Klausland: The Life and Work of Klaus Postler, by Eileen Claveloux with Meghan Piercy, tells the story of this relatively unknown New England collage artist through personal essays that depict a man full of joyful generosity and intense focus. Claveloux, Postler’s longtime partner and an artist in her own right, wrote the following tributes for the book.

On January 6, 2013, Klaus Postler died very suddenly in his studio in Conway, Massachusetts, at the age of 61.

An artist who worked diligently and devotedly throughout his life, he spent the last five and a half years in Holyoke, Massachusetts, with me. Before that Klaus had lived in New York City, and for many years before that he resided in Westmoreland, New Hampshire, and the Brattleboro, Vermont, area.

Klaus left many friends and family members who still cannot comprehend how such a powerful life force could have slipped away so quickly.

Klaus in his studio in Romania, summer of 2007. Photo courtesy of Small Batch Books.

Born in 1951 in Yonkers, New York, Klaus grew up in Fairfield, Connecticut, where the family moved when he was six. Fairfield was a relatively rural place in the 1950s and ’60s, and Klaus roamed free with his siblings and friends. That freedom and constant interaction with the natural world informed his artwork for the rest of his life. He was also a child of his time, exposed to a great deal of commercial images, both still and moving. Klaus was a vast repository of the most obscure jingles and sound bites imaginable, able to pull out appropriate and inappropriate bits at will for any and every occasion.

Although Klaus exhibited his work internationally, and kept Mail Art correspondences with people around the world, his work is not well known. This book is meant to introduce the life and work of Klaus Postler to a larger audience. It is also intended to bring together some of the work he left behind for those who loved and treasured Klaus and his art.

Untitled, mixed media, 18 × 24 in. Photo courtesy of Small Batch Books.

Klaus was a consummate artist. He constantly drew, scribbled, collaged, and wrote. He told me that he had to draw continually in school—it was the only way he could concentrate. He had ADHD with dyslexia, and drawing and making art focused him so that the hours flew by without his realizing it. When he died, he left almost 35 years’ worth of sketchbooks, filling a good-sized bookcase along with more in boxes. They span the ’70s to the end of his life in January 2013. The sketchbooks include everything—detailed accountings of his finances, dreams, life events, cut-out pieces from everywhere and anywhere that caught his attention. There are drawings, copies of drawings, collages, copies of collages, notes on exhibitions and art he’d seen, lists of galleries to apply to, letters and Mail Art from friends and strangers, receipts and musings. He also stored pieces he planned to use for Mail Art, often the covers to be glued onto large manilla envelopes. The books, all shapes and sizes, were also his way of organizing and filing things he might need, including addresses and phone numbers. They are not in a true chronological order; one might span a few years and have a kind of theme, finances, or dreams, but not necessarily exclusively. I’ve helped him try to find some important paper or phone number that was stored in a notebook, both of us going through decades of books to try to find the desired item. There was a kind of order to them, but not order in a way that most people would understand or be able to tolerate. Klaus’s books are a wonderful reflection of the alive and vividly imaginative brain that drove him.

Klaus was fun. Always. His artwork reflects his playfulness and exuberance. It also shows his remarkably sophisticated eye and sensibility. The artwork and sketchbooks remain to attest to his development as an artist and human being, and to his dedication to his work.

Pop, 2005, mixed media, 8.75 × 12 in. Photo courtesy of Small Batch Books.

Klaus Postler – artist
Holyoke, Massachusetts
Website 

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Vermont collage artist Marcus Ratliff spent 40 years in an office on Madison Avenue plying his trade as a graphic designer, but inside his heart he had plans to return to an art form he no longer had time to pursue. His work in New York City saw him creating catalogs, posters, books, and other material for clients like Leo Castelli, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and others, but what he really want to do was make art for himself.

“I just got too damn busy and put it aside,” Ratliff says. “I just had to spend time in a different way.”

Looking back, he doesn’t see those four decades as an obstruction to creativity, but rather time spent gathering his tools and perfecting his methods. The collage work Ratliff creates now is done with the same methodology and materials he used all those years as a graphic designer, and much of his source material was amassed on Madison Avenue. Some of his current works use portions of his design work from that era, and his working size, 9″ x 12″, is a continuation of his graphic design standard.

