Dan Wingren: "Cataract," 1961

Dan Wingren

Dan Wingren

Ruth Asawa

Ruth Aiko Asawa 

Ruth Aiko Asawa 

Ruth Aiko Asawa 

Ruth Aiko Asawa 

Ruth Aiko Asawa 

Activist, sculptor, and educator Ruth Aiko Asawa was born in 1926 in Norwalk, California to Japanese immigrant parents who made a living as farmers. As a child, Asawa dreamed of being an artist while she helped out on the family farm. 

In 1942, she was separated from her father when he was arrested in February under emergency legislation that authorized the detention of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. Four months later, the rest of the family was taken to the internment camp at Santa Anita Race Track, where they were housed in former horse stalls for five months, before being moved to another internment camp, in Rohwer, Arkansas. 

Among the many people detained at Santa Anita were two cartoonists from Disney Studios who held daily art lessons for the children. Despite the trauma of internment, Asawa was able to draw for hours every day. When she was moved to Arkansas, she became the art editor of the camp’s high school yearbook.

In 1943, Asawa obtained permission to attend college. With funds from a Quaker scholarship, she enrolled at Milwaukee State Teachers College in Wisconsin with the intent of becoming an art teacher. However, she was unable to complete her degree because prejudice against Japanese Americans prevented her from getting the classroom teaching hours that were required. 

In 1946, Asawa transferred to Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where she studied with Buckminster Fuller and Josef Albers. While she was at Black Mountain, she took a trip to Mexico in 1947. While there, she attended a workshop on how to create baskets by crocheting wire and was inspired by this folk method of basket making.

After graduating from Black Mountain in 1949, Asawa moved to San Francisco, where she settled permanently. She began experimenting with wire crocheting techniques, creating sculptures that, “turned inside into outside and . . . made no distinction between interior and exterior so that a free flow of form and space was produced.” 

These intricate works began to earn her recognition in the 1950s with her first solo exhibition taking place in 1956 at Peridot Gallery in New York City. Afterwards, her work was included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in 1958 and 1959 respectively. 

In addition to her crocheted works, in 1962, Asawa made a series of large wall-mounted sculptures inspired by the internal structure of a desert plant. Initially, she had tried to sketch the plant but unsatisfied with the results, she decided to “draw” it in wire instead. The results were beautifully intricate multiple forms that, while made from metal, were delicate, organic shapes. With light and shadow play these metal wire sculptures seem to exist in two worlds, both corporeal and ethereal.

Robert Motherwell and T. S. Eliot

Robert Motherwell

T. S. Eliot

Robert Motherwell

Timing: James Surls at SMU

James Surls 

James Surls 

James Surls 

James Surls 

James Surls 

James Surls 

Timing is everything. The great Texas sculptor and teacher James Surls only taught at SMU from 1970-1975. That's 10 regular semesters (not counting any special Summer sessions). 

I had him for an introductory studio art "foundation" course, "Materials and Concepts (3-D)," in 1974 or 1975. Around this same time Surls had an artistic "breakthrough" and created many of his seminal wood pieces. The works from this era still rank among my favorites. 

I had the best -- instruction from this visionary artist -- right off the bat. It was lucky timing, plain and simple. "Must be present to win."

The Frank Lloyd Wright Collection of Surimono

Surimono

Surimono

Surimono

Surimono

Surimono ("printed things') constitute one of the most delicate genres in Japanese printmaking. This genre fascinates because it combines poetry and image and because it presents a pictorial puzzle, which provides the viewer with a particular insight into the intellectual and literary world of late 18th- and early 19th-century Edo (today's Tokyo). 

Major artists such as Katsushika Hokusai, Utagawa Kunisada, Totoya Hokkei, and Yashima Gakutei, to name but a few, provided imagery to accompany the poetic exploits of poetry club members. 

The prints were circulated among networks of poets and friends and, in contrast to other prints of the period, were not produced for commercial gain.

