Christine is an introvert, and it works very well for her. She’s calm. Centered. No drama. While she relishes her solitude, she doesn’t shy away from being with people. And she gets people. As a portrait photographer, she nails the core of their being in her photographs.
Courageous Christine
Christine is an introvert, and it works very well for her. She’s calm. Centered. No drama. While she relishes her solitude, she doesn’t shy away from being with people. And she gets people. As a portrait photographer, she nails the core of their being in herphotographs.
In the early 2000s, Christine traveled the byways of America meeting people in villages and communities, documenting their professions by capturing them in their work element. Her book “Working in the USA” is a love letter to working folks, a fascinating study of people ordinary and extraordinary, all the more poignant because she shot each one in black and white.
A spread from Christine’s book, “Working in the USA”
I dare you to open her book and try to close it after a few pages. I sure couldn’t. Its width straddled my lap and I turned page after page, unable to stop looking at the next person — a firefighter, a Cajun accordion maker, a gold miner, a shrimper – each with their earnest face surrounded by the tools of their trade. Proud people. Humble people. Dignified.
More USA workers photographed by Christine
For an introvert, Christine excelled at traveling in her RV and meeting all kinds of people along the way. She stills lives in that same RV… since 2001. These days, she winters in Scottsdale, Arizona, and summers in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Even more USA workers photographed by Christine from all lower 48 states
From Denver to Daring
Growing up in Denver, Christine enjoyed spending solitary time drawing and coloring when she wasn’t out being “one of the boys” with her two older brothers. From an early age, she was immediately attracted to pencil and charcoal drawings, which formed the basic artistic thread running through her life; producing works in black and white.
Christine also loves animals and had planned to be a veterinarian, until one summer when her mother arranged for her to work on a pig farm in South Dakota. “I realized I didn’t like seeing animals in pain,” Christine says.
These days, she photographs portraits of rescued and protected animals, like donkeys, horses, goats and sheep, and transfers their black and white images onto wood panels that she embellishes with white tissue paper, textures and paint or encaustic.
Christine in her booth at the Arizona Fine Art Expo, transferring a cow print onto canvas
Christine’s animal faces are charming. But photography and mixed media pieces aren’t her only creative outlets. She also cooks. Each winter, she exhibits at the Arizona Fine Art Expo and also runs the Expo Cafe with her assistant, Caroline Kwas, also an exhibiting artist. Together, they prepare breakfast and lunch seven days a week for visitors and resident artists.
Each summer, Christine hosts multiple Art Spas in Santa Fe. While her business partner teaches painting classes, Christine prepares their meals and demonstrates cooking. She focuses on healthy vegetarian foods while explaining the cooking process. In a recent Art Spa, she taught everyone how to create and roll their own spring rolls.
Christine’s Expo gig in Scottsdale goes beyond just showing her art and cooking wholesome foods (which keeps her busy for 80 hours each week). She is also part of the crew that erects the giant u-shaped white tents for the Expo.
The entrance to the Arizona Fine Art Expo
The show launches mid-January and she arrives from Santa Fe in November to get the Expo up and running, along with the show managers and facilities team. When the Expo closed on March 25, Christine spent April leading the crew in dismantling and packing up the massive tent for storage until next year.
Christine’s booth and artwork
During the Expo, Christine stays busy painting, running the cafe and then walking to her RV out back each evening where she continues to make her art.
Many people dream of pulling up roots and following their passion, living an endless summer in mild climates. Christine is doing it, though she admits it’s not as freeing as it might sound. The hours are long, the work hard and the pressure is on to make a living from her art.
“You can do anything for 10 weeks,” Christine laughs. That’s her motto for this year’s Expo.
Christine with her new elk mixed media work
Though her location changes, Christine’s focus on producing art never does. She continually learns from customer feedback, what’s selling and what’s not, to try new things. “I’m always chasing that carrot,” she says, laughing. Making a living from art drives Christine each day to discover new ways to market what she does.
Working in the USA
Christine received her college degree in psychology and worked for a year counseling troubled youth for $6 an hour, which was minimum wage. Working with the kids was fine but after a year, Christine realized her co-workers were the ones with the more severe issues. To compensate for work stress, she took a class on darkroom techniques and promptly fell in love with it.
She also took a couple of pre-med courses for genetic counseling but soon determined speaking with pregnant women about potential baby problems would be too taxing. When her father pointed out how passionate she was about her hobby of photography, and encouraged her to consider turning professional, she took his advice.
Christine chose commercial art photography over her pre-med studies and started her own Portrait studio in Denver. She liked to experiment, to stretch her creative muscles, and worked with infrared film, which plays off of the red spectrum to produce ethereal photos.
For six years, Christine ran her business and also spent two of those years caring for her aged grandmother. Soon, feeling stifled by traditional portraiture and her home life, she longed to follow her creative urges to travel and take pictures.
Always a traveler at heart, Christine had taken solo trips to China, Singapore and Hawaii. She knew her new dream of traveling the U.S. and taking photos was doable, with proper preparation. She talked about her project with a purpose. She dreamed about it. Finally Christine’s dad convinced here there was no time like the present to chase a dream.
Again, she listened to her dad and set her departure date for one year ahead.
Heeding the wanderlust call, Christine bought a 29-foot RV and converted the main bedroom into a compact custom darkroom. In April, she set out to visit all 48 lower U.S. states and photographically document workers of all professions. Her project, called Working in the USA, was a way for Christine to show people in other countries what real Americans look like, as opposed to those seen on TV shows and in movies.
“We’re a nation of diverse people who work hard,” Christine says, “and work is a common theme all over the world. The first thing we ask when meeting someone new is ‘what do you do?’”
For three-and-a-half years, Christine traveled 70,000 miles with her cat Ansel and her dog Gracie. When her travels were over, she worked on producing her book “Working in the USA,” which was published in 2006.
Christine had finally burst out of traditional portrait methods and captured people from all walks of life. Along the way, she learned to avoid tornado alley in May and June, to avoid the north in the winter, to look for free RV lots, to lay low while parking overnight at truck stops and to overcome her natural shyness to approach people and learn their stories. She was traveling before people were actively blogging and before social media provided a platform for instant sharing. She wrote about the people she met, in addition to photographing them, and she still has many stories to tell about the people in her book. I’m looking forward to hearing those stories. And to seeing what Courageous Christine does next.
“There are no excuses to not travel,” Christine says. “Don’t wait for a traveling companion. Don’t wait to pursue any dream. Get out there. You’ll survive.”
When I first saw Shawna’s large, bright canvases from a distance, I had to get down there… and fast… even if it meant passing up many other artists’ booths. Up close, her bold, singing work did not disappoint and when Shawna came around the corner with her wild hair barely contained and her stride full of joy, I instantly knew her natural glee perfectly matched her art. And who wouldn’t be drawn to both!
As an undergraduate at Auburn, Shawna was a nude model for painters at the nearby Columbus Museum of Art in Georgia.
“It took some getting used to,” Shawna says, “ but I made $20 an hour, the most I’d ever made.”
Her body isn’t the only thing she’s bared for art.
This past December, Shawna quit her job as an art therapist, packed a van with art supplies and home furnishings, and drove from Jensen Beach, Florida, to Scottsdale, Arizona, to exhibit her tissue paper pieces at the Arizona Fine Art Expo, a 10-week show housed in a giant white, u-shaped tent.
Shawna in her Expo booth, shared with her partner Gregory, a glassblower.
Every year from January to March, more than 100 artists occupy booths at the show and paint, sculpt, make jewelry, etc., in their spaces, sharing their work and techniques with guests seven days a week.
Shawna took a leap of faith to try her hand at being a full-time artist, encouraged by her boyfriend Greg Tomb, a masterful glass blower who has made a living from his art for years by traveling to shows around the country.
So, newish relationship, new “job,” new city, new condo… all at once. Hello, Overwhelm.
“January was a stinker of a month,” Shawna says, laughing. “Setting up a booth with a partner for the first time was stressful as we got used to each other. And traffic at the show was slow, so we naturally worried about money.”
By February, Shawna had made friends throughout the giant tent and she and Greg were grooving as a couple.
“I’m the type who has to be connected with people,” Shawna says. “If I’m making art, I must also be doing something to make a difference in other people’s lives.”
She’s a cheerful and kind spirit who gives and gives of herself. Her artwork, created by gluing colorful tissue paper onto canvases, is an outward sign of her inward joy. Full of happy, bright colors, her pieces cause continuous smiles.
After getting a Master’s degree in art therapy, Shawna has been a nationally board-certified art therapist for 20 years. She honed her skills working with tissue paper while showing clients how to express their emotions through their hands; even if it meant they used only black. The simple act of wanting to switch to a color other than black could signal a big breakthrough for a client.
How does someone help traumatized people day after day without succumbing to trauma themselves? Especially someone like Shawna who is sensitive and attuned to others’ feelings and energy.
“I’ve been lucky to work for companies that offer insurance with mental health benefits for employees, and really good self-care is a must,” Shawna says, with a chuckle. “Plus, helping people freely express in 2- and 3-dimensions while encouraging them to connect to their imaginations and innate creativity is very rewarding.”
Shawna was born in Alliance, Ohio, but grew up in Jensen Beach, Florida, influencing the definite coastal feel in some of her work. From the age of 2, Shawna chose crayons and paint over dolls and TV. Her mother knew, even then, that Shawna was an artist.
Shawna used her therapy training to acclimate to her new nomadic life and the self-contained art community that pops up each winter in the Sonoran desert.
When people show interest in her work, she delights in telling them how she does it. Oftentimes, they want to learn to do it.
“After several women expressed interest in doing tissue paper art, I put up a class sign-up sheet in my booth and it filled up in less than a week!”
Shawna has given several classes during the show in a classroom available to artists for just such activities, and she’s an excellent teacher/coach/cheerleader. I was lucky enough to take her “Tissue Paper Art 101” class and admired how she put everyone at ease about being creative.
“First thing we’re going to do is take off our judgement hat and throw it out of this room,” Shawna says.
Animated, she tosses her imaginary hat like a frisbee and smiles big. Her long hair, extra curly and full, moves when she does, accentuating her vibrant personality.
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The room we’re in has walls but no ceiling, except for the big white tent overhead. We can hear cars on Scottsdale Road, but Shawna can easily be heard telling us about the nature of Bleeding Art tissue paper, the medium for her artwork. When the paper gets wet, colors bleed onto adjacent papers, creating unpredictable patterns.
Shawna then uses a sponge brush to gently apply a mixture of Elmer’s glue and water, adhering the paper to a canvas. Or she might use a bristle brush to smooth it into place. In this beginner’s class, our only objective is to experiment.
In class with Shawna, fellow student Annie and a big mound of tissue paper!
“Cut it or tear,” she says, “there is no wrong way. You’re learning about the paper’s qualities with every piece of tissue you add.”
After working with tissue paper for decades, Shawna has mastered composing images, although she admits controlling how the colors bleed is nearly impossible. Coat hangers hold folds of tissue paper already splashed with water and fully dried. Working when the paper is wet can be difficult, so Shawna always has lots of dried, prepared paper on hand.
