February Symposium on Women Artists

Smith College hosts the symposium “Real Lives of Women Artists” February 26-27, 2010. Visit their website to register, or for more information on the panelists (who include Lucy Lippard, Paula Cooper, Susan Hiller,  and Mierle Laderman Ukeles) http://www.smith.edu/artmuseum/symposium/students.php

Laura Gardin Fraser

Laura Gardin (1889-1966), was the daughter of a wealthy and distinguished Chicago family. She grew up in New York, attended Columbia University, and studied at the Art Students League where she won both the Saint-Gaudens medal and the Saint-Gaudens Figure Prize. She married her sculpture instructor,  James Earle Fraser, and the couple moved to Long Island and built a large studio in Westport.

Laura’s career included medallic commissions as well as her better-known, heroic-scale figurative work. Her “Pegasus” (pictured) can be seen in Brookgreen Gardens. She modeled panels depicting the history of the United States for West Point Academy, and sculpted mascots of the Navy goat and Army mule.

James Earle and Laura Gardin Fraser, though inseparable, only collaborated on one sculpture project, the Oregon Trail Centennial Coin. “We talked and laughed all our lives,” Laura once said. “When we weren’t working we were talking, and we never grew tired of each other or ran out of subject matter.”

Soutrce: http://www.meadowlarkgallery.com/FraserLaura.htm

Outer Shell

Now the hydrocal backup shell halves are complete, and all I have left is the tedious task of separating them (not so easy when you’ve basically created a vacuum!), cutting off the rubber “glove” shown below, and then cleaning up the big mess that’s sure to follow.

Beginning a mold

Here’s a photo of a new sculpture, in the first stage of moldmaking. I spent the weekend at Open Studios trying (and occasionally failing) to describe this basic moldmaking process, but here it goes again.

I’m making a reusable “glove” mold on this lifesize half figure. The figure was sculpted in a red earthenware clay (the color you can see through the greenish mold rubber), which I let dry to a leather-hard stage which stands up better to the rigors of the moldmaking process. Over the clay I spread several thin layers of Polytek’s Polygel 40 mold rubber. This mixes 1:1 by volume, a fairly forgiving mix for a plastic but this is thankfully typical of Polytek’s products. Since this is the first time I had used a gel rubber (actually polyurethane), I found that it hardened up a bit suddenly and I got stuck with several drips and a few untintentional gaps. Next time I will mix it with some poly-fiber (although the company says this is not necessary) to make a more evenly-spreadable resin in the liquid stage.

I then fastened a strip of cast rubber about 1″ x 1″ x 36″ around the top of the figure (cementing it on with more liquid rubber), which will ultimately form a dividing line for the two pieces of the hard backup shell. I added a wall of plastelina on top of this, making a fairly solid dividing line for the backup halves, which I will make in hydrocal.

After I make the hydrocal outer shell, I’ll remove it as soon as it sets up completely, then cut the seam line (that cast 1×1″ strip you can see running around the top of the head and shoulders) of the rubber mold until I can peel it off easily from the clay. Usually the clay original is pretty badly destroyed in this stage, but occasionally I can retrieve part for another use. Once I put the rubber halves, and then the covering shell, all back together again, I can fill the rubber mold with a number of materials: plaster, wax, cement, or polyurethane hard plastic.

Edith Parsons

Edith Barretto Stevens Parsons was born in 1878 in Houston, Virginia. She studied with Daniel Chester French, and at the Art Students League of New York where she won a sculpture prize and scholarships. She sculpted figures for the 1902 St. Louis Exposition’s Liberal Arts Building, and in 1908 showed her sculpture Earth Mother at the National Academy of Design. That same year she married Howard Crosby Parsons and built a studio on the top floor of their home. Her work changed its subject matter as her own children were born and posed for her sculptures, often holding ducks, turtles, and other creatures. Duck Baby, beginning a series of garden sculptures for which she is best known today, was the popular hit of the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition. The exposition handbook stated: “In the presence of so much that is weighty and powerful, the popularity of Duck Baby is a significant and touching indication of the world’s hunger for what is cheerful and mirth-provoking.” The same may be said of Turtle Baby and Frog Baby, which forms the centerpiece of the small works collection at Brookgreen Gardens, South Carolina.

Parsons also created portrait busts and public monuments including a World War I memorial in Summit, New Jersey, and a fountain dedicated to John Galloway in Memphis, Tennessee.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/archive/200503A55.html

Evelyn Longman’s Lowell Monuments

Two of Evelyn Longman Batchelder’s standing bas-relief  monuments are in the Lowell Cemetery in Lowell, Mass. Lowell Cemetery is a lovely 19th-century “garden” cemetery with an intriguing history, and just as intriguing are Longman’s graceful and poignant masterpieces.

