Bee Magic

Ooooo, yes. Two postings today, and to what do we owe the honor? Creativity, kids. It's all going down in the Guz basement today. The painting below should appear in the art shop tonight. (Couldn't wait to share, though.) A swanky flatbed scan is necessary before she's listed, and that requires she dry completely.

For some accompanying bee-related music, see the video below. Zee Avi is my new discovery, thanks to artist Dana Perea-Bloede's excellent music selection. Check out her beautiful blog here. Her tune selections are my new soundtrack.
(And! This just in:) Writer Chris Bowen, of Burning River, just turned me on to The National. Bloodbuzz Ohio appears just below Avi's video. The man has an amazing voice. He also looks exactly like my Pittsburgh neighbor, painter Phil Rostek. Really, no jokin'. The two could be twins. Or, well...father and son.

Savannah Schroll Guz, Rocket Bees (2011)



Yellow Wallpaper (redux) and Some New Treasuries

Photo Credit

It's that time again, kids. Time to teach Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper." I get excited about teaching this story not because of the its inherently morbid quality, but because of its potential for bringing the circumstances of the Victorian woman to light. We ladies have absolutely no idea what it was to wear a corset. And I'm not talking about these lovelies, which I might actually consider putting on for fun. No, no, I'm talking corsets that made women like children, since they could not dress themselves without help. (Remember Scarlet O'Hara getting help from her maid while dressing?) I'm talking corsets that changed the shape of the body permanently, from repeated use, much like Chinese foot-binding practices. Miscarraiges were common because of the compression of the fetus (believe it or not, they still wore corsets during pregnancy....isn't it a wonder that we as a species continued into the 20th century at all?).

Scarlet's inability to dress herself was due in large part to the corset,
which laced in the back and had to be pulled tight.
Corsets were not only a health hazard, they robbed women
of their independence.



Edwardian-era Corset, c. 1900 (Photo Credit)



And because the lungs were similarly compressed, fainting was common. It was considered exquisitely feminine to be so pale and frail, to faint at distressing news. A tightly laced corset, darlings, does that to a girl. Those staight-backed,  fainting couches were not simply part of fussy Victoriana. They served a purpose: first, it promoted good posture already reinforced by the corset. (Whalebone stays prevent slouching.) Moreoever, a girl needed somehwere to be lie until she recovered herself.

We think our era has unrealistic expectations of women. Indeed it does, in many ways. But, we don't have anything over the Victorian era's chief caging device. Want to keep a good girl down? Make her wear one of these and call it fashionable. No, make it a social requirement. Why, every good girl wears one. (In truth, mostly all of the bad ones, too). It thins and smooths, giving you an elegant contour. How can you not want to wear yours, darling?

In other exciting news, I've been a busy, busy girl. There's been a great deal of studio work, and new creations will be posted in my art shop soon. In the meantime, I've created a few treasuries of beautiful items. Two of these treasuries appear just below. Enjoy!

New 'Beautiful Blue' Treasury and Full Moon Art Jewelry

See the treasury, in its natural beauty, here.

Full Moon Choker!



The full moon choker on!

 Next time, kids, a much more substantial post. For now, sleepy time. I have a literature class to teach at 8:00 tomorrow morning. Zzzzzzz.....

Late Coming to the Party....

So, I don't know why it's taken me so long to find them (since I realize now they've been everywhere--even scoring the movie Tron), but, by chance, while listening to Royksopp--as I always do when I'm working--I  clicked on this video by Daft Punk, on a whim. Wow...what beautiful weirdness, and a gorgeous repetitive tune. The song elicits in me this strange ache for all the personal European history I have stashed away  in my memory banks.



And then there's the following...do I see elements of Poltergeist and the horror doll Chuckie in this? Certainly, these boys are my age, according to the Wikipedia article. These influences wouldn't be out of their culture reservoir, although they are French rather than American.

