Inner Light by Melinda Moore

Spring is in the air and the arts are alive and blooming at Midtown Palm Beach Gardens.  The Lighthouse ArtCenter Gallery at Midtown  offers its latest exhibition titled, “The Rite of Spring.” The show will feature new work from the ArtCenter’s Artists’ Guild and will focus on everybody’s favorite topic this time of year: Spring.

Loxahatchee River By Bruce Bain

Spring Thaw by Barbara Bailey

“Much of the work in the new show is traditional fare — essentially what you would expect from artists portraying spring,” says David Willison, an artist and coordinator for the gallery.  This includes the detailed floral work of Carrie Vaintrub, a Hobe Sound artist and photographer whose intimate floral close-up work will help anchor the show.

But there’s more. Viewers also will find a different take on the topic, including a darker, more foreboding view of the season as well as some abstract work that approaches spring from a more emotional point of view. As Willison notes, “Spring comes with tulips and tornadoes, and the season suggests a whole range of emotions and interpretations — not just pretty flowers.”

Spring Has Sprung by Carrie Vaintrub

Instant Cello Encaustic by David Willison

The show also offers a second theme: music.   “We wanted something a little deeper than just a spring show with flowers. So the artists chose to open things up a bit to include music. We settled on the title, ‘The Rite of Spring,’ because it combines spring with an allusion to the Igor Stravinsky composition,” he says.

Sculpture by Norman Gitzen

The Lighthouse ArtCenter Museum and School of Art is a member-supported not-for-profit 501(c)(3) community arts organization, providing excellence in art exhibitions, instruction, education and outreach for all ages. Programs are funded in part by the Palm Beach County Cultural Council, the Palm Beach County Tourist Development Council and the Palm Beach County Board of County Commissioners.

For more information on the Lighthouse ArtCenter Museum, School of Art, exhibitions, programs and events, visit www.LighthouseArts.org or call (561) 746-3101.

The Lighthouse ArtCenter is located in Gallery Square North, 373 Tequesta Drive, Tequesta, Fla., one-half mile west of U.S. Highway 1. Museum hours are Monday through Friday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. with admission free for members and $5 for non-members ages 12 and up. Saturday hours are 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., with free admission. The Lighthouse ArtCenter Gallery at Midtown is located at 4759 PGA Blvd. in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. Gallery hours are Thursday through Saturday, noon to 8 p.m. and Sunday, noon to 4 p.m.

For coverage of your events, to place an advertisement, or speak to Rickie about appearing in The Rickie Report, contact The Rickie Report at:

Rickie Leiter, Publisher

The Rickie Report

P.O.Box 33423

Palm Beach Gardens, FL 33420

Rickie@therickiereport.com

561-537-0291

The 22nd Annual Downtown Stuart Art Festival will take place  on Saturday and Sunday, February 25 & 26th from 10:00 am – 5:00 pm each day.  This Howard Alan Event takes over Osceola Street in Downtown Stuart and promises a wonderful show filled with paintings, life size sculptures, photography, ceramics, glass, wood, handmade jewelry, collage and mixed media artwork.  The artists and artisans will be there representing their own work, so it is a perfect time to meet and speak with the people who create the work!

A portion of the proceeds from the art festival will benefit the Stuart Main Street programs.                 

This juried gallery style outdoor art showcase will go through downtown Stuart starting at Osceola and St. Lucie, down to Haney Circle and continues on Osceola to Denver Street and down to Detroit Street.   It promises original art – Handmade in America by 250 artists from 30 different states.  There are prices to suit all budgets – ranging from as little as $25 to $30,000.

One of the artists, jeweler, Shano Kelly, has a studio in Boulder CO as well as in FL.   He tells us, “My journey as an artist/jeweler started in 1973.  I left West Virginia and headed for California.  Spent a year living and exploring Berkeley and San Francisco, then come winter, found myself heading south along with a few new friends to Tucson.”

