Quilts are tangible records of American life, a tactile method of storytelling. Anna Von Mertens’ bold conceptual quilts tell more than stories: they’re hand-dyed, hand-stitched reflections on existential questions about time and space. “Time plays a key role in my work,” she says. “I’m drawn to existential or time-based scientific data. Looking, observing, quantifying and naming—it’s not dissimilar to the artistic process of looking and seeing.”

Originally a printmaker, Von Mertens, who lives and works in Peterborough, New Hampshire, received a bachelor’s degree from Brown University. She stitched her first quilt in college and was transformed. “I just fell in love with the medium,” she says. “There are all these associations with quilts and if you take an idea, then translate it through quilting, you see things in a different way.” Von Mertens explored her passion in the textile department at the California College of the Arts, receiving a master’s degree in fine art.

Marriage and family eventually brought her back to Peterborough and the east coast. She explored the dichotomy between her east coast roots and west coast sensibilities in an early quilt series called North, South, East, West, depicting each region as energy patterns; the east coast was portrayed as a black hole. “I saw the east coast as an introverted landscape and the west coast as extroverted,“ she says, “but it wasn’t meant to be a definitive statement.”

Jupiter Rising, January 7, 1610, Padua, Italy, 2008, hand-stitched, hand-dyed cotton, 54 x 100 in. Photo courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery; photo by Don Tuttle.

Her studio, in a former textile mill in Harrisville, New Hampshire, helps create a sense of place. “It’s a wonderful place to work and the history feels very present,“ she says. “I’m in a section where the textile looms were.”

Von Mertens uses scientific phenomena to interpret events, thorougly researching and immersing herself in a subject before, and while, creating her work. She designs her patterns on a computer, then uses a projector to transfer the patterns to hand-dyed fabric, outlining them in chalk; then she stitches the outlines. Her favorite body of work mapped stars above violent historic events in U.S. history, such as September 11, 2001 and the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War. “It links these questions of time and our place and perspective to it,” she says. “I sited the viewer at the act of violence in a way you’re removed from it but in the moment.”

Bacchus’ aura, after Caravaggio, 2009, hand-dyed, hand-stitched cotton, 39 3/4 x 33 in. Photo courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery. Don Tuttle photo

Her next project is inspired by her daughter’s fascination with phone emojis. “I’m looking at emojis and how they’ve become a language we’re making together,” she says. “My daughter thinks they’re amazing. It’s like a visual art language.”

Von Mertens’ work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the RISD Museum; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, among others. Upcoming shows include Shape/View, the Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, Oregon, September 6-30, 2017; and Another Time, Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York, November 1-December 17, 2017.

Anna Von Mertens–Artist
Peterborough, New Hampshire
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Top image: The Duke and Duchess of Urbino’s auras, after Piero della Francesca, 2009, hand-dyed, hand-stitched cotton, 18 x 13 in. (each). Photo courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery; photo credit Don Tuttle.

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The trajectory that set Morris Norvin on the path to becoming a professional sculptor and arts educator began when he was 8 years old and a student at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He continued his learning at age 12 by taking sculptural figure classes with the legendary Ralph Rosenthal, also at the MFA.

Today Norvin is a well known artist in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston where he presides over the teaching studio, Stonybrook Fine Arts. He also instructs a number of sculpture courses—continuing Rosenthal’s legacy of instilling artistic inspiration and creativity—at MFA.

While Norvin is passionate about the artistic education of others, he is a fine artist in his own right. Working with a range of materials, many of them recycled and found, he creates pieces that might whisper to us not necessarily about politics or sociological notions, but ideas that help set our minds at ease.

Norvin working on “A Test of Mettle,”, made entirely of horse shoes from the Boston Park Rangers and strapping from Sam Adams beer casks. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Focusing on sculptural animals and people, Norvin hopes that his work might serve as a therapy for its viewers. If his art does nod to the political climate, it is done so in a subtle manner. One such example is The Discarded, which features two brilliantly shining polar bears created with scrap metal from the Sam Adams Brewery. But he also makes magical figures created simply for the sake of beauty and enjoyment, everything from dogs at play and horses at full gallop to unicorns, dinosaurs, and pegasus.

“The Discarded,” Photo courtesy of the artist.

Beautiful as they may be, Norvin considers himself more focused on process. Collecting and assembling objects of metal, wood, paper, wax, clay, and glass, he searches for these items knowing that each piece will one day become part of a bigger creation. He uses gears and springs for body parts, a discarded chain for a dog’s spine, and works to constantly refine and tailor his craft.

Many artists work alone within the confines of their studio, but this sculptor finds that it is community that inspires him. He is a Boston native and explains he has “always been drawn to its mix of people and cultures, as well as its welcoming attitude to art and artists.”

It was with this in mind that he opened the doors to Stonybrook Fine Arts in 2007, a school and creative space offering courses and workshops for teens and adults in welding, bronze casting, jewelry, small metal casting, mold making, live figure sculpting, and stone carving. Stonybrook also provides a scholarship program, Community for Art and Sculptural Training or CAST, for youth at risk.

