Portraits of St. Louis Artists: Jane Martin

.
I'm in Chicago on business so that's the reason for few comments on your blogs today. I'm actually working. Please believe me.

This is Jane Martin (click the link to see more of her work), one of the artists at the Soulard Art Market cooperative, where I've shown some photos. Martin had some of her paintings on display at Tomatofest. That's where this was taken. She was in a little covered tent thing on a bright day and the light was gorgeous (with the help of some fill flash). And what happy blue eyes. That's the joy of street portraiture.

Portraits of St. Louis Artists: J. C. Gray

.
J. C. Gray was one of the most interesting people I met during studios open house weekend. Her approach is simple, sincere and lovely: she paints what she sees and feels. She doesn't have a website. She's not on Facebook. She has no need of e-mail (she said I could send us to her daughter if I wanted to). I was almost overcome with the charm of the painting she was beginning. Gray told me that it represented how she felt when she was at her happiest as a child.

Flickr says that this is my most interesting photo of all time, and there are 1,906 of them there as of today. The results you get at this link may change. Flickr has an arcane, semi-secret algorithm for determining "interestingness." It has something to do with how many views your picture gets, who views it, groups you upload to, tags and more. Every day, they determine what they call the 500 most interesting uploads. You can see August, 2009, to date here, for example. My work has never made the list, although sometimes I look at it and think "my picture is way better than this &$#!*&%@ picture." I almost never add tags. Maybe I should start doing that. Anybody have any insights about this?

By the way, if you look through my somebody-else-said-so most interesting pictures, all the ones from Nepal were shot by my wife in February-March, 2008. I'll get my own next month.

By the by the way, it's impossible to select your own most interesting photo; it's all so subjective. However, if I had to choose one I'd pick this.

There is a new Arch photo

today on GATEWAY.

Portraits of St. Louis Artists: Angela Malchionno

.
Angela Malchionno makes the most subtle works on and from paper, fabric and other unexpected materials. They are complex. Her statement on her web site says:

My current body of work explores the developed and undeveloped landscape as a metaphor for shifting personal identitiy. I am concerned with increasingly routinized interactions between people and what architect Sanford Kwinter describes as a neo-fordist world in which the unpredictable forces of human nature are boxed up, walled off and disregarded.

I must confess that I had never heard the term fordist, neo or otherwise, until I read this text. So I looked it up - see here. In any event, her web site has many illustrations of her work. The objects in the foreground of the photo are similar to these. They are made of bits of paint color sample cards, each pinned to a core. One can look at them for a long time.

Portraits of St. Louis Artists: Paul Young

.
I shoot everything in color. If I want to go to black and white, I use a B&W adjustment layer in Photoshop. My first edit of this picture was in color (you can see it here). However, the more I thought about it, Paul Young and his work have such seriousness of purpose that monochrome might be more appropriate.

Young makes exquisitely detailed reproductions of old rural buildings. These are not just models; they carry the spirit of a place. A photograph cannot do justice to the craftsmanship and, I think, love involved in making them. Some of the work is so fine he has to use dental tools. You just have to see it for yourself.

TOMORROW: Thursday Arch Series

Portraits of St. Louis Artists: Jennifer Hayes

.
Jennifer Hayes' painting is confrontational. Large scale, in-your face color, heavy texture; female figures never showing the face, semi-nude, clad only in minimal underwear. She's had some real success in the art market. SLeeK, the high-end steak house in the Lumiere Place casino complex, decorated the walls with her pictures. So, it's not without reason that she looks self-confident. You can see more of hew work on her web site.

Portraits of St. Louis Artists: Jay Babcock

.
Jay Babcock makes art that has something to say. The installation on the wall is in the shape of our state, made up of losing Missouri Lottery tickets. We talked about what this might communicate. Who buys lottery tickets, and why? A cynic once described lotteries as a tax on the stupid but it's much more complex than that. Lottery tickets buy big dreams for little money - unless you get hooked on them. You might purchase them if you have debts, little money and a lot of dissatisfaction. It is sometimes said that the chances of winning a lottery in the U.S. are less than those of being hit my lightning. Babcock asks us to contemplate this.

There is a new Arch photo

today on GATEWAY.

Portraits of St. Louis Artists: Paula Lincoln

.
Paula Lincoln produced some of the most unusual art I saw at Open Studios Weekend. A large white wall was covered with cut-out silhouettes, mostly black but with wood tones in the foliage at the bottom. A crow flies away from a larger-than-life man wearing a top hat. Plants cover the ground; Lincoln pointed out to me that one was foxglove. I think the plant at the left is a thistle. Like a Rorschach test, the meaning is left to the viewer's imagination. The piece reminds me of the work of Kara Walker.

TOMORROW: a musical interlude in the artists' portrait series.

Portraits of St. Louis Artists: Thomas Shepherd

.Like Danielle Correll, I know Thomas Shepherd from Soulard Art Market. This is Shepherd's third appearance on STL DPB, which may be a record (see the previous posts here and here). He is working on a web site but there is an interesting display of his work on the SAM site. Shepherd is primarily a photographer but some of his creations involve sculpture and collage. I have one of his photos in my office, a square-cropped picture of the head of a man with wild hair and beard, gazing up and out of the frame, shot with a Holga. It's really cool. Not familiar with Holgas? Have a look here.

Portraits of St. Louis Artists: Danielle Correll

.

I've known Danielle Correll from the Soulard Art Market, the only gallery where I've shown my stuff. She works in many media but I had no idea how many and how successfully until I checked her web site. She paints, draws, photographs and does a variety of graphics. If you are in St. Louis, you should go bt SAM and check it out.

I'm particularly happy with this portrait for the light, color range and sense of a competent, confident woman.

TOMORROW: Thursday Arch Series, then a return to artists' portraits on Friday.

Portraits of St. Louis Artists: Scott Ernst

.
The summer St. Louis artists series continues with Scott Ernst, who comes here from Oakland, California. His work that I saw included scenes of both the Bay Area and St. Louis, photos that were not so much site-specific as the impressions of a moment. The long composite in the right of this picture shows details of a weathered statue. Three detailed observations say more than a glance at the whole.

Portraits Of St. Louis Artists: Sandra Marchewa

.
Whimsy. Sandra Marchewa stands in a little cloud of her own making, buzzing with bug-like elves, mini-monsters and flying pigs. I can imagine a huge array of these critters hanging from a ceiling for a viewer's disorientation, drifting from peripheral vision to central focus and out again. You might need some Dramamine.

SPECIAL NOTE TO THATONEGIRL: thank you for your notes and comments in Flickr yesterday. I wrote you back at the address you gave me but the message bounced - Yahoo said there wasn't a user by that name. Can you email me directly? There is a link to do that on my blog profile.

There is a new Arch photo
today on GATEWAY.

Portraits of St. Louis Artists: Amanda Verbeck

.
I spent Saturday afternoon beginning my tour of the St. Louis artists open studio weekend. First up in this year's series of portraits of St. Louis artists is Amanda Verbeck. Her irresistible smile swept her into the lead off spot but her work will keep your attention. She makes works on paper based on things like grains of pollen (lower right in this picture) . Sometimes part of her process is to leave objects on photosensitive plates, resulting in a printable negative on metal. It's a little like the photograms made by Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy decades ago, but much more graphically sophisticated. Her web site is Pele Prints and you can find her on Facebook.