insight. “In Vallauris, I was going to make this piece and realized ‘you know, I can't get this home if I make it like this,’ so I did something else and it was this notion of layers of planes with colors that are fairly architectural and also fairly sculptural.” Currently in his studio, he’s arranged pieces of wood of different widths and thicknesses. He sees what he’s doing as similar to Louise Nevelson’s sculptures. “They’re not as animated as Nevelson, but they’re more architectural than Nevelson. One piece that I really liked, I just wiped white onto unfinished wood, so it had this really unpainted quality. I'm really debating about how I present these and use color to make the sculpture be one thing that’s not just a painted thing.”

The last weekend of the residency, there was an exhibition of the work the artists had completed that summer. “There were a lot of locals who came, about 30 people which was very surprising.” McCain has especially fond memories of that square, Place Lisnard, where their residency stood. “If you go on the weekend, the gallery will be open and the little chapel is right across. It’s a tiny, little wonderful place.”

Below is a slideshow of McCain’s own pictures from his stay.








French Connections: Part II

Intern Emma Cunningham-Bradshaw interviewed Touchstone member artist Amy Sabrin about her ‘In Provence’ watercolor collection and her trips to an artist residency in the Provence region of France that inspired it. Amy fondly recalls the fun shapes of the trees, the pervading smell of lavender, and the vivid colors that make you think of artists such as Cézanne and Van Gogh who painted scenes of Provence as realists rather than impressionists. Emma followed in Amy’s footsteps, visiting many of her favorite places in Provence while endeavoring to capture elements of the environment that Amy was so enamored with.

The Zoom waiting room closes and up pops Amy Sabrin in a pale green shirt with one of her own watercolor paintings as the background: blue-purple trees in the region of Provence, France, casting shadows over a golden yellow field. Amy thought it appropriate to showcase this image since today we are speaking about her collection ‘In Provence’ and what inspired it. Starting in 2009 and continuing for eight non-consecutive years until before the pandemic, Amy went to a hamlet in the Luberon National Park called les Bassacs. There, for two weeks in the summer she attended Arts in Provence, a program started by two British artists who had lived in Provence for years. When Amy began going to Provence, she was still a full-time lawyer. “I didn’t have much time to paint when I wasn’t there. So, I just wanted to paint every hour I could.”

Under the Olives

The primary activity every day at Arts in Provence was ‘plein-air’ painting which is, most simply, when one paints outdoors. ‘Plein-air’, literally ‘open air’, is a practice that emerged in the 19th century in France with the invention of tin paint tubes. This enabled artists to travel with ready-mixed paints. ‘Plein-air’ painting fueled the Impressionist movement with artists such as Monet and Renoir endeavoring to capture the changes in the environment on a canvas. Amy says of her summers in Provence, “lavender was in bloom, every day you would go out and paint plein-air in this new, beautiful location and then you had art instruction in the afternoon, art critique and wonderful meals, homemade on-site with all the fresh local food and wine. It’s just an unbelievable experience in a beautiful place so I kept going back, and that’s what inspired all these paintings.” I ask Amy about what she thinks drew such famous artists, and continues to draw artists to Provence today. She believes it is the light and rural scenery. “When I think of Provence, I think of Van Gogh and Cézanne. When you walk into these pine forests, they look just like a Cezanne painting! You think his painting is made up, it’s actually more realist than you think it is… those colors, especially the orange and the green. It’s just such a pleasant environment.”

This vibrant orange is best showcased in the ochre quarries of the Luberon Valley. I visited one of these quarries named ‘Le Colorado Provençal’ because of its startling similarity to the American Southwest’s colors and rock formations. Indeed, the smell, dry heat and colors all reminded me of Colorado or New Mexico. The ground beneath as I walk up the mountain, on a path between fragrant pine trees, is red clay. As the rock formations come into view, one sees a continuum of color, from light pink, to yellows, bright oranges and reds. This land was mined for paint pigments for almost two centuries, and is now protected territory where people like myself and Amy can admire the land. This type of land is something I never fathomed seeing outside the US. One thing that reminded me I was in Provence while on that hike was seeing the lavender fields atop the mountain, blowing in the breeze and buzzing with bees. 

Amy’s plein-air painting at the ochre quarry

However, the vibrant colors in the ochre quarries are anomalies with regard to the Provence landscape. The colors of the vegetation oscillate between yellows and pale greens. Much of Provence is wheat fields, and so that golden color of grain is ubiquitous. The ground is sandy both in color and texture. It is a very dry environment, though there are lush milieus like shaded gardens and vineyards—Provence is famous for its rosé. Out in the open, unshielded by shade, the heat is quite relentless, particularly in the afternoon when everything slows down. At that time, most businesses close and people take their daily respite from the toils of the day. Arts in Provence also abided by this tradition. After finishing the daily art lesson and of course a sumptuous meal, the artists were free to do as they wished. Amy said most often they would sketch or paint in the environs of the school, either individually or as a group. “There are these beautiful undulating vineyards and lavender fields within a very short walk of where we stayed and so that was a frequent attraction.” When I visited Les Bassacs, I walked on a path that continued beyond the village. I focused on the trees rising on either side and their shadows, criss-crossing on the ground below. I imagined Amy would have painted there, and I’m sure she did. She said of Les Bassacs, “that time of year you can be outside until 10 at night; it’s still light. The sunsets, the sunrises are gorgeous. Where we stayed there are many teeny weeny villages and they’re all perched on the side of the valley. The art school was on one side, and if you sat on the patio overlooking the valley, as it got dark, the lights would come on all over. It was just magical.”