“Anyone can make art,” Norvin says. “So many people believe, and tell me, that they couldn’t draw if their life depended on it, but making things is not necessarily a creative process. It’s a genetic one. It’s something we all have within us. You might not create something like Michelangelo, but you can certainly create something of worth. And you will only get better with practice.”

Norvin’s work is widely collected and is shown at a variety of pubic shows and venues in New England. On September 23rd – 24th, from 11:00am to 6:00pm, he will be participating in the Jamaica Plain Open Studios event, which works to support the arts through events, exhibitions, and professional development.

Morris Norvin–sculptor
Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts
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Top image: Piscator 2, recently installed at the Pingree School in Hamilton, Massachusetts. Photo courtesy of Morris Norvin.

The post Morris Norvin: Sculpting a Community of Art appeared first on Take Magazine.

Metalpoint artist Susan Schwalb uses a fork a bit differently from most people. While you or I use it to pick up a floret of broccoli or stab a piece of beef, Schwalb uses it to draw. She also uses steel wool; flat bars of silver or gold; and special styluses that hold fine pieces of silver, copper, or other metals. Basically, if it’s metal, chances are she’s tried drawing with it.

While this might sound like a strange new idea, drawing with metal—aka metalpoint—actually has a long history. In the Renaissance, long before graphite or red chalk existed, Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, and other Renaissance masters used metal to sketch out their ideas. The works were often unfinished, really more a means to an end than a product in itself.

Schwalb’s work, however, is anything but unfinished. This is work that is absolute and final, her intricate lines meticulously drawn, each with its own place in the abstract story she’s creating. Schwalb has taken an ancient technique and made it boldly contemporary by experimenting with different metals and evolving it from its figurative beginnings into the abstract. Her innovation and vision are recognized far and wide in the art world—her drawings and paintings can be found in the collections of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, among many others.

Not bad for a technique Schwalb discovered by happenstance. “I was doing very precise ink drawings with a Rapidograph pen,” she recalls. “I kept looking for finer and finer lines. And then I was in the Hamptons with a few other artists for a few weeks. I looked at this artist working; it was silverpoint. Here’s a tool to make a line on my painting! I went back to the city, bought paper and tools, and started. Within a year it was my primary medium. “It’s the precise line I love. I never looked back.”

Intermezzo XXI, 2015, tin, silver, and goldpoint on black gesso, 12 × 12 × 2.125 in. Photo by Jacklyn Boylan

And yet, of course, she did look back, at least initially. Because looking back at the Renaissance is really the only way to learn how to do metalpoint. The drawings themselves are the only points of reference.
“I’m not that interested in all Renaissance drawings,” Schwalb says, “but I’m always interested in Renaissance silverpoint.” Apparently . . . how else to explain her spending not one, not two, but four days looking at the metalpoint retrospective Drawing in Silver and Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC in 2015? “By day two, my husband was looking at other parts of the museum, but I wasn’t. There are things in these drawings.

“I’m not looking at the whole image,” Schwalb continues. “Sometimes it’s just a little section.” She cites Rogier van der Weyden’s Portrait of an Unknown Young Woman as an example. The woman wears a traditional Dutch headdress with a flowing scarf. “I was really looking at how he got the darks and the lights,” Schwalb explains. “Right below her neck is a really thin line. I kept looking, looking, and looking.

“I found this medium, and it doesn’t seem to let me go.”

At her airy Watertown, Massachusetts, studio, Schwalb stands by her drawing table to illustrate various metals’ versatility. She picks up a piece of paper and grabs the aforementioned silver fork, pulling it across the paper to leave a line. She trades the fork for a piece of steel wool and creates a different set of lines. “You can draw with jewelry,” she says, scraping her ring against the wall to make a smudge. “It’s not complicated. What’s hard is the drawing. It is a direct medium. You have to be able to draw.”

Susan Schwalb lines up at her Watertown studio. Photo by Izzy Berdan

Each metal has its own properties, too. Understanding which one tarnishes and how much, for instance, is something Schwalb considers before she begins a piece. Silver, copper, and brass all change color differently. Tarnishing is also affected by the surface and time of year. In humid summer months, a piece can tarnish overnight. In the winter, it can take months. “I try to anticipate it, but I don’t always know,” she says. “Even after 40 years, the medium can surprise me. That’s the fun.”

Schwalb prefers to create series of drawings or paintings rather than individual works, exploring variations on a visual theme. “I do it because I want to try something else—different colors, different metals,” she explains. “One piece leads me to another.”

Her Orchid series, which began as a figurative study, gradually morphed into abstraction as Schwalb created lines around the orchid. “I took the image out. I was drawing what was behind it.” Then she began to tear the paper, eventually burning its edges. “I used a match, then a candle. I finally had to give up burning; if you put your finger on it, there’s a fingerprint,” she says, noting she used burning from 1978 to the early ’80s.