Shano’s Earring Display

Shano has a design studio in Boulder, Colorado as well as Florida. He continues to create in precious metal and stones doing shows throughout the country as well as galleries and private benefit showings. Over the years I have passed my craft onto quite a few folks, a few who still create a livelihood from their work. Quite a few apprentices have come and gone over the years and one exceptional one is still around, Tonya Goodwin.

As Shano tells us, “I didn’t start out to be a jeweler, it’s been a life experience that found me”.   We hope you will  go to the 22nd Annual Stuart Art Festival and find Shano!  For more information:  www.artfestival.com  or 561-746-6615.

For coverage of your events, listing of announcements in our events section, to place an advertisement, or speak to Rickie about appearing in The Rickie Report, contact The Rickie Report at:

Rickie Leiter, Publisher

The Rickie Report

P.O.Box 33423

Palm Beach Gardens, FL 33420

Rickie@therickiereport.com

561-537-0291

LONDON’S NEW STARS: CHRISTOPHER WALKER ART ANNOUNCES ARTISTS FOR FIRST US SHOW – ART PALM BEACH (Jan 19th-23^rd).Christopher Walker Art’s dedication to “discovering tomorrow’s stars” across all media is demonstrated by this selection, with the choice of three young photographers, and four painters. They will be shown at the Palm Beach Convention Center from January 19th.

Selection of Painters

Leading the painters selected to exhibit is Isao Miura. Miura is a Japanese painter and sculptor based in London. He trained in Japan, then at the Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. He paints with oil colors and inks, on canvas and tatami (Japanese reed mats). His sculptures are mainly in wood and stone and other natural materials. He also makes installations using a variety of found or crafted objects, such as moss, rocks and Japanese tea ceremony utensils. Mick Goggin, Arts Service, Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea comments “…MIURA’s work reflects his Japanese background, with its emphasis on balance and harmony, and somehow recovers the Japanese influences that have suffused the work of European artists”

Lady By Ingrid Lucas

Ingrid Lucas’s work is highly intelligent, looking at hidden agendas and gender manipulation. Her paintings use color and size to seduce the viewer into another world of time gone by. Oil paint is applied thinly and evenly over a large canvas, with naively depicted figures mimicking magazines or children’s picture books. A prominent feature of her work is the choice of primary colors selected from her predilection for the 1950s magazines’ printing methods.

She deals with events and images that have had political impact in an attempt to remind us of lessons learnt and forgotten. Ingrid herself comments –“The ambiguity of time and space within my paintings creates confusion…….a juxtaposition of the visible becoming invisible, the seen becoming unseen and forgotten.”

Matt Webber’s abstract paintings are built up, layer by layer, over a period of many months. The artist begins each work by drawing an element from a landscape image. Although this aspect will be largely obscured, it forms the structure for the piece, and creates the opening ‘move’ in the painting’s development. The artist describes the process of making these works as being like a game or a conversation, with each layer subtly influencing the outcome of the next. Sometimes this happens on a purely aesthetic level, but at other times the effect is a chemical one, as almost-dry paint reacts to the application of a new layer of oil paint, creating unplanned textures and forms.” At a certain point in the painting’s development”, Matt notes “when I feel that all the parts are in place, I begin to strip the layers away, carving and scraping the finished painting from a dense slab of accumulated paint. Every layer that has been applied gradually re-emerges; every mark that has been made on the surface during the painting’s construction will have a part to play in the final image.”
Matt sees his paintings as landscapes in their own right. Rather than being overt representations of a specific place, they become a new, often alien environment; one that is created by a process of obscurement and destruction, a process that the artist sees as being analogous with our wider environment. He studied fine art in the North of England but now works out of a studio in London’s East End.

Jazmin Jane is the youngest of Christopher Walker’s painters, but also one of the most talented. She grew up in the East of England and studied fine art at Canterbury University. She concentrates on the physical and emotional aspects of a subject, using color and texture on the canvas’s surface to demonstrate character in portraiture. Jazmin says “I make vivid observations. The hard jaw lines which showcases a person’s strong will; a past story or memory that can be read from the lines in someone’s expression.” This will be the first exhibition of her work.