Shadow Play, painted plein-air in Les Bassacs

One can discern Amy’s love of light, color and shape in her ‘In Provence’ paintings: shadows of trees cutting luminous paths, flame-red tomatoes in market baskets, a sinuous black cat on a pastel window sill. Amy painted exclusively in watercolors when she was there. “One thing I really like about watercolors is that they’re so transparent and luminous and the light bounces through them, and that is consistent with the environment there. From a technical point of view, if you’re working fast, watercolor dries fast, since it’s a very dry environment.” She found the trees in Provence particularly appealing. “The trees just have the most fun shapes and they make the most fun negative shapes, and their leaves are this interesting silvery color. It took me like two years to figure out how to mix that color. The sun comes under them and they cast these cool shadows.”

Market Day, Apt

The coloring of the towns in Provence reflect the natural environment: dry with toned down versions of every color. One sees shutters the same purple-gray as lavender fields and walls of orange hues (some painted with pigments from the ochre quarries). Many of the towns in Provence were founded prior to the 15th century, including Saint-Saturnin-lès-Apt, one of Amy’s favorite towns. At the highest point of the town, there are well-preserved ruins of a medieval fortress and several cypress trees (perhaps Van Gogh’s favorite tree, as seen in his paintings) as well as a still-operating church dating to the 11th century. You are also surrounded by a stunning vista of the Luberon Valley and look down to see all the clay-shingled houses of the town proper. There, you walk through narrow sloping streets, stumble upon arched passageways, see bushy vines shrouding ornate doors and all those classic Provence colors.

Dreaming of St. Sat

While Amy has painted scenes from several countries, there are only two places that she is most drawn to: coastal areas in the US (she is calling me from Bethany Beach, Delaware) and Provence. She sees the commonality of these two areas in their colors and bright light. These are environments she’s spent a lot of time observing, practicing mixing the colors she perceives around her. Years of immersion in Provence made her very familiar with the land. “I went so many years in a row, that I could almost paint with my eyes closed, thinking of the sounds, the breeze, the sunlight.” She even cultivated relationships with market vendors who she would see year after year. “In the eight years I was there, the same vendors were always in the same place. I remembered the vendors and they would remember me.”

About half of the paintings in the ‘In Provence’ collection were painted plein-air in France, while others were inspired by the memories and photos of her surroundings. Arts in Provence has not operated since the pandemic. Yet, even though Amy hasn’t been to Provence in several years, the sense of the environment is embedded within her. “I look at the paintings I did in Provence and I can remember what it felt like when I painted it, when I was in that place.” 

French Connections: Part 1

This is first in a series of three articles on Touchstone member artists and their connections to France. Emma Cunningham-Bradshaw, a Summer 2023 Touchstone intern, interviewed photographer Rick Braswell at his home in Paris. They spoke of Rick’s street photography style, his experiences traveling and photographing in Europe, and the torturous feeling of not having his camera on him when he sees the perfect shot! Emma also visited places where Rick likes to shoot around Paris and Marseille (another one of Rick’s favorite cities) and includes her own images of the locales.

Rick Braswell in Paris

In his apartment overlooking l’Île de la Cité where a scaffold-laden Notre Dame stands, artist Rick Braswell welcomes me for an apératif and an interview. He and his wife Sandy have lived here in Paris for five years. As we settle in the living room, Sandy offers us each a glass of white wine and a plate of little snacks before retiring to her office. Although she has her own job to attend to, she helps Rick out on his artistic escapades including the weekly Marché de la Création — or Montparnasse art market — in the Montparnasse district of Paris. What is at night a cluster of neon signs, lanes of restaurants extending onto the sidewalk, and more than one sex shop, in the daytime becomes like many other Parisian locales with its bustling cafés and people going to and from markets and grocery stores. Only that over this district looms the Montparnasse Tower, the tallest building in Paris proper. “The Montparnasse art market is a fun thing.” Rick says. “It's physically kind of demanding since you have to bring all your stuff down, hang all the pictures with tension ropes… we don’t have a car so we carry everything over. Everybody there is an artist, a few photographers, many painters. The first time we arrived, just rookies and so grateful to be let into the market, my wife Sandy and I got out of a taxi and all these artists look and this guy says, “I think this is the first time an artist has ever arrived at the art market in a taxi.” Their surprise, of course, stemmed from the age old idea that artists don’t have much money. 