Many of these works are on display in his new show, The Ladies Room, at the Big Town Gallery in Rochester, Vermont. They reveal the vast swirl of his expertise, not just at wielding an Xacto knife and applying glue, but pulling from the deepest recesses of his accrued knowledge and interests regarding art history to create unexpected connections to, as Ratliff puts it, “myths and ancient ideas of all kinds that creep into forms of art.”

Icarus Flirting

“I’m certainly influenced by Surrealism, and the things that don’t belong to each other originally, but when put together something happens,” he says. “There’s some spark of some sort that comes from putting things together that were never meant to be, and I like that.”

If graphic design is the practice of bringing different pieces together to create a cohesive presentation, Ratliff’s collage work is about taking those same parts and shuffling them into a new, sometimes disruptive, meaning. His piece Back to the Future features Little Red Riding Hood pulling a curtain to reveal her future encounter with the wolf. For Icarus Flirting, Ratliff mixes Greek mythology with 1920s lingerie to fashion something both absurd and tragic, displaying Ratliff’s dark humor. “It’s a little bit amusing that he has no idea that when he flies out to the sun he’s never going to survive it, and they don’t know it either,” muses Ratliff.

Pierette 2013

Ratliff moved to Vermont part-time 15 years ago, following his late wife’s diagnosis of ALS. He continued commuting back and forth to the city until after his wife’s passing in 2004, when he retired to devote his life to full-time art making. He now lives in Norwich, Vermont, where he creates collages in his home studio.

Marcus Ratliff–collage artist
Norwich, Vermont
Website

Top image She’s Leaving Home, image courtesy of Marcus Ratliff

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Mark Guglielmo’s resume is as layered as his collages. A former rapper and hip-hop producer, known as Vesuveo, the audio-turned-visual artist and Northampton resident has a new series, Cuba in Transition: Narrative and Perspective, at the A.P.E. Ltd. Gallery.

Guglielmo first visited Cuba two years ago with a group of friends he met salsa dancing in Northampton. “I had such a profound experience down there, that I had to do something as an artist to share with the world what I was feeling,” says Guglielmo. He has since returned to Cuba twice, and is now ready to share his experiences through the form of photo-collages and interviews.

Guglielmo took the photographs and conducted the interviews in the series during seven weeks spent in the Pearl of the Antilles exploring Santiago de Cuba, Baracoa, Havana, Viñales, Cienfuegos, and Trinidad. “For me, Cubans are the real draw,” says Guglielmo of his experiences staying at casa particulars, or Cuban families’ homes, while visiting. “You have lots of real conversations with people in Cuba, real connecting. There is little to no barrier for strong human connection if you have the courage and Spanish to bridge the gap.”

Che, 54″ X 41″

To date, Guglielmo has completed 16 collages in this series, with plans to make more before his upcoming shows in Cuba this February. The materials for these collages, Guglielmo says, mainly came from simply walking the streets in Cuba. “I’m not interested in normal tourist activities. I go horseback riding in the Cuban outback. I search for the perfect mojito. I swim in underground caves. I watch the world go by from the back seat of a bici-taxi. I drink rum with strangers. I get great $1 haircuts.”

Escuela-Primaria, 69″ X 142″

Guglielmo used neither a computer or Photoshop in creating these collages. “I’m on the computer too much as it is. I do not want to be on it when I’m making art,” says Guglielmo of his need to disconnect. “I also really like the tactile, old-fashioned approach of putting my fingers on the work. There’s no barrier between me and the pieces. They’re really an extension of me, not something filtered through a computer. My process is very simple; a child could do it: just scissors, tape and 4×6″ photos.”

Guglielmo’s seeking simplicity is not as evident in his pieces of art, which are a complex mosaic of experience. Instead, he says his desire to come home and create his art in the Pioneer Valley after 15 years spent in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and New York reflects this interest.  “Ten years ago I moved up here, and I’ve never been happier,” he says. “This area has everything I want: nature, affordability, culture, music, diversity.”

Mark Guglielmo’s series Cuba In Transition: Narrative and Perspective is at the A.P.E. Ltd. Gallery June 1-25, with an opening reception on Friday June 9 from 5-9 p.m.