Intricate still lifes, historical and mythical heroes, actors on the stage, and tranquil landscapes form a visual partnership with the witty poems (kyōka). The beauty of these prints is enhanced by the astonishing printing quality, including the use of metallic pigments and blindprinting.

Eliot O'Hara: Watercolors

"I might be able to tell what I know about composition or color, but in more senses than one it would not do the student much good. If, however, I can teach him how to do the mechanical part of producing a watercolor, such as tinting a paper, blending colors, or performing the various other operations or tricks of the trade -- then if he has anything to express, his hand will be ready. In other words, I shall try to give him the spelling and grammar -- he must have the ideas." -- Eliot O'Hara

During his lifetime, Eliot O'Hara (1890-1969) was one of America's most widely respected watercolorists and teachers. In addition to an extensive exhibition record, O'Hara wrote eight books, produced more than twenty films on watercolor technique, and taught classes all over the country. From 1930-1947, he ran the successful O'Hara Watercolor School at Goose Rocks Beach in Kennebunkport, Maine, the first such school in the United States. (The school burned down in the great 1947 fire that destroyed over 200,000 acres in Maine, and was never reopened).

O'Hara was born in Waltham, Massachusetts, where his father owned a successful manufacturing company. With the sudden death of his father in 1912, the twenty-two year old O'Hara took control of the business, assuming responsibility for his mother and three younger siblings. In the early 1920s, O'Hara began to paint as a form of relaxation. Soon, however, he spent more and more time developing his painting skills. When he married in 1924, he and his wife honeymooned for several months in Europe where he produced nearly three hundred paintings. That same year, some of those European-inspired watercolors were accepted into the Philadelphia Watercolor Club Annual Exhibition. The following year, his first solo exhibition in Boston sold out. By 1927, O'Hara was a successful artist and could devote all his time to painting. He would go on to receive many honors during his long career, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a life membership in the American Watercolor Society, and was one of the first watercolorists elected to the National Academy of Design.

Painting on-site, O'Hara worked without an easel, sitting or kneeling directly over his watercolor paper (usually 15 x 22 inches), with his paints and brushes to one side. With almost no formal training, O'Hara taught himself to paint and created his own personal style. Hoping to provide other beginning watercolor students with the painting techniques that he was forced to develop on his own, O'Hara wrote his first book on the subject in 1932. "Making Watercolors Behave" was the first of eight how-to-books to follow. In 1936, he made his first watercolor demonstration film, eventually producing twenty-four color films commissioned by the Encyclopedia Britannica Company.

O'Hara's watercolors are characterized by solid compositions painted with traditional washes, and economic brushstrokes that convey details with a startling simplicity. Said to complete most paintings in little more than an hour, O'Hara was fond of saying -- "It's the last stroke that kills the picture." An avid traveler who painted all over the world (for sixteen years he painted each summer in Maine), O'Hara was a master at conveying the distinctive color and light that characterized each locale he visited.

Among the more than sixty public collections that include O'Hara's work are -- the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Library of Congress, the Museum of Fine Art Boston, the National Academy of Design, the National Museum of American Art, the Toledo Art Museum, the Worcester Art Museum, and the Ogunquit Museum of American Art.

Eliot O'Hara

Eliot O'Hara

Eliot O'Hara

Eliot O'Hara

Eliot O'Hara

Joan Miro and his Constellations

Joan Miro

Joan Miro

Joan Miro

Joan Miro

Joan Miro

Joan Miro

In 1939, at the outbreak of the second world war, Miró and his family moved to Varengeville on the Normandy coast, a few miles from Dieppe. Georges Braque was a neighbor. The village was subject to a blackout, and that fact prompted Miro's most luminous and affecting series of paintings, "The Constellations." He explained their genesis in a letter to a friend -- "I had always enjoyed looking out of the windows at night and seeing the sky and the stars and the moon, but now we weren't allowed to do this any more, so I painted the windows blue and I took my brushes and paint, and that was the beginning of the 'Constellations.'" 