Greg’s talent isn’t limited to blowing remarkably beautiful glass bowls. He’s a good carpenter, too, and built Shawna a rolling cart to hold her art supplies, including glitter glue, paints, tiny canvases on wooden easels and all sorts of tiny sparkly notions to add to a completed piece of art. The cart even has a handy rail on one side for displaying her many coat hangers of inspiring papers.
The rolling cart that Gregory built to hold Shawna’s supplies and paper.
In class, we get very quiet as we experiment with collages of tissue on a thick piece of paper, to get a feel for how to handle the glue, paper and active colors. The moistened foundation papers tend to warp or curl.
“No worries about curling papers,” Shawna assures us. “Once it’s dry, simply put it inside a large coffee table book overnight and it will emerge flat.”
After experimenting, we tackle covering a canvas with tissue. Shawna has several canvas sizes available. I grab a 10-inch square and spot some prepared papers with orange, white, pink and yellow. The brighter the better is my motto. Plus, I have visions of Shawna’s art in my head. Using her prepared paper means my piece of artwork is a collaboration with her.
The piece I made in Shawna’s class using her prepared paper.
Two hours fly by. Shawna finishes our partially-dried artwork with a spray acrylic in either mat or gloss. It also provides UV protection.
I enjoy the class so much, I’m hoping to be able to take her Intermediate course before she packs up and goes back to Florida.
One wall of Shawna’s booth holds the smaller items she collages and paints.
Canvases aren’t the only surfaces Shawna covers in tissue paper and paint. She makes one-of-a-kind notecards and decorates the covers on planning calendars and bound journals, turning them into useful works of art. I bought one of her journals to use in a writing workshop my daughter Jaime and I are taking in Paris this June.
“Art is integral to who I am,” Shawna says. “I find a natural flow between creating therapeutic space for the art-making process for others and for myself. I’m in constant connection to my creative core, even when addressing an envelope, cooking or starting a new art project.”
Sculpture is another 3-D art form Shawna relishes as she uses organic materials to evoke the Divine Feminine. “Nature is rarely linear and my sculptures are a celebration of all that is feminine, soulful and passionate,” Shawna says.
As an undergraduate, she dove into sculpting with wood, clay and stone, and sometimes using found objects to create assemblage pieces. In fact, her senior thesis was based on a theme for nine large-scale assemblage sculptures. But when she started working, sculpting took a back seat, even to her collage work.
Two years ago, Shawna’s best friend, Susannah, fell in love with the carved wood, alabaster and marble pieces Shawna had created in early 90s. “Susannah asked me who had done the carvings and she couldn’t stop touching them,” Shawna says. “When I described how I carved them, she nearly flipped because she’s only known my tissue paper collages. She emphatically told me I must, must, must get back into sculpture as soon as possible. In fact, she made me promise I would.”
The Expo, a creative place to the max, is the perfect spot for Shawna to sculpt, paint, and, most importantly, make good on her promise to Susannah.
Shawna is wise to acknowledge her need for being emotionally connected with the people around her. We all have that need to some extent, yet some of us don’t always honor it… and we’re the poorer for it.
A giver, Shawna has created a new life and a new relationship that gives back. She credits Greg with evoking the courage she needed to embark on this current desert adventure. In fact, he convinced her to see the possibility of taking a two-month hiatus from her job last summer and travel to New York where he would rent an apartment, giving Shawna the freedom to produce her large-scale pieces for two art shows in which she and Greg would participate.
Shawna’s employer did not offer anything like a hiatus and she expected a big fat “no.” But when she asked, they said yes!
Greg believed in her work enough to know she could pursue it, and they could share a life on the road as partners in every sense of the word. He also believed in her talent enough to hand-build the large canvases for her work.
“It was amazing and scary to wake up each day and only have to make art,” Shawna says. During those two months, she learned a lot about art, about Greg, about herself and about the public’s reaction to art.
When Greg suggested they both apply to exhibit at the Arizona Fine Art Expo, Shawna saw the stars aligning. That’s when she made the decision to leave her job of nearly four years and dive head first into being a professional artist. These last four months have been eye-opening, frightening and a catalyst for her next stage.
Recently, Shawna scheduled an art therapist job interview for early April back home. “I’m hopeful to go back to work full-time in South Florida,” Shawna says. “I will definitely continue to do my art on the side, and exhibit at shows.”
Greg has a few shows lined up for the remainder of 2018, giving them an opportunity to flex and strengthen their intermittent long-distance relationship with FaceTime and other technological wonders to stay connected.
Shawna sounds at peace with their future. “We have plans to join forces down the road,” she says.
I’ll miss Shawna when she’s back in Florida, but I have no doubts she’ll brighten the lives of her clients through art therapy and retail art therapy.
Shawna’s extraordinary parents, Jim and Melody, taught her to always be kind. She takes kindness one step further and is always loving, even with people she doesn’t know.
On a daily basis, Shawna bares her soul to those who are lucky enough to be near her, and she gives us permission to open our souls and be creative, be vulnerable, be colorful, be loved and see the joy in life.
Shawna shows us how to throw our judgement hats out the window, and we’re the richer for it.
Detail of the dragonfly above.
Education
Bachelor of Fine Arts with a concentration in sculpture from Auburn University.
Master of Arts in Art Therapy from Ursuline College, Cleveland, Ohio.
“There is nothing in this world that make more sense to me than the balance and beauty of nature,” Evgeni says on his website. “In my art, as in my life, I try to maintain this delicate process.”
Apple and Cherry, 18″ x 24″.
Paintings to Live In
Ordinarily, I meet an artist whose work speaks to me, and I click with them on some level before writing them about them. However, Evgeni Gordiets is at home in Pennsylvania while his art is on exhibit at the Arizona Fine Art Expo through the end of this month. He may show up in Scottsdale for the last two weeks of the Expo. If he does, I will crawl across the desert to meet him. Meanwhile,his artwork is much, much too good to not show here… NOW!
“There is nothing in this world that makes more sense to me than the balance and beauty of nature,” Evgeni says on his website. “In my art, as in my life, I try to maintain this delicate process.”
Graceful. Elegant. Serene. Pure. In some of his works, Evgeni uses pointillism to create his sometimes soft, sometimes vibrant scenes… layering tiny dots on top of tiny dots.
Looking at his still life paintings brings about a peaceful feeling, as though our daily worries are wiped away by ruminating on Evgeni’s images. Seeing one painting is not enough. Having another and another to contemplate brings contentment, like the meditative trance of watching water flow easily over river rocks.
Scouted as child prodigy at the age of five, Evgeni grew up in Ukraine and earned a Master’s of Fine Art degree from the State University of Fine Arts and his PhD in fine Arts from the State academy of Fine Art, both in Kiev. He was then a Professor of Art at the National Art University of Ukraine.
His work has been compared to Monet, Magritte and Dali, but it has a magical tranquility and sunniness unique to Evgeni. His artwork has won many awards and can be found in museums and private collections worldwide. His marketing flyer says, “In 1991, his work was chosen for the cover of Christie’s Evening Auction catalog.”
“Today, for me,” Evgeni says (on his marketing flyer), “life and painting are one. I have no desire to follow fashion; it has no value to me. In my art, the sea, the sky, woman and child are subjects of importance, eternity. In nature, I find a never-ending source of inspiration.”
Aksana and Paul, a local couple also originally from Ukraine, are working in Evgeni’s booth at the Expo while he’s in Pennsylvania. Paul tells me they own several pieces of his artwork (lucky them!!!!) and are helping out in hopes of Evgeni and his art gaining recognition in Scottsdale.
He sure has my attention!!
Paul was kind enough to allow me to take a few photos, and I pulled others from Evgeni’s website, which is definitely worth a visit: http://www.EvgeniGordietsArt.com
Gallery
Evgeni Gordiet’s booth at the Arizona Fine Art Expo in Scottsdale.Detail of the landscape photo above.Bay of Silence, 20″ x 20″.Seashell and Fruits, 10″ x 16″.Woman and Red Birds, 15″ x 10″.Detail of the sleeve in the above portrait.Garden with Blooming Tree, 24″ x 28″.Woman in Blue, 12″ x 9″.Summer and Butterfly, 22″ x 28″.Old Village with Red Cypress, 12″ x 15″.By the Red Tree, 20″ x 26″.Woman with Orange, 16″ x 12″.Improvisation with Yellow, 10″ x 8″.Lonely Cloud in the Afternoon, 20″ x 30″.Fishing Boat by the Old Village, 16″ x 20″.Rainbow, 8″ x 10.5.Garden with Blue Tree, 40″ x 52″.
Kit Carson built Camp Cactus, his stone-cottage house in New River, Arizona, in 1993, and created there until 2016. He is now living in a rental house in Prescott, Arizona, while his new home, Cortez Camp, is being built on a lot just four blocks from downtown Prescott. I wanted to see Kit’s temporary creative space in his rental home, so I visited him on Super Bowl Sunday 2018, and wrote the update below. When Cortez Camp is completed later this year, and Kit’s new workshop is outfitted, I’ll return to Prescott and will share here all the delightful artistic touches to be found in his new home and creative space.
A Moveable Menagerie
Kit Carson built Camp Cactus, his stone-cottage house in New River, Arizona, in 1993, and sold it in 2016. He is temporarily renting a house in Prescott, Arizona, while his new home, Cortez Camp, is being built on a lot just four blocks from downtown Prescott. I wanted to see Kit’s temporary creative space in his rental home, so I visited him on Super Bowl Sunday 2018. When Cortez Camp is completed later this year, and Kit’s new workshop is outfitted, I’ll return to Prescott and will share here all the delightful artistic touches to be found in his new home and creative space.
Kit spends day and night focusing his creativity on making jewelry and sculptures. He appears laid-back in his faux leather jacket, cowboy hat and boots, but at 68, Kit hasn’t lost his energetic drive to always be producing… something. A true cowboy at heart, when Kit has ventured from his roots, he always returns to the Arizona desert.
At the age of 16, Kit was deeply influenced by reading The Prophet, which led him to read Thoreau and Whitman. As Kit aged, his Philosopher-Artist sensibilities were honed ever sharper; his wisdom now seeps out in aphorisms, a hobby of his, and he often puts them on hisjewelry. For instance, the inside of a bracelet might read, “Don’t fence me in,” or “Life is good.”
Kit likes to say, “Every good artist has a sketchy past.” Ba-dum-bump. His past may be sketchy, but Kit still has his youthful, lanky physique and mischievous eyes.
“Age is an attitude,” Kit says. “The older I get, the younger I am.”
Kit’s Temporary Cre8-Space
Kit’s quaint, aged, 900-square foot rental house is white with brown trim. A white picket fence encloses a charming, tiny front yard. Inside the living room, honey-colored wood floors creak comfortingly as we walk. Metal art hangs on every wall, and antique wooden chairs with tooled leather look as though they’ve been in place for 50 years. His well-loved furnishings fit the house perfectly as vintage suitcases sit under tables and atop shelves.
An acoustic guitar is propped on his desk. “I’ll pick up my guitar at any time and sing a song. Singing makes me stop thinking,” Kit says. Otherwise, his mind is always working (or more like playing), envisioning jewelry pieces or metal sculptures.