Photographers Selection

Nudibranch1 by Nicky Taylor

New star, Nicky Taylor, is fast establishing a reputation as one of the UK’s leading landscape photographers. Although he has lived most of his life overseas in South America, Canada, Europe, Australia and the Caribbean. His extensive landscape, seascape and underwater photography reflects this global perspective, and he has been well received in the fringe scenes of London and Sydney. He has been published in various national and international newspapers and magazines, including “El Pais” and “La Provincia” in Madrid, and “Tangent Fashion” in Sydney. He currently splits his time between the United States and London, where a major exhibition is planned at the Strand Gallery in 2012.

Nicky Taylor commented – “I see my work as part of the ‘return to beauty’ that has gripped the new wave of young photographers in London. My work seeks it’s inspiration in Nature’s destructive, and yet creative, forces – shaping the world as we see it, and dwarfing man’s mark.” Eleven of Nicky’s works will be shown, three of his underwater photographs, such as “Nudibranch 1” above, and eight landscape photographs including “Oddacity” below. Nicky will also be exhibiting in New York later in the year.

Grace Vane Percy’s series of female nudes in classical settings reflect a strong creative flair, and artistic sensibility. The glorious, stately, backdrops celebrate English Palladian architecture at its finest. Grace Vane Percy’s approach is resolutely artistic, reflecting her training at the Charles Cecil studios in Florence as a classical artist working mainly in charcoal. This has also influenced her comprehension of anatomy, and the strong sense of chiaroscuro which is visible in her current work. Grace herself grew up in an English country house in Cambridgeshire. Her love of photography started from an early age when she discovered her father’s collection of Victorian glass plate negatives. She studied history of Art at the Courtauld Institute and Fashion photography and darkroom techniques at Central St. Martins. She has been commissioned to photograph some of the most elite and successful women in London and New York. She recently photographed new mother, and wife of Orlando Bloom,Miranda Kerr, and has been invited to join the ‘Women in Photography’ Archive at Yale.

Tim Lord works from a garret studio in London’s Soho which overlooks the city’s roof tops.  Soho is the center of London’s creative community – including advertising, theatre and film.   It is also historically the center of its sex and entertainment industries, and acts as a refuge for its outsiders and misfits.  His street work reflects that quarter’s multiple roles, and the sometimes grim and gritty backdrop in which creativity flourishes.  His portraits range across the varied characters and mavericks of Soho, captured in traditional black and white medium format film photography.

561 568 8445   or  info@christoferwalkerart.com

For coverage of your events, listing of announcements in our events section, to place an advertisement, or speak to Rickie about appearing in The Rickie Report, contact The Rickie Report at:

Rickie Leiter, Publisher

The Rickie Report

P.O.Box 33423

Palm Beach Gardens, FL 33420

Rickie@therickiereport.com

561-537-0291

The Rickie Report interviewed Edna Hibel in the midst of  her numerous 95th birthday celebrations.  How many of us know  an artist who has made her living solely by selling her artwork?

Along with our staff, we shared the experience with Georgie Duber, a close friend  and Michael Metzner, an FAU Honors College student who is collaborating with Edna on a new piece of artwork.  Michael Metzner is a Palm Beach County resident and student at the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College at FAU. He is a double major in Biochemistry and Visual Art and currently an Executive Producer for a Short Film, “The Restaurant Job”.   The Rickie Report will share more about Michael’s photography in a future post.  For more information about his film work go to:  http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nicholasreichard/the-restaurant-job

Edna’s Studio

TRR: When you enter Edna’s home, you are surrounded by large canvases piled up against the walls, boxes, statues, furniture and an atmosphere that exudes history wherever you look.  Edna’s warmth and enthusiasm when visitors arrive is palpable.  Oriental carpets of all sizes cover the floors and once we were settled in chairs for this interview, I noticed that on almost every surface of the multiple tables in the room were piles of her sketches, finished drawings and small lithographs.  Some will be framed and available for sale at the Hibel Museum on January 14-15th.

