December Newsletter

--Beppie Weiss | beppie.net

Hi everyone,

We are just days away from the winter Solstice and the sun will start setting later and get up earlier. I’m so glad! We all at The ArtiFactory wish you a very happy winter break with lots of good cheer, fireplace nights and time with family and friends. We will be closing down our usual activities through most of January, so watch for emails about when we get together again.

If you are looking for an outing, the Small Works show at Art Domestique in Washington, Iowa is up until after Christmas, and the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art has the Byron Burford show as well as another of our Iowa City artists and U of I art professors, Chunghi Choo, “Visionary”. There is more. Mauricio Lasansky, Marvin Cone, and Art in Roman Life. You may need to plan an overnight getaway!

All from me until next year! Beppie

The Foiling Studio Group
January 28 - 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm
February 4 - 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm
February 11 - 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Make Valentine cards different from any you’ve ever made before! Surprise your friends and family with beautiful cards that shimmer luster. Join a hot stamped foiling workshop and let workshop leaders Deanne Wortman and Robert Richardson show you how to use this unique printmaking process utilizing hot stamped foil. ,,,more

Life Drawing at the ArtiFactory

Body Parts
February 4 - 10:00 am - 12:00 pm
February 18 - 10:00 am - 12:00 pm

Your leader in this effort is Beppie Weiss. She has drawn and painted hundreds, maybe thousands, of portraits and people drawings, and will help you improve your own drawing skills. Our class will work on drawing all the body parts from different positions. Our goal will be to understand how it all comes together, and be able to draw it with more accuracy. ...more

Join us for life drawing in the lower level of 120 N. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA. Please register for each session. Sessions may be canceled if the minimum enrollments have not been received by 24 hours in advance. We will be drawing from nude, scantily clothed or dressed models. Must be over 18 to attend.

Attention: Regular oils using odorless terpenoid will now be permitted.

Long Pose Studio Group
February 12 - 9:00 am - 12:00 pm
February 26 - 9:00 am - 12:00 pm

Phil Dorothy Drawing Studio
February 2 - 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
February 16 - 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

--Phil Beck

Lee Krasner’s birthday was in October (Oct.27, 1908), so it’s well past the time to celebrate it. Which is sadly fitting because recognition of her as an artist also came later than it should have. For many years she lived in the shadow of her more famous husband, Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock. She was mostly known as his wife, as someone who “also painted.” It wasn’t until years after his death in a car accident in 1956 that Krasner began to come into her own and be recognized as the important and innovative artist she was.

Krasner was born in Brooklyn to a couple who’d emigrated from what is now Ukraine. Beginning her art studies in high school, she advanced from traditional figure painting to Cubism and eventually to the budding movement of Abstract Expressionism. During the Depression, she supported herself by working in the WPA mural division. She met Pollock in 1942; three years later they married and moved into a farmhouse outside of East Hampton, New York, where they both set up studios.

Recognition came hard for her not only because of who she was married to but because she was very self-critical and destroyed many paintings she grew dissatisfied with. As a result, her existing body of work is relatively small compared to contemporaries, only 599 pieces. Almost none of her early work survives. In addition, though she is most often identified with Abstract Expressionism, she did not rest comfortably within its borders but was constantly exploring new techniques and changing her style. In the 1950s she began creating collages, pasting torn pieces of rejected drawings onto existing paintings, which she then painted over to form new works. Many critics found her hard to pin down and so dismissed her; some called her work derivative of Pollock’s, though it was anything but. Her reputation grew slowly but it did grow, and thankfully she lived to see her accomplishments acknowledged. Six months after her death in 1984, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City held a retrospective exhibition of her work, celebrating her independence. At the time, she was only the second woman artist to be given that honor.

ArtiFactory began its commemoration of movies about artists in 2018 with a free screening at FilmScene of Pollock, the superb 2000 biographical film directed by and starring Ed Harris. One of the best artist biopics out there, the film traces his rise from obscurity to fame in the years after World War II, along with his painfully co-dependent relationship with his wife. Harris’s intense performance bursts with conviction, but equally compelling is Marcia Gay Harden’s quieter turn as Krasner. Her deep dive into the life of a talented woman who puts her career on hold to support her husband through alcoholism, depression, and love affairs movingly captures the simultaneous strength and weakness of all such self-sacrifice. Without grandstanding, Harden communicates Krasner’s inner conflict and pain with such authority that it won her that year’s Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

You can check out an example of Krasner’s painting for yourself with a visit to the UI Stanley Museum of Art. Though the triumphant return of Jackson Pollock’s Mural (1943) to Iowa City highlighted this year’s opening of the new museum, the striking beauty of her 1969 Portrait in Green, with its swirling contours of green, white, and black, is well worth a trip by itself. It’s true that her husband continues to throw a longer shadow than Krasner, but it’s very gratifying to know that with time she’s found a place in the sun that’s hers alone.

Lee Krasner on Film:

Pollock (2000)

We have several needs for volunteers.

If you are interested in helping keep the arts alive in Johnson County. Please click here for more details.

Graphic design by: Robert Richardson