“So, what brought you to Paris?” I ask Rick. After years in D.C., Rick and Sandy moved to Geneva, Switzerland for Sandy’s job. When it came time to move and Sandy thought they would head back to D.C., Rick asked the question: “What about Paris?”. “We’ve always loved Paris, and visited many times. I knew I would love to photograph here, but we moved simply because I love Paris. I love the ambiance, the style of people, the look of the place, you just can’t beat the quality of life. There’s tons of culture including photography, art and music here. Jazz is a big passion of ours, and there are just wonderful jazz clubs in Paris. I love D.C. but I just thought, for something new, I’d like to live in Paris.”

Rick’s photographs have now become synonymous with Parisian and European street scenes. He’s traveled in Italy, France and Switzerland, focused on capturing people in cities. “For better or for worse you could say working people who are out doing what they’re doing.” He doesn’t care for photographing ‘the glitterati or well-to-do.’ “Those cafes of Paris, you can take beautiful pictures there, but it’s not so much my thing. I’m looking for working people, young people, and their families. The real diversity you find in the population.” When I ask why he is drawn to photographing the working-class, Rick reminds me that he was a union organizer before retiring and pursuing photography as a career. He sees himself as part of and sympathizes with the working-class, and finds beauty, excitement and fun in photographing regular folk. “I’m just not ever going to get that real appreciative feeling of taking a picture of a guy in an Armani suit.”

Tango, Banks of the Seine, Paris

Rick aims to be as discreet as possible when he’s on a shoot. “I don’t do any posing of people, I don’t ask people if I can take their picture because that’s not the picture I want. Most of my pictures you wouldn’t get if you asked the person, you wouldn’t get the sort of interesting picture I’m looking for.” He’s had a few people spot him and then object to him taking their picture, and while he respected their wishes, he sees no reason for people to object to his photographing. “I’m always trying to make people look good, and capture these characteristics that I think are really admirable and attractive. So, I have no bad motive in it.” He tells me that some photographers think that once you’re in the public space, others are free to look, photograph, paint you. While Rick is more sensitive to this issue and recognizes that taking photos is offensive in some milieus, he somewhat agrees with the sentiment.. “I take a picture and the picture turns into this piece of paper on the wall. Nobody’s ever going to attach that piece of paper to this person. It’s just something that existed in the world and I took a picture of it.”

Some might call this candid style of photography ‘humanism’, a movement in photography that blossomed in France after World War II. Rick speaks of the movement’s defining photographers: Sabine Weiss, William Ronis, Henri Cartier-Bresson. “These people took street photography shots back in the 50s, 60s and 70s. They’re just an inspiration if you do street photography. They always found something very human about the people they were dealing with, something that you would say, ‘oh, i’ve seen that gesture a million times, that’s exactly what people do!’ It’s real hard to get this kind of shot.” These artists mainly photographed in black and white which is also Rick’s preference. “Black and white photographs seem more artistic above and beyond anything that I’m doing; they look a lot better, more artistic and a little more meaningful.”

In short, Rick’s focus is on the people, interesting in their everyday activities, whether he’s in Paris or Chicago. He frequents Marseille, a city in the south of France. Parisians often give Marseille a bad reputation for its dirtiness (I did encounter several overflowing piles of trash just off of prominent boulevards), but Rick loves it for its grit. He also loves the sun and lighting there which, as a photographer, one notices right away. Marseille is on the Mediterranean sea and boasts a beautiful coastline, and many rocky alcoves with turquoise waters just minutes from the city-center. Many in Marseille are of North African descent. Walking down the streets near the Old Port, I hear about as much Arabic as I do French.

Old Port Marseille

Though I haven’t been to any North African country, I grew up in Tanzania and for a time lived in Zanzibar, an island off the coast. Similar to Marseille, Zanzibar has for centuries been a ground for cross-pollination of cultures and people. The sounds of Arabic on the streets of Marseille, the shops with baskets filled with bright spices, the all important ritual of tea (mint in Marseille, masala in Zanzibar) were comforting in their familiarity. Yet, in Marseille, only a short walk away from the North-African-leaning Noailles district, are those classical French buildings. This mélange of France and North Africa in terms of architecture, language and traditions make Marseille a truly distinctive and dynamic city. 

I also ask Rick about his time photographing in Italy. Earlier on the day of our interview, I went to an exhibit at the Académie des Beaux-Arts called ‘The Italians’ by French photographer Bruno Barbey. He traveled around Italy in the 1960s  and said, “Italians give themselves freely to being photographed, contrary to other people.” Rick has to agree with him. “Italians are very photogenic. They just seem to be indifferent if you’re taking their picture. Some French people, I notice, are a little reluctant to be photographed. You would never imagine finding an Italian who would refuse having their picture taken.” Rick has a particular fondness for Sicily. “Like Marseille, Sicily is a cross-cultural mixture, and at the same time very very Italian.” His collection Neo-Neorealism has photos from a road trip down the eastern coast, from Padua down to the heel of Italy. “The further south we went, the more we loved it. There were just incredible scenes. On that road trip, I was looking for a neorealist look that I could replicate. You know, those middle aged guys talking to their momma and those kinds of things, and you find that it’s really there.”

