Category: Arts Writing

May 22nd, 2006 by sandyadmin

Helpful Tips for Buying Folk Art

originally published in the New Mexican’s Folk Art Market supplement May 22, 2006

 

  1. Buy what you like.

 

  1. Buy the best quality you can afford.

 

  1. Look to someone more knowledgeable than yourself for information, critiques, and sound advice.

 

  1. Look for unique patterns, textures, and materials, as well as original design motifs, care in craftsmanship, and unusual color or color combinations.

 

  1. Look for work that shows originality of form that is a good or exceptional example of its type.

 

  1. Consider how much time, work, and skill have gone into making the work.

 

  1. Is the piece unique or one of thousands?       If it is a multiple, is it the best of the lot?

 

  1. How good are the materials: is the thread natural or a synthetic fiber? Handspun or machine spun? Hand-woven or factory-made? Natural dyes or chemical dyes? Are the borders of a textile straight and even?       Does the textile lie flat?       Is a wooden item machine tooled or hand-carved? Is the wood cracked? Machine-sanded or hand-sanded? Joined by mortise-and-tenon or nailed and/or glued together? Is the metal work well soldered with finished edges?       Has the work been artificially aged? Does pottery have the right ring to it? Is it chipped, cracked? Is its glaze uniform?

 

  1. Ask yourself, “What does the piece tell me about who made it?”

 

  1. Edit your selection to make a statement.

 

 

 

 

From El Palacio Magazine, Vol. 110 #2, Summer 2005

By Carmella Padilla

 

Posted in Arts Writing

January 29th, 2002 by sandyadmin

Erin Spencer: Opening a Window to Herself,

first appeared on the Benham Gallery website in Seattle, Washington, January 29, 2002

“I’m a mostly shy person, and I don’t feel very comfortable in front of the camera when others are taking the picture. But in front of my own lens, I feel empowered. I never really know what I’ll see until the picture is printed, and yet I know that I’ve captured some part of myself that I need to see again.”

  • Erin Spencer

In her earliest experiments with a camera, photographer Erin Spencer shot “a great deal of everything,” looking for a theme and an idea that she could pursue more deeply. Much to her own surprise, she found that the work that received the most feedback from viewers were her self-portraits, wherein this shy, quiet, and often soft-spoken woman was found to be revealing intimate perspectives of herself.

At the Benham gallery in downtown Seattle, Spencer has a little alcove all her own, a room-within-a-room, where sixteen of her “self-portraits” hang on the walls. Only a few are self-portraits in the way we have come to expect, with the artist looking dead on at the camera.   The rest involve explorations in time, geography, framing, exposure, and printing techniques. If photography is Spencer’s medium, then self-portraiture is her ever-evolving theme, but her pictures are as much about what isn’t seen in her as what is revealed by the camera lens.

“As a person, I’m not especially good at dealing with conflict, and it’s difficult for me to talk about myself. Self-portraits are a way for me to reveal, express, and then deal with my emotions.”

In choosing to make herself the primary subject within her photographs, Spencer narrows the focus of her eye down to a single point that is always available to her, any time and any place that she happens to be. The result is an exploration of body parts, clothing styles, lines, framing, printing, and most of all, the moods and the emotions she happens to find herself dealing with when the impulse to make a picture arrives.

By her nature, Spencer isn’t the sort of person who revels in the limelight or seeks to be the center of attention. Rather than using her work as a means to court a certain kind of narcissism, Spencer views showing her work as a revealing exposure of what she is working on photographically and internally to an audience that often sees a lot more in her work than she might be intending.

“People see a lot of themselves in my work, and approach me with comments that they think are about analyzing me,” she said. “They’ll say things like, ‘I know you must have had a rotten childhood,’ or they’ll ask me if I’m suicidal or emotionally disturbed. And it makes me wonder what they have experienced in their lives to feel that way when they see my work, because it would seem that I am opening a window to their lives rather than my own.”

While the prints on the walls captures her emotions and mood in time and space forever, it is the printing process which provides her with the greatest satisfaction. In the darkroom, Spencer relives the emotions that occurred when her pictures were shot, then finds a kind of cathartic release of emotion that she doesn’t experience elsewhere, rendering the process of image acquisition and printing as a kind of self-analysis with the picture as but a memory of what has been seen and revealed.