Wayne Thiebaud Tribute Cake Slice



Savannah Schroll Guz, "Wayne Thiebaud
Tribute Cake Slice", 2011 (art pin)

 Yesterday, I finished a polymer clay piece that I'd been working on for a few days in between other projects and lecture prep. The work is a tribute to the painter Wayne Thiebaud, whose stunning images of cakes, pies, and candy have become such an essential part of mid-century Modernism.

My studio arts professor, Sandy (again, short for Alexander), used to talk about Thiebaud's work during lectures, and may--although I am not 100% sure of this--have known him. I am uncertain of this only because, even though my mind vaguely (and perhaps incorrectly) remembers a conversation in which Sandy mentioned meeting him, the two artists were on opposite coasts. Moreover, Sandy is now my father's age (late 60s/early 70s) while Mr. Thiebaud is 90, so it may be unlikely they had any significant contact. Still, Thiebaud's paintings came up in both Sandy's classes and in my art history classes.

Even when I was young--long before college...even long before high school--I used to sit on our brown plaid couch with my Mom's college text, H.H. Arnasons' History of Modern Art (which has been edited three or four times by various curators and art historians, one of them Marla Prather, for whom I worked as an intern when I was at the National Gallery in 1996). While paging through it, I used to stop and wonder over the plates of Thiebaud paintings. The application of paint made them appear as if they were actually edible. Forget about their three-dimensional quality, they looked positively confectionery. Look at their gorgeousness...and there's more of their amazingness here. They also recall department store lunch counters and the cases in bakeries, both of which have a great deal of nostalgia now that they are largely extinct in American culture (there are a few exceptions, of course...here's one I know well. Still, in terms of lunch counters, I rely on stories from my mother's childhood to remind me of what it was like to go shopping and be able to eat lunch all in the same place.

Yesterday evening, after I'd listed the cake slice in my art shop, someone very closely associated with Mr. Thiebaud purchased it. As you might imagine, I am totally over the moon about it! I'll be packing it up this morning, so it can be on its way to its new home. It's so fantastic to have one of my little works be enjoyed by someone so closely associated with an artist I've revered for such a long time.  It was a very good day indeed.

You, too, can have ears for earrings!

New art jewelry: painted, polymer clay ears
with translucent beads

What they look like when worn.
Ah, strange, surreal, exciting!
Yes, sometimes it's necessary to humor me.

And the little darlings from the back. Cupped like ears are.

And because they keep swinging to and fro,
I found it necessary to hold them for the pic.
Smile for the camera, kiddies!

New Review and Studio Good Stuff

Let's take a short sojourn away from nostalgia-land for a moment (Nostalgia-what? Just me looking back and being six kinds of sentimental in the previous two posts). We'll get back to that. But right now, I've got new stuff to chat about.

First, my review of Peter Calaboyias: A Retrospective appears in this week's City Paper. You can read it here. In the meantime, a wee excerpt:
"But these works are only a fraction of Calaboyias' oeuvre, which also includes paintings. All 29 pieces featured in his 50-year retrospective, at Shadyside's GalleriE Chiz, are pregnant with memory, and reference the artist's dueling cultural identities: Calaboyias grew up in a steadfastly Greek household in post-war America. Many of these works draw equally from both worlds, uniting Greek mythology with American mid-century minimalism."

I know, I know. French words so early in the day? This kind of thing should be confined to cocktail hour, shouldn't it? Right. I'll make a mental note to use words like 'oeuvre' only after 5:30 p.m. and in the presence of a large gin martini, up with olives, please. Sure, well-gin is fine.

In other news, there's productivity in the studio area. I present the following for consideration. The top image may not look familiar at all. However, it is actually built from something you might have seen here before. (<--To see what lies under those bees, click on the link, which takes you to a February 19th blog post). Like I said, no more dead stuff. So, out with the skeletal foot. In with the bees. (Our real live bee packages arrive around April 1st, incidently. We're stocking 3 hives this year: one for me, one for Michael, and one for my brother-in-law Glenn). So the bee dance here is inspired in part by our hive studies.