Kit’s temporary workshop just off his living room looks like it’s been there since the house was built. He gives me a tour and allows me to video him while he’s engraving a metal bracelet cut from an old can with orange paint on it.
“I make these bracelets, part of my Romantic Rust line, out of old, red tool boxes and license plates, too,” Kit says. “Painted metal from the 70s, or earlier, is best for these pieces. When I use a raw-hide hammer to shape bracelets made from newer painted metal, the paint will chip off.”
Kit’s two essential engraving tools are his vice and nematic engraver. Watch the video below to see how his sophisticated rotating vice and the electric engraver make engraving look easy. It’s not easy. Not at all. Especially creating the intricate scrolls and desert scenes, trademarks of his art. Kit has clearly mastered his engraving technique.
Kit’s workspace is about six feet wide and 11 feet long. Stations for engraving, cutting, assembling and soldering face one wall while on shelves case after case of tiny drawers hold teeny tool pieces and jewelry parts. A window over his main counter provides lots of natural light, but he also has multiple lamps clamped to every work station. The workshop is comfortable and efficient.
A large table in his living room along the front wall holds stones and gems, allowing Kit space to play around with composition of the jewels’ placement on earrings, pendants or bracelets.
Starting Out
When Kit decided to pursue art, his mother, Paula Carson, gave him good advise. “From day one,” she told Kit, “run your art like a business. Know how much you pay for supplies, add in labor costs and never sell for less than what you have in a piece.”
Kit has lived by that guidance and under his means, which meant he was able to produce art and support himself, sometimes barely being able to pay his $60-a-month rent in the early years. But he kept at it, worked on a rickety stool pumping out his handmade, unique designs, growing his business and then shrinking his business to a perfectly manageable size. To this day, Kit continues to reinvent himself and how he markets his art.
In the beginning, he branched out from just making jewelry, which has always been his core, to working with drawings, sign painting, calligraphy on signs and wedding invitations, watercolors, wood and rock sculptures, and engraving for local jewelry stores. “I couldn’t make a living and make art while working for $3 an hour at the bronze factory,” Kit says. “I needed a steady income and I knew I could have constant business by offering several artistic services.”
Kit didn’t know anything about running a business.
“Early on, I sent my jewelry to a gallery and didn’t include anything in the package. No list of items. No pricing,” Kit says. The gallery tracked him down from his return address and called him, asking, “What is this?”
“It’s my jewelry,” Kit replied.
“How much are you selling it for?,” they asked.
“What do you think it’d sell for,” Kit laughs, recalling the conversation.
“I didn’t know. They suggested how much each piece might sell for and I learned a lot by them walking me through the process.”
That gallery, the first one he approached, sold his jewelry.
Jumping into the commercial art world without any guidance meant Kit did some things wrong, and other things right. But he had courage and belief in his art. For 43 consecutive years, he has made a living from his art.
“One job leads to another job,” Kit says, “and I always make time for jobs.” Like when Fender saw his his skull jewelry on his website and contacted him about designing a “DIA DE LOS MUERTOS,” or Day of the Dead, Telecaster guitar for them. Naturally, Kit said yes. Fender collaborated with Kit, and other artists Dan Lawrence, Ron Thorn, Tom Arndt and Chris Flemming to create the most expensive customer guitar Fender ever produced. While some folks wondered if the guitar would sell, Fender ended up making and selling three of them.
Kit lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for 12 years. He got his career going by having the courage to jump smack dab into the middle of the Santa Fe art community where he knew no one. His business took off so well, it eventually earned $250,000 a year. Kit opened an office in Santa Fe and sold his art to 270 stores and galleries across the U.S. He was able to hire several employees to assist in producing his jewelry.
“One day I was in Boston and passed a store,” Kit says. “A bunny pin in the window caught my eye. It was a knock-off of mine. I went inside and told the clerk the pin was a poor-quality knock-off and I wanted them to remove it. The clerk said, ‘Oh, Hi, Mr. Carson. So nice to meet you. That is your pin.’ I was so disappointed in the quality of the work, that it had my name on it, and I hadn’t stopped it from going out the door. I went back to Santa Fe and closed my business. I wanted to be an artist in his studio knowing every piece that goes out is the best I can do.”
Kit firmly believes the two best things he ever did was to go into business big time and to get out of business big time. He had jumped into making art with both feet and little business know-how, yet he managed to have more successes than failures. Luckily, he’s happy to share the following lessons learned with aspiring artists of all mediums:
Quit your job. “Working a job will only take a new artist away from building their skills and their business.”
Kit’s sketch book
Don’t get married.“I knew two friends who wanted to work in art at the same time I was starting out and they got their girlfriends pregnant. They married and took other jobs to support their families. Of course, I got married later, too, so I didn’t listen to my own advice.”
Study an artist. Kit says find an artist whose work is of interest and then take weekend workshops with them. “You can learn more in a weekend with an artist than you can in an entire college course,” Kit says. “I’m an open book and will share my techniques with anybody.” Kit learned some jewelry-making techniques in the jewelry program at University of Oregon, Eugene. He also took night classes and weekend workshops.
Believe in yourself.“Artists must believe in themselves. I believed in myself,” Kit says. “That’s why I was able to build a business and stay self-employed. You have to discipline yourself to make a product, and another one. When you have bills to pay, that’s incentive enough to sit down and create.”
Find your voice.“An artist must find the core of their voice and they must have the ability to resolve abstract composition,” Kit says. He developed a voice early on and started engraving his drawings of bunnies, horses and desert scenes onto jewelry. “My jewelry stood out because not many people engraved their sketches into jewelry,” Kit says.
After 10 years in business, Kit was able to hire an assistant and has had several over the years. He trusts his employees and looks for enthusiasm when hiring. “I can teach them skills, but not enthusiasm,” Kit says. “They must also be able to tolerate failing and pushing through. Failures happen all the time, pieces don’t turn out the way we expect, but we keep creating.”
Currently, Sandy operates his website and Etsy shop; Halle in Denver constructs his jewelry from parts he sends her; and Louis, a glass artist from Prescott, works with Kit in his studio.
Growing Up
Kit was born and raised on Champie Ranch, a dude ranch, near Castle Hot Springs and Lake Pleasant, northwest of Phoenix, Arizona. His dad had given flying lessons during WWII and had spotted the ranch from the air. Growing up, Kit’s family didn’t have a phone, but they did have electricity and a radio, on which Kit as a six-year-old first heard Elvis Presley.
At the height of Gunsmoke’s popularity on TV, James Arnez, who played Sheriff Matt Dillon, brought his family to stay at Champie Ranch for a couple of weeks. Kit and his three brothers enjoyed swimming with “Matt Dillon,” and when James Arnez showed them his six-shooter, Kit was more interested in the gun’s engraving than he was the gun. Admiring the scroll work was a precursor to Kit’s fascination with the Arts & Crafts Movement and his love of Art Nouveau design lines.
When the Carsons divorced, 10-year-old Kit and his brothers moved from Champie Ranch to Prescott with their mother. To ease the transition after his parents’ divorce, Kit would retreat to his room and paint model cars and sketch. By the age of 12, Kit knew he wanted to be an artist.
“My mother taught us self-discipline,” Kit says. “If we wore out our jeans, she wouldn’t replace them. She would tell us to get a paper route and buy our own jeans. I had two paper routes delivering in the morning and afternoon. It was 1963 and I was the only Seventh grader with $20 in his pocket.”
Kit’s mother was also creative. Although she worked full-time, she took up weaving as a hobby and made quite a few rugs, some of which Kit sill owns. To this day, the local college manages the Paula Carson Scholarship Fund for Weavers.
Kit’s brothers still live in Prescott. His twin, Steve, uses large earth-moving equipment to coax nature back to its natural setting after man has messed things up. Steve is a cowboy. His other brother Tom is a building contractor, one of the best in Prescott, of course, and his other brother Johnny is a cowboy.
Sculpting
For his sculpture, Kit uses found objects, mostly rusted metal parts of all descriptions which make up his Library of Visual Solutions. Kit brought 10 tons of his metal “Library” to Prescott and sold about 40 tons before moving from Camp Cactus in New River.
Library of Visual Solutions at Camp Cactus in New River, ArizonaCortez Camp Library of Visual Solutions at Kit’s new home now under construction
When sculpting metal, he will search through his “library” and select pieces that complement each other, welding them together to create a pleasing composition of angles and geometrics. As an artist who has learned to focus intensely, Kit honed his ability to quickly select and arrange pieces. His eye is trained and his mind revels in moving pieces around and around until he lands on the perfect composition.
Sketch of an iron gate for a client
Two smaller sculptures pictured below hang in the rental’s living room and illustrate his use of repeated angles or other design motifs.
Before moving from Camp Cactus, Kit constructed a massive metal sculpture that looked like a giant earth-moving machine. It was about 30 feet long, 10 feet wide and 8 feet high. He sold it to one of his collectors. Not all of his sculptures are gigantic, however, and not all are completely metal. They come in all shapes and sizes.
The day of my visit, Kit is monitoring the construction of a rock sculpture, a bench commissioned by a client and constructed from rocks on the client’s land. Kit selected two large stones, one for the base and one to sit atop it as a back, and directed the crew on where to place them. Because big machinery wouldn’t fit on the rocky hilltop, the rock bench crew manually moved two massive rocks with levers, straps and cable.
As we’re photographing his workspace in the rental home, Kit receives a call; the rocks are in place and ready for his review. We jump into my MINI and drive over. “Everything in Prescott is only a 5-minute minute drive away,” Kit says.
We promptly arrive and Kit sits on the bench, posing with the happy men who built the bench using their brute strength and power provided by Red Bull. Kit approves the rock placement.
“I’ll add stones around the bottom,” Kit says, “and place soil, pine needles and sticks to make it look as though the bench has been here a million years.”
We drive back to town for lunch and Kit says, “I’m glad to see those guys so happy about the rock bench. They figured it out as they went along.”
These are the same men who moved the 1914 house off of Kit’s Prescott lot on Cortez Street, clearing the way for him to build his new home, Cortez Camp, which will be much like Camp Cactus back in New River; about 1,300 square feet of artistic touches, including metal pieces here and there, inside and out, and a big shop in the back.
Kit lived at Camp Cactus in New River on the edge of Tonto National Forest for 25 years and when he stood on his front porch looking out, all he saw were mountains and Saguaros, nothing man-made.
“I became a bit too isolated there,” Kit says, part of the reason he decided to sell Camp Cactus and move to Prescott where his three brothers live.
Camp Cactus in New River, Arizona
“Camp Cactus is my largest piece of art yet,” Kit says. Thinking of it as an art piece is the only way Kit could bring himself to sell the home he crafted with his own hands. As with every other piece of art he’s made, Kit signed Camp Cactus by engraving a silver plate with the following words and attaching it to a wall inside the house:
“This home was conceived in my heart, designed in my mind, and built with my hands as a work of art. It remains my masterpiece. Kit Carson.”
“I’ll always miss the house, and the view, but I’ve integrated those memories and only want to remember how good it was,” Kit says.
