The concept for painter Lavaughan Jenkins’ new work “Reconstructed Figures”, currently showing at Abigail Ogilvy Gallery in Boston through October 1st, came to him as his ideas often do—in a dream. His previous series of oil paintings focused on texture in such a way that they could barely be considered entirely two-dimensional, given the way Jenkins slathered the paint onto the canvas. “I had a dream about them where I was walking through the paintings,” says Jenkins, “and that’s when I knew it was time for me to figure out how to make them three-dimensional.”

Jenkins’ interest in three-dimensional paintings centers around the idea of seeing the other side of the canvas, a concept that has fascinated Jenkins for years since he was an undergraduate at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. He returned to consult with professors who specialized in clay, but Jenkins didn’t want to use that medium. He wanted to sculpt with oil paint. “I figured since I’m a painter I should probably use oil paint,” he says.

The figures he created have skeletons of wire and molding paste with four to five dense layers—up to an inch-and-a-half thickness—of oil paint on top. These took Jenkins a year-and-a-half to complete and required a break from working on them before the show’s opening to give them time to dry properly. The pieces take up to four months to dry enough for travel and display, particularly in the leg areas, which Jenkins says are almost entirely made of paint, and in the sections using darker colors, which are more oil heavy.

Once dried, the figures are attached to spinning wood platforms and mounted on the wall to be presented as paintings traditionally are. The mechanism allows the viewer to experience the paintings from all vantage points, like the three-dimensional versions Jenkins imagined.

The figures are a manifestation of Jenkins’ own life, what he calls “the accumulation of things forgotten.” He points to images in ancient Egyptian art of figures called gift bearers, and he sees these figures within the same context. He is giving the gift of his life to the viewer.

“They’re like landscapes of my personal history,” says Jenkins. “My dad, women who have played a role in my life, mentors, artists who have helped me get to where I am right now. Those stories are now physical, and I won’t be able to forget them because they are documented.”

Jenkins still loves working in the two-dimensional, and his plan isn’t to move away from either that or three-dimensional, but rather to integrate them. One plan has him creating life-sized versions of clay and plaster. Another will find Jenkins creating portraits of his figures, which suits him fine.

“Everything that I do in 3D I’m going to end up painting in 2D,” Jenkins says. “I think they’re the best models now. They already look how I see the figures, so I don’t have to alter people, and also they don’t move, so they’re the best models. And they don’t complain about how bad I make them look.”

Lavaughan Jenkins–artist
Boston, Massachusetts
Website
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter

Top image, Lavaughan Jenkins, all image courtesy of the artist

The post Oil Paintings Enter a New Dimension appeared first on Take Magazine.

Gail Spilsbury places a major emphasis on setting in her writing. Whether her stories take place in the olive hills near Rome, where she lived for three years and made olive oil; or within the surrounding natural beauty of Washington, DC, where she and her foreign service family were based in between deployments; setting is central for Spilsbury. This time she is setting her story a little closer to home—on the Red Line.

Spilsbury was writing the Red Line as a novel when she read a New York Times article on the rise of fiction podcasts. “Instantly I knew I wanted Red Line to be a podcast,” says Spilsbury. “The medium was perfect for it as my protagonist, Pia LoMonte, was telling readers her story in an intimate voice already.”

Actor Anna Gravel, photo courtesy of Gail Spilsbury

When we interviewd Spilsbury, the Red Line Podcast had recently aired its 17th episode and Pia’s story is now well underway. LoMonte, 29, has arrived at the Haskell School located in the Boston suburb of Wessex. But her dream is to live in downtown Boston near the Red Line.

“The idea for the story was born in a moment of hilarity with a millennial friend as we discussed the pitfalls of relationships, and that living near the Red Line was so important to quality of life in Boston that a woman or man would stay in an awful relationship just to keep that proximity to the subway,” Spilsbury says. “The original title of the story was ‘I Did It for the Red Line,’ but that was too long for a podcast cover. That line is still in one of the 21 episodes.”