Mark Guglielmo–artist
Northampton, Massachusetts
Website
Facebook
Instagram

Top image Cuba_El-Coche-Verde_68″ x 94″, photos courtesy of Mark Gugliemo

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Things aren’t always what they seem. In her collages, made from images found in magazines, art books, maps, calendars, and end papers, Vermont artist Mary Welsh depicts what we all take for granted—houses, rooms, and their contents. “Found materials placed in new contexts pose questions about appearances and reality, and stimulate our imaginations,” says Welsh. So while some images represent exactly what they appear to be, others do not. Welsh explores this theme of porous fluidity in art through her most recent exhibit, Appearances & Reality, at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center through June 18th.

Mary Welsh, ARCADIA, collage on panel, 28″x34″

Welsh started creating works of art over 45 years ago. She and her husband (also an artist), spent two years traveling and studying on a two-year sojourn through Portugal, Spain, France, England, Holland, and Italy. During this time, they toured European art museums, galleries, cathedrals, palaces, country houses, gardens, and cities. It was here that Welsh learned her current technique. “I glue the images with acid-free acrylic medium onto birch or mahogany plywood panels prepared with acrylic gesso, and seal the work with several coats of clear acrylic varnish,” Welsh says. “Each frame is custom designed, and is hand painted with acrylics in patterns and colors suited to the particular collage.”

Many of the historical masterpieces Welsh encountered during her journey can be found in her works of art. Welsh chooses the historical relics, she says, “because, for whatever reason, they spoke to me. Because I found a visceral connection to a certain time and place.”

“It is a world of wonder, where we delight in both the physical and the fantastic,” says Brattleboro Museum Chief Curator Mara Williams of Welsh’s work. “While the framework is familiar, the content transforms the scenes into something exotic”

Mary Welsh, A Room with a View II, collage on panel, 24.5″x 24.5″

In addition to known historical landmarks, images from nature almost always find their way into Welsh’s work. That inspiration comes in large part, Welsh says, from living in Williamsville, Vermont, a village of 300 or so in the Township of Newfane, 12 miles from Brattleboro. Awe-inspiring nature scenes are literally out each window. “We like the seasons and the fresh air and our garden,” says Welsh. “This July, we’ll have lived here 40 years. The Rock River, which we live along, has worked its way into our hearts, minds, and souls.”

Mary Welsh – Artist from Williamsville, Vermont
Website

Top image khedrlkaghsdfljha

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The painted wooden sign was one of New England’s earliest art forms, starting back when colonial innkeepers lured customers with bold hand-lettering and eye-catching imagery such as bulls, lions, and goblets.

Portland, Maine artist Will Sears has a thing for wooden signs. His company Better Letter Hand Painted Signs makes signs for restaurants, shops, farms, and other small businesses that evoke the look of commerce in the early 20th century. But when it comes to Sears’ art, the medium is the message.

“My fine art is very closely tied to sign painting,” he says. Recent works involve sawing his own hand-painted, pre-weathered wooden signs into pieces, then re-assembling them to create really cool Americana-inspired abstract patterns.

Born and raised in Philadelphia, the 27 year old also does paintings and collages that cheekily combine hand lettering with old newspaper images, business stationery, blueprints, pornography, and photos from CPR manuals. Shortly after graduating from Syracuse University in 2010, he landed in Portland via a residency for young artists led by prominent sculptor John Bisbee.

“I really loved New England – my dad grew up in Hanover, New Hampshire,” says Sears, who also spent summers at Camp Belknap on Lake Winnipesaukee. “Before I knew it, it was home.”

Sears helped design the Oxbow Brewery’s taproom in Portland. Photo by Bret Labelle Photography

Sears is entrepreneurial, moving comfortably in and out of the commercial and artistic worlds. That’s also true of some of his clients, a major one being the local Oxbow Brewing Company of Newcastle and Portland. These days, where there is an art scene, there is usually also a craft brewery (or three). The artisanship behind Oxbow’s Belgian farmhouse ale-inspired brews is reflected in Sears-designed labels, as well as wall murals in the Newcastle brewery and, in the Portland taproom, barstool tops made from – you guessed it – wooden signs.