Polignano A Mare

Rick doesn’t always have his camera on him, he normally plans to shoot on a particular day since lugging around his camera gets pretty heavy. Though, as life would have it, he says he often sees the ideal shot when he doesn’t have his camera. “I was just going to the grocery store about three days ago and walking up the street in front of the Monde Arabe and I saw a shot that… I could’ve kicked myself! I didn’t have my camera. For whatever reason, it was this woman leaning against a lamppost with a lit cigarette, smoke coming up, reading a newspaper, and no one reads a newspaper these days! The sun hitting her right in the forehead…” 

The shooting, he says, is just a matter of luck. “I take my camera and I go to places where I think I’m gonna see the kind of thing I want to see, I go at the time of day when there's the light that I like. If I see it, I take a shot of it but I may not see exactly what I want. I can’t readily articulate what I’m looking for, it’s a matter of instinct that makes me get my camera up and shoot when I just see what’s going on in front of me.” 

Rick and Sandy are settled in Paris, though they maintain their connection with D.C. and visit every summer. Touchstone Gallery was the first place Rick continuously showed his photos and he sees being a member as a very big accomplishment. During my own month of living in Paris this summer while working virtually for Touchstone, I relished in the relative slowness of Parisian city life coming from the valued daily rituals, the balance of work and pleasure. I think the beauty of this slowness is captured in these words of Rick’s, “sometimes I set up in a place, look at this shadow, look at that glancing light over there, this is a nice urban scene, I’m just going to wait here for a while and see who comes by.”

- Words and gallery photos by Emma Cunningham-Bradshaw; inline photos by Rick Braswell

An interview with Elaine Florimonte

Gallery Assistant Jackie Soto speaks with artist Elaine Florimonte about her art and her solo exhibition Lost & Found.

JS: While we were both sitting in the gallery together, I had the amazing opportunity to talk with Elaine about her solo exhibition, her art style, and about teaching. Here are some snippets of our conversation.

JS: How do you approach the use of color in your work?

EF: I tend to use the same palette in most of my works. You can see in the smaller pieces that I have that there is some inclusion of new colors, but the old ones will make their way in. But I just gravitate towards these grays, and it’s so much easier to use them than to fight it.

JS: Could you describe your painting process?

EF: I begin new work with intuitive drawing and blocking in with color. I really just start painting and let the process guide me. Sometimes I have an idea of what the composition will be, but more often than not, I just paint and look.

JS: How do you form an idea, and then transport it to the canvas?

EF: I am inspired by nature and the things that happen during any given day. I see light patterns or proportions that inspired me. Sometimes I grab them with my phone and use bits and pieces in my compositions, but I don’t paint from a specific image. I draw a lot too and I think my work reflects the value that I use in my sketches.

JS: What themes or concepts are you exploring in your current series of paintings?

EF: The paintings are mostly landscapes, because that is what makes me happy. But the theme – we’re at a point in our culture where change is dramatic. It’s lost and found, its things that are lost and being found now that put us into the direction we are going on. I include some pages from my personal drawings, old letters, notebook paper, things that have been lost and have now been found.

I am also playing around with the idea of dislocation and separation, by showing the interior and exterior views.

JS: What is your favorite painting and why?

EF: If you mean in this show... My favorite painting in this show is “This Side of the Glass II.” It feels a little like a pivot piece. I’m not sure what it is about it, but I feel really satisfied when I look at it.

If you mean of all time, that is like asking me which finger is my favorite... I need them all! :) My current favorite painting is Rod and Reel by Andrew Wyeth. It is everything. The design and composition makes me salivate and the abstraction in the surface quality, I mean... And that red string. What the heck!!! I love every inch of it.

JS: How has teaching art informed your process?

EF: I always learn from my students. There’s a generational gap between us, I’m in my 50s and they’re all under 20. They’ll come up and ask me questions and it would completely change what I do – based on a question. I teach using the socratic method, asking them questions until they come up with the answer themselves. One of the most powerful things is being in a constant creative space.

JS: How do you decide when a painting is finished?

EF: You feel it. It depends on the piece, whether it's planned or not. But it is intuitive. I tend to lose track of the piece, so it's a feeling when it's done.

JS: Where do you see your art going next? What are your plans for the future?

EF: I am not sure. I am following my gut right now.

*****

See Elaine Florimonte’s Lost & Found at Touchstone Gallery through December 3.

Click here to read a review of the exhibition in the Washington Post.

An interview with Setareh Pourrajabi

Read an interview with Touchstone member and Persian Perspectives: Celebrating Iranian Women Artists of DC artist Setareh Pourrajabi and Touchstone Intern Emma Cunningham-Bradshaw about Pourrajabi’s pieces in the exhibition and her artistic influences.

See Persian Perspectives through July 2, 2023.

ECB: You currently have two pieces on display at Touchstone, could you tell me about ‘Rebecca’ and ‘The Notice’, the characters or people in these pieces? 