Cortez Camp is his newest work of art/future living space. Strict building codes in Prescott mean Kit has to hire certified welders to put up his rusted porch poles instead of doing it himself. That’s a bummer for someone who welds all the time. Luckily, Kit’s brother Tom lives next door and is the building contractor for Cortez Camp.
Cortez Camp under construction as seen from Cortez StreetKit walks through his future bedroom at Cortez CampKit stands in his future workshop; his house is in the background
Tips and Tricks
Making a living at art isn’t just about making art. It requires adapting to customers’ changing tastes and active marketing. Over the years, Kit incorporated a few sensible tactics into his marketing repertoire.
“I was in Neiman’s one day and saw a consultant advising a customer on what colors worked best with her skin and hair. It occurred to me that I needed to know those things so I can advise my clients. And that’s what I do. I make the jewelry about them.”
Kit has attracted a number of serious collectors who buy his jewelry and home decor items. But he can no longer depend on his collectors to show up at art shows and buy enough jewelry to make it worth his while. Lately, he’s hit on a mutually-beneficial arrangement where he visits his collectors in their homes as they host a lunch or breakfast for friends. Kit enjoys spending time with his clients and hearing what works and doesn’t work with his jewelry, and they enjoy having an artist in their home, as a friend.
After 43 years of ups and downs, Kit is still the artist who branches out and takes jobs when offered. He still makes art from his heart, lives below his means and has an uncommon piece-of-mind.
Kit crafts his life like he crafts a well-designed piece of jewelry. And it sparkles.
For an in-depth look at how Kit created his stone home in New River, be sure to read Candy Moulton’s online article, Camp Cactus: Kit Carson’s artist retreat near Cave Creek, Arizona: https://truewestmagazine.com/cactus-camp/
Mike Padian’s watercolor abilities were the best kept secret in Black Canyon City… until now. He’s mastered the medium, and life.
Watercolor Wizard
I met Mike last spring at a cooking class taught by Matt, French chef and owner of Nora Jean’s Koffee Kitchen; the second-best kept secret in Black Canyon City.
Mike’s talent as a watercolorist was the best kept secret.
During the monthly classes, where a group of wanna-be chefs try our hands at classic French dishes crafted with Matt’s imaginative twists, I’m always drawn to Mike, his sunny nature, quick smiles and absolute delight in the color, texture and chemistry of veggies, oils, meats and spices.
Delight. That’s Mike.
When I learned Mike painted watercolors, and asked him about it during class, he was standing behind a chair, hands resting on its back. Folks at our table were busy shoving haricots cooked with slivered almonds and garlic mashed potatoes into our mouths as Mike modestly said, “Yes, I paint watercolors.”
He mentioned being mystified by people who master oil painting. Soon, I’d learn just how modest Mike was being.
Last November, Black Canyon City hosted its third annual Hidden in the Canyon self-guided art studio tour. The weekend event included six artist studios in the small city. Each studio hosted multiple artists working in various mediums. When my husband Brent and I learned of the artist tour, we were in!
Most importantly, whatever studio Mike was exhibiting in would be our first stop.
Mike, along with a jewelry maker, glass artist and ceramicist, was showing his work in Lori M’s beautiful home, practically a museum of paintings, sculptures, ceramics, multi-media pieces and furniture by many artists; all tasteful and arranged for living with, not just looking at.
Lori is Black Canyon City’s patron saint of art patrons and she’s a huge Mike Padian fan.
“Wow,” Brent said when we first saw Mike’s watercolors, set up in Laura’s dining room, just off the patio. “Who knew he was this good?”
I had suspected Mike’s talent was great. But, the details… the colors. How was he able to so deftly manipulate colored water, the slipperiest of all media?
We immediately selected a small, rectangular landscape in a complementary frame and bought it. Fast. Before someone else did.
Lori, the homeowner, is a pretty woman, dark shiny hair, who was adorned in eclectic necklaces, bracelets and earrings made by local artists, each piece revealing her taste and personality.
“Since you bought a painting from Mike,” Lori said, “I want to show you something.”
She turned and removed a chair that blocked visitors from entering her living room. I felt like we had won the lottery as we followed Laura on our mysterious journey through her treasure-filled home. I found it difficult to walk forward because my head was constantly turning to take in each large painting, or sculptured figure or carved wall-hanging. Surprisingly, I didn’t bump into Lori, and Brent didn’t bump into me, when Lori stopped outside the closed door to her bedroom.
Drum roll, please. My head was actually buzzing with anticipation when we stepped into her room and our eyes immediately went to the mural over Lori’s metal bed, a faux window filled with a colorful Sonoran Desert scene.
Mike’s mural in Laura M’s bedroom
“What?!” is all I could say. Vaguely, I sensed Mike’s presence, but all my attention was on the gorgeous, red-blooming Ocotillo, white-tipped wildflowers and stately Saguaros showing through the optical illusion of a deep-set window.
Brent leaned over the bed to put his hand on the fake window sill and exclaimed, “I thought it was a real window ledge!”
The entire wall was painted to look like plaster, cracked in some places. Right then, I knew I had to feature Mike on this blog.
Lori beamed, clearly proud and in awe of Mike’s extraordinary talent. There was a hint of tears as she said, “The only reason I agreed to host artists in my home today is because of Mike.”
Lori knew something that would take me a little longer to figure out. Mike’s entire life had been spent making art, in one physical way or another, and sharing its beauty with people.
On a Saturday afternoon in December, I visited Mike in his home and began to put the pieces together, the ones Lori was already intimately familiar with, the ones that could bring tears of sadness and joy.
Mike’s home behind Ron’s Market is wooden, narrow and deep, reminiscent of shotgun houses found in the Deep South where I’m from. Cozy and inviting, each room is well-appointed and a reflection of Mike; his interests, his passions.
“I like my house,” he says simply.
His “Happy Wall” in the dining room has a kayak and paddles resting in a corner, a row of carefully arranged beer glasses, and a long, perfectly-executed oil painting, one of Mike’s masterpieces, of the Dirty Devil River, a tributary of Lake Powell. “The Dirty Devil only gets enough flow for kayaking five days out of the year,” Mike said. “We had a blast for a week on this river.”
Mike likes his beer/ale/lager dark and stout. In fact, he finishes a pint as we begin our tour of his home, and pours a new one.
“Would you like one?” he asks. A beer is tempting, but I say no. I must remain sharp and focused so I can remember everything he says.
Next to the refrigerator is a mound of empty beer bottles tucked into cases stacked one on the other. I stare at the pile.
“Don’t judge,” Mike says.
“I’m not judging,” I say. “Brent plans to build a greenhouse with walls of colored bottles. He’s not interested in brown bottles, so I’m just checking out how many clear and colored bottles you have.”
“I didn’t just drink all of those,” Mike says, still concerned I’m judging. “I’ve been saving them for a while.”
I’m truly not judging Mike, about anything. In fact, as we talk through the afternoon and explore his watercolors of all shapes and sizes, framed on the wall or tucked into boxes under tables, my high estimation of him steadily and steeply rises.
As we talk about his life, and painting, we pull out more and more pieces, each distinct and breath-taking. Mike knows the geographic location of each landscape, even those from his imagination. I feel like a gold miner striking a vein and can’t get enough. “Bring it on,” I say, when he remembers another stash.
Some of the framed watercolors reflect light from windows, which can be seen in the photographs we’re taking. Instead of going through the trouble of taking the paintings out of their frames, we pull them off the wall, prop them up and Mike stands across the room with a giant piece of cardboard, moving it up or down, right or left, according to my directions, attempting to block light from over the kitchen sink or through the sliding glass doors. It’s rather comical and the photos don’t turn, of course. They look like stars shooting out of desert rocks.
But that’s okay. Mike hands me a CD labeled “MIKE PADIAN’S PAINTINGS” and I happily discover these very framed masterpieces are quality jpegs on the CD.
In his studio, Mike and I excitedly arrange his library of unframed watercolors, one by one, on a white background and take photographs, me feeling like an amateur photographer next to the master. Like the guy who washed Michelangelo’s paint brushes, or brought him a sandwich.
‘Don’t judge,’ I think as I try to capture each piece of artwork with just the right light at just the right angle.
Distortions would be bad; I want to be true to Mike’s art. And to Mike.
Mike created his first painting at the age of nine. “It was large,” Mike says, “and Mother still has it.”
For 23 years, painting billboards 48-feet long was all in a day’s work for Mike. He painted 10-foot tall Big Macs, giant portraits of Phoenix newscasters and naked women. Well, he only painted naked women on Fridays as a practical joke for his boss, Don Weber; on Monday, Mike would paint clothes on the women before the billboards were hung in public.
10-Foot tall Big Mac sitting in the workshop
Mike admits that at 5′ 4″, he’s not a big man, so it’s ironic he created such massive artwork. “We used a projector,” Mike says, “to create enlarged sketches that I then painted in with detail. We had to paint quickly, too, because time was money.”
After billboard painting, Mike began a mural painting business in 2003. One day in 2004, he found out he needed a heart transplant… right away.
“In the emergency room, the doctor asked how many heart episodes I’d had, and I told him two. He said, ‘most people die on the third one,’ so I immediately went on the donor list, knowing that my small heart cavity meant I’d need the heart from a small woman or child.” The doctors gave Mike seven days to live.
A heart became available on Day Five.
These days, if you ask Mike how he’s doing, his face lights up as he says, “Great! Can’t complain.” If anyone has a right to complain, it’s Mike. The medicines necessary these many years to keep his body from rejecting the donor heart have damaged his health in significant ways. However, Mike chooses laughter over the alternative; curling up in a fetal position and dropping out.
Besides, Mike is too busy preparing for art shows and spending time with his brother Ron, who lives nearby, and crafting exquisite culinary dishes for his mother and stepfather; like Madeira sauce with tarragon and mushrooms.
While Mike focuses on watercolor painting, folks continue to fall in love with him and his work… it’s simply impossible not to!
In the short time Mike painted murals around Phoenix, he was kept busy by quite a few customers. For his favorite client, Mike painted Davinci’s Last Supper on the man’s dining room wall, a John Force funny car mural in his home office and a movie-themed mural of vintage film posters surrounded by popcorn and movie reels on the wall over his TV.
Mike poses with his “Last Supper” mural
“My client called me this past December and told me he painted over the Last Supper mural,” Mike chuckles. “I mean, it was his to paint over. Now he wants me to paint a scene with the Ten Commandments’ stone tablets, maybe with Mt. Sinai in the background.”
Mike’s mural work, like the one in Laura’s bedroom, is stunning and often contains T’rompe-l’oeil (French for “deceive the eye”), imagery that creates an optical illusion of objects existing in three dimensions. In homes, Mike has painted windows with desert scenes, extended hallways, floral trims and scroll work. He even painted a space-themed mural for a phone store.
The real hallway ends just after the hanging lamp. Everything beyond that point is illusion.
LEARNING TO PAINT ON A LARGE SCALE
Mike grew up in Phoenix and graduated from Moon Valley High School in 1976. He started painting billboards and signs one year later.
“At first, I was sloping panels and cleaning up messes. My boss said I should learn how to draw letters to scale, and once I had experience doing letters, I could paint billboards.”