Sears is excited to be co-curating a show this summer called Ode to Letters through the Biddeford, Maine art collective Engine. “It’s a three-part show of work – graffiti art, sign painting, and letterpress – that exhibits a love for letters,” he explains. And he and his girlfriend, artist Tessa Greene O’Brien, recently received a grant through the Space Gallery’s Kindling Fund to start a mural initiative in Portland – one with a focus on contemporary art.

“It’s a chance to bring contemporary art, which might not be found outside of a museum or a gallery, to a public forum,” Sears says. Now, that’s a good sign.

The artist with his installation of sculpture and signage at Portland’s Space Gallery. Photo by Bret Labelle Photography

The article first appeared on the Take site on February 18th, 2015.

Will Sears and Better Letter Hand Painted Signs are on Instagram and facebook.

The post It’s a Sign appeared first on Take Magazine.

When I first met Kristine Roan back in 2012, her mouth was stained from eating six popsicles in a row for breakfast. Thankfully, not much about her personality has changed since then. She can always be found wearing an assortment of soft textiles, fluorescent spandex, and one of her many sculpture necklaces, an eclectic hodge-podge reflecting her artistic style and playful sensibility to the world around her.

perennial grasses, 2016 | found material, polymer clay, and spray paint | Photo Kristine Roan

As a multidisciplinary artist, Roan engages with painting, sculpture, and collage, creating a neon dreamscape from objects that she obsessively collected over the years from various thrift stores. “I collect objects with curious surfaces and shapes—usually mimetic of organic material—which can easily be decontextualized from their original use,” she explains. Objects that you might recognize in everyday life, such as deconstructed children’s games and toys, plastic fruit, seeds, discarded metals and wood blocks, are all repurposed to create small sculptures. It’s a process that she refers to as “formaliz[ing] unexpected friendships…between the natural and artificial, the austere and goofy.”

Her current work focuses on sculpture and “para-painting,” a self-actualized collaging method that involves layering and piecing together various flat materials, such as placemats and paper scraps, that have been sanded down to reveal their layers and are then sometimes painted upon. Roan refers to this work as “para-painting” because she feels that it is more adjacent to painting than collage. “Para means beside…like paranormal,” she says playfully, adding that she spends far more time gluing these orphan objects together than focusing on the process of painting, which she considers only a microcosm of her work as an artist.

flappery, 2016 | found material, spray paint, acrylic, and paper on wood panel | Photo Kristine Roan

Kristine notes that the layered, textural landscape of her work often makes viewers want to touch the art. “Shelf-life,” her curated series of found objects and sculptures that, at first glance, looks like a shelf of plants, inspires onlookers to interact, to want to hold and rearrange. “I want [my work] to whisper, Come closer. Look closer,” she says. While her art is not interactive, Roan enjoys the tension between familiarity and curiosity in her found objects. Her practice also enables her to preserve objects that were once loved and later discarded, keeping them both out of landfills and in the minds of her viewers.

Roan’s work will be making an appearance at Distillery Gallery for an anti-Trump pop up show on inauguration day, but future shows are temporarily on hiatus. Since the election, she has felt slow to work, spending her time reading and reflecting, contemplating what direction she will move in as an artist. With the new year, however, she plans on jumping back on the artistic wagon.

stone, seed, and shriveling, 2015 | found material and polymer clay | Photo Kristine Roan

Kristine Roan is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Beverly, Massachusetts. Follow her on Instagram for more of her strange magic.

Top photo Kristine Roan | Photo by Jena Tegeler

The post Come Closer appeared first on Take Magazine.

Do you notice how much we mention aspects of weaving in everyday conversation? How much we talk about the ‘common threads’ through our lives, the very ‘fabric of our beings’, moments that pull at our ‘heart-strings’?

We are all Woven in some way and Gail Skudera‘s show of the same name at the Maine Museum of Photographic Art, communicates this philosophy in a visually stunning way. This upcoming exhibition, curated by MMPA director Denise Froehlich, is a mixed-media feast. Skudera has a long and impressive resume of shows across the states and the world starting in the 80’s; textiles, photography, collage, assemblage, painting – all these techniques and materials have passed through her work. Director Froehlich is enthusiastic and rightfully so, “Talk about expanding the photographic medium, the truly spectacular thing about Skudera’s work is that her process is photographic in nature, and she realizes the imagery employing weaving and construction.  There isn’t another artist using this methodology in the State!”