SP: These two artworks belong to the Forbidden Zone collection and explore women’s relationships with themselves and effects from their surroundings. I think the woman embodied in these artworks is the real woman. The figures are uncovered physically, yet there is a lot going on in their minds. In these pieces, the women are not in comfortable positions, they are broken figures. I see women like them, beautiful and still struggling. Woman can state her independence and professional success but at the end of the day she is a mother, she is a wife, she has to take care of so many things. Here are the oppositions: she wants to relax but she doesn’t. The pieces also move in a circular fashion: there is always movement, never rest. But the women are happy too; the bright colors say as much. This is how we are as women, we are happy yet we bear the weight of so many responsibilities.

ECB: You have varying degrees of realism in your art, what inspires you to produce art in these different styles and techniques? 

SP: I started producing art when I was 10, drawing fruits, vegetables, flowers, then faces. I got bored after a couple of years and so I went to watercolor which was so exciting. Again, that was boring after a couple of years. I was successful as a watercolor artist, yet I wanted to create something for myself and watercolor did not provide me with the creative space I craved. I moved to oil color, and then I fell in love with acrylic. At 20, I learned from a very good teacher in Iran, and his class really propelled a revolution in my mind. I was exposed to so many things that were all new to me! Now, expressionism with acrylic paint is what satisfies me most, though this might change in the future. I also love photography since I have a passion to find people’s beauty, at different angles and positions. 

ECB: You name Hegel as one of your influences, can you tell me more about his influence? 

SP: Hegel’s theory of dialectic means there is a continuous back and forth motion. There is a space in between these oppositions and in my art I want to capture what occurs in that in-between area. The Notice, for example, asks you to question where the movement is between the two figures, in which direction it’s going. 

ECB: Do you have other influences who are not primarily visual artists, whether these be philosophers, poets or otherwise? 

SP: Definitely, many Persian poets have influenced me. I read Forough Farokhzad’s poetry everyday as a teenager because she wasn’t traditional, she was so brave, she brought a new vision for women’s life in Iran. Also important to me are poets Saeed Soheyli and Khayam Saady, though there is a long list of others.

ECB: The title of the show at Touchstone is ‘Persian Perspectives: Celebrating Iranian Women Artists of DC,’ what does Persian Perspectives’ mean to you? And do you feel you have a dual identity of being Iranian and a DC-dweller? 

SP: As an artist, I am trying to show that we as Persians can be free too, we can talk about our ideas and goals. D.C. is the most important political city in the world, so if you are a Persian artist and show your art here, attention goes to the situation in Iran. Being an artist in Iran is a very political action, many artists in the US cannot go back to Iran as they could be jailed. Still, I see a very beautiful prospect for Iranians. Throughout history we have always managed to keep our independent identity, culture and language so I think there is a bright future for us of union, peace and happiness.

Feel the Heat (Part 2): Climate Change Art in the HEAT July Member Show

By Alicia Perkovich, Gallery Assistant Intern & Heat Exhibition Specialist

In the last two Heat blog posts, we’ve introduced common ways to visualize heat— most recently its idyllic depiction in summer landscapes. But for today’s artists, heat may not be associated with leisure, but with dread. This post will show how Touchtone artists Patricia Williams and Gale Wallar visualize the heat of climate change. Additionally, we’ll show how these artists’ different styles exist alongside the broader movement of climate change art.

Patricia Williams Wildfire I

On display this month in the HEAT member show, Patricia Williams’ Wildfire I, Wildfire II, and Wildfire III are a watercolor triad inspired by the California wildfires. Wildfire I and Wildfire II appear as either abstractions zoomed in compositions of a raging fire, with billows of orange and yellow colors moving throughout the image, enveloping any resemblance of a typical natural landscape. In Wildfire III we see brown trees along a hill in the foreground, with an orange mass of fire creeping behind it, having already burnt nature in its path. The watercolor medium allows for the burgeoning shapes to appear just as volatile as wildfire, creating a range of colors that can visualize the chaos of both a raging fire and burning natural landscape. 

Patricia Williams Wildfire II

Speaking of her Wildfire series, Williams says she “was struck by the contrast of the beauty of the images with what I knew to be the terrible destruction and loss of life taking place. Are beauty and destruction always companions?” To Williams, climate disasters such as wildfires may be visually stunning, but in the end that beauty reminds her of tragedy— the tragedy of destruction, as well as the shame that humans should feel for their responsibility for that destruction. 

Patricia Williams Wildfire III

Williams’ small-scale landscapes, focused on the shapes and volatility that show the essence of a wildfire, draw inspiration from the American watercolor artist Donald Holden, whose works such as Yellowstone Fire XIX take on a similar subject matter, although Holden’s technique of starting with dark colors and gradually moving onto lights contrasts the brightness of Williams’ triptych.

Donald Holden Yellowstone Fire XIX

The sublimity of these watercolors— meaning the awe-inspiring beauty of something larger than human life, which can inspire great feelings of spirituality and transcendence, but also terror and fear— harkens back centuries to Romanticism artists, who, witnessing an expansion of human power over the environment, were inspired not by human achievement, but by natural resilience. 