EH: Edna begins our visit by thanking Georgie for her latest batch of home made mandel bread.  Edna points out that she herself never cooked, not even when raising her family.  She told us that “nobody ever let me, not even my mother.  They told me I would have more precious time to spend on my painting!”

TRR: It is an honor to be here with you, Edna and exciting to see all of your paintings that are here.

EH:  Oh, the honor is mine.  I don’t have very many paintings left here, because I gave them all to the (Hibel) Musuem and my kids.  The ones in the studio belong to the Museum and I am fixing the frames.  “While I’m around, I like to take care of them” she explains.

TRR:  It is easy to look around your home and see where you get your inspiration.

EH:  “Oh, I have that all the time, it isn’t a problem finding the inspiration.  If I look at you, I can see ten different paintings just starting from you”.

TRR:  How do you deal with all the images you have in your mind?

EH: I didn’t know enough to be frustrated.  I was simple in my thinking and was lucky because I had fantastic teachers just at the age I needed them, starting at about 12.  I think that because I was so lucky and enjoyed every minute of them, I never got frustrated with anything.

TRR:  Are your children artistsic?

EH:  You know, when they are little, they all are!  Every little kid is an artist.  I didn’t push my children into art because I felt I had no right to.  I may have made a mistake.  I did take them to museums but I didn’t encourage them to be artists.  Early on I got a report from the University of Chicago on how many artists actually made their living from their art.  Less than 2% make their living from their art.  I’m not talking about teaching or art-related jobs but  just producing art.  Then I got nervous over that!  How  could I be one of the less than 2%?  I have been lucky in that respect.

TRR:  Tell us how you started selling your art work.

EH:  My wonderful father died and my mother lost her will to live.  We tried to get her interested in doing anything, with no results.  In the meantime, a woman who had met me offered us a store in Rockport, MA which is an artists’ colony.  The store had been a grocery store, so there was nothing we could use.  We borrowed some walls to make divisions and hang my paintings.

My mother had never been in business but we still asked her to help.  Her first assignment was to have a sign made.  And we asked her to help us fix it up, which she happened to be good at.   We didn’t want to scare her, so we told her to just be a “charming hostess”.   I told her “Ma, I’ve never had a real exhibit in a gallery and here we’ll have a gallery!  It turned out that she was good at everything!”  I was 30 and had sold things but had never made much of an effort before.   This was a chance to see how I could do.

TRR:  Opening a gallery involves more than just the space itself.  How did you  proceed?

EH:  We didn’t know anything about pricing.  I had sold a painting to the Boston Museum for $60.  The Director sent me a note saying I should come and talk to him because my price was ridiculous because it was so low.  The trustees had a good laugh over that!   So when we opened the gallery, the prices started at $25 and went to $100.  These were original, one-of-a-kind paintings that were framed!  I think the frames cost us more.  But we were in business!

TRR: This was a real turning point for you.

EH:  Tod Plotkin, my husband, said “We have this great talent and it deserves the best effort we can give it right now.  The important thing is to give you time to paint.  I’m going to do all the chores that you were doing.  I’ll take care of the children, shop, and do whatever you were doing.  So at least you can have  eight hours without stopping to be able to paint.”  Enda smiles and says, “that was about the best present I could have ever had”.

So, my mother helped run the gallery and my husband was taking care of everything and I was painting.  I was so happy!  I never got tired of painting.  I may have stopped to eat something or go for a swim, but I never needed a break.

TRR:  You were granted artistic freedom and Tod was a stay-at-home father.  You were a family ahead of your time!

EH:  One of our children was already in college and we still had two boys at home.  They were ecstatic to have their father around all the time. It was a novelty!

We had discovered that whatever I painted sold right away.  So, if I could paint more, we would  be doing fine.  And we did real fine because I could concentrate on my work.  Until recently  I worked seven days a week from 5:00 am – 5:00 pm.    I miss it but I shouldn’t say anything because I have enjoyed many wonderful years.