Mike took a lettering class at Maricopa County College. Back then, all lettering was drawn out by hand using math to determine spacing, letter widths and heights. Every step was manual, no computers. After a year of lettering, Mike began painting his own billboards and over the next two decades, learned on-the-job.
Painting giant faces on billboards was difficult because Mike was too close to see the entire face. To compensate, he developed a system of dotted lines to identify where he was on the face.
Mike’s dotted lines on a billboard face from the 80s.
“A line of long dashes meant a long blend,” Mike says. “Shorter dashes meant a short blend of colors and shadows, and dots represented things I needed to change. For instance, I would outline eyes in dots and knew I needed to go outside of those lines.”
Mike educated himself in the Venyetti effect, a phenomenon that causes proportions to distort when an image is enlarged. “Venyetti effect is especially critical when painting large objects on billboards,” Mike says. “A one percent distortion, or difference in size, can change the entire face.” Painting a huge face might have taken Mike an entire day. He didn’t want to have to redo the whole thing by not taking potential distortions into account.
Mike mostly painted billboards on the ground in a giant studio, though sometimes he would need to climb up on the catwalk and paint from there, which was dangerous for obvious reasons. While most billboards were 14-feet high and 48-feet long, some had 16- or 17-foot high extensions, making them mega-tall billboards.
Mike paints high in the air, under the desert sun.
Not only could rain ruin the paint on an outdoor job, the chance of falling was ever-present. In fact, Mike fell twice. Once when working with his boss, Don, on a billboard on Grand Avenue near the train tracks. They were standing on the catwalk when a board snapped and they both fell 15 feet. Mike landed in a barbed wire fence and got hung up. Don hit a truck and bounced onto Mike, then walked away unscathed, saying, “That’s what a good apprentice is for. Thanks, Mike.”
Even while bloodied with mud packed in his nose, Mike climbed back up and continued the job.
In the early 1990’s, with the advent of computers and big ink printers capable of producing large vinyl pieces, printing raced to overtake hand-painting. Within a decade, hand-painting would be gone.
“In the early days of printed billboards, the inks were inferior,” Mike says, “and our clients thought it looked awful. They would ask us to fix it. I had to match the dot matrix with a solid paint color, which was very difficult to do, all the while standing on the catwalk. To check my work, I’d have to climb down, run back to look at it, and then climb back up again.”
Around 1999, Mike decided he no longer wanted to be a billboard monkey, stretching vinyl, fixing bad print jobs and climbing up and down. It was simply too dangerous.
WORDS AND IMAGES
Mike’s artistic skills are broader than painting. He has always written poetry, lyrics and articles for magazines. During the 1980s and 1990s, while Mike painted billboards, he also ran his own stock photography company. Drawn to recreational sports and the outdoors, Mike took photos of models while kayaking, snow skiing, mountain biking and hiking. He catalogued the photos for use by publications and also sent monthly submissions to outdoor magazines and visitor guides.
In addition to publishing photos, Mike occasionally wrote pieces for Bike magazine, Mt. Bike magazine and National Geographic Explorer magazine. He honed his writing chops with Sweat Magazine.
Here’s an excerpt from an article Mike photographed and wrote for Bike magazine about the Five Miles of Hell (5MOH) trail system in Utah. The intro reads, “In this part of Utah, west and north of Moab’s storied red rocks, there’s a trail with a cruel name and a brutal reputation. To ride it, torture is salvation, punishment the prize.”
“What 5MOH lacks in epic length, it makes up for in the fatigue per mile it doles out. While it might not have breathtaking vistas, traveling among the tightly sculpted sandstone creases has an almost mystical appeal. There are no zen-inducing climbs or vision-blurring descents, but 5MOH holds the needle in the red on the pucker-meter by requiring the rider to show utter conviction in the two simplest of disciplines… letting the bike do everything it is built to do and forcing the bike to do what it needs to do.”
A spread of Mike’s article with photos of his model.
Mike’s ex-wife, Jill, published a piece in Bike magazine about Mike’s stock photography adventures titled People Who Ride. Here’s an excerpt:
“Then there was the time he came home two hours late and parked his truck in front of the house but didn’t get out. He just sat there. I kept working at my desk, figuring he was jamming to a song on the radio. Finally, a plaintive bleating of the truck horn awakened me to the fact that all was not right in the world of Kodachrome.
I found him naked except for a beer in his hand. That position was all the better for the setting sun to glint off the cactus prickers stuck all over his legs and buttocks, allowing me to find and pluck them from his body with tweezers. As I performed the delicate surgery, he of course fumed about the shots he’d missed.”
Mike doesn’t take up a lot of space in this world. He doesn’t push his ways on those around him. He’s gentle, unless conquering a river or landscape, either in kayaks, on bikes or with watercolors. He’s thoughtful. For instance, as a stock photographer, he would sometimes urge his clients to give their business to another stock photographer, one who was making a living at it, unlike Mike, who had his full-time job of painting billboards. Mike is considerate of others, sometimes to his own deprivation. But that’s who Mike is.
In 2005, Mike donated 4,000 of his stock photos of Downtown Phoenix to the city archives. He estimates 12,000 slides of outdoor recreational photos are currently stored in his art studio. “They’re outdated,” Mike says. I try to convince him publications would find value in those scenes, which could be considered vintage by now. Everything vintage is “in” these days. Besides, shot through his artistic eye, and on film nonetheless, these thousands of photos are pure Mike Padian Art.
WATERCOLOR
Watercolor is Mike’s medium of choice, and desert landscapes are his forte.
“Some people don’t like working with watercolors because they’re hard to manipulate,” Mike says. “People get frustrated at how difficult it can be to place the color exactly where they want it. But that’s what I love about it. It’s such a thrill when the colors go into place and turn out as I’d imagined.”
The “imagining” is Mike’s favorite part of the process. He uses an engineering approach to carefully plan exactly how he’ll apply colors in layers to create the image in his head. He will spend time thinking and strategizing before ever putting brush to paper.
Once his strategy is in place, Mike can create a painting in a day, including time for drying between layers. “I’ll paint the sky,” Mike says, “then I’ll wash dishes while it dries.”
“I’m self-taught,” Mike says. “I’ve learned from a lot of people by listening. I’m never too proud to attend a demonstration or a class. And I’ve studied light my whole life.”
In one class, Mike had an epiphany. “You must look past what you’re looking at to see the true colors,” Mike says. “An instructor in Sedona showed us how to look through a small hole punched into cardboard to view the object and see the colors as they really are.”
Nature can be a powerful teacher, too. “I hadn’t understood hot and cool in colors until one day I was hiking, not really thinking about painting, when I saw the sun burn around—and appear to nearly burn through—a saguaro. I was able to then see the orange and red, purple and blue in the rocks.”
Mike uses his knowledge of photography to enhance his eye for painting. “In photography, you must trick the camera into seeing the colors in the shadows, make lighter spots more light, and it works with painting, too.”
Years ago, Mike used black in his watercolors. “I don’t use black as a darkening agent anymore,” Mike says. “I’m able to manipulate my color pallet to get good dark colors without black.”
Mike had always painted from photographs, but after his heart transplant, he began to make up images in his head. Eventually, he began plein air painting, which is now his preference. Attending the Moab Plein Air Festival in Utah is one of his favorite past-times.
“They have competitions within a certain geographic area and you’re given a time frame for completing a painting and framing it,” Mikes says. He’s won several awards for various competitions, including Plein Air.
Mike’s Awards
First Place – Water media, 2014 Escalante Plein Air
Second Place – Water Media, 2013 Moab Plein Air Festival
First Place – Water Media, 2012 Moab Plein Air Festival
Honorable Mention – 2011, 36th Annual Western Federation of Watercolor Societies
Award of Excellence, 2011 AZ Watercolor Association Spring Exhibit
Purchase Selection – 2010 Watercolor West Juried Exhibit
Merchant Award – 2009 AZ Watercolor Association Spring Exhibit
Award of Excellence – 2008 AZ Watercolor Association Fall Exhibit
He enjoys the process of painting, it makes him happy, especially when he tries a new technique and it works. “It feeds my soul,” Mike says.
“You know, one painting represents four paintings, because three other paintings didn’t turn out exactly right. They had some glitch, but that happens working with any medium. Just the process itself, many times a painting doesn’t work out.”
Mike keeps the ones that don’t turn out and he’ll use the back for experimenting with colors. “I’ll rip up the really bad ones, though,” he admits, laughing.
His work space is simple and not crowded with paints, paper or other supplies. He works with only a few small tubes of paint or watercolors. “I’m not a supply hoarder. It’s funny to have so few supplies because when I was painting murals, I bought paints by the pint or gallons.”
One raised drawing table, a work table and shelving occupy Mike’s creative space. Here he sketches and paints with his film cameras snugly stored in a nearby closet. Mike’s studio is at the back of his house. Soft light filters through the blinds. It’s quiet. A perfect spot to contemplate/engineer his paintings.
Mike sells his paintings through art shows, word of mouth, Sho ‘N Tell retail space in Rock Springs, and in the upstairs gallery at the Rock Springs Cafe. He has a devoted following, which now includes me and Brent. To give back, Mike donates paintings for various fundraisers around Phoenix.
Painting and preparing gourmet meals hasn’t been Mike’s only creative outlets, though. He’s also built a house and drummed.
Starting in 2000, for 53 weeks Mike and his then-wife of 25 years, Jill, built a home in Black Canyon City. Mike took a year off of work and acted as general contractor. He also did much of the on-hands work, including drywall, finishing, installing windows and logging his own timber from the Mogollon rim to hewn into vegas for his patio. Vegas are logs used as posts on patios or as architectural features indoors, perhaps to emphasize entry space between rooms.
Unfortunately, Mike went into the hospital for the heart transplant in 2004.
Mike built this gate in his backyard.
In his younger days, Mike played the drums, preferring to perform progressive rock by groups like Gentle Giant, Gong and Yes. But a couple of times, he was asked to sit in with a Country & Western band to play for residents of Shangri La, the famous nudist resort that’s been in New River, Arizona, for at least 50 years.
“I prefer rock music,” Mike says, “so I faked half of the Country & Western songs. But the crowd didn’t care. They were all just dancing in their natural glory on the tennis court, having a good time. After the first set, they started yelling for the band to take off our clothes, but we didn’t,” he laughs.
The second time the band played at Shangri-La, the bass player and guitarist dropped acid. “The guitarist went into a Jimi Hendrix riff and all these naked people stopped dancing to look at him like he was crazy.”
Most of his gigs were with professional bands and Mike even recorded in a studio; back then, it would have been on a reel-to-reel or tape cassette.
Mike’s life has always been about making art, beginning at the age of eight with painting, then as a billboard painter right out of high school, and eventually as a stock photographer, writer, drummer, gourmet cook, mural painter and watercolorist.
Mike has consistently brought beauty into the world.
“As I age,” Mike says, “I don’t need to paint every day like I used to. But I do have two compositions in my head right now and I need to draw them out, get them down on paper.”
In the last year, Mike’s painting has been overshadowed by other priorities, like going to dialysis three days a week for three-hour sessions each time.
“Dialysis isn’t awful,” Mike reassures me, “but it’s not great, either. Usually I put in ear plugs and just try to sleep through it.”
