Marc Burckhardt + Gustavo Torres'
Gallery Shoal Creek through Dec. 3

By Wayne Alan Brenner
Austin Chronicle
Fri., Nov. 25, 2011

Some fool somewhere is always going to say: "Well, that's not really art, is it? That's, well, that's just illustration." At which point your personal fate hinges on whether or not you have a fatal, stress-related embolism before or after you assault the offending citizen with a tire iron.

So be wary of the presence of any such fools wandering the elegant, small rooms of Gallery Shoal Creek when you go to see the two-man exhibition of works by Marc Burckhardt and Gustavo Torres.

Certainly, Torres' cast bronzes of strangely enhanced or inhabited water vessels won't confuse even the most foolish: There's something about three-dimensional objects created from metal alloy, especially when they're as darkly sublime as what's on display here, that signify art to even the least aware among us. But it could be that Burckhardt's paintings in acrylic and oil on panel – no less sublime in their subjects and execution, even richer in color and more dense with narrative – might confuse the sort of people who'd also relegate Norman Rockwell or various Wyeths to the mere-commercial-graphics category. It didn't confuse the Texas Commission on the Arts or the Legislature that named Burckhardt the Texas State Two-Dimensional Artist in 2010, though, and it won't confuse you as you stand there, enthralled, reveling in beauty so close to home yet bigger, in its implications, than all of this storied Lone Star State.

ARTS REVIEW / Austin Chronicle,
Oct 20, 2011

[ SHAWN CAMP's ] newest show, "Sum of All Parts" is the kind of thing that makes galleries worth going to and causes folks to build new rooms just to have a place to display art.

Shawn Camp's solo show at Gallery Shoal Creek is called "The Sum of All Parts," and you'd be well compensated if you journeyed from all parts to see some of these works. What did we say last year, reviewing Camp's work as part of the Telos exhibition at the Butridge Gallery? "[I]mmense oil paintings, abstracts with a thickness of colors like high aerial photography of barren earth ... riddled with meandering ribbons of metallic paint like braids of glass, like glades of brass."

Yes, like aerial photography, we said; but of a barren earth rendered with a depth and density that also brings to mind what we know of the atmosphere of Jupiter. Mostly what we know of that is the color palette, of course, and you'll see such colors – stunning reds, algal shades of green, whites and grays mixed like some matte mother-of-pearl in a depressive phase – gone approximately two-dimensional and gracing the tony walls of Shoal Creek. Only approximately two-dimensional, yes, because Camp's technique here (and his usual technique) is what the scholars call impasto: thick smears of paint, of pigment, applied with a palette knife or maybe God's Own Trowel, covering canvas the way the eerier bits of Yellowstone cover the part of tectonic plate on which that national park resides.

But, then, are the artist's works more redolent of this planet's geology or of Jupiter's thick gasses or of, maybe, what? The shifting sands of Barsoom? The dromozoan-swarmed landscapes of Shayol? Listen: They're "The Sum of All Parts," abstract and beautiful, and you don't need anything but terrestrial transportation to reach them.

aether magazine / an online dialogue for the visual arts

Austin has a new online arts publication - aether magazine - which launched this week. For the inaugural issue, arts writer and critic Erin Keever penned a review of Shawn Camp's show The Sum of All Parts as well as wrote a feature piece on Marc Burckhardt. Camp, Keever suggests, thinks in polarities, while Burckhardt engages in a personal conversation about identity. In addition, the issue's bookshelf includes reviews of recently published art books by GSC owner Judith Taylor, one of the collaborators behind the e-mag. All are great reads!
Check it out ... www.aetherart.com

KATIE MARATTA / The Grand Rapids Press

Katie Maratta caught the attention of ArtPrize goers at the recent contemporary arts invitational at the Grand Rapids Art Museum last month. Joseph Becherer of The Grand Rapids Press wrote:
Without hesitation, Katie Maratta of Austin, Texas created one of the most astonishing pieces in the exhibition. Her ink and graphite, "Fireworks Stand and Birds" is an exquisite and intimate work. Measuring but an inch high and several feet long, the work possesses the quiet grandeur of something of great immensity. Lose yourself in the open, bucolic landscape. Marvel at the craftsmanship, certainly, but take in the vastness of illusionistic space and the suggestion of form rendered through just a few masterful strokes. It is overwhelming how something so diminutive can ultimately be so monumental.

MARC BURCKHARDT / Texas Book Festival's 2011 Featured Artist

Bravo to Gallery Shoal Creek artist MARC BURCKHARDT! His painting, FULL CRY, was selected for the 2011 Texas Book Festival poster. Marc joins an impressive lineup of Texas artists whose visual imagery has been featured in conjunction with the annual festival: Lance Letscher (2010), David Bates (2008), Julie Speed (2004), Malou Flato (2003), Carmen Lomas Garza (2002) and photographers Keith Carter (2009) and Kate Breakey (2001). Marc will join sculptor Gustavo Torres for a two person exhibition here at the gallery, which opens on November 11 and runs through early December.

