--Dan Cummins (Board President)
Newsletter Feedback Needed

As you probably can tell, we enjoy writing the ArtiFactory Newsletter.   But, we want to make sure that you find the newsletter interesting, helpful or both.

Could you take a few minutes to tell us what you like about the newsletter and/or what you would like to see us do differently?  Are there topics that we should add?

To jog your memory the newsletter contains the following sections:
  • Schedule of Events
  • Art Musings (update on local art events and commentary) - Beppie Weiss
  • Exploring the Online World of Art (links and commentary of websites, events, etc available online) - John McGlinn
  • Artists in the Movies - (movie reviews and commentary) - Phil Beck
Click here to provide feedback. 
Joe McKenna is a collage artist who has lived in Iowa City for the past 12 ½ years.  Prior to that he worked as an administrative aide in Montgomery County Social Services (later reorganized as the Dept. of Health and Human Services). It was during his time there that he began doing collages with cardboard appropriated from boxes of State Government forms and magazines from client waiting rooms. . . more
July 17 | 1 pm in the Gallery
Art in the Afternoon | David Noyes

Just Add Water 
"In its purest form watercolor is applied with water in transparent layers on paper." , , , more
Life Drawing at the ArtiFactory
Life Drawing
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.
Phil Dorothy Drawing Studio
June 30 - 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Long Pose Studio Group
June 10 - 9:00 am - 12:00 pm
June 24 - 9:00 am - 12:00 pm
Body Parts
July 16 - 10:00 am - 12:00 pm
July 30 - 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
The Foiling Studio Group
June 25 - 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm
July 9  -  1:00 pm - 4:00 pm
July 16 - 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm
July 23 - 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm

The Foiling Studio Group is an ongoing studio group open to both new foilers and those with past experience. Plan on taking multiple sessions to take your foiled prints from start to finish. Sessions do not need to be consecutive.   ,,,more
 
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--Beppie Weiss | beppie.net
Dear Art Friends,
Summer is really speeding by. The En Plein Aire weekend in Washington went well….just a few sprinkles on Saturday. If you missed it there is the Amana one on Labor Day weekend to look forward to. Details next month.



The big news on the local art scene is the opening of the new U of I Stanley Museum of Art. Fourteen years ago the Iowa River flooded the art museum. Everything was successfully removed, even Jackson Pollock’s “Mural”. First it went into hiding, then major restoration, then touring. It will be a joy to have it back home. August 26 is the big day.

The last few months I have been writing about art theft, but focusing mostly on theft from countries and individuals. Theft from museums is one other area that is a big concern. Unlike the former which are usually sanctioned by one authority or another, museum theft is always in secret and the stolen art rarely resurfaces. Willem de Kooning’s “Woman-Ochre” was stolen early one morning in 1985 from the art museum at the University of Airizona. It was cut and torn from its frame and backing, rolled up and vanished for 30 years.



It turned up in an antiques shop in goods from an estate sale, and when the owners discovered what they had they returned it to the museum. In an agreement with the Getty Museum, the painting was restored in their paintings conservation department. Special scans and hours of meticulous work have brought it back to a stable and nearly original condition.



In other news, in Paris, a man dressed as an old lady in a wheelchair threw cake on DaVinci’s “Mona Lisa“ painting. (Luckily she is under glass these days.) In 1911 she was stolen and missing for two years until she was offered for sale to an Italian art dealer who informed authorities.



And in Florida, the FBI Art Crime Team is investigating the authenticity of a show of 25  works by Jean-Michel Basquiat. The Orlando Museum of Art is showing works stored in a warehouse until 2012, most never before exhibited.



That’s all from me this month.
Stay well and enjoy these days of summer.
Beppie

PS. Please share any art related events or news.
--John McGlinn | artshowjourney.com
Zao Wou Ki Artwork Overview

Sample of his later work: “9.4.86” 1986

From Artsy:
“A master of post-war art and among the highest-selling Chinese painters of his generation, Zao Wou-Ki synthesized tenets of modernism, calligraphy, and traditional Chinese landscape painting. Using primarily oil paint, watercolor, and—eventually—ink, Zao developed a unique style defined by contrasting colors, intense linework, and lyrical abstraction. Like traditional Chinese landscapes, Zao’s paintings function as fragments of larger scenes and possess a fluidity, transparency, and graceful luminosity that reflect the interior energies of the artist himself.”