“If there really is some kind of disturbance within me, it only appears in the time when I take the picture. But in the darkroom, watching the picture come to light, I recall when the picture was taken and the feeling is relived – and then released. By the time the picture is on the wall, I’ve moved through whatever I might have been feeling at the time. In a sense, both shooting and printing offer me a process of empowerment. And what remains is just an artifact of what I have experienced in that process.”

 

Posted in Arts Writing

January 23rd, 2002 by sandyadmin

Originally appeared on the Benham Gallery website in Seattle on January 23, 2002

Kempe & his Leica:  Playing outside the rules

 

“I am not motivated by a desire to show my work to others, but to express what it is that I see. The darkroom is where my process is most alive for me, and if I hadn’t fallen into showing my work at the Benham, I would probably have little more to show for myself than a stack of prints at my house, covered in dust.”

– Denis Kempe

By his own admission, Denis Kempe doesn’t like to play by the rules. A seasoned art photographer for the past fifteen years, Kempe doesn’t like to shoot and present his images in “themes” that would neatly circumscribe his work for the viewer, preferring instead to carry his camera along with him and shoot as the mood strikes, allowing his experienced eye and his Leica camera to gather the images he presents.

Kempe’s love affair with Leica equipment began very early in his photographic career, soon after he got back his first roll of film, in fact.

“A friend had loaned me a camera, and though I had never used one before, I knew that as soon as I had the viewfinder against my eye that photography was going to be with me for a long time,” said Kempe.

The results of this early foray, however, were less than spectacular.

“I got back the pictures from the developers and I thought, ‘god, this is just terrible.’   I mean, really terrible.”

Prior to his career as a photographer, Kempe spent 20 years working as a precision machinist in a tool production facility. From this perspective, Kempe could quickly grasp that much of what makes a great finished image lay in the technical aspect of film development and printing. So he went out and bought himself a complete used darkroom – and it just so happened that one of the main components was a Leica enlarger.

“What technical processes have in common is a need for constant creative problem-solving, with an eye towards the aesthetics of solving the problem,” said Kemp. “In the darkroom, there are any number of decisions to be made based on what to do with the negative to make a good picture.”

Soon, Kempe bought his first camera, and began shooting and making prints, teaching himself as he went along. But his other career in tool-making led him to believe that the camera he had wasn’t the precision tool that he was really looking for.

“I was in a camera shop complaining about my camera,” said Kempe. “I still didn’t really know how to take pictures, but I knew that my camera was a piece of junk. The guy behind the counter listened to me for awhile, and then he finally reached into his own bag, pulled out his own Leica and said, ‘This is the camera you really want.’ And he was right. Because as soon as I saw it, I knew that it was a high-quality tool made expressly for the process of capturing images in the moment, and I knew I had to have one.”

When it was first introduced in 1924, the Leica 35mm was a breakthrough in photographic technology in that it offered the photographer such now common conveniences as multiple exposure within the camera, a new portability that allowed the camera to be carried easily in a pocket and taken into crowds with ease, as well as the striking innovation that a camera could be held to the face as an extension of the photographer’s eye. But though all of these features are now built into any portable camera, it is the Leica’s all-metal construction, durability, and precision design that keeps photographers like Kempe committed to the Leica.

“There’s a rule in tooling that I learned from my mentor, which is very simple. Tooling must look like tooling, and it must have an aesthetic quality and a structural integrity that will encourage the person using it to do an excellent job with it. Without a doubt, it was my career as a tool machinist that allowed me to recognize on sight alone what the Leica had to offer, in terms of structural integrity and as a precision tool designed for gathering images that the eye finds intriguing.”

And while the images that Kempe’s eye finds to capture and print may not adhere to the guidelines of an a priori constriction of a stated theme, even a cursory glance through his past and recent work reveals an eye intrigued with two strongly opposed thematics: the juxtapositions of man-made geometrical forms in compositions framed by his lens, and the immediate, temporal essence of life, revealed through captured moments of ordinary people in passing. In his more ambitious works, Kempe realizes a fusion of both obsessions, revealing to the viewer the reality of ourselves as shadow and motion, and our artifacts as forms frozen outside of the time which marks our movement amidst them.

“Time is essential to understanding what is captured on a negative,” said Kempe. “After all, the camera just captures what will need to be printed, and the process of making pictures comes in the processing and the printing. The negative is the paint, and the enlarger is the brush – but it’s really in the darkroom where the art is revealed.”

You can view Denis Kempe’s latest work at the Leica Presents show, beginning on March 25 at the Benham Gallery.

Posted in Arts Writing