Congratulations are in order for two of our favorite authors, who will be honored at the festival. Pulitzer-winner Lawrence Wright and his friend and collaborator, New York Times bestselling author Stephen Harrigan, will be given this year's Texas Writer Award. "The Texas Book Festival is thrilled to honor these thoughtful writers," said Heidi Marquez Smith, executive director. "Because of their wide-ranging accomplishments as writers, screenwriters and journalists, and because they are invaluable mentors to many other Texas writers, their contributions will continue to enrich the lives of countless writers and readers." Wright and Harrigan have both been actively involved in CAST, Capital Area Statue, a non-profit devoted to celebrating the history and culture of Texas through public sculpture. The group's projects include "Philosopher's Rock" (Barton Springs Pool entrance) by Glenna Goodacre and "Angela Eberly" (Congress Ave) sculpted by renowned cartoonist Pat Oliphant.

For the 2011 Texas Book Festival, TBF Literary Director Clay Smith has put together an expanded lineup of 250 authors. Visit the Festival's website for a complete list of authors; then, make plans to enjoy the weekend events, October 22 -23, in and around the Texas State Capitol. The 2011 poster will be available for purchase at the Festival or online. http://www.texasbookfestival.org/

Success Stories / William Kalwick Jr.

Southwest Art Magazine first featured William Kalwick Jr as an artist to watch in 1998. In the August issue, they caught up with the Houston-based artist about his pursuits and successes and discovered that he continues to "capture a vanishing way of life" as he records the life and customs of the Mayan people of Guatemala.

Over the years, he has seen centuries-old customs and traditions vanish. One of his artistic missions over the past two decades has been to portray the culture before it is lost to the history books. "Guatemala looks like something from a hundred years ago," says Kalwick. "But it is all starting to change. The traditional dress, customs and culture are disappearing. The dress is already becoming more western."

Known primarily as a studio painter, Kalwick talks also about his parallel interest in plein air painting. In the fall, he is drawn to the color palette and the mountains of southwestern Colorado - Silverton, Telluride, and Durango. In Texas, "I like to drive from Houston to places like Galveston, Dickinson, and San Leon, where there are a lot of shrimpers and shrimp boats," Kalwick says. "I grew up on the Jersey shore, so maybe that is part of my attraction to the coast."

The gallery looks forward to showcasing a collection of Kalwick's plein air paintings in December. So, stay tuned.

*Excerpts from William J. Kalwick Jr / Capturing a Vanishing Way of Life, Southwest Art, August 2011.

René Alvarado at the Latino Cultural Center, Dallas

An overview of Rene Alvarado's work is the subject of the 2011 Maestros Tejanos Exhibition at the Latino Cultural Center through August 20.

In writing for the Dallas Art News, Kent Boyer suggested .... Spend some time really looking at these paintings and you see that the magic of Rene Alvarado's art is that he is a consummate visual storyteller, decorative artist, and beautifully technical painter as well.  [Read the review]

Initiated by the Latino Cultural Center in 2008, the annual Maestros Tejanos exhibition seeks to recognize the talent and contribution of leading Latino Texas artists. Past exhibitions have featured Benito Huerta, Tina Fuentes, Celia Alvarez Muñoz, and Jesús Moroles.

If you are in the Dallas area this summer, don't miss the chance to see Alvarado's large-scale paintings at LCC's impressive facility designed by world-renowned architect Ricardo Legorreta.

Introducing Colorado artist SANDRA PRATT

Thick, juicy paint combines with an inspired sense of color harmony in a signature Sandra Pratt landscape.  Pratt spent a year at the Art Institute of Chicago before moving to Colorado, where she began to transfer her love of nature onto canvases that explore texture, shape and color.  There is often an Edward Hopper sensibility present in her minimalist scenes, where a single building is depicted amid a barren landscape.  But Pratt would be the first to say that she isn’t tied to the Ashcan School or any particular art theory or cadre of artists.  Instead, she prefers to wield her palette knife with a spontaneous flair to capture a moment in time.  Often the result is a painting that conveys the idea of viewing something from a distance, as if passing by in a car.  Her main mission, she says, is to ensure that viewers get a fresh understanding of a place, whether it’s a bucolic farm in Ireland or a cabin in the Rocky Mountains.
- Southwest Art

Titovets inducted into the Artists' Hall of Fame

Deane Miller, president of the International Museum of Art in El Paso, introduced Aleksander Titovets as a "great success story" when the Russian-born artist was inducted into the museum's Artists' Hall of Fame on October 29.  Sasha - as he is known to his friends - was the guest of honor along with his wife, Lyuba, and daughters Anna and Nina, at the museum dinner and ceremony where a bronze bust of the Russian-born painter was unveiled for the Hall of Fame.  When Sasha shared the news with his Mom in Russia via Skype, she was perplexed as to why someone would want to cast a bronze bust of him when he was still alive.