TRR:  You still think about paintings you could be doing?

EH: ”I look at the world in paintings.  I cannot help it.  Wherever I look, I see paintings”.

TRR:  What advice would you give to an artist just starting out?

EH:   It depends on them.  Everybody is so differnt.  Some people need to study with someone.  Other people just need to work by themselves.  When I would go to speak to groups, often people would approach me for advice  on how to help their child or their sister or their friend who was painting.  The only advice I ever gave to anybody was to “frame something”.   It doesn’t have to be art, it could be something they wrote.   “I lucked out on that one.  People would tell me that the shyest child will suddenly greet you at the door urging you to come see their framed work”.

TRR:  That is very sage advice.  It improves their self esteem and confidence, no matter if it is a child or an adult.

EH:  When you give advice you need to be very careful.  “I don’t know what you could say that is general that might not hurt somebody.  I hesitate about giving the wrong advice.  I don’t think an art teacher should work on a student’s piece of art.”

“When I did a little teaching, I found the best thing I could do was to focus on something that is good in the student’s piece, even if it is only a line from here to here.  I try to go on the positive.  I don’t know how I was taught…I don’t remember”

TRR: How did you start creating art?

EH:  I discovered art through pencil drawing when I was nine. I was happy using a pencil.  I didn’t know about other materials.  By the time I was 12, I was doing portraits using oils and learning about color mixing.

TRR:  What medium are you comfortable with?

EH:  I made my own egg tempra.  Later I found it was easier to use acrylics as underpainting to get the effects I wanted, with an oil overlay.  I studied all about the materials that were used by the old masters.  “I seemed to be lucky to be ready for whatever I was studying at the time.  I always felt so lucky to have that teacher at that specific time.”

TRR:  Do you feel your work connects you to something spiritual?

EH:  ” I don’t really know what that means, though I am told that my paintings are spiritual.”

TRR: We’re talking about being able to portray a life force beyond the merely physical aspect of what you are painting or seeing.  Many people feel that your faces capture some of that spirituality.

EH:  “Can I capture spirituality without knowing I do it?   Everybody gets told they are this or that and I get told these things.   I am delighted to hear them, but I don’t feel they belong to me.  But it’s nice.”

TRR:  You are very humble, Edna.

EH:  “I am not humble. I am realistic!” She chuckles, ” I love what I do and I don’t feel that it is special or I am more special than anyone else who spends their life doing it.”

TRR: How much do you attribute your success to natural ability and how much to being taught?

EH:  I was rather old when I started.  A teacher asked me if I wanted to something else besides arithmetic.  That’s when I discovered ,”well that’s interesting!”   The first piece I did was a water color but I never did any after that until I got some of my own watercolors.  “Then I went watercolor crazy”!   I started at age nine at home.  I did the drawings on my own. I had no one to tell me anything at that time.  I had a pencil and was thrilled with that.  It was enough for me.”

TRR: How did you develop your style?

EH: I never thought much about style.  I’ve never really thought about painting in a style except when I studied the earlier Rennaissance artists.  Then I would paint something and try to keep in that same style.

TRR: When you produced art for the various plate series, did you feel you had to remain in the same style to maintain the integrity of the series?

EH:  Actually, the material influenced my style.   That fact that my painting was going to end up in porcelain made me consider what I did.  It is not easy to replicate all of the colors in a watercolor or oil pallet into porcelain.

“The first time I was asked to do a plate was by Royal Daulton.  They had seen one of my lithographs and called to ask if I would be interested in doing a plate.  I must have sounded like a nut!  I told them I didn’t know anything about dishes!”   So we went to Jordan Marsh, a Boston Department Store,  to see what collectors’ plates were like.

Once I saw the plates, I became excited and said “Oh, what a lovely technique.  I would like to do that on a plate”.   I worked hard to get the right transparency on the plates.  I was thrilled with the way the plates turned out, but there were always things I could have done differently.  Maybe I could have experimented more with porcelain.

