Anne Powers Artist Statement

At 73, I have been making and pondering art for as long as I can remember. As far as the marks and splashes, images and ideas that inhabit the wide world called ART, I’ve pretty much seen it all. As a young art student, I poured over the historical progression of art, those now called Masters pushing to look at the world in a new way. While an art teacher I saw the good, bad and the ugly. There were many unimaginative copies of cartoons but I also saw fresh unspoiled expressions straight from young souls. All through my teens and adulthood, I wandered through New York and gazed at work and installations aiming to redefine, to be something new and shocking. Much of it was breathtaking and thought provoking. Some of it was silly.

Like most artists, I’ve spent time in many camps, finding my way. In this show, there are examples of stops along that journey.If you look closely, you’ll see traces of all those in the work I make now.

As a child, my summers were spent rambling through sheds of building materials (my Dad was a lumber dealer with no babysitter) and I learned to love textures and surfaces, the aroma of wood. Preacher Adkisson, the in-house carpenter, gave me my own corner with wood scraps and taught me how to stick them together. I was eight. Much to my consternation, I wasn’t allowed to use the table saw.

At home, I filled scratch pads with imperfect drawings that made me mad. I crafted and sewed and stitched. I began college as a Printmaking and Drawing major, and then switched to Painting. I studied Illustration in New York at the Art Students’ League. I became a teacher and had to learn every media under the sun so I could teach it. Teaching design, I learned to respect the beauty of every art element for its own sake. For many years, I was a fairly successful watercolor painter. People wanted more. And more. I made 300 watercolors every summer and began to feel like a factory.

Then, the computer happened and I was lured to the dark side - 3D Modeling and Animation. Started the Computer Art and Design program at RSCC, taught summers at Stanford, wrote 5 animation books. I was in deep and after several years of twenty hour a day writing, burnt. The last book went to press and I never opened 3D Software again. Yet. My awareness had leapt from 2D to 3D, which affected my traditional work moving forward..

Now, almost every day, I go to one of my two studios and make whatever I’m in the mood to make. Most artists increasingly work toward focus and consistency in their work. I’m unapologetically all over the place, and I even wander into side tracks more related to crafts. Girls just wanna have fun. I play with processes and media I enjoy. While I’m not slavishly concentrated on a consistent style and themes, if one plays hard enough, lovingly enough, in spite of oneself, an individual’s concerns and an individual’s voice end up coming through.

No subject or media or process is off limits, but certain themes keep bubbling up. The churning complexity of nature overseen by a higher power and the collective soul of all things. The VooDoo and lore of Appalachia. Human weaknesses. Anxiety. My close environment, Watt’s Bar Lake. And appropriate to my age, yearning upward and onward.

Here are some of the art processes I especially enjoy, which you will see in this show. I love the inherent beauty of the simplest art element. The itchy scratchy line, a puddle of wash with just the right edge, the off color, The humble players, marks, symbols, stitches. This is the underlying language of art,

I love to collect things and forms, tiny bits of nature and bead and paper and tape, old things, stepped on things found on walks, pieces of rusty metal, castoffs that have had a life and have a patina, and then draw and paint all over them. If put together in the right way, they begin to speak. My favorite thing is making something out of nothing. I learned how to weld and I love to build and glue and torch. I now have my own table saw.

In the artist’s life, all is art. The arrangement of food on a plate. The garden pathway. The brooch on the scarf on the vest on the blouse. The spending of hours in a day. I recently built a treehouse. People come and look. They say, “Wait! This is art!” Yes. Isn’t everything?

Jim Brown Artist’s Statement

The main concern in my art has always been to arrange the visual elements into right relationships - to create a harmony of the whole. Whether dealing with representational or non-objective forms the aim has been to let the parts of a painting be organized in a “meaningful” way. Finding this right relationship of elements requires collaboration between myself and nature and requires an ongoing dialogue to stay in tune with natural order of things. I want to respect the universal design principles while reserving the right to edit and deviate from those rules. But it is creatively enhancing to try to merge with nature by putting aside assumptions and predispositions. Also, some suppression of self and ego is helpful for staying on track in search of artistic truths.