The Changling, 2011 | woven mixed media, 41 x 40 inches

Opening October 3rd, and running until December 30th, visitors to the exhibition will be presented with assemblages, collages, and wall hangings featuring human subjects, known and unknown to the artist. Skudera notes, “Some are personal and some have become personal after working with them for so long.  For years I have worked with family photographs and photographs of known subjects. When I began to introduce found photographs that I was in some way ‘taken’ by, it opened up new freedom for me in approaching what was once familiar.”

Aperture, 2014 | woven mixed media, 30 x 12 inches

We were Taken with it too – Skudera presents us with one the most inventive examples of contemporary collage. The manipulation and interpretation of photography is being stretched out of its old familiar format now that digital has become the top dog. Film and printing continue to be used, but in wilder, more abstract, innovative ways than they were initially made for. Her use of photographs as raw material for weaving a base for her work marries the equally analog world of fiber arts, culminating in objects that are as appealing texturally as visually. There is space for the work to breathe, open fretwork here and there, button reference points, you can look at the surface and then sink in deeper. There’s a conceptual element as well, the artist as needleworker, darner, knitter that gives the works a homey familiarity and the color palette evokes a nebulous but nostalgic place in time.

Block Portrait, 2010 | mixed media on blocks

Gail Skudera’s WOVEN
Maine Museum of Photographic Arts
5th floor, USM Glickman Library
Portland ME
Exhibition Dates: October 3 – December 30, 2016
Opening Reception: Thursday October 27, 6-8pm
Artist Talk: Thursday December 1, 6-8pm

All of the works shown at MMPA are for sale (unless noted).  70% of the proceeds go directly to the artist and 30% to MMPA to cover operating expenses.

Top image: Aperture, 2014, woven mixed media, detail

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“Cracktonite” | Photo courtesy Jahmane

Jahmane says, “Norwalk is a great place to live and make art. My wife and I are raising two daughters, I’m teaching in the public schools and at the Westport Arts Center, and contributing to the cultural boom in the downtown “SoNo” neighborhood. Plus, if I drive fast, I can make it to Manhattan in 40 minutes!”

A recipient of the Westport Artist Collective’s Arts & Culture Empowerment Award, Jahmane seems to be everywhere in the Norwalk community. Paintings from his series “The Nebula Collection”, “Nooh Vintage”, and “Graffikollage” were recently on view at the popular Sidewalk Gallery in Norwalk. And his prolific Instagram tells followers when to show up to Studio Spase (sic) for pop-up shops selling new clothing from KULTJAH, the fashion label that he co-founded with his older brother way back in high school.

“Bitches Brew” | Photo courtesy Jahmane

When asked about his upbringing, Jahmane talks about feeling like a “go-between” between two different worlds: the brothers attended a private Catholic school and grew up in a housing project in Norwalk. They often exposed friends from both spheres to cultures they might not have otherwise had access. And the early clothing designs were influenced by that role. Acting as an extension of the artist’s visual language in painting, they proudly affirm that “Hip-Hop, Urban, Rap, Street, Ghetto…Culture is the most relevant, powerful culture to emerge from the human psyche in centuries.”

“Restless Natives” | Photo courtesy Jahmane

Known for compositions that combine collaged fashion photography and screen printing, and that rely on his background in graffiti, Jahmane depicts black subjects whose bodies have often been distorted. In some cases, cutout eyes and lips stand disembodied against chaotic fields of pattern, color, text, and line. In others, faces are glitchily stretched across the canvas and bodies are transfigured by collaged prosthetics. Themes of alchemy and healing, Afrofuturism and shamanism intermingle amongst sardonic imagery dealing with drug use, genocide, unattainable standards of beauty, and the Harlem Renaissance. “Nothing is new under the sun and everything is connected. We should be able to synthesize the universe, and as I do that, I try to draw people in. It’s my duty to try to communicate with people, to speak to people, to meet people where they are.”

“Zenobia Diamond” | Photo courtesy Jahmane

Top photo “Vanity Deity” courtesy Jahmane

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