How considerate of Mike to make me and others feel better about what he has to endure. Just like he urged his clients to give other photographers their business, Mike thinks about not taking from others to give to himself. That’s why he is hesitant to seek donor kidneys; he speculates there’s a chance he might only live for two more years with new kidneys, which would take kidneys away from someone else who might live longer. I try to argue the point but Mike is following a deeply-ingrained moral imperative. That’s who he is. And that’s why I respect him.
“I have to make a decision, though,” Mike says. “I need to decide soon if I’m going to move forward with kidney transplants.”
One thing’s for sure, Mike is ready to crank up his painting again, dialysis sessions and moral dilemmas be damned!
“With everything I’ve studied, I haven’t mastered any of it, just figured things out. I was never a great biker or kayaker or skier or photographer. I’ve done everything half-assed, except for painting. I think I’ve finally mastered watercolor.”
“Each figure is a character and I can you tell you their story,” Rob says about this army of 18-inch zombie warriors and skeletal cowboys, some with long, hooked noses and gnarled fingers, others with half-skeletal faces, all with a determined look to survive by wielding their “junk-yard” armor and weapons. “They all come from the School of Hard Knocks. Or else I’m purging some deep anger issues,” he laughs.
Gorgeously Grotesque
The first time I lay eyes on Rob, he’s sitting on a bench looking miserable, even though an 8-foot tall perfectly-rendered life-sized and life-like Frankenstein monster stands watch over him. Rob sits in the monster’s shadow by his tented sculpture gallery, which is sandwiched between a silversmith making exquisite contemporary pendants and earrings and a… well, I don’t see who the other artists are or what their pieces look like because once I start examining Rob’s ghoulish figures, I spend the remainder of our visit at Stop Number Five on the Hidden in the Canyon artist-studio tour amongst Rob’s macabre creatures, my mouth hanging open.
If Rob looks temporarily miserable, I think, perhaps he is feeling like a fish out of water, his artwork under-appreciated by the average visitor. Me? My mind is blown and I’m not moving on. I lean in and study each piece, a different character sculpted from Rob’s imagination. My eyes follow the intricate lines of every face, hand and piece of clothing, some of which are actual pieces of fabric. The detail is exquisite even if the features are grotesque.
“Each figure is a character and I can you tell you their story,” Rob says about this army of 18-inch zombie warriors and skeletal cowboys, some with long, hooked noses and gnarled fingers, others with half-skeletal faces, all with a determined look to survive by wielding their “junk-yard” armor and weapons. “They all come from the School of Hard Knocks. Or else I’m purging some deep anger issues,” he laughs.
Rob sculpts the small, one-of-a-kind figures in Chavant clay, and he might paint certain parts of their clothing or armament. He also casts some larger pieces in silicon, like Frankenstein, whose skin looks so real with hints of red and blue veins, pores and hair, that when the sun shines through the stretched web of his hand, it glows like a human’s. Frankenstein has eerie, sparse hair flowing over metal pieces that realistically clamp the top of his head on. Even his large, black coat and pants are worn and frayed in just the right places.
Frankenstein is marvelous, and so is Rob.
While studying the minute details of every work, all I can say is “wow” and “amazing,” yet Rob communicates beautifully about his process. When he talks about sculpting clay or casting silicon or resin, his passion is obvious; his hands dart and his eyes shine.
Not only has Rob perfected, through self-guided learning, the techniques needed to create his sculptures, he did it in his spare time while being a hair stylist the last 30 years. For 18 years, Rob owned his own shop, called Salon Designs. Now, Rob and his wife Anna, a nail artist, share space at a salon near Happy Valley and I-17 north of Phoenix. They like the arrangement. Between customers, Rob can sculpt.
“Having a sculpture at work,” Rob says, “means I can take an entire day to work on one finger!” He’s not joking. The time he spends on the tiniest of details shows up and pays off. He studies bone construction, where muscle meets bones, to craft the second-most important feature of any figure, their hands. The most important feature is, of course, the face. But the eyes Rob crafts are incredible, too. Very real and moist and just-right red.
“I’m Not lazy,” Rob says. Understatement! The amount of work he turns out is impressive, and it’s not all sculpting.
Rob built a large detached garage as his workshop. In the desert summer, when it’s too hot for the workshop, he retreats to a small room off his living room where he sits at a desk, with lots of good lighting, and sculpts, or paints, or attaches real human hair from his salon clients to his creations. The room is lined with shelves holding molds, silicon monster faces pocked with warts, and sculptures in various stages of completion. A torso sits in the center of the room, at child height, and a closet holds even more molds and heads and faces.
Rob demonstrates applying eyebrows to a silicon face. He clamps a sewing needle, point down, into an X-acto knife holder. He has nipped off the tip of the needle at the eye, leaving a u-shape in which he threads a human hair. Inserting the needle at an angle, like eyebrows naturally grow, Rob leaves the hair embedded in the brow and moves on to the next one. When all hairs are in place, he’ll trim them.
At the 2017 Arizona State Fair, Rob entered several pieces and wondered if the general public would understand his work. Well, let’s just say he swept the damn fair! And that’s after they weren’t even sure how to categorize his work. Most of his entries were listed as “Home Arts,” and the show organizer told Rob they will create a unique category for his entries in next year’s State Fair. He won two first place awards, two second place, one third place, one fourth place and a big pink ribbon for “Exceptional Merit.”
But for someone who wasn’t sure where his work belonged, the category was irrelevant. In the end, he was awarded a big purple “Best of Show” ribbon and a big purple “People’s Choice” ribbon. Rob swept the damn fair.
Rob sells his pieces through shows, galleries and retail shops, and he has a client base who buy multiple pieces to decorate their fancy homes, and who even commission work.
Rob should be a make-up artist on The Walking Dead. In fact, he was selected to work as master sculptor on an independent short horror film called The Kiss, written and directed by Remi Vaughn. Rob’s sculptures will be used as art produced by one of the main characters in this horror/psychological thriller starring Caterina Murino and Sean Patrick Flanery. The project has been stalled by budget and distribution issues, and Vaughn is re-assessing the format of telling the story. Stay up-to-date on the film by visiting www.thekiss-movie.com.
Rob also worked on Sweet, a short horror film shot in Mesa, Arizona, in 2014, about vampire cowboys based on Stephen King’s Skinner Sweet short story. Rob made the hands and face for the lead character and he also played a couple of parts. Check it out on Youtube to see his low-tech solution for having a bloody human heart beat in Sweet’s hand.
On Rob’s To-Do List is making fully-functioning hands using 3-D printed bones on which he sculpts organic-looking details. He’ll do it. Rob ultimately completes his projects, which are many. A giant T-rex head, molded from paper, masking tape and a bed sheet, rests in his workshop, waiting for final finessing. Half-completed sculptures sit here and there.
“There’s a freedom to living the dream,” Rob says, “and being able to jump from project to project.” His mood leads the way. In addition to being a great artist and a talented actor, he also has rhythm.
In his younger days, Rob was a drummer, playing in several bands, such as The Bashers and Right Side Up, rehearsing four nights a week for four hours. When his band was interviewed on TV, he was asked what he wanted to do with his career. Rob’s answer was, “Be a pilot.” He laughs remembering his answer then, which had nothing to do with music and playing in a band.
Sometimes late at night, when he’s concentrating on his art, Rob will crank up his favorite groups; Type O negative, Primed, Ozzy Osbourne or Rush.
But, Rob is as obsessed with aviation as he is with monsters and his dream to be a pilot came true. Currently, he’s building from scratch a Hummel Bird aircraft designed by Morry Hummel (of Hummel Aviation of Byran, Ohio).
Rob is crafting each piece by hand (except for the wing ribs). Otherwise, he fabricates the aluminum pieces and other parts according to detailed sketches on 40 pages of plans provided by Hummel Aviation.
“I’m cutting two cylinders off a Volkswagen engine,” Rob says. “It will be a two-cylinder, four-stroke half-VW aircraft engine, weighing about 84 pounds and ramping up to 47 horsepower.”
Rob talks about crafting a monster to sit atop his Hummel Bird airplane and then entering the plane/monster “sculpture” in next year’s Arizona State Fair. Get ready for another sweep!
One man’s daunting task is another man’s pure joy.
While flying recently, Rob had to make an emergency landing on the east side of Lake Pleasant in his Error Bike plane (which he bought already put together). The engine in the yellow and white plane ate a piston, stranding Rob at the lake. Anna came to the rescue with Rob’s hand-made boat, in which they promptly scooted across the lake to his stranded plane. He put the yellow and white plane on his wooden boat, carried it back across the lake and on to home for repair.
He’s usually quite proficient at flying. In 1999, Rob took first place at the Arizona State Aerobatic Championship.
When he’s flying, Rob will spot coyotes or interesting items he might want to pick up when he’s back on the ground. One find was an antique french door which Anna converted to a tabletop, refinished to match the table base and topped off with a thick sheet of glass. Very shabby chic.
But let’s get back to that hand-made wooden boat. Rob has made three boats in the last couple of years. The first one is a shorter version, something of a prototype with which he could experiment. When that boat turned out well, he built a larger one out of plywood.
Unfortunately, returning home from Lake Pleasant after taking the boat on its inaugural run, Rob’s truck attracted a burro like a red cape attracts a bull in Spain. Burros that live around the lake and are protected by Arizona Game and Fish are known for being testy, and vocal. They can create issues for recreation seekers like Rob. This particular male charged Rob’s truck, ran into the side of it and ended up under the boat trailer, wrecking everything and demolishing his new boat.
Shaken but not deterred, Rob built a second boat out of plywood from Home Depot. He spent $250 on supplies and proudly says, “it catches fish like a $65,000 bass boat.”
Rob grew up in Phoenix in the 1970s, riding his bike to the end of his paved road where desert started. “As a kid,” Rob says, “I loved looking at monsters in magazines, comic books and the movies.” He began sketching and sculpting in his teens.
As a senior in high school, Rob recalls a cowboy showing interest in his paper mache sculptures. One was of a Native American man wearing a necklace of real coyote teeth. The man wanted to take three of Rob’s pieces to the Art Institute of Chicago, to be considered for a show. “I met him in the parking lot where I would later own a hair salon,” Rob says. “I remember putting the sculptures on the hood of my truck for the man to inspect. He left with those sculptures and I never saw the sculptures or heard from him again.”
Rob sculpted this creature from paper mache when he was in high school.
Older and wiser, Rob and Anna, his wife of 16 years, now live in Black Canyon City, about 25 miles north of Phoenix, with their cute little dogs, Addie and Lacey, and two gorgeous feral cats who appeared in their backyard as kittens and decided to stay (the food Rob and Anna leave for the cats is a good enticement).
Being practical, Rob plans to keep his day job. “I won’t kick that bee hive,” he says. Cutting hair provides a stable foundation from which he can stretch his artistry in new directions and even in new places.
“For me,” Rob says, “the creative process is like throwing dice down on a table. Each throw comes up with a different result, and following one dice often takes me off in a new direction.” Rob’s fingers scurry across the coffee table as he speaks, showing the adventure of going down the rabbit hole of creativity.
Rob’s is a talent and an energy that can’t be contained. No limitations.