Caspar David Friedrich The Sea of Ice

Romanticism was a European artistic movement that gained popularity in the early 19th century. At this time, the Enlightenment and its values of reason, order, and human power— as travel and imperialism were proliferating— were popular, and Romanticism proposed an alternative framework. Focusing on the movement’s views on nature, Romantic artists stressed the unpredictable and unyielding power of nature, despite the human hubris to conquer it. The Sea of Ice, by leading Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, visualizes this with the sharp, giant sheets of ice that swallow a shipwreck, showing the victory of nature over humans, as well as the hostility of nature. Yet despite all of this, the ice remains beautiful in its clear lines and dramatic shape— creating the sublime beauty that Romanticism treated nature with. 

While Williams’ Wildfires evoke the same power of nature, we might see this power as a swan song of nature’s powers, since recent wildfires have been the result of human activity. While these disasters may, for a moment, be sublime, they are bookmarked by human-generated climate change, which in the end may leave nature powerless.

Gale Wallar Aletsch Glacier, Switzerland

Gale Wallar’s acrylic painting Aletsch Glacier, Switzerland also reflects the negative impact of climate change’s heat, but in cold regions. The Aletsch Glacier is part of the Alps, located in Southern Switzerland. Fourteen miles long, this glacier has been melting at an alarming pace, adding to rising sea levels and threatening the livelihood of mountain communities and their economies. 

The bright, cloudless sky in Aletsch Glacier, Switzerland, along with the brown, iceless peaks and hollow valleys, are the details by which Wallar visualizes the melting glacier. With poignant realism, the painting seems photographic, and Wallar takes on a dual job of painter and photojournalism. 

Edward Burtynsky Anthropocene

This method of artists documenting climate change similar to journalists is common, and best seen in German photographer Andreas Gursky and Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. Gursky is known for his landscape photographs which capture large-scale settings. For example, his photograph Antarctic (2010) is a collection of satellite images which capture the entire continent. With its high quality, we can see the ice melting off in real time. Burtynsky, through his ongoing series Anthropocene, works at a similar scale and aesthetic, although his subject matter is how human industry harms the environment— in the end depicting “the landscape of human systems imposed in nature to harvest the things that we need." Philosopher Timothy Morton has described climate change as a “hyperobject,” something so big that, while we can see examples of it, we can’t observe or even understand its totality. This second method of documenting climate change, contrasting from the sublime, emotional work of Williams, as an attempt to approach the hyperobject of climate change. 

Andreas Gursky Antarctic (2010)

Lastly, in the genre of climate change art, site-specific exhibits and installations are popular as they literally ground art in vulnerable environments For example, the 2018 exhibition Indicators: Artists on Climate Change, in the Storm King Art Center in Hudson Valley, New York, hosted the climate-change art of 17 contemporary artists who created climate-related sculptures, installations, multimedia works, and earth-works. For example, Mary Mattingly planted tropical fruit trees from Florida in the art park to speak on how global rising temperatures may force a repurposing of environments to maintain current markets and lifestyles— such as harvesting coconuts in Upstate New York— and David Brooks made bronze castings that replicate natural objects in Storm King’s forest, acting as time capsules as climate change will continue to alter the landscape.

Mary Mattingly Along the Lines of Displacement: A Tropical Food Forest, 2018

Through two of our member artists and a brief survey of the climate change art movement, we’ve outlined three distinct ways that artists depict climate change, and how heat relates to all of their work. We hope that this blog post can be informative in how you look at your own changing landscape, and the role of contemporary art in documenting it. To view Patricia Williams’ Wildfire works and Gale Waller’s Aletsch Glacier, Switzerland, along with the other works by our artists, visit the HEAT member show, open  Wednesday-Sunday from 12:00PM-5:00 pm until July 31.

Feel the Heat (Part 1): Summer Scenes from Imperial China, Impressionists, and Touchstone Gallery Artists

By Alicia Perkovich, Gallery Assistant Intern & Heat Exhibition Specialist

In our last blog post, we provided an overview of numerous ways artists have depicted heat in art. Today, we’ll be focusing on perhaps the most common form of this theme—summer. 

18th and 19th century French artists showed the beauty of summer heat in their paintings. Known as Impressionists, because critics of the time felt that their work looked more like impressions than completed works, these artists created landscapes of their changing environments which favored natural light, as well as bold colors and brushstrokes. These artists were radical for their time as they didn’t paint inside a studio, but in nature. They were also radical for using short strokes of unblended color, as well as using vibrant palettes where color, rather than incorporating white and black, made up highlights and shadows. 

Claude Monet Haystacks

For example, in Claude Monet’s Haystacks series, where he painted the same haystacks at different seasons, times of day, and angles— to show how light can transform a singular subject— the vibrant yellows and oranges of End of Summer, Morning help us feel the sunlight’s warmth, while pale lilac tons in the background show the bounty of the season. Monet’s brushstrokes highlight the hay’s texture while providing a foundation for the light as well as shadows. 

Berthe Morisot Summer’s Day

Berthe Morisot’s Summer’s Day, on the other hand, shows how the French middle class can enjoy the leisure of summer. In a calm pond surrounded by trees and grass, two elegant, and assumedly wealthy, women are seated in a row boat, with the left-hand figure looking at ducks in the pond, and the central figure staring forward with an umbrella on her lap. While the subject appears tranquil, Morisot’s technique is quite dynamic, due to her zig-zag brushstrokes which showcase light reflecting from the water, as well as her color palette that takes advantage of new synthetic paints, such as cerulean blue and cadmium yellow.

