A Smash Hit for North Bennington Sculpture Show

Show stands untill October 13th, 2012 

Strong show and Excellent artist work ='s Good fun  and stimulation............................

Fred X getting ready for performance....

 Painting above- Ann Pibal

  Maria Siskinds having a hoot of a time in performance with her Pc- Die Katze.

This is what I'm showing called Home Town its on the corner of the Post Office.

North Bennington Art Park’s 15th Outdoor Sculpture Show

Opening reception- July 21^st 4 to 8pm

35 nationally acclaimed Artist, Food, Music, Ice cream, Live show

Located- Rt. 67 on the property’s around the post office

Show runs through October 13^th 2012

Horses Horses and more Saratoga Horses!

 

miChelle has created a large new inventory of sculpted horses for the opening of race season in Saratoga NY. The newly Published article reads (previously posted) about how meeting the artist is free family fun while vacationing in Saratoga. The artist has been welcoming visitors for more than 20 years, from around the country at the Ballard Road Art Studio Gallery, located Exit 16 off the Northway one mile East on the corner of Rt50 (you can’t miss it). The studio gallery has a large display of outdoor sculpture in various styles that are available for purchase. The artist works by commission and personal vision. Vara has 4 shows solo shows coming up so please visit again or go to http://www.michellevara.com/for the updated information and pictures.

If you are seeing this through some one else's site (hacked) please visit Vara's ACTUAL SITE:

HTTP://WWW.MICHELLEVARA.COM

-Thank you!

Experience Junkie

I’m reading about the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s relationship with artist Eduardo Chilida. I found there point of view very interesting and of my personal perception and thought.  I enjoy, look forward to, have many, I am always reaching for more experiences.  From those experiences I do build perception but with that also comes the art. My art is the heart of who I am. In this process I can say the journey reveals discovery leading to development of my works. Unlike Eduardo Chillida, I do not feel that experience is one foot in the past. I like to think that all of me even in reflection is in the present or the now.

This is the excerpt I am referring to:

Eduardo Chillida engaged into a dialog with the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. When the two men met, they discovered that from different angles, they were "working" with space in the same way. Heidegger wrote: "We would have to learn to recognize that things themselves are places and do not merely belong to a place," and that sculpture is thereby "...the embodiment of places." Against a traditional view of space as an empty container for discrete bodies, these writings understand the body as already beyond itself in a world of relations and conceive of space as a material medium of relational contact. Sculpture shows us how we belong to the world, a world in the midst of a technological process of uprooting and homelessness. Heidegger suggests how we can still find room to dwell therein.

Chillida has been quoted as saying: "My whole Work is a journey of discovery in Space. Space is the liveliest of all, the one that surrounds us. ...I do not believe so much in experience. I think it is conservative. I believe in perception, which is something else. It is riskier and more progressive. There is something that still wants to progress and grow. Also, this is what I think makes you perceive, and perceiving directly acts upon the present, but with one foot firmly planted in the future. Experience, on the other hand, does the contrary: you are in the present, but with one foot in the past. In other words, I prefer the position of perception. All of my work is the progeny of the question. I am a specialist in asking questions, some without answers."

Maybe you have thoughts you’d like to share on the subject – Just email me!

Paul Jenkins Passes at 88

Paul Jenkins, a colorful Abstract Expressionist who came of age during the heyday of the New York School and for several decades carried on its highly physical tradition of manipulating paint and canvas, died on June 9 in Manhattan, where he lived and had continued to paint until recently. He was 88. He died after a short illness, said his wife, Suzanne.

In the late 1940s, joining a wave of aspiring painters moving to New York, Mr. Jenkins used the G.I. Bill to study at the Art Students League and soon met Jackson Pollock and befriended Mark Rothko. In 1953 he resettled in Paris, but maintained a lifelong connection with New York.

Early on he adopted a tactile, chance-driven method of painting that privileged almost every technique over brushwork. Dribbling paint Pollock-like onto loose canvasses, he allowed it to roll, pool and bleed, and he sometimes kneaded and hauled on the canvas — “as if it were a sail,” he said once. His favorite tool for many years was an elegant ivory knife, which he used to guide the flow of paint.

The billowy, undulating results could look like psychedelic landscapes or what Stuart Preston, reviewing his work in The New York Times in 1958, described as “Abstract Expressionist rococo.” Influenced by the theories of Jung and by the visionary imagery of Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau.

 “I have conversations with them,” he said of his paintings, “and they tell me what they want to be called.”

His work attracted collectors and museums in the United States, but he had a stronger following in Europe, where, with his flowing hair and beard — a friend said he looked like Charlton Heston’s Moses — he seemed to embody an old-fashioned archetype of the avant-garde artist. In a 2009 review of work from the 1960s and ’70s, Roberta Smith wrote in The Times that Mr. Jenkins’s paintings were “more a popular idea of abstract art than the real thing” and “too gorgeous for their own good.”

William Paul Jenkins was born — during a lightning storm, according to his official biography — in Kansas City, Mo., on July 12, 1923. As a boy, he met both Thomas Hart Benton and Frank Lloyd Wright. (Wright suggested that he should think about a career in agriculture rather than art.) He worked weekends at a ceramics factory, where watching the master mold-maker’s handling of shape and color, he said, had a profound effect on his ideas about painting.

By the 1970s and ’80s, his art career had provided him with a glamorous life, divided between France, where his work graced a Pierre Cardin boutique, and New York, where he kept an airy loft near Union Square that had previously belonged to Willem de Kooning. The first lady of France, Danielle Mitterrand, once visited the studio, and the party he gave for her was attended by guests like Paloma Picasso, Robert Motherwell and Berenice Abbott.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Jenkins is survived by his daughter, Hilarie Jenkins.

In 1971, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Art organized a retrospective of Mr. Jenkins’s work. But he got much more exposure in 1978, when his paintings had a starring role in the Paul Mazursky movie “An Unmarried Woman,” in which Alan Bates plays a smoldering, heavily bearded Manhattan artist. The paintings supposedly done by the Bates character were actually his work.

Mr. Jenkins spent weeks teaching Mr. Bates how to approximate his methods of paint-pouring and canvas-wrestling, a way of making art that he described as tempting fate.

“I try to paint like a crapshooter throwing dice, utilizing past experience and my knowledge of the odds,” he said in 1964. “It’s a big gamble, and that’s why I love it.”

From Print- New York Times, June 17^th 2012

Travel and see!

Arria is her name and she is now welcoming the entrance to the Scottish town of Cumbernauld, a symbol at once of its aspirations and potential for renaissance.

Created by the artist Andy Scott. It is believed that the sculpture will give a boost to the town, towards which Arria’s arms are outstretched. The artist’s inspiration for the work came from the idea of using the past, as a way to look towards the future, and as such the piece severs as a visual metaphor for the aspirations of the local community. We have all seen what and how art changes a community. ~Congratulations~ Andy and Cumbernauld, thank you for sharing.  

Forthcoming new

Another year departed.

Time passed so quickly.

 My person has changed.

Epoch has provoked intriguing interactions and stimulation.

My many thoughts, theories, gestures and ideas formulate.

I feel compelled to express or represent,

My art in new ways

Happy Birthday to all and to all a fun life!