Through it all, she was always searching for the perfect exact line. “I have combined everything—gold leaf, tempera, burning the edges of the paper,” she says, recalling various phases. “It was that I was looking for a very fine line.”

While the colors, textures, and metals vary in her series, the linearity unites her work. Sometimes the lines are straight as arrows—she uses a T-square to ensure that. Other times they waver slightly. Sometimes she mixes the metals. Other times it’s one metal against a solid color.

Schwalb gives her series fairly generic titles—Strata, Music of Silence—deliberately. Individual paintings simply receive a number, as in Strata #246. She often uses musical references. “I don’t want a title that makes you read an image in it,” she says.

Harmonizations is a divergence from her signature line-and-band work. A series of squares with intricate lines, each one is slightly different, yet all meld to create a shimmering design. Each painting looks one way as you look at it straight on; if you look from the side, its depth and intricacies change entirely.

Orchid, photo courtesy of Susan Schwalb

“The creative process is peculiar,” Schwalb says. “Most work doesn’t have the clear narrative everyone would like. There is a narrative; it’s just not as obvious.”

Today, Schwalb draws primarily with styluses. In her earlier years, she often used wider, heavier bars of silver to make her marks, which was hard on her hands. For the same reason, she only shakes hands with her left. “I have to save my right hand for my work,” she explains.

Part of that work involves spreading the news about metalpoint as an art form. While Schwalb would prefer to answer questions about the intent of her art at her shows, she often carries a piece of paper and a silverpoint tool in her pocket. “In the end, I surrender,” she says. “They want to know. It looks like a pencil, but it isn’t. It’s shiny, more fine. People are curious. What is this?” And so, she tells them.

For more images of Schwalb’s work, plus a look around her studio, visit our subscriber-only gallery. 

Susan Schwalb–metalpoint artist
Watertown, Massachusetts
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Top image: Polyphony VIII, 2015, gold and silverpoint on carmine gesso, 16 × 16 × 1.5 in. Photo by Izzy Berdan

The post On Point appeared first on Take Magazine.

Don’t mess with the arts. That’s the message behind Ink For The Arts, a new initiative from Cuseum making a bold visual statement to call attention to the attack on federal funding for major American arts and culture programs. Slogans like “The Arts are Our Anchor,” “Art For Life,” and “NEA & NEH Forever” adorn the set of five unique temporary tattoos, which take inspiration from sailor tattoos of the mid-20th century.

“They’re iconic, and they’re visually stimulating, cheeky, and unexpected for this kind of movement,” says Cuseum founder and CEO Brendan Ciecko, who designed all of the tattoos. Cuseum is a museum engagement platform designed to help museums improve their digital engagement with visitors and members. Ink For The Arts is a direct response to the current administration’s proposed cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. It’s also a reaction to a longer trend of those in power treating the arts like something disposable.

“Seeing what’s happening politically, and seeing what’s happened to arts funding over the years where it seems it’s always under threat, we felt we needed to do something to speak up and become more active,” says Ciecko. “I feel that a lot of the threats that come into play go off this old stereotype that the arts are sensitive, that artists are sensitive and fragile, and you can mess with them. So we wanted to flip that on its head.” Ciecko and his team thought about an aesthetic treatment and motif that reflected something “fairly rugged, robust, and not what you would mess with or threaten.”

The tattoos cost $1.00 to $1.50 each, and profits from web sales will benefit Americans For the Arts or the American Alliance for Museums, with which Ciecko is actively working to partner “for some deeper initiatives.” Ink For The Arts began by sending out batches of tattoos on its own dime, and has since sold or donated thousands.

Ciecko says “dozens of museums” have ordered 500 tattoos, and that the initiative already has around “3,500 tattoos out and about,” estimating that a total of 10,000 tattoos will be distributed by the end of August. Some museums want to sell the tattoos in their stores; others are considering social media campaigns with their entire staffs, and university museums and arts organizations hope to get the tattoos “out to their students when they return to school this fall.”

The Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and the Pequot Museum in Connecticut are all on board, as are other institutions around New England and across the country. Ink For The Arts has been active for roughly two weeks according to Ciecko, and efforts will continue at least for the next couple of months. Right now the project is laying a foundation and taking an “iterative approach to see where the most response and action comes from.”

Ink shown by a supporter from the Isabella Gardner Museum, photo courtesy of Isabella Gardner Museum

“Every great advocacy mission or initiative had some sort of bonding badge that holds people together visually or thematically. We’re taking that quite literally. Your badge in being unified to fight for the arts and raise awareness for what’s going on and just show how near and dear the arts are to you—you literally have skin in the game.”

Brendan Ciecko–Cuseum, Founder of Ink For The Arts
Boston, Massachusetts
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Unless noted, tattoo images courtesy of Brendan Ciecko and Ink For The Arts

The post #TakeAction: Getting Skin in the Game appeared first on Take Magazine.