Painted on paper, the pictures create the most vibrant expression of Miró's inner universe, with its by now recognizable system of codes and symbols. 

On May 20th, with the advance of the German forces, he managed to get his wife and daughter on the last train for Paris, from where they miraculously found room on a train leaving for Spain. Miró had time to take nothing with him, except a roll of the starry paintings. 

The family got passage to Palma, Mallorca, where Miro had spent his childhood summers with his grandparents, and where, on August first, he resumed work after more than two months of escape. 

"The Constellations," which Miro completed in Barcelona, were among the first artistic documents to reach America after the war, and were exhibited in New York in 1945. 

Andre Breton, who saw them, talked of how at a "time of extreme perturbation" Miro had escaped into a realm of "the purest, the least changeable..."

Joan Miro on his "Constellations" series...

Jan McComas and Stuart Davis

Clockwise from upper left: Jan McComas, Don Mangus, Stuart Davis, and Stuart Davis

In the mid-seventies, Jan McComas (Bates) was Roger Winter's teaching assistant for his Advanced Drawing class at SMU. Because of my love of jazz, Jan took me down to the art library and hepped me to the paintings of American Modernist Stuart Davis. I'm STILL jamming to Davis' syncopated "eye-ball kicks." One -- more -- time...

Brian Cobble: The Poetry of Facts

Brian Cobble

Brian Cobble

Brian Cobble

Brian Cobble

Brian Cobble

Brian Cobble

Brian Cobble

Brian Cobble

by Roger Winter

"There is a dignity and poignancy in the bare fact that a thing exists." -- C. S. Lewis

John Ruskin once wrote that delicacy of drawing and subtlety of sight were common traits in all great painting, an unmistakable clue that Ruskin belonged to some time other than the second half of the 20th century. Most painters of the 1950s through 2000 followed the trends of the art world, pursuing either an expressionistic approach to materials or a pristine flatness via pop and minimal art thatshowed no evidence of the artist’s hand.

Fortunately for us, but perhaps not always for him, Brian Cobble turned his back on this trend away from subtlety and fineness. His hermetic painstaking style has, more often than not, left him watching his friends gain wider recognition through approaches to painting that allow more rapid production. But with dogged commitment, and with the support of a few devoted patrons, Cobble has managed to follow his heart. He has resigned himself to an almost monastic existence of long workdays and a frugal lifestyle that allows him to remain true to his gift and to his aesthetic ideals.

Knowingly, Cobble’s work picks up some long abandoned threads of American art, especially the art of reportage. This is not to infer that his work is out of date -- “out of date” is a concept of fashion -- but rather to point out its timelessness. The insistence on facts seen in the works of Cobble’s predecessors such as Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer has precedence in 17th century Dutch painting, still earlier Flemish miniatures, and in occidental philosophy all the way back to the Hellenistic idea that art was neither more nor less than the careful imitation of nature’s appearance. And although earlier American painters turned away from their aristocratic parent cultures of the Old World and toward the phenomena of a new society, the art that did emerge over time was a pared down factinfatuated echo of the remembered grandiose styles of Europe.

Cobble is a self-taught historian of 19th and early 20th century American painting. During his years in New York, he spent time each week in the back of the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum, where scores of earlier American paintings are clumsily displayed in huge glass cases. Here he was able to study at leisure a wide cross section of painters, some famous and some not so famous. While he deeply admired the works of the best known of pre-Armory Show artists, especially George Inness (whom Cobble wanted to be when he grew up), he was perhaps more personally enamored of some lesser-known painters such as Samuel Colman and Daniel Garber. Colman and Garber’s views of America -- its recently placed architecture, its special light, its geographical terrain, its distinct flora -- seem to match and reinforce Cobble’s own vision. His interest in artists whom some Americanists would call minor is consistent with his general investigative curiosity which leaves no stone unturned.