In progress: "Bee Dance"

Also, I'm working on finishing some much smaller canvases that I started in D.C. over a decade ago. They've been lying around this house for several years now. On a side note, dig my excellent studio mess. Ahhhh....what comfort. I feel like I'm home again. Oh wait, technically I am. Still, I was speaking figuratively, though.

Three small un-photogenic canvases currently in progress.
Man, they look so much better in person.
Ooo..ooo! See the studio mess. Ain't it purty?

 

Life with Renger



Carla (hand on the X-Ray), Olivia, Andreas, and Ilse (far right)
all consider an X-Ray of Rubens' "Massacre of the Innocents"
(I can't remember the woman in orange).

 I call this post "Life with Renger" because for a great part of my time in Munich, I worked as an assitant to Konrad Renger, who was both curator of 17th Century Flemish paintings at the Alte Pinakothek and a noted Rubens scholar. During the period I was at the Pinakothek (my office was in the Neue, but we made frequent trips across to the Alte, which was being restored and updated), there were so many of us in the Renger retinue--sometimes as many as five--that when people saw us coming, they called us "FC Renger," meaning "Football Club" Renger. We apparently looked like a soccer team, trailing behind a coach.

 In the picture you see above, a group of us are regarding an X-Ray of Rubens' painting "Massacre of the Innocents". I've written about this specific experience before. To get all the juicy details, you can take a look at this earlier blog posting, titled "I've seen this painting naked". I'm not in the pic, since I'm taking it, and sadly, time has erased from my mind the name of the woman in orange, who was only with us a few times. However, the rest of the folks in the picture I saw every day, and they all became my friends. On the left is the fantastic Carla, who could speak four languages, and became an intern a month after I began in February of 1998. She is Spanish, but admitted she could speak French better because she'd spent years in a French school. Her father was an architect, and she often got invited to events like champagne dress rehearsals at the opera. Next to her is an art restorer named Olivia (with the pencil in her bun). She is half-French and always very chic. She and Carla eventually planned my surprise going-away party--in my presence!--entirely by speaking French to each other. And making gestures is a research fellow named Andreas, about whom I have funny stories I will later share when we get to additional pictures of him. He was a very serious character, with whom I liked to have fun and sometimes affectionately torment. Last but definitely not least, is the sweet Ilse, who also had a wonderful going-away dinner for me before I left to come back to the US in July.



Claudia Denk and Konrad Renger working on this book.

Several times, we met Renger at his country home. These were pretty idyllic times. While he worked on a book about Flemish painting in the Alte Pinakothek with scholar Claudia Denk, Carla and I picked berries, read books, or made meals. In the picture at right, we were playing hooky from work, although they are clearly working. I took this photo through Renger's kitchen window into his side yard, where the two were working at what would eventually become our lunch table. You can see the beginnings of lunch in the final pic.

More pictures of all this to come in the next post.

Carla, Dr. Renger, and me (ay! 40 pounds heavier than I am now and with a terrible haircut)
The conversation looks awfully serious, doesn't it?
Gracious, he's holding a knife, too.
Not sure what we were all talking about anymore. It wasn't that serious.

Some pictures from my days in Munich (Part 1)




My apartment at Moosacherstrasse 81, Munich, 1998
You can see apartment buildings
from the Olympic Village outside the window.

  
So, in a recent rush of nostalgia, I went looking for pictures of my time in Munich. I'll be posting the best of them over the next few weeks, grouping them by subject (work, parties, etc.) I have very few of the university, since I spent so little time there. Instead, I spent most of my days at the museum, where I was an intern (and, later, a correspondence translator).

To the left and just below, at right, are pictures of my apartment, which stood along a busy traffic artery, Moosacherstrasse, several blocks from the Olydorf (Olympic Village) and down the street from the BMW plant. It's funny that, a little over a year before I moved to Munich, I received as a gift a series of three 1972 Olympic posters from one of my professors, Klaus Kipphan. Over 12 months later, and somewhat unexpectedly, I would find a Studentenwerk apartment near the repurposed Olympic Village. A great number of my American friends (also Fulbrighters or DAAD recipients) lived in these tiny quarters with the balconies protected from pigeons by soccer nets. I went to more than one party in rooms not much larger than a closet. We were each glad to have our own spaces, though. What a change from the American dorm life so many of us had come from.