Paper 2'
Gallery Shoal Creek through October 2

By Wayne Alan Brenner
Austin Chronicle
September 24, 2010

The work of a quintet of artists making marks on paper, making marks with paper, currently fills the halls of Gallery Shoal Creek. Five artists like the dissimilar fingers of a hand that holds the key to creation within a world that river-raised papyrus spawned long ago.

Melissa Jay Craig's array of bookish objects that double as bright fungi, constructed from kozo fibers and colored as fancifully as fairy-tale toadstools, sprouts from the venue's vestibule walls, a three-dimensional, mycological greeting to this current exhibition. Leonard Lehrer spent many years creating the paintings, watercolors, and lithographs that he now dissects and repurposes, via digital technology, into complexly overlapping collages – represented here by a series of "Gardens" whose polychrome aquatic and piscine elements suggest a Japanese woodcut feel. Karen Kunc's prints are made from literal woodcuts, with pigments applied so meticulously to the blocks she's bladed to abstract shapes and patterns that the resultant images jar the eye with distinct and fully saturated colors.

Francesca Samsel works in an intaglio process called viscosity etching, creating prints that juxtapose textures and portions of natural objects and machinery, as if providing the catalog for two opposing styles of wunderkammer or attempting to prove through sheer graphic beauty that God is in the details. Catherine Dudley creates mixed-media collages, but the media she's mixing with were also created by her: Screenprints based on the vernacular of urban signage and architectural patterns are chopped and cropped, estranged and arranged on backgrounds of paper further embellished by handpainting and precise drawing.

These works of art are presented thoughtfully within the elegant Shoal Creek gallery – allowing enough space for viewers to enjoy each piece by itself, yet concurrently providing a fine flow, a faint current of visual pull to draw one deeper down this river of printed, paper-based beauty.

Piramidal Grafica:
Historic Setting + Contemporary Process

Like many academics, Karen Kunc, Cather Professor of Art at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, packs a lot of travel experiences into the summer months. This year was no exception. She taught workshops at Anderson Ranch Art Center in Snowmass Village, Colorado before heading to Portland, Oregon where she was an Artist-in-Residence at the Oregon College of Art and Craft. In August, she travelled to Guanajuato, Mexico and conducted a mentored workshop with the Boston Printmakers, an international association of artists.

The Guanajuato tour and studio workshop was organized by the Boston Printmakers and Emeritus member Carol Summers who hosted the group at his award-winning bed-and-breakfast inn, La Casa de Espiritus Alegres. The inn, which houses Summer's vast collection of folk art representing every state in Mexico, served as the starting point for participants to explore the artistic passion and creativity of the region.

Piramidal Grafica, a private print studio near the city center, provided the ambiance for Karen Kunc's mentored workshop. Surrounded by historical two-century-old walls, open patios and adjacent gardens, the hands on workshop focused on the possibilities of creating contemporary woodcuts in response to the culture and beauty of Mexican Folk Art.

Karen, whose work is featured in PAPER2 on view through October 2, will be at the Gallery Shoal Creek in Austin on September 17th for "An Evening with the Artists."

THE ART OF PAPERMAKING

Clive Philpott, once in charge of book acquisitions at MOMA, stated that artists' books were not artists' books unless they were part of an edition of 100. While his opinions are still embraced by many, particularly in academic environs, they incited a bit of rebellion in Chicago artist Melissa Jay Craig.

In creating (S)Edition, Craig limited the site-adaptable installation to exactly 99 copies. Each book is a unique piece of art sculpted from handmade paper - abaca fiber embellished with cotton rag. In September, thirty-six copies of (S)Edition will be installed at Gallery Shoal Creek as part of PAPER 2. The complete (S)Edition was unveiled this summer at the Morgan Conservatory, a Cleveland Foundation supporting the art of papermaking.

The idea of creating an art center devoted to the preservation of papermaking was conceived by Tom Balbo and Ted Morgan, for whom the center and foundation is named; in 2006, Balbo began the renovation of an old machine shop which opened in 2008. Today, the Morgan provides educational programs, artist residencies and papermaking facilities for artists. In the garden, bark is harvested from kozo trees which provide a renewable source for pulp. This year the urban garden has been expanded to include herbs and flowering plants from which natural dies can be extracted.