Though Albuquerque is Cobble’s home, one would make a mistake to think of him as a New Mexican painter in the current typical use of that label. The state’s picturesque landscapes and Pueblo cultures have been painted and repainted ad nauseam, sometimes with great originality as in the works of Georgia O’Keeffe as well as any number of fine artists who worked in New Mexico during the first half of the 20th century. But despite its growing legitimate art scene -- the highly regarded Site Santa Fe being but one example -- New Mexico has been flooded in recent decades with commercial galleries that cater to the tourist market. Cobble is aware of this phenomenon, and he knows he must eschew the stereotypical. Like Walt Whitman thinking of the sea while writing about other matters, Cobble’s work is influenced by the awe-inspiring light of the desert and by vernacular architecture in small New Mexican towns even as he translates this influence into subjects in places as far ranging as New York or Nebraska. His view of the Long Island Railroad seems haunted by the same espantos he originally discovered at home. His vision is, as in Edward Hopper’s definition of art, “nature seen through a personality.” Cobble’s is a personality formed by the forces of a specific place.

When he does paint a pure landscape, Cobble is painting a subject that he knows about and cares deeply about. His vision of the mountains, deserts and rivers of the southwest is based on decades of firsthand observation. As a nine year old, he moved with his family from Ohio to Las Cruces, New Mexico. Throughout his life, he has kept close contact with the New Mexican landscape through frequent camping, backpacking, cross-country skiing and kayaking, although he understands that this landscape is not just a playground. As well as seeing it as a place rife with present dangers and a very long bloody history of human conflict, he also shows respect for the maintenance of his beloved corner of the planet through involvement in environmental work. Cobble and his wife Julie Kutz, a biologist, worked for years to get the Mexican wolf reintroduced to the area. They have also participated in river restoration projects, as well as clearing brush for trails and for wildlife areas.

If Cobble has a signature subject, and whether or not he does is, to his credit, a debatable issue, it would have to be called the built environment. Like American artist John Gast’s 19th century painting of an angelic figure stringing telegraph wire across the continent while below, pioneers on the ground are moving west pushing the aboriginal population and the wild animals out of their way, Cobble sees the landscape superimposed with fences, artificial waterways, refineries, quickly installed human habitation projects, trailer parks, asphalt slabs, and on and on and on. He paints the outward signs of a mobile seminomadic human culture, a culture in constant change. He often quotes his Skowhegan teacher, Willard Midgette, as saying that he thought it strange that so many artists painted landscapes as if they had just walked into a world without cars or telephone poles. To the earlier American artists who saw landscape as beautiful (pastoral) or sublime (wild), a third category needs to be added to cover the commonplace.

The most noticeable and comment provoking aspect of Cobble’s painting is his medium: pastel. Pastel, often written off as a Sunday painter’s bailiwick or a medium for quick studies, became Cobble’s almost by accident. Oil paint was the medium through which he learned about art. Because of oil’s flexibility, atmospheric nature, and, in his own word, “cachet” – after all, oil had been the major medium of every great painter from Rembrandt to de Kooning -- he assumed it would be his medium. But an eye condition called iritis (inflammation of the iris) worsened by the solvents used in oils led him to experiment with pastel. It seems more than possible that even without an eye condition Cobble might have gravitated to this medium. Pastel’s simplicity and directness (no brushes or palette to clean, no tubes or lids to deal with) and its potential for drawing fine detail in color makes it a natural for his needs. As time has passed, pastel has all but supplanted water and oil based media for him, although he still uses watercolor and gouache, along with charcoal, for underdrawing and underpainting.

The folk-painter, Grandma Moses, once said that she started her paintings “with a broom and ended with a straw,” a good metaphor for Cobble’s approach. The early stages of his painting are broadly rendered, the middle stages less so, and the final layers are composed of thousands of tiny colored strokes made with finely sharpened pastel sticks. He shies away from no complexity, giving each square centimeter the loving attention that it must have. Almost obsessively, he works until each painting’s surface is left with no “hot spots;” no unevenness of craft.