From John McGlinn:
I have liked his work for a long time: touches of Paul Klee, Chinese subtleties, washes and active brush strokes.
16:15 minutes long.
Zao link


Andrew Wyeth Overview

His “Bull Run” watercolor

Somehow I feel his work exhibits a real appreciation of Chinese and Japanese art with washes, contrasting shapes from landscapes, refined definition, and limited color.
I have been to the Brandywine River Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, PA, several times, which is up the road from my grandparents’ old house in Kennett Square, PA, and where one would see many of his works of art. He lived but a few miles away.

My appreciation of his work as a young art student allowed me to consider works on paper as finished pieces, not studies. In fact, I have always liked his reductive approach to these kinds of pictures. The full-blown oil realistic painting genre was never my cup-of-tea, except of course Rembrandt.

This video will not show everyone’s favorite Wyeth, but more likely gives us a glimpse at unseen ones, like “Bull Run” above.
20:09 long
Andrew Wyeth link


Jack Youngerman Overview

“Totem Blue”, 1968, Tapestry

You don't hear much about Jack Youngerman of late. His abstract paintings, some very large, are not in vogue today, but this video overview reminds me of his talents and even shows some paintings I remember vividly.
Who cares?

For me he is an inspiration for developing his own abstract style in the midst of giants such as Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, and Robert Indiana. In fact I have a photo of the four of them together on a rooftop in NYC most likely in the 1950s. Now let’s throw in all the AbEx (Abstract Expressionism) artists like de Kooning, Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, etc. Can you imagine the talent required to standout in NYC in the fifties in abstract art?

I am not referencing any expert source when I say: he appears to me to set us teetering on the edge of what is foreground and what is background in his mature style works. That creates a tension for me as well as enjoying his exploration of exciting shapes.
17:56 long.
Youngerman link


An Opulent New Kimono Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Interweaves History, Craftsmanship, and Contemporary Fashion

Exquisite!

From ArtNet.com:
"Kimono Style: The John C. Weber Collection" traces the thread from feudal Japan to 20th-century design.”
“… in a new exhibition devoted to kimonos within the Japanese galleries of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, it’s clear that we’re not just seeing clothes, but art rendered in silk and gold thread.”

JMc: Amen.
As long as you want.

Once you land, be sure scroll down and to “View all”, then click on individual thumbnail images to see splendor enlarged! They get better as you progress down the site’s page.
Met Kimono Style in NYC link
--Phil Beck
Maurits Cornelis Escher, better known as M.C. Escher, was born June 17, 1898, in Leeuwarden, Netherlands. He died 74 years later, having enjoyed widespread recognition and success for only the last few years of his life. His eye-popping graphic designs began to seep into popular culture during the 1960s with the ascendance of Op Art, but it wasn’t until 1970, when he was 72, that a major exhibit of his work opened to the public. Acclaim was immediate. Astonishment at what this reclusive Dutch artist was able to produce in his imagination continues.

After a youth spent traveling extensively in Spain and Italy, he returned to the Netherlands at the outbreak of World War II and spent the rest of his life there, working on his mind-bending images in relative isolation. Escher was fascinated by mathematics and created woodcuts and lithographs featuring geometrical shapes and mathematically precise repetitive figures. He’d learned the intricate design form of tessellation by studying the mosaics of the Alhambra, a Moorish fortress in Granada, Spain. His landscapes and figurative work often distorted scale and perspective in ways that led the art establishment to pay him little notice. One would think his breaks with tradition would have made him popular with Cubists and Surrealists, but that connection never happened. He created on his own, apart from the art movements of his time, known and respected mainly by mathematicians and scientists, who felt a kinship with his ideas.

Until the late 1960s and 1970s, when fame finally overtook him. His perception-bending designs hit a nerve with youth culture and began to appear on posters, book and record album covers. Among his best-known images are his “impossible” staircases in House of Stairs (1951) and Relativity (1953), which depict zigzagging, interconnected staircases that defy spatial logic. He was the subject of a few short films but no major work until 2018, when writer-director Robin Lutz premiered his fanciful but reverent documentary, M. C. Escher: Journey to Infinity. A quasi-autobiography with narration drawn from Escher’s own writings (voiced by British actor and comedian Stephen Fry), the film tours the world architecture that inspired him and reveals the thoughts behind many of his best-known works as he changed from drawing what he saw to what he imagined. Journey also includes footage of Escher in his studio and brief interviews with his two sons, George and Jan, and daughter-in-law Liesbeth, who remember him as a man bravely struggling to provide for his family through some of Europe’s darkest days. In addition, some of his most fantastic images are cleverly brought to life through animation. Journey to Infinity is definitely a trip you’ll want to take.

M.C. Escher on Film:
Seen any of these films?  Tell us what you think of them, or suggest others not covered in the newsletter. Email us at “Artists in the Movies.”

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Graphic design by: Robert Richardson