--Dan Cummins (Board President)
Art + Summer = Happiness

Summer in Iowa City brings wonderful opportunities to get out and enjoy the nearly constant activities including festivals, concerts on the Ped Mall and outdoor films.

Kicking it off is the Summer Gallery Walk on Friday June 3rd from 5-8PM.   The ArtiFactory is featuring Julia Lohrman Audlehelm: “A Study in Pen and Ink”.   Stop by to visit with Julia and to explore her fascinating work.

The weekend of June 3-5 will be filled with art and music as downtown Iowa City hosts the Arts Festival.  On Saturday The ArtiFactory will have a booth at the Iowa City Public Library with fun activities for kids of all ages.  

We have a full calendar of classes, workshops and exhibits.  Take a look at our website.

From Our Minds to Yours: Inner Thoughts


Part of a three-part performance art series using multiple EEG headbands, Jason Snell will be composing music with a group of people’s minds, including his own. Their collective brain activity will be converted into both music and color for a multimedia performance at Artifactory. . . more
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
Life Drawing at the ArtiFactory
Join us for life drawing in the lower level of 120 N. Dubuque St., Iowa City, IA. Please register for each session.  We will be drawing from nude, scantily clothed or dressed models. Must be over 18 to attend.
Phil Dorothy Drawing Studio
May 26 - 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
June 2 - 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
June 16 - 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
June 30 - 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

Long Pose Studio Group
June 5 - 9:00 am - 12:00 pm
Body Parts
June 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
Foiling Studio Group
The Foiling Studio Group
June 11 - 1:00 pm -  4:00 pm
June 18 - 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm
June 25 - 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
Hello Art Friends,
Happy mid May! Happy Spring at last! Here are some events and activities coming up in the next few weeks that I know you would enjoy attending and participating in. I will start with a show of ink drawings by Julia Lohrman Audlehelm in our own gallery.

Julia’s little ink drawings are as finely drawn as Albrecht Durer etchings. Her pens are extremely tiny and the detail unbelievable. Our gallery is open Saturday afternoons from 1-3 and will be open for Gallery Walk, June 3. Watch the video of her Art in the Afternoon on YouTube.
On Saturday, June 4 we will be at a booth by the library doing activities with kids. We will have drawing activities and book making going on all day. Come down and say “hello”.
Across town at the Hudson River Gallery in Coralville, Tom Langdon is showing his wonderful photographs. Tom is a local photographer who has worked many years as a photographer, teacher, and now semi retired travels and continues with his wonderful work. His show, “Fotos Populares” runs from May 20-June 25 and can be viewed online. Opening reception, May 20, 6-8.
A little farther away is my show at Art Domestique in Washington. “People, Places, Things” will run until June  15. It is a collection of oil paintings, pastels, and drawings and is a pretty fair representation of the work that I do. If you go, make it around lunch time. It’s right next door to a lovely little restaurant, Cafe Dodici. Check out the menu on line and make an excursion out of it. (They didn’t pay me to put that in.)

June 11-12 is a plein air event hosted by Art Domestique. If you want to try a Saturday of plein air painting, you should check out their web page for details. All finished work will be displayed and for sale on early Sunday afternoon.
I don’t have any scandalous international art news this month, but I do have a little follow up on the subject of art theft. If you are interested in a very good book about a family’s struggle to find and repossess its art collection, I would recommend The Orpheus Clock by Simon Goodman. This book reads like a novel spanning generations, but is a chilling, poignant true story that needed telling and remembering. There are two movies that I really enjoyed. One is The Woman in Gold concerning a woman’s journey to reclaim her family’s paintings, (two of them, her aunt painted by Gustav Klimt) from the government of Austria. The other movie is a very good documentary, The Rape of Europa. This is really well done with plenty of actual film included, and a very interesting rhetorical question at the beginning. Adolf Hitler applied to an Austrian art academy and his application was rejected. Had he been admitted, would the Nazi Party and all its murderous evil ever happened?
Ongoing:
  • Ongoing in our gallery most Tuesday evenings is Tango! Instruction and Practice alternate weekly, and it’s Free!
  • Ongoing Wednesdays at 1 pm, John Preston is doing demonstrations in watercolor and pastel. Visit him on Facebook.
That's All Folks
I’ll say goodbye for this month and close with a little art project for you to do when you get tired of  playing “Wordle”.

Beppie

PS. Please share any art related events or news.
--John McGlinn | artshowjourney.com
Nicholas Krushenick Artwork Overview
Nice title: “James Bond Meets Pussy Galore 1964”

This bold 20th century modern artist Krushenick uses flat-colored areas with no texture in his mature work. Each of his paintings that I have seen in magazines over the years has always been eye-catching. Not conceptual, not figurative nor representational, not really pop art, just interesting hard-edged shapes with striking color contrasts.

Given this in an introduction to most folks and since this video is so long, I suggest dragging the slider bar across the bottom to see thumbnail images that might be worth clicking to view enlarged. In real life the sizes upwards of 6’x8’ provide an engaging foil to the simplicity of the imagery.

For me his mature works are really a relief from the constant stories in painting told with personal interpretations of humans interacting with their environments. Once in a while I need a slap to remind myself that art can be seriously playful and delightfully bold.