Certainly, Cobble’s technical artistry is a magical, compelling quality in his work, but not the only such quality. He is able to compose a horizontal rectangle quite as well as any living painter of any style. At first glance, we may think that we are looking at a painting based on one photographic image, but on examination we begin to suspect that what is there is a synthesis of details from several sources placed together to orchestrate a system of values, linear forces, colors and shapes that have likely never existed before in quite this arrangement. For instance, in “Shakeytown,” a commonplace two-lane highway scene, we begin to see a constellation of small shapes and colors juggled into an overall treatment of light that has to be too ordered to be the random aggregate we know to expect from chance clutter. But nothing here is overt; nothing for surrealistic effect. Cobble incorporates predictable imagery for design’s sake, and he does so expertly.

As close to the surreal as he is likely to get can be seen in the detail of artificial tulips in “310 W. 7th,” (pastel, 12 7/8 x 31 3/4-inches) a dead-season scene in a stable American neighborhood showing fragments of several houses and yards. In the lower center of his composition, Cobble has placed an arrangement of flattened brightly colored metal tulips -- a visual pun that heightens the viewer’s experience of a structurally complex portrait of a prosaic cultural stratum. His depiction is as poignant and telling as realist literature.

In “Tchoupitoulas," Cobble paints a vintage commercial street at the point of being reclaimed by nature (as can be said of many of his subjects) sharing the space with an elevated freeway. The freeway, oblivious of its surroundings, ushers in a new world that demands expediency above all other considerations.

“Machine Gun Fun” (pastel, 26 x 39 1/2-inches) is a tour de force depiction of a carnival stand shown near closing time. The noisy rhythm of the repetition of pinwheels, stuffed toy prizes, bar stools and other motifs is foiled by a quietly working cleaning man off centered in the foreground and two women in passive poses behind the counter. Cobble echoes the spinning nature of the pinwheels with a distant view of a Ferris wheel.  The more we look at the painting, the more we see repeated forms, whether in the far away city lights, the vertical posts in the middle ground or the windows and stripes of a nearby trailer. And yet the counteracting, deceivingly random placement of figures and objects throughout the picture plane makes “Machine Gun Fun” a perfect example of Croce’s classic observation that art possesses “variety in unity.” The same is true of “View from the Viaduct” with its rhythmic repetitions in an unplanned industrial neighborhood seen from above.

While “Machine Gun Fun” takes a giddy garish subject and turns it into a serene study, “Lotaburger” reverses course by transforming a potentially pedestrian fast food establishment into an exciting cacophony of reflections, figure studies, signage, distant mountains, etc., without losing the quality of classic calm that always prevails in Cobble’s work.

Any attempt at painting by any artist is an act of faith. In Cobble’s case, the element of faith is magnified since he inevitably spends months of his life resolving one middle-sized work. The world around him changes while a single painting evolves hopefully toward a successful completion. He may feel, as does Joyce Carol Oates’ metaphorical writer, that the whole world is having fun outside his window while he pushes a peanut with his nose across a dirty floor. He has come to accept the fact that low production can lead to under appreciation in the short run, but he also knows that his gifts of perception and discrimination are rare, and that they can only be manifested through disciplined work. This knowledge is enough to bring him into his studio at 7:00 o’clock each morning for a ten to twelve hour workday. We are the beneficiaries of his faith, his patience, his insistence and persistence. In a clamoring market-driven art world, Brian Cobble’s contribution is, indeed, blessed assurance to each of us that delicacy of drawing and subtlety of sight still exist.

My Lieber Meisters

Jerry Bywaters

Jerry Bywaters

Dan Wingren

Dan Wingren

Roger Winter

Roger Winter

Louis H. Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright

Froebel Gifts

Frank Lloyd Wright often referred to architect Louis H. Sullivan as his "lieber meister" (beloved master). 