Throughout the century, these artists would escape to the South of France during the summer— not only for a sea-side vacation but to experience a region for new, inspiring landscapes. While much of Impressionists work had been focused on how modernity has altered natural landscapes or attention to rural respited amidst urbanization, the French Riviera provided a new oasis of fishing towns, coastal landscapes, and saturated colors for artists to depict. Staple names of the Impressionist movement, such as Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, therefore sang the region’s artistic praises. As time went on, artists such as Henri Matisse— who took on a new movement known as Fauvism— made these travels to greater extents, finding remote coastal towns that led to vivacious, expressive paintings.

Left: James Francis Cropsey Summer Landscape; Right: Henri Matisse Seated Woman, Back Turned to the Open Window

Landscape painting was also formative to American artistic tradition. As America forcibly expanded westward under the ideology of Manifest Destiny, landscape paintings that depicted a vast, unspoiled wilderness romanticized the American landscape. This style was most official in the Hudson River Valley School, which consisted of a group of landscape painters centered in New York. Their paintings were grand in scale as well as subject, depicting panoramic natural landmarks with dramatic light, and features that expressed a renewal in American identity and spirit. James Francis Cropsey’s Summer Landscape, for example, shows a shaded riverbank with a couple— miniscule in the landscape’s scale— enjoying the leisure and harmony of undisrupted nature.

Georgia O’Keefe My Front Yard, Sumer 1941

While painter Georgia O'Keeffe is best known for her enlarged paintings of flowers, she also has numerous landscapes of the New Mexican Desert, an area that became her artistic focus and home in the later portion of her career. A constant throughout her work, O’Keeffe injects life into her subject with lush greens and warm peach tones, along with clearly defining the contours and elevation of the mountain.

Summer landscapes, however, aren’t confined to European or American art. By the Tang dynasty (619-908 AD), Chinese art championed the genre of landscape painting through ink on paper scrolls. Almost a century later, under the Ming dynasty, there were two prominent styles of landscape painting: the depiction of gardens and orderly landscapes which symbolized the order of the state, and literati painters such as Dong Qichang who depicted landscapes as a form of self-expression. 

Dong Qichang, Landscape and Calligraphy

Asian landscapes did, however, influence modern European artists. In a phenomenon known as “Japonisme,” artists such as Edgar Degas and Vincent Van Gogh took inspiration from Japanese landscape paintings brought to Europe upon the country’s reopening of trade in 1853; While not a landscape artist, Degas often used extreme horizontal compositions with asymmetrical compositions and noticeable negative space, while the strong lines and contrasting colors of Japanese woodcuts influenced Van Gogh’s depiction of his local landscapes.

Following this brief historical overview, let’s give attention to how artists at Touchstone have continued the tradition of idyllic summer depictions.

Elaine Florimonte The Opposite Side I

Elaine Florimonte The Opposite Side II

Elaine Florimonte’s duo of The Opposite Side I and The Opposite Side II follow this tradition. The acrylic collages depict opposite sides of the same river, using distinct strokes in white to visualize sunlight, and dark blues to evoke the reflection of surrounding trees on the water. This attention to natural light is central to Florimonte’s identity as an artist, per the artist statement on her website.

Rosemary Luckett Daydreaming in the Garden

Also of note from the July member show is Rosemary Luckett’s Daydreaming in the Garden— a collaged portrait of a figure staring off to their left side. The gaze appears peaceful, but perhaps not fully satisfied. With a flower in their hair, sheet music as the backing for the figure’s mouth, a jewelry chain lining the hair, an upcycled bottle cap for a necklace, Luckett’s work reads as whimsical, picturesque, and using elements of nature to provide a harmonious collage which reminds us of the leisures of summer.

Linda Bankerd White Cap

Lastly, Linda Bankerd’s White Cap and Marcia Coppel’s Just Say Cheese are both paintings which, similarly to French impressionists, depict the leisured actions of people in summer locations. Coppel’s painting shows a collection of people at the beach, confidently posed in swimsuits, with beach chairs and umbrellas. Bankerd’s painting focuses on one figure sitting and reading at the beach. While the effortless joy and relaxation is similar to Impressionist works we’ve discussed, our Touchstone artists still have a distinct style through their color choices. For example, Coppel’s use of blues and greens for skin color make her work appear more playful, finding unconventional ways to visualize the joy of summer activities. 

Marcia Coppel Just Say Cheese

In our upcoming blog post, we’ll discuss how climate change has altered the way contemporary artists view summer heat. To view any of our mentioned works visit the HEAT member show, open Wednesday through Sunday from 12:00 pm -5:00 pm until July 31.