The amount of changes that have taken place in the last ten years surrounding social media and the way we communicate with others was a key source of inspiration for Spilsbury when writing the Red Line. “[The podcast] takes place in our times, and our crazy political and globally challenged times fascinate me—they form my backdrop,” Spilsbury says.

Many listeners will find they can relate to protagonist Pia—especially millennial listeners, Boston transplants, or those just starting out in their careers. “I wanted a young female protagonist for a number of reasons—that part of life when you embark on your dreams is so wonderful but it also involves finding out what the workplace is really like,” says Spilsbury. “We can love our jobs, our work, our institutions, but we also inevitably find bad characters there spoiling the environment. Pia falls right into this on her first job, just as we all have.”

The themes in the Red Line are universal, we’ve all experienced them—this is what makes the podcast so entertaining, that and the fact that Boston simply makes for a great setting. “I grew up here and returned here because Boston is alive, intelligent, creative, and innovative,” says Spilsbury. “The sheer amount of education happening here—in all branches of life pursuits—means there are hundreds of thousands of students, professors, and those who graduate and stay. It’s a mecca for depth of knowledge and output.”

Follow Red Line’s twice-weekly episodes on iTunes, Google Play, or Stitcher. Search for “Red Line Boston.”

Gail Spilsbury–creator/author, Red Line Podcast
Website
Facebook

Image courtesy of Gail Spilsbury.

The post She Did It for the Red Line appeared first on Take Magazine.

Kick off your summer with the most creative party in the South End of Boston.

Boston Center for the Arts will hold its annual fundraising gala event, the BCA Ball & Disco Under the Dome, June 3rd from 7:00 pm until midnight at the historic Cyclorama Building in Boston’s South End. This year follows up the inaugural event in 2016 which had record-breaking attendance and set the standard for this evening that features two great parties in one unforgettable night.

“This year, it was really important for Boston Center for the Arts to put the art front and center at the BCA Ball 2017,” says Gregory Ruffer, President & CEO of Boston Center for the Arts. “So we’ve contracted nearly 70 artists that run the gamut of the visual and performing arts, from classical cello to sampled dance music, contemporary dance to hip hop, spoken word and performance art, and visual arts of all kinds. This is truly an experience with something to delight all arts lovers.”

Support of the BCA Ball 2017 makes Boston Center for the Arts programs possible including those that incubate work by theatre, dance and visual artists; facilitate the development of vital contemporary art and performance; and introduce the community to artists and art that transforms.

The evening features a pop-up exhibition curated by Robert Moeller (with all sales benefitting the BCA), performances by John Lam (Principal Dancer, Boston Ballet), The Wondertwins, and Company One, music by composer Nate Tucker, Mobius Percussion and the Community Music Center of Boston.

PBD Events, will set the stage for the first part of the evening with delicious cocktails and cuisine donated by Gourmet Caterers, Capers Catering, The Catered Affair, East Meets West and MAX Ultimate Food while audiences are immersed in an awe-inspiring multidisciplinary experience. At 9:30 PM, the lights will dim for the second party, Disco Under the Dome, and DJ Natito will spin tunes to keep the party bouncing all night long, with delicious desserts and signature cocktails provided by Gourmet Caterers.

Single tickets for the BCA Ball ($300) and Disco Under the Dome ($100) are now available. For ticket and other event information, visit www.bcaonline.org/bcaball.

The post One Night Two Parties appeared first on Take Magazine.

The digital realm—staring at laptop screens, scrolling through social media feeds, manipulating images with photo-editing software, banal narcissism in the form of selfies, pervasive porn, the searchable history of human culture—it’s all swirling through the paintings, silkscreens, fabric assemblages and drawings of Cambridge, Mass.-based artist Samuel Kontny. Analog media like paints, ink and brushes get expertly deployed in Kontny’s vibrant work as he renders images from Western art filtered through our online universe, complete with pixelation, dinky icons, cursor arrows, layered windows, screengrabs, crude cut-and-paste jobs, or jarring photoshop maneuvers.

