Wendy Kowalski
Jim Blackwell
Other Stories
Five reasons to come to the Taste of Durham
A Full Course of Music and Entertainment at Taste of Durham!
Come and get it at the Taste of Durham
Outside the Ark Artist Narrative In Her Own Words
Art: Painting a Prettier Picture of Life
Festivals Highlight Homegrown and International music and Dance
If you've ever had a yard sale, then you know the difficulties of parting with nostalgia. Suddenly, that cracked coffee mug with the blue cornflower and the artist's signature on the bottom that you procured from a street vendor on a trip to Ibiza serves not as a container for coffee, but as a memory of the time that you proposed. You write on the tag a whopping five dollars.
Pricing items which carry an emotional value is a tricky business, one in which artists and art galleries engage daily. Behind the price tag of a contemporary painting are the artist's training and skill level, the art's inception, and the artist's process. To better understand the total composition of the price tag and to demystify the appreciation of art, we'll go behind the scenes with three visual artists who will be displaying their latest works at the Taste of Durham Festival: Wendy Kowalski, Harvey Mercadoocasio, and Jonathan Blackwell. These three are founding members of Artologie, a not-for-profit contemporary artist collective which formed in 2003-2004 in the Triangle.
"We were near other creative ambitious people with similar goals: to produce art, to sell art, and to enjoy the benefits of doing these two things within a community of peers," says president Wendy Kowalski. Membership numbers almost a baker's dozen.
Artologie artists want to reach a wide audience. They exhibit their work in art galleries and offbeat venues, nightclubs, and impromptu spaces during special events. Unofficially, Artologie began when artists collectively transformed the drab slat walls of an empty athletic store on Franklin Street, Chapel Hill into a successful art gallery during a weekend-long art festival. Artologie as a group has exhibited at the offices of Red Hat in Raleigh, NC, and at the nightclub Ringside in Durham, NC during Durham's Artwalk 2004. The members motivate each other to pursue their art and to be active in the community. Mercadoocasio and Kow alski are now part of the Wing's Art Center in Durham's Bragtown neighborhood.
Artologie links investors and private collectors to a single source for visual, contemporary art in various mediums, including painting, photography, and sculpture. "It's an organization that can link buyers to artists before they are dead," jokes Kowalski.
Wendy Kowalski
"I am at the early stages of my painting career," Kowalski says. "It's a very exciting time and I feel fortunate to improve with each new work. For me, the pleasure in painting is the physicality of moving the brush over large canvases, of using my hands and my fingers to coerce the paint into the feeling that I am trying to convey.
"Emotionally, I'm going through an explosive, productive time. In a sense I paint to hide from my mortality. The result has been brightly colored works using vibrant oranges and aqua blues to create dreamy, ephemeral paintings. Like the singer/song writer Bjork, I strive to merge the earthy with the ethereal. My subject matter is currently children, freaky kids. Through them, I return to my youth. We feel everything strongest when we're young and when life is a string of firsts. It's an exciting time that inspires my current work."
Kowalski is self-propelled with numerous projects in development. In addition to writing poetry and fiction, she is at the early stages of writing and illustrating Estella, a children's book. Her most recent large scale paintings are of dark, doll-like girls and boys and another of brightly colored soaring and dancing women with backgrounds of flora and fauna, inspired by clothing designer Emilio Pucci. "Very groovy stuff," she says, laughing, and adding, "I've been busy in the studio." Her creativity has paid off. If she feels more emotionally connected with a painting, she prices it higher.
Kowalski and artist-husband Harvey Mercadoocasio owned Amano Paperie and Fine Art Gallery in Durham. From it, the pair launched Culture Crawl, a third-Friday art crawl in city center Durham. In other efforts to promote art and downtown renewal, Kowalski founded the annual Main Street Fair, with the help of the city of Durham and partnering downtown businesses. They shut the doors to Amano in September 2004 to return to what they love: making art. Founding Artologie was a natural progression for them.
Harvey Mercadoocasio
Harvey Mercadoocasio's work has enjoyed popularity in the Triangle. Two notable series of works, one of large nudes painted with a potion of coffee and ink and the other a series of geishas, lilting white-faced women in subdued poses with elaborate kimonos and gilded backgrounds, housed in thick gold carved frames, showed at Cyclos in Raleigh, NC and Ringside, Durham, NC among other local venues. His recent works are a mystery though, sealed within the pages of his sketchbooks.
Mercadoocasio, a self-taught artist, sketches daily (upon waking and periodically throughout the day) which is an important part of his routine, one that has developed since his first exhibit of his work in a museum in Ponce, Puerto Rico at the impressionable age of 13.