The entrance to my Munich apartment.
There's that two-burner stove I talk
about in my "Domestic Goddess" post.
Q: Is that a bottle of Jim Beam near the stove?
A: Why, yes it is.

So, this was the apartment I painted in (in fact, in the image at right, you can see one of my paintings--a small one, on top of the ancient-looking fuse box, from which a white apron also hangs. It's a partial work that I intended to finish by way of other smaller canvases. The painting is a dragon head breathing fire under a full moon. I'm not sure where that work is anymore. It did make it back to the States via slow-freighter mail, but I think I gave it to an old boyfriend when I was in graduate school, so it's probably somewhere in Pittsburgh, if he didn't destroy it or lose it along his own professional journey up to New Haven and back). Sadly, I don't have a picture of my painting corner, which was at the foot of my bed and lit by a desk lamp. Instead, I have a pic the opposite wall (above). There, I was apparently working on a giant charcoal drawing, one that never made it back to the states. I think I ended up tossing it when I was packing up to come home. Anyway, there was something funky about the nose I could never fix.

The last photo, below, is a picture of my desk at the Neue Pinakothek. I used to be able to crawl onto my desk and out the window, where there were beds of lavender. Really, this was part of the building's roof, but it was fully accessible, if you could fit through that metal and glass portal to the outer world. The particular room, in addition to having the long desk, was also the completely temperature-unmodulated "archive room", meaning that the room was populated by large Formica cabinets with doors that locked but were not temperature controlled. Inside these cabinets were catalogues dating back to the 1700s, filled with languorous script that was practically illegible to the contemporary eye. I was in these cabinets often, tracing the ever-changing numbers assigned to paintings in the Wittelsbacher collection, which became the foundation for the Bayerische Staatsgemaeldesammlungen (Bavarian State Painting Collection). In the next post, I'll share pics taken while several of us are looking at an X-ray of Ruben's "Massacre of the Innocents" within the Doerner Institute, the Pinakothek's restoration department. Also, there will be pictures of parties with the restoration deparment staff, too. Some very good memories. 


My desk in the archive room
Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Spring  1998

 

The Lesser Known Girl Gang and other tales

Tales of the Lesser Known Girl Gang have begun... I've started a series of polymer clay jewelry loosely (very loosely) based on Foxfire by Joyce Carol Oates, a book I loved when I read it (and still think about sometimes). This has actually inspired a whole host of characters that I've started painting in between bouts of review writing, lecture prep and paper grading. (Um, right. I made that sound like a case of Montezuma's Revenge, which was not intentional, but funny nonetheless). The rest of the pics here are two of the characters from an ever-growing cast (more each week).

Eva, the Enforcer
See her on Etsy here.

My review of Peter Calaboyias' retrospective, currently on view at GalleriE Chiz in Pittsburgh's Shadyside neighborhood, will run in Pittsburgh City Paper next week. And right now, I'm also working on a review of this show, currently at the Warhol Museum: Sandow Birk's American Qur'an. It is not what I first believed it to be from the publicity statement alone. But more on this later, once the review runs. I don't want to show my cards just yet, you know?

Eva on my "lapel". She's kinda tiny.
Believe it or not, I was very much like Eva as a kid.
Dad didn't call me "Rip and Tear" for nothin'.

Loretta, Eva's mother and girl gang "house mother".
You can see her on Etsy here!

Also, check this out: an interview with the artist Alex Kuno, whose work I talk about in the previous post. There are more examples of his art to complement the text. Excellent, excellent stuff--these other worlds and the characters he populates them with are simply amazing.

Finally, before I go a-review-writing, let's enjoy a delightfully freaky moment with our friend Sebastien Tellier, shall we?