The larger is Longman’s monument to Louisa Maria Wells, known also as the “Mill Girl” monument. Wells worked all her life in the Lowell mills, and never married. Her will provided for the memorial, which depicts an angel soothing a weary woman who rests her head on one hand and lets a bobbin drop from the other. The inscription reads: “Out of the fibre of her daily tasks/she wove the fabric of a useful life/Louisa Maria Wells/Died February 20, 1886.”  Longman’s beautiful carving catches one by surprise. Instead of stock representations of Victorian sentiment (an angel, a fading mortal, the enveloping drapery of death), the figures radiate emotion and purpose; their faces, gestures,  and clothing are individual and specific.
The bronze high relief figure of death on the Storey memorial is (unfortunately) in a state of picturesque deterioration. A cloaked woman holds a finger to her lips, gesturing for silence. In her left hand she holds a key, and a poppy, symbol of death, sleep, and forgetting. Smaller than the lifesize women on the Wells memorial, this stately figure is similarly arresting in the thoughtfulness of its execution. Longman, working with and within the conventional and antique symbology of death and resurrection, has endowed her figures with an individuality and humanity that communicates to us even after a hundred years.

Lowell Open Studios

The Western Avenue Studio complex in Lowell is growing by leaps and bounds. Now home to the Revolving Museum, the former mill complex also has studios for about 140 individual artists and craftsmen. Open Studio weekend was Sept. 26-27, and and studios are also open every First Saturday.

Shown is painter Diana Zipeto with a work in progress, her portrait of local boxer Matie Desjardins.

Joyce Audy Zarins

I had the pleasure of visiting Joyce Audy Zarins in her Merrimac studio this weekend. An adjunct art professor at Middlesex Community College, and longtime participant in the Maudslay Outdoor Sculpture exhibit in Newburyport, Joyce is a consummate craftsman who works primarily in metal, welding her own large-scale, outdoor sculptures.

I asked Joyce to comment on the giant maple keys shown with her in the studio, and she replied: “The title of the big maple seeds is Potential 3×3 (as in Potential cubed times three). The thought was, like Claes Oldenburg, to make a mundane object enormous to affect its meaning. … Theoretically, that first seed has the power to generate a forest. So, it’s also about exponential growth. Then … they are kinetic, responding to the slightest breeze. When they are installed on a lawn the support is not visible, so it is always a surprise to people when they move.”

On Maudslay: “I have had pieces in nine of the eleven (Maudslay) shows. The first two years that the core group exhibited together, the show was at Old Town Hill in Newbury, at Trustees of Reservations property. … Then [the show] went to Maudslay and has been there ever since. …This has always been a group effort and jobs rotate–I’ve done just about all at one time or another. The show and the catalogues are gifts to the public.”

Pictured below is Joyce’s “The Whistler”, painted steel, on view at the Maudslay Outdoor Sculpture Exhibit, Newburyport, Mass., until October 4th.

Outdoor Sculpture at Maudslay

The Maudslay Outdoor Sculpture exhibit is up until October 4th at Maudslay State Park, Newburyport. Many pieces are site-specific, and community members (including a few kids) as well as area artists are represented in this diverse show that is, in the words of organizer Bert Snow, “beautiful, thoughtful, humorous, musical, subtle, and wild.” The outdoor sculptures represent many different styles and are located in several different environments around the park. A catalog and map are available at the main entrances.
The park itself, an 80-acre former private estate on the banks of the Merrimack, is home to a theatre company as well as walking, riding, biking, and x-c ski trails.
http://www.mass.gov/dcr/parks/northeast/maud.htm

Pictured is “Untitled”, stripped poplar and linen, by Michele Koenig Augeri.

Rose O’Neill

As a child in Nebraska, Rose O’Neill (1874-1944) loved to draw, and at the age of 13 she entered a drawing contest sponsored by the Omaha Herald and won first prize. At 16 she went to New York City on her own where she stayed with the Sisters of St. Regis.  After selling 60 drawings within three months she became the highest paid female illustrator in the United States.

O’Neill then joined the staff at Puck magazine, and led a bohemian life in Greenwich Village. While O’Neill was in New York her father homesteaded a small cabin in the Missouri Ozarks, which became known as “Bonniebrook” and was O’Neill’s home in later life.

Rose O’Neill created the Kewpie characters she became popular for during a stay at Bonniebrook, but the Kewpies were a response to the lives of slum children in New York. The cartoon was instantly famous. In 1912 a German porcelain manufacturer started making Kewpie dolls, and that year she and her sister went to Germany to show the porcelain artists how to make the dolls the way she wanted them.

O’Neill made a fortune from the kewpies, and was considered one of the world’s most beautiful women. Known as the “Queen of Bohemian Society” O’Neill used her wealth and visibility to become an advocate for women’s rights and poor children. O’Neill continued working, even at her wealthiest, and studied sculpture with Rodin. She had several exhibitions of her sculpture in Paris and America and held open salons in her Washington Square apartment where poets, actors, dancers and artists of her day would gather. O’Neill retired to Bonniebrook in the 1930s.

http://thelibrary.org/lochist/periodicals/ozarkswatch/ow304h.htm

Photo: a retired Rose O’Neill at Bonniebrook with her sculpture “The Embrace of the Tree”