YouTube University continues to be Rob’s source for everything he wants to learn and do. When it comes to his sculptures, big and small, he’s adamant that “it has to be horror.”
Three years ago, Rob and Anna trekked to Monsterpalooza in Burbank, California, to check it out and see if he might want to participate in subsequent years. But they couldn’t even get in! After only 40 minutes of being there, they returned to Arizona. Rob doesn’t worry about being in with the art world or even cognizant of artists considered master monster crafters. He’s on his own path, following his own aesthetic, exploring and learning new techniques and new mediums. It’s simply what he does with his endless energy.
At the Phoenix Comicon this year, a long line of young and old people waited to have Rob apply bloody flesh wounds to their faces, hands, knees and elbows. Rob donated The Terminavigator, a large torso piece, to be raffled off to benefit a local no-kill animal shelter. A lucky female scientist from California was delighted to win the sculpture.
Rob recently joined a Facebook group for people who work on horror movies. He’s making connections and expects to travel to Hollywood soon to meet folks face-to-face, laying the groundwork for being considered for future projects.
“I’m transparent about my skills,” Rob says about getting exposure for himself and his work. “I’m opening myself up – heart, mind and soul – to other people, laying bare my abilities and dreams.”
I’m using words like ghoulish, macabre and grotesque to describe Rob’s figures. Yet, they elicit compassion rather than disgust. Their faces reveal them as victims, not the bad guys. They’re pulling together their broken spirits and their broken bodies and riding on, or stumbling on, their dignity intact. They may look like monsters, but Rob has embedded a humanity in each, and given each their own story, their own struggles. They won’t quit, and neither will Rob.
He has the usual self-doubt of any artist and sometimes he’ll ask himself the usual questions; Why am I doing this? Does anyone really care? Do people understand my work?
“I do it because I want to,” Rob says. Let’s hope he’ll always wants to.
Navigating the Art Institute of Chicago may be like navigating O’Hare airport for the first time, just without the crowds, but helpful guides are on hand to out you straight. PLUS, the museum allows visitors to photograph most works of art!!!
Even with plenty of signage pointing the way, and with a color-coded floor plan map as reference, I had difficulty locating several sections on a recent visit. Each time, Sandy was right there to graciously point me in the right direction, even saying, “I’ve been here a while and am still learning my way around.”
With only four hours to roam the museum, I focused on viewing paintings and started with the Impressionist section for which the Institute is know, and then moved to the special Rodin exhibit (they’re not paintings, but couldn’t pass up seeing the sculptures!).
The gallery of Modern paintings was my favorite, which surprised me. Abstracts, stark lines and dull or dark colors usually don’t move me. But not this time.
Below are some of the paintings that drew me in. All are oil on canvas unless otherwise noted. Dimensions are in inches. Sorry for the inconsistency in how each work is framed… I shot the pics with an iPhone. Happy Browsing!
Art Institute Photos
Louis Anquetin, An Elegant Woman at the Elysee Montmartre, 1888 (28 3/8 x 35 5/8).
This painting’s bright colors caught my eye, and then I noticed the unusual black outlines. Wikipedia writes, “Around 1887, Anquetin and Emile Bernard developed a painting style that used flat regions of color and thick, black contour outlines. This style, named Cloisonnism by critic Edouard Dujardin, was inspired by both stained glass and Japanese ukiyo-e.”
Claude Monet, Water Lily Pond,1900 (39 3/4 x 35 3/8).
Monet re-routed a river to create his marshy backyard specifically as a subject for his paintings… and to please his eyes. He created 18 Versions of this scene.
Vincent Van Gogh, The Poet’s Garden,1888 (28 3/4 x 36 1/4).
In a letter written around mid–September, van Gogh wrote that he had created a painting of “a corner of a garden with a weeping tree, grass, round clipped cedar shrubs and an oleander bush…there is a citron sky over everything, and also the colors have the richness and intensity of autumn.” This was the first of a four-painting series that would eventually hang in Gauguin’s house.
Van Gogh, The Bedroom, 1889 (29 x 36 5/8).
Van Gosh painted three similar pictures of his bedroom in the “yellow House” he rented in Arles, France. This was the second one, which he painted it while living at an asylum in St. Remy.
George Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte -1884. (81 3/4 x 121 1/4).
The La Grande Jatte, which means “the big platter,” was an island in the River Seine. Seurat used tiny brushstrokes of complementary colors next to each other so they blend at a distance but add dimension (and even a little sparkle). Art critics named this technique Divisionism, or Pointillism. His use of geometric shapes and accurate proportions contrasts with works of the Impressionists, making him a post-Impressionist.
Detail of A Sunday on La Grande Jatte -1884.
Claude Monet, Poppy Field (Giverny), 1890/91 (24 1/16 x 36 3/4).
Monet painted this poppy field four times, the same summer he started painting the stacks of wheat in 25 versions. It’s visually appealing.
Bonham Family Portraits, William Bonnell,1825 (12 x 9 14/16).
William Bonnell, an Amerian painter, painted William Bonham, his sonJ. Ellis Bonham from his first marriage, and Mrs. William Bonham (Ann Warford), his second wife. This queer, yet charming, little trio were completed in three successive days. I like the varied shading of the backgrounds, yet everything else is similar; biggish heads, smallish bodies made to recede even more in black, and each holding an object representing their interests. The man smokes a cigar, the boy reads a book and the woman holds a scarf.
Charles Biederman, American, Untitled, Paris,March 1937(45 5/8 x 35).
Biederman first studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, then went on to study and paint in New York and Paris, where he was exposed to Cubists, Surrealists and other modern artists. Interestingly, he was dedicated to starting a new work each day.
Charles Sheeler, Western Industrial,1955 (22 7/8 x 29).
Sheeler was a painter and photographer known as a Precisionist. I love how the diagonal lines add movement to Inland Steel plant in East Chicago, Indiana.
Charles Sheeler, The Artist Looks at Nature,1943 (21 x 18).
Is he really looking at the disproportionate nature? Looks instead like he is drawing an antiquated stove based on a photograph he took in 1917. The museum says, “His self-portrait also relies upon a photographic self-portrait he took in 1931.” I like the lines.
Jacob Lawrence, American, The Wedding, egg tempera on hardboard, 1948 (20 x 24).
Lawrence painted from his every day life in Harlem and about the history of African-Americans in the U.S. This painting reflects a solemn wedding ceremony but also joy in the colorful flowers and, my favorite, the stained glass framing the scene.
Archibald J. Motley, Jr., Nightlife,1943 (36 x 47 3/4).
Motley depicts nightlife in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood and paints diagonal lines and geometric shapes to represent jazz and motion.
Archibald J. Motley, Jr., Self-Portrait
Motley painted this self-portrait after the Chicago race riots of 1919. The museum says,”The violence convinced him that he should use his art to influence perceptions of African Americans in a positive manner.”
Thomas Hart Benton, Cotton Pickers, 1945 (32 x 48).
Benton painted this scene based on a trip he made to Georgia in the 1920s. It illustrates the dignity of sharecroppers, and how sharecropping kept agricultural laborers impoverished. The museum writes, “Benton held progressive views on race, social relations, and politics, and he believed ardently that African American history was central to the understanding of American culture.”
Grant Wood, American Gothic,1939. Oil on beaver board (30 3/4 x 25 3/4).
Wood publicly exhibited this painting for the first time at the Art Institute of Chicago, winning a $300 prize and instant fame. It’s still there! This photo is iconic, of course. Wood used his sister and dentist as his models.
Niles Spencer, Cape Cod,1926-27.
I was unable to find any details about this painting.
Georgia O’Keeffe, Spring,1923-24 (18 x 14).
O’Keeffe painted the building that held Alfred Stieglitz’s darkroom in Lake George, NY. Best known for her sensuous flower paintings, O’Keeffe portrays care and simplicity in this version of her husband’s humble studio.
Marguerite Thompson Zorach, Landscape, 1911-12 (23 1/4 x 19 1/4).
The museum says, “Marguerite Thompson Zorach was one of the first Americans to embrace abstract art, and she exhibited her vividly colored canvases at some of the most important early exhibitions of modern art, including the 1913 Armory Show.”
Diego Rivera, Portrait of Marevna,c. 1915 (57 3/8 x 44 3/8).
Husband of Frida Kahlo and best known for his murals (and Socialist activism), Rivera early on studied in Paris and practiced Cubism. This is his Russian mistress,Maria Virobieff-Stebelaka, whom he called “a she-devil.”
Mary Cassatt, On a Balcony,1878-79 (35 1/2 x 25 5/8).
One of Cassatt’s early Impressionist paintings. It’s pretty and shows the woman reading a newspaper rather than a novel. That’s a little progress for women.
John Singer Sargent, 1907, The Fountain, Villa Torino’s,Frascati, Italy (28 1/8 x 22 1/4).
All the international high society folks of his day wanted Sargent to paint their large portraits. Here he paints his friends,Wilfrid and Jane Emmet de Glehn, who are also artists.
John Singer Sargent, Rehearsal of the Pasdeloup Orchestra at the Cirque d’Hiver, c. 1879 (36 5/8 x 28 3/4).
Sargent painted this Impressionist piece as a student. Very different in perspective and technique from his well-known portraits of the global wealthy elite.
Shepard Fairey, Barack Obama Hope poster, 2008(24 x 36).
Willem de Kooning, Interchange,(sometimes called Interchanged), 1955 (79 x 69).
This painting sold at Sotheby’s of NY in 1989 for $18.8 million, the highest auction price ever paid for a contemporary artwork at that time. David Geffen privately sold the painting in 2015 for an estimated $300 million. I liked it for the powerful color bursts before learning about it’s value.
Alma Thomas, Starry Night and the Astronauts, 1972. Acrylic on canvas (60 x 53).
Thomas was the first fine arts graduate from Howard University. Born in Georgia, she taught art at a junior high school in Washington, D.C. for 35 years. Eventually, unfortunately, she stopped pursuing painting. The deep blue pulled me in, as did the brushstrokes and overall effect that reminds me of geometric quilts made by African-American women. This is one of my favorites!!
Roy Lichtenstein, Ohhh… Alright… 1964.Oil and manga on canvas (36.6 x 38).
This is relatively small compared to his usual giant pieces. Looking closely, it’s a marvel how he painted the dots so straight, like a machine.
Roy Lichtenstein, Artist’s Studio: Foot Medication,1974 (96x 128).
Had to share this one because it involves an artist’s Cre8-space, and Lichtenstein modeled some features, like the plant and patterned wallpaper and tablecloth, on Matisse’s famously colorful home interiors.
Wanda Pimental, Brazilian, Involvement Series.1968-69 (51 1/5 x 38 3/5).
Benny Andrews, Flag Day,1966 (31 x 16 inches).
I love Benny Andrews’ art! With this painting, Andrews is believed to be making a commentary on how African American men are imprisoned; this gentleman is trapped in the stripes of the U.S. flag.
Robert Ryman, Untitled, 1962.Oil on Linen (69 1/2 × 69 1/2)
Ryman’s painting may seem white, which attracted me, but other colors pop up, along with the burlap-colored linen background around the edges. He painted a series of these large-scale works in 1962 .