I liked working with a man from Rosenthal China because he never said “no” to me when I wanted to try something new.   He knew Rosenthal would make a lot of money on my plates.  I suddenly decided that I wanted to do lithographs on porcelain and no one had done it before.  He made a fortune!

Of course, for every plate that came out, they had to destroy 6 that were not acceptable in quality.  So, it cost a fortune to make, too.  At the time, making a porcelain plate from one of my paintings was painstaking work.  They had to separate all of the various colors as well as each hue and put it on the plate separately because every color is solid. To get from light blue to dark blue you might have to do fifty different values to get the right blue from the beginning to the end.  Giclees take advantage of a similar process.

TRR:  Did you have to approve of every plate?

EH:  Oh, yes.  “I’m a fuss budget” , she chuckled, ” I want it to be the best I can do or else not do it.”

TRR:  When we first met, you shared a story about one of the Popes wanting to meet you after seeing your artwork.

EH:  The Pope had seen reproductions of some of my paintings and wanted to meet me.  He said anybody who caught the human spirit the way I did deserves a medal.  He sent me a medal and a lovely letter.   I never got to meet him because I didn’t want to take the time away from my painting to go!  It was probably foolish but there were a lot of people I would have liked to have met.

TRR:  Tell our readers who you would have liked to meet.

EH:  I would have loved to have met Einstein.  I would have just listened to anything he wanted to talk about.  Einstein’s work is art, in its own way.  He wrote in a different language.

TRR:  We move into Edna’s studio and see what she is working on with Michael.  As we walk through the connecting rooms, we see some of the many books written about Edna’s art, a few stones she has started for lithographs, paintings on easels, her limited edition plates, and more sketches.  Some of her antiques were acquired by bartering for her paintings.

Michael, Edna, and Rickie

Edna and Michael have been working on the collaborative piece for over a year.  After being recognized for his artistic talent at Arti Gras three years ago,  Michael had an exhibition of his photographs at the Hibel Museum.  Michael has taken over 30 photographs of Edna’s work along with an original photograph of Michael’s.  Together, they sat down and digitally placed all of the pieces together and made them into one piece that has been gicleed on canvas.

Edna and Michael’s work in progress

EH:  We’ve learned a few things in this process.  For example, the head from my art and the head from Michael’s picture were not in proportion, so we needed to fix that.  Now we are focusing on the tones.  The skin tones don’t have to match, but need to live with each other.  And the hair on Michael’s photograph is too dark.

MM:  Edna has gone back and painted over some areas and highlighted others with gold leaf.  It is still a work in progress.  To get the skin tones closer, Edna applied a wash.  We’ll use some other glazes to tone things down.  We’re trying to maintain a happy medium but we don’t want to lose the contrast and photographic quality.

TRR:  We see paint, turpentine, brushes, pastels.  What is your preference?

EH:  Anything that will work and get the effect I see in my mind is what I will work with.

TRR:  We urge our readers, their friends, family, and neighbors, to go to the Hibel Museum located on the campus of FAU in Jupiter. On January 8 from 1-4PM there will be a celebration of Edna’s Birthday with a performance by Jazz Pianist Copeland Davis. Admission to this event is free. 

There will be a special art festival, where Edna’s work will be for sale (including some of the pieces we saw during our interview) on Janaury 14-15.   There will be special pricing in honor of Edna’s 95th birthday!   Hours are Noon – 4:00 pm.

The Cherry Blossom Ball takes place February 17th from 6:00- 9:00 pm.  $75 includes dinner and dancing.  This is a fundraiser for the museum and also helps fund the Edna Hibel Summer Art Camp Grant to underprivilidged children. 

For more information: 561-622-5560 or HibelMuseumofArt@gmail.com

For coverage of your events, listing of announcements in our events section, to place an advertisement, or speak to Rickie about appearing in The Rickie Report, contact The Rickie Report at:

Rickie Leiter, Publisher

The Rickie Report

P.O.Box 33423

Palm Beach Gardens, FL 33420

Rickie@therickiereport.com

561-537-0291