21:42 minutes long.
Krushenick link


CAI Contemporary Art Issue:
“Contemporary Still Life Painting: 8 Still Life Painters You Need To Know”
Contemporary Still Life Painting
Gerhard Richter: sample painting (not blurred by me) in video

This issue of CAI’s continuing review of contemporary and historical works is jammed packed with very capable, successful and challenging modern artists. This video probably needs to be seen twice before any summary opinion can be rendered.

All of the artists provide artwork that has stood the test of time and high-end market success. Some would call them masters of their craft.

8:10 long.
CAI Contemporary Still-life Painting link


One foot in the 19th century and the other in the 20th: Raoul Dufy
Here is a distinctly different historical figure in that his style is… hmm, breezy? He paints with a light touch, brush strokes vary as necessary to be sufficiently descriptive. His washes are initially casual, but then become perceived as essential to the works. He passes through several periods as influenced by the dominating forces of Impressionism, then Matisse, Fauvism, Picasso, Cubism, etc. Around 1913 by this survey he seems to come into his own.

We have a lithographic poster by Mourlot-Paris from 1953 that I have had for 30+ years that captures his mature style. Love it.

Another longish review, so I suggest dragging the slider bar across the bottom to see thumbnail images that might be worth clicking to view enlarged. Bravo to anyone who views the whole film in real time!

19:55 long.
Dufy link


Japandí: Shared Aesthetics and Influences
Japandí: Shared Aesthetics and Influences
Some beautiful stuff!

“Japandi is a hybrid union of Japanese and Scandinavian aesthetic approaches appreciated for its exceptional craftsmanship, simplicity and minimalism, reverence for nature and natural, sustainable materials, and the beauty of embracing imperfection.“

6:28 long.
Japandi link
--Phil Beck
Recently I read an article about an artist named Oscar Howe (born May13, 1915). I had never heard of him before, and the reason isn’t too surprising. Howe was Native American, a member of the Yanktonai Dakota (or Yanktoni Sioux) People, born on the Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota. For a long time, this country tried to erase the history and culture of Native Americans, and while that is no longer official government policy, American culture has been slow to discover what was nearly destroyed. The majority of Native American artists are still neglected by art historians and remain mostly unrecognized outside their own circles.

But Howe, who died in 1983, is finally emerging from obscurity, his place in Native American art itself undergoing reevaluation. During his lifetime, he caused controversy for breaking with more traditional styles and utilizing techniques that crossed paths with Modernism—abstract designs, fractured perspective, Surrealistic backgrounds and details. In works such as Dance of the Heyoka (1954) and Medicine Man (1961), Native American history and mythic imagery are combined with bold experimentation in line, color, and form to produce art of great originality and emotional power. He didn’t simply imitate what European art had done, however—he followed similar impulses to bring Native American tradition and the 20th century together into an astounding synthesis, an individual vision that is breathtakingly beautiful and often terrifying at the same time. It’s a vision with serious implications for our understanding of American history.

It almost goes without saying that there is no major film treatment of him, though there should be. Fortunately, however, there is a short documentary that was made in 1982 for South Dakota Public Television, called simply Oscar. Although Howe himself does not appear (he was ailing and died the following year), several artists who had been his students discuss his influence on them as a teacher and his importance as a groundbreaking artist.

I would certainly never condone art theft under any circumstances, but I can enthusiastically recommend a film I just saw, The Duke, which offers a witty, irresistibly entertaining look at one notorious case. The movie, released last year, is a mildly fictionalized account of the theft of Francisco Goya’s 1814 Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, the British military hero famous for defeating Napolean at the Battle of Waterloo. In 1961 the painting disappeared from the National Gallery in London. The subsequent search for its whereabouts, its surprising return, and the trial of the confessed thief have become a part of modern British folklore. The central figure was a loquacious 56-year-old named Kempton Bunton who had a history of protesting the treatment of elderly Brits living on pensions, specifically the requirement they pay a license fee to watch television just like everyone else. Because of their straitened circumstances, he thought they should get TV for free. Imagine! Bunton’s ostensible purpose in lifting the Goya was not to keep it or profit personally from the theft, but to demand a ransom that he would then donate to charity. He was, at least in his own view, something of a modern-day Robin Hood (some likened him to Don Quixote as well).

I won’t reveal the outcome, just urge you to see this delightful and frequently moving film. Roger Michell’s supple direction keeps its shifts between humor and poignancy effortless, and the letter-perfect cast is wonderfully led by Jim Broadbent as the irrepressible Bunton and Helen Mirren as his long-suffering wife, Dorothy. Neither has been this good since the last movies they were in—in other words, they give their usual superb performances. They’re just two of the best around. And they get great support from everyone else. While the serious implications of stealing a valuable work of art are never ignored, the movie has plenty of fun with its quirky characters and the sheer implausibility of the events it’s based on. If there are moments when you think you’ve wandered into a screening of A Fish Called Wanda by accident—that’s probably no accident!
  • Oscar Howe on Film: Oscar (1982)
  • Art Theft on Film: The Duke (2021)
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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If you are interested in helping keep the arts alive in Johnson County. Please click here for more details.
 
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Graphic design by: Robert Richardson