Louis Sullivan designed with the principles of reconciling the world of nature with science and technology. Form ever follows function was his famous dictum (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe later said "form IS function"). His buildings were detailed with lush, yet tastefully subdued organic ornamentation. His attempt to balance ornamentation into the whole of building design inspired a generation of American and European architects; the idea that ornamentation be integral to the building itself, rather than merely applied.

Frank Lloyd Wright joined the firm in 1888, after working for a brief period for J. Lyman Silsbee, also in Chicago. Sullivan provided a loan in 1889 so Wright could start building what is now known as the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio. Wright worked for Sullivan for several years, becoming the "pencil in Sullivan's hand" (as Wright put it). He became chief draftsman for Sullivan, and eventually was responsible for all of the firm's residential contracts (including the Charnley house completed in 1892). Louis Sullivan even asked Wright to design his own (Sullivan's) house. Wright was forced to leave in 1893 after moonlighting houses under his own name while working for Adler and Sullivan -- a betrayal of trust (the Harlan house, built in 1892, was the one that caused the rift). "This bad end to a glorious relationship," Wright reflected, "has been a dark shadow to stay with me the days of my life." While Wright was remorseful of these circumstances, and was usually very positive and enthusiastic about Sullivan and the role Sullivan had in shaping him as an architect, he was to have no contact with Sullivan for 20 years. The six years at starting out at Alder and Sullivan provided Frank Lloyd Wright an excellent foundation for his own advancement of architecture.

The tide of architecture turned against Sullivan around the time of the Columbian Exposition of 1893, during which the leading edge Chicago School-style design was rejected for a traditional neoclassical style. Sullivan's contribution, the Transportation Building, appears to defy the design requirements for the exposition nonetheless (compared to more typical buildings at the exposition, which included the building that now houses the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry). Sullivan predicted that the Exposition would set architecture back 50 years. This return to neoclassicism had liittle place for the design principles of Sullivan, and Sullivan himself was unwilling to follow this trend.

In a later phase of his career, Sullivan wrote books on what came to be called organic architecture. Sullivan insisted that architecture had to embody the human connection with nature and to democracy, while still accepting the most modern functional needs and materials. He railed against the prevailing architectural practitioners for failing to take these principles into account. The book titles were Kindergarten Chats and Autobiography of an Idea

Although Frank Lloyd Wright had reconciled with Sullivan at the end of Sullivan's life, Sullivan died in obscurity and poverty in a hotel room in Chicago in 1924. "Sullivan was elated with the evolution of Wright's work and saw him as a natural successor, the keeper of the sacred flame of architecture" (Donald Hoppen, The Seven Ages of Frank Lloyd Wright)

Dan Dailey: Glass Art

Dan Dailey

Dan Dailey

Dan Dailey

Dan Dailey

Dan Dailey

Dan Dailey

American visual artist Dan Dailey has simultaneously produced sculpture and functional art with an emphasis on lighting since 1970. Made primarily from glass and metal, every piece of work begins with a drawing. Dailey's drawings and the objects they inspire depict human character and the world we inhabit, with many familiar forms rendered iconic. Dailey's myriad series explore extraordinary concepts with a broad range of themes and styles. These attributes and his forty years of achievement and recognition have made Dan Dailey a prominent artist in the history of glass, and unique among American artists.

Dailey was born in 1947 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Philadelphia College of Art. Dailey received his Master of Fine Arts degree from the Rhode Island School of Design. He is Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, where he founded the Glass Department in 1973. He has taught at numerous schools including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Pilchuck Glass School and the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and he has given lectures and workshops throughout the United States, Europe and Japan. Dailey's emphasis on the individual development of his students' sculptural concepts has defined his approach to teaching. He now works in his New Hampshire studio with the help of a staff of assistants.

Since 1971, Dailey has participated in over 250 group, juried, and invitational exhibitions, and has had numerous one-person museum and gallery exhibits including a major retrospective at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution. He has completed more than 70 architectural commissions for corporate headquarters, hospitals, municipalities, a county courthouse, a performing arts center, and private residences. His work is represented in over 45 museum collections around the world.