Visualizing Heat Throughout History

By Alicia Perkovich, Gallery Assistant Intern & Heat Exhibition Specialist

Sharon Malley, Mindscape I, 2021

Sharon Malley created her piece for the July member show in December. The work, Mindscape I, is a collage of vibrant warm tones— where blooming floral shapes cover a background of lilac tones. Commenting on her work, Malley writes that it “was to be the underpainting for an abstract image in pastel colors, focused on winter weather. However, as I worked on it, I realized it was expressing my desire to ‘get on’ with winter, as I prefer warmer months.” And so, through her hot colors, Malley not only visualizes her desire for summer, but the heat of summer itself. 

In a collection of blog posts throughout this month, we’ll be guiding you through numerous manifestations of heat in art— from both our Touchstone member artists and the art historical cannon. This post will outline various ways artists have visualized heat, and how in historical and contemporary contexts heat can stand as an allegory for concerns of life and death. 

An allegorical representation of heat— meaning that heat is supposed to represent an immaterial idea, often with political, religious, or social significance— was common throughout the Renaissance. In the Northern Renaissance, which was centered in the 15th and 16th century Netherlandish region, depictions of summer bounties represented the benefits of hard work. We can see this best in Peter Breugel the Elder’s The Harvesters. This painting shows peasants laboring in various steps of the wheat harvest, as well as a group of people in the background enjoying the leisure that awaits the peasants after completing the harvest. Both a landscape of Netherlandish summer and an ethnographic depiction of peasant behaviors, Breugel is showing how heat is a time of bounty, but only after a period of hard work. Nature’s cycle of harvest comes to represent the human cycle of labor and leisure and that hard work must be obeyed in order to come to a period of relaxation.

Peter Breugel the Elder, The Harvesters, 1565

Artists of the same time also depicted heat in the fires of hell, as posthumous punishment for a life of sin and folly. Of the same time as Bruegel, painter Hieronymous Bosch often used heat as a religious allegory. Bosch used both common proverbs and biblical texts to criticize sinful actions, and warn of the damnation in Hell that awaits sinners. For example, in The Triptych of Saint Anthony, a fiery inferno becomes the setting to host demons and sinners which tempt the most holy saint into committing acts of sin. In The Haywain Triptych, a group of foolish people who live lives of sin are carried in a giant hay cart— representing the world’s superficial material goods— from the center panel into the right panel, which depicts a fiery Hell. 

Hieronymus Bosch, The Haywain Triptych, 1512-1515

In our show, member artists also have visualized heat in ways that evoke life and death, but from secular aspects. Placed next to each other, Maureen Squire’s Nebula Series XII, The Butterfly Nebula and Steve Wanna’s Myths of Creation - CE191111.1914 show us moments of space’s heat.  Wanna’s work is part of an ongoing series that relates the cosmic life cycle to the human inclination to origin myths. Based on space photography, Wanna splatters paint to capture the energy of a singular moment of creation. In space, a supernova explosion that inspires this work can reach temperatures of 1 billion degrees Celsius, while a nebula’s cloud of dust can peak at 10,000 degrees Celsius. Squire’s red nebula, ejecting itself against the black background, is ignited in its own heat, but we can see how its materials will dissipate into the cold universe (which averages at -455 Farenheit). While on its surface these three works may just depict moments of space activity, they all use heat as an entrypoint to discuss birth and death— whether it be secular myths of creation, the beauty in a star’s death, or looking back on an optimistic time of expansion that has gone. By visualizing heat, these artists also visualize key changes in life.

Steve Wanna, CE191111.1914, 2019

Continuing with our gallery, we can see the visualization of heat clearly in Amy Sabrin’s Reflections on the Shower Glass (or Self-Portrait with I-pad). This watercolor shows Sabrin in an orange shirt, taking a photo of herself from the glass door of a shower, with its handle and faucet visible. Atop the self-portrait are curved white lines on the shower’s glass, evoking heat waves in the condensation and steam resulting from a shower.

Left: Amy Sabin, Reflections on the Shower Glass (of Self-Portrait with iPad); Right: Maureen Squires, Nebula Series XII, The Butterfly Nebula, 2022

If you’re interested in a focus on surfaces, and the effect of heat and light on them, exploring the photorealism movement would be of interest. Photorealism, an American art movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s, characterizes oil paintings that attempt to replicate photographs. A meticulous process, photorealism treated subjects as a surface to replicate, painting things out of focus or blurry if they were photographed as so, but also honoring how light reflects off of surfaces, how heat may cause surfaces to distort. This is something we see clearly in Ralph Goings’ paintings of diners and other relics of the Americana lifestyle.

While heat itself doesn’t have a specific form or shape, we can see it through bright colors, manipulations of light, and explosions of action. Isolating the transitory sensation of heat allows artists to use the implications of that moment to relish in its temporary nature, and comment on ideas that are similarly fleeting. Look out for our upcoming blog posts to learn about other ways that artists depict heat!

Ralph Goings, Ralph’s Diner, 1981-1982

Sharon Malley Addresses Racial Inequality and Climate Change Then and Now

Despite growing up in the Jim Crow era, Malley was unaware of the racial divide between herself and her tenant farmer and migrant playmates. As an adult, she addresses racial inequality through compelling figurative paintings. As a child, she was immersed in nature on her grandparents’ farm. Today, she expresses her concerns for the environment through intriguing abstracts and advocating for climate change legislation.

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