Cy Twombly, American, Untitled (Bolsena),1969. Oil-based paint, wax crayon and graphite on canvas (78 1/2 x 94 1/2).
Lots to look at here. Twombly has ardent fans, one of which is Ralph Rucci, the couture designer who collects Twombly’s works. Rucci has even used Twombly canvasses in playful French needlework on some of his clothing.
Andy Warhol, Four Mona Lisas,1978, acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen (50 x 40).
Well, I had to share at least one Warhol, and this one is based on the work of a master, rather than a soup company (not that there’s anything wrong with appropriating every day items for art).
Jackson pollock, The Key,1946. Oil on linen (59 x 82 inches).
An expressive abstract, this work was painted in an upstairs bedroom and worked from all sides. It predates Pollock’s famous drip paintings, which were released the following year. The museum writes, “The Key belongs to Jackson Pollock’s Accabonac Creek series, named for a stream near the East Hampton property that he and his wife, the painter Lee Krasner, purchased in late 1945.”
One of Jeff’s earliest impulses to sculpt happened at Riazzi’s Italian Garden restaurant in Mesa, Arizona, circa 1964, when she was six years old.
Sculptress-in-Demand
One of Jeff’s earliest impulses to sculpt happened at Riazzi’s Italian Garden restaurant in Mesa, Arizona, circa 1964, when she was six years old.
“Our table had white candles,” Jeff said, “and I remember using my thumbnails to press the warm wax into shapes. Every time we ate there, I looked forward to playing with the wax. I always loved playing in the mud, too, because I could squeeze forms from the muck.” Sadly, Riazzi’s closed in August 2017 after 72 years in business, but Jeff continues to sculpt professionally and for fun.
“Over the Rainbow”
Growing up, Jeff stayed outdoors as much as possible, and claims to have been a Tom boy. “I was the perfect son for my father,” she laughs. Her father, Wade Hoffman, hailed from Gastonia, North Carolina. He’s the reason she has a masculine name. “I think he really, really wanted a son after they had my older sister, Patricia,” Jeff said. “And sometimes he says he named me after the actor Jeff Chandler. Then why didn’t he name me ‘Chandler?'” she laughs.
Wade started his career in the U.S. Secret service. Eventually, he was sent to Japan where he met Shizuko, a big-city girl brought up on the Ginza strip in Tokyo, what Manhattan is to NYC, with all the big-city accoutrements, including a fine education and an impeccable fashion sense.
When they married in the late 50s, Wade could no longer be in the secret service, so he brought Shizuko and Patricia to Rock Hill, South Carolina, where Jeff was born in 1958. Three years later, Shizuoka could no longer stand the injustice of a segregated south and insisted they move. After traveling throughout the U.S., Wade and Shizuko chose Phoenix to make a home for their family.
Jeff has spirit. She’s gentle and energetic, witty and considerate, and always creating something with her hands.
Jeff’s latest creation made the newspaper! She sculpted a life-size bronze statue of Pat Tillman posted at ASU’s Sun Devil stadium near the entrance of Tillman Tunnel. Arthur Pearce II provided funds for the statue and commissioned Jeff to do the piece.
Left: Jeff & Art Pearce at the Pat Tillman statue reveal, ASU Sun Devil Stadium, August ’17.
Tillman is remembered as a former Arizona Cardinals and ASU football player who enlisted in the U.S. Army in June 2002 in the aftermath of 9/11, and who, as an Army Ranger, was tragically killed in Afghanistan in 2004 by friendly fire.
Jeff sculpting the Pat Tillman maquette, or model.
Jeff sculpted the 16-inch maquette, or model, in clay from a photo of Pat with his long hair flowing and his ASU helmet in his hand. Officials at ASU however, asked to have Pat’s likeness crafted from photo of him wearing a helmet. She revised the model and re-submitted it to ASU.
In progress: Jeff’s maquette of Pat Tillman.
They approved the revised maquette and Jeff proceeded to work with local foundry Bollinger Atelier to digitize the model into a 3-D image, which was then enlarged to 1.1 times life size and cut out of foam to form the core of the statue. The foundry layered the foam with clay between 1/4 and 1/2 inch thickness all over.
Jeff later crafted the letters “ARIZONA” AND “TILLMAN” and laid them on the life-size clay sculpture. When she made the 16-inch maquette, it was too small to place raised lettering on the jersey.
The 6-foot, 400-pound statue was revealed in a dedication ceremony on Wednesday, August 30, 2017, and Jeff, her mother and husband Mike attended as special guests. With the statue’s unveiling, ASU’s new pre-game ritual involves players touching the statue as they run onto the field.
Jeff with the clay-covered core sculpture after the mold was made.
The entire process of producing the statue was emotional for Jeff, who, as an ASU graduate, followed Pat’s career and story.
How did a young Amer-Asian woman become a bronze sculptor?
After studying fine arts at Northern Arizona University (NAU) in Flagstaff, Jeff worked as a metal chaser at Beyond Bronze Foundry in Colorado, where she welded parts together, ground down metal to clean seams and other surface imperfections to make just-poured pieces look like one complete piece.
Back in Tempe, though, her parents had opened a Japanese restaurant and asked Jeff to come help out, which she did. Next, she began her 25-year stint at Arizona Bronze (now Bollinger Atelier), a foundry in Tempe, Arizona, where she worked as a metal chaser, then switched to wax works when the pneumatic tools caused her hands to hurt. Jeff used dental tools to take down wax seams and design the gating system that feeds the bronze into a mold. She also learned the art of mold making.
Miscellaneous pieces Jeff crafts as demos at school for her students.
“I love making molds!” Jeff said. “You must be methodical and plan everything out. It’s an engineering feat in mixing the rubber, brushing it on and them pulling the rubber as it sets.”
The one thing Jeff has never done at either foundry was pour the bronze. She also did not work on patinas for foundry clients, however, she occasionally adds patinas to her own works.
“To add a red patina to Pat Tillman’s ASU jersey, and a hint of gold to his pants,” Jeff said, “I brought in Aiya Jordan from San Francisco. Aiya is also an ASU grad and one of the best patina artists I know.”
Aiya Jordan adding patina
Preparing the surface for patina
There are at least 12 steps to producing a bronze sculpture and Jeff became intimate with them all during those 25 years. Here’s a five-minute video of a “How It’s Made” episode showing the lost-wax casting technique.
“I did the fine detail work on projects,” Jeff said. “If a piece required detailed precision, I’d have the stamina and small motor skills to make it right.”
Jeff with Zebulon Pearce statue in Mesa, Arizona.
Having Art Pearce as a client means Jeff went from being a long-time employee of the foundry to being their valued customer. Before Pearce commissioned the Tillman statue from Jeff, he had asked her to create a bronze statue of his grandfather, Zebulon Pearce, a former Mesa mayor who owned the local Feed & Grain store on Main Street located at 155 W. Main Street. Zeb Pearce is also known for bringing Coors beer to the valley.
Like most folks, Jeff’s life hasn’t been all work. She married, had two sons Jeff and Cori, divorced and then married Mike, a retired NAU police officer, 21 years ago. Mike also has adult children; Michael, Lisa and Kyla.
During her annual performance review 11 years ago, the foundry owner told Jeff her salary had topped out; if she wanted more money, she needed to work elsewhere.
“Like many people who hit a dead-end in their job,” Jeff said, “I considered going back to school to learn new skills.”
Art Studio inspiration.
A Friend suggested Jeff teach art; the pay is okay and benefits are really good, especially having summers off! Jeff applied to an education program offered by the Deer Valley Unified school district and Arizona State University. Having a bachelors degree was a pre-requisite. Of the 22 students accepted into the program, Jeff was one of 11 who made it all the way through.
She started teaching 10 years ago, initially instructing 4th graders. Four years ago, she went to Sandra Day O’Connor High school to teach art and ceramics.
“I enjoy building relationships with the kids, and I learn so much from them, Jeff said.”
Jeff challenges herself to make something every day. In class, as the kids work on their sculptures, Jeff molds earthenware clay into small animals or abstracts.
“Sometimes, the little thing I’m sculpting becomes the inspiration for a statue, like the boy playing soccer, called ‘Over the Rainbow.'”
“Learning Together” won first place in the Prescott Valley art show and now sits in public spaces of Prescott Valley, Mesa, and Oro Valley. Jeff has other public sculptures, including the “K9 Police Memorial” at Wesley Bolin Plaza in Phoenix and Vancouver, Canada, “Charlie” at Wickenburg Ranch, and the “Scottsdale Police Memorial.”
Boy’s head from “Over the Rainbow” sculpture, plus forms for making animals.
“Learning Together” won the people’s choice award and features a boy with a ball and a dog ready to fetch. Jeff has a knack for making her subjects appear weightless and buoyant, even though they’re cast in bronze. And her style touches hearts, as evidenced by the connection between the boy and his dog while playing catch.
“Learning Together”
Charlie was Merv Griffin’s dog, and Merv donated the land in Wickenburg that became the Dog Park where Charlie watches over the visitors.
“When my students see my sculptures in a public place,” says Jeff, “they come up to me with eyes wide, asking for my autograph, and I remind them I’m still the teacher they’ve always known. I’m me.”
Even on the days when Jeff sculpts at work, she still arrives home and sculpts or paints. Usually, she works in her detached art studio, which she and Mike built in 2016. Their house in New River sits on a hill and their backyard looks out toward hills and into a valley.
“I look around and am amazed at how much I’ve produced,” Jeff said. “I was in a local gallery one day and admired a little bronze piece, an alligator bag on the back of a horse sculpture, and I said, ‘how would they do that?’ The gallery owner said, ‘Don’t you remember, you made that?’”
Jeff laughs at having made so many tiny bronze items and not being able to remember them all. If an artist needed a small item for their sculpture, they would ask her if she would create it. She’s made everything from that small alligator bag for a horse, to guns, holsters, rabbits, cats, and even a cowboy riding an armadillo. The last item was for an artist from Texas.
Musical instruments called ocarinas made by Jeff.
When Jeff’s students complain about not being creative, she asks them if, when they play video games, do they go through all levels the first day. “Of course not,” Jeff said, “the more you play, the better you get. It’s the same with sculpting, or anything you do. I’ve been sculpting for 40 years, which is why my students think it looks easy.”
Her advice for anyone who wants to make a living doing the creative work they love is to “keep with it. That’s what I was told by my professor. The artists who make it are the ones who don’t quit. Work, work, work. You get a little bit better each time.”
GALLERY OF STUDIO AND PUBLIC ART PIECES
K9 Police MemorialScottsdale Police StatueJeff playing her handmade ocarina.Charlie, Merv Griffin’s dog, at Wickenburg Ranch Dog Park.
After 10 years in business, Kit was able to hire an assistant and has had several over the years. He trusts his employees and looks for enthusiasm when hiring. “I can teach them skills, but not enthusiasm,” Kit says. “They must also be able to tolerate failing and pushing through. Failures happen all the time, pieces don’t turn out the way we expect, but we keep creating.”
“I’ll add stones around the bottom,” Kit says, “and place soil, pine needles and sticks to make it look as though the bench has been here a million years.”
Cre8-Space 