"I sit down and put a thought onto paper," says Mercadoocasio. "This is the sketch that begins the work." Mercadoocasio's sketches are most often figures in motion, and in sensual or erotic stances too. His pencil sketches use varying line weights which add to the musculature of the nudes and give what is needed to make them seem real: solid weight. The figures are then stylized, often with larger hands and longer necks ... influenced by both comic book art, manga, and the elongated sculptures of Giacometti. Mercadoocasio does several sketches which progress into more elaborate studies, smaller sized versions of what will become lar ge paintings. He works in acrylic on cotton paper and canvas.
When he paints, Mercadoocasio "thinks about how to counteract the everyday ugliness that we hear and are bombarded with, with beauty. A beautiful image brings the message home just as powerfully as an ugly one, if not more."
Mercadoocasio's geishas are precisely executed with mixed media: acrylic, gold leaf, and Japanese imported papers. These paintings, which he describes as highly decorative, were influenced by the works of Klimt, Schiele, Hokusai, Hiroshige, Tomoyama, and Alphonse Mucha. "People need to know who these people are and they can catch little glimpses of them in my art. I don't copy them. I'm just influenced by them."
The geisha paintings juxtapose East and West, and contemporary and traditional forms. "My neo-geishas are an amalgam of many cultures on a canvas in order to put forth an image of geishas that have been known for centuries," says Mercadoocasio. Fans are awaiting Mercadoocasio's next epic paintings which are in an incubation period, a state he describes as "an intersection of emotions, experience and thought."
Mercadoocasio came to fine art first then pursued a career in commercial art, freelancing on the popular comic book series including Sonic the Hedgehog and Shi. He worked in commercial art design for the advertising giant, Satchi & Satchi, and more recently for Vicious Cycle, a software video game creator in Chapel Hill. When asked about the price tags, which range from $150 to $5000, Mercadoocasio says confidently, "The prices of my paintings reflect twenty-eight years of experience in the commercial and fine art fields selling my work in galleries, museums, and private collections."
Jonathan Blackwell Another Artologie artist, Jonathan Blackwell, is passionate about making his art accessible. He collaborates with the brass band Topography, producingsmaller work in their rehearsal studio or while they record, and finishing larger paintings during live performances as part of their act. Blackwell's paintings fuse the energy of the crowd and the music with his artistry. During a performance, Blackwell sets up a large brown paper panel directly below the stage where the band plays. Prepped with an aluminum muffin tin filled with watery paint, Blackwell points quick line strokes. The results are spontaneous, syncopated works that reflect the sound in a way that can be literal with drawings of band members at play, intersected with more expressionistic concentric squares and inch-wide brush strokes that dazzle the audience as much as the musical performance.
Part of the reward of owning one of these paintings comes from the experience of watching it being made of connecting in some way with the energy of the room, with the expansive music of the band, and with Blackwell while he is painting. He has done live painting at Ooh La Latte and Ringside, both in Durham.
"With Topography, I really enjoy playing on their name, producing work whose Lineaist characteristics resemble topographical maps," says Blackwell.
At first glance this spontaneous creation of art seems at odds with Blackwell's more formal background, which includes extensive study of art history at Duke University and art schools like SACI in Florence, Italy. Blackwell explains the correlation of these studies with his work as a"romantic relationship with art that comes from concise packets of historical relevance. Without specific movements and schools of thought, art would seem erratic and arbitrary."
Blackwell is a lineaist. "Lineaism comes from my thorough understanding of Michelangelo and Da Vinci's study of Disegno, or fine art based on the fundamentals of strong drawing skills. As opposed to the Venetian school of painting, which focuses more on layers of brushwork, the Florentines start with a drawing and fill in thiscartoon w ith color'.By always drawing first like the Florentines and painting later, my work arrives as Lineaism."
"I later came to realize that perhaps my closest relative in this method of art production is Egon Schiele, contemporary of Gustav. Schiele practiced the technique ofcontinuous drawing,'which arrives as the more rapid- fire application of the same Florentine interest in draftsmanship."
Blackwell has new projects cooking on the front (and back) burners. He is preparing to release a series of nudes, which he is"very excited about, and hopes to find the right place to display them soon."And through a partnership with artist Andrew Barco in the Transom gallery, Blackwell will be offering more of the live drawings from live-music performances. "I thrive on producing drawings to live music (something of which Schiele was well aware). Andrew and I are collecting portraits of bands for the Durham Music Festival and are seeking interested artists or bands."
"In addition to all that, I am currently finishing the feature-length film I wrote, directed, and designed, LOUVST, which features music from Topography, Mosadi Music, my girlfriend Talia Wight, my brother David Blackwell (the UniFire), my cousin Jody Blackwell in Boston, our local jazz guru Andy McKee. The theme of LOUVST addresses the emotional complexity of relationships, and should be screened in this area by Fall 2005 after a premier I am a rranging in London."
The combined energies and talents of the Artologie artists will engage art collectors for years to come.