Kontny, 32, works in a number of interrelated styles and techniques. He paints. He makes silk screens. He draws. He uses visual editing software and then replicates his creations in other media. Sometimes he uses Kid Pix, the vintage-ish bitmap drawing program for children to generate nostalgic Web 1.0 images. “I like using those tools and in some cases recreating those effects by the human hand, or by my own hand,” he says.

Kontny might riff on a recognizable painting by Picasso or Andy Warhol, taking a selfie in front of a famous canvas, then manipulating the image digitally and then making a painted or silk-screened version of the end result. There are layers and layers of meta. It’s a giddy self-referential hall of mirrors. Kontny, who works full-time as a bartender, also has a sideline working for restaurants and bars making elaborate murals, semi-permanent lists, menus, specials boards and other dense, text-heavy projects. As with his silk screens and paintings, Kontny’s restaurant work sometimes makes playful quotes of art history, with one mural suggesting the coiled graffiti-ish figures of Keith Haring and the playful cartoon zing of Kenny Scharf.

Samuel Kontny, Mom N Pop-Up Mural, acrylic, 2014, photo by Emily Isenberg

You can think of Kontny’s work as a visual version of mash-up culture in music. If a dance DJ might sample snippets of older hits, jamming together two bits from different eras, abruptly dropping out sections, making space with silences, muddying up the texture, Kontny does the same thing. He might appropriate an image from Lichtenstein, say, (already an appropriation of comic book art) and quote it in the context of 21st century digital technologies, referencing the tools he uses (the grids, the palette icons, tabs) within the piece itself. All the component parts are in conversation with each other.

Erasures and deletions are part of the look and feel of these pieces. Look at “Me and Laocoon and Chuck,” a 2015 CMYK silkscreen. It appears to be a picture of someone in front of a Chuck Close portrait, with those signature tangles of color that the eye and brain assemble into a facial close-up, as if broken down to its coloristic molecular structure. But in Kontny’s piece the figure and the portrait behind it are uncovered and erased to reveal an ancient Greek bust of the blind fortune teller Laocoon, sort of like a bass note underneath the whole thing.

The erasures bring the work of Alberto Giacometti to my mind. Giacometti may be more known for his carved-away spindly sculptures of figures, but in his sketch books he routinely made extreme use of his eraser, rubbing away lines and sections from his vigorous pencil markings. Kontny establishes a kind of lineage of portraiture and labor: the work required to create an ancient bust from a block of marble is contrasted with the work of painting a portrait on a canvas, which is in turn contrasted with snapping an image on a cell phone. All of it can be digitally replicated, deleted, or manipulated with a click. The entire set of images is framed within another set of images: the smartphone screenshot, with its icons for battery power, wireless bars, timestamps, signal strength, GPS and bluetooth, all serving as a hieroglyphic of digital decorative banding. “I like taking the idea of portraiture and using what’s available at the current time,” Kontny says.

Samuel Kontny, Installation sketch, CREATE Boston, 2017

As with Kontny’s non-permanent work in restaurants and bars, his digital-centric art confronts the nature of sustaining and archiving images over time, how some things are wiped away and some preserved.

Kontny likes the idea of “layering and comparing” the different modes of portraiture, “contrasting the amount of work that went into ancient marble sculptures—and now it’s so easy to create a portrait of something so meaningless and passe, of yourself just doing whatever.”

Technology and media saturation, web-enabled distraction, the virtual world subsuming the physical world, and ambient narcissism can all be easy targets, but Kontny isn’t necessarily wringing his hands about the state of the world and how we relate to pixels and our digital devices.

“I’m more embracing it than critiquing,” he says.

Sam Kontny–Artist from Cambridge, Massachusetts

Website
Twitter
Instagram
Facebook

Top Image: By Chuck, CMYK silkscreen print, 22″X 31″, edition of 4, 2015

The post Scratching Beneath the Digital Surface appeared first on Take Magazine.