Summer Sojourn

Posted on | Monday, October 1, 2012 | No Comments

Sugar Creek - Marianne Ballenger

Featured Artist
Oct. 3 - Nov. 14
Opening Reception October 5, 6 - 8 pm
Marianne Ballenger 
Exhibit titled:
"Summer Sojourn"

Ballenger teaches high school art using various media and is passionate about all of them. In this exhibit she does the same - paint and pencil as well as the printing process, photography and clay. Nature encompasses a full range of nuances and Ballenger embraces those many differences in this show.


Artist Statement:
Summer Sojourn - artistic wanderings of Marianne Darling Ballenger

I teach high school art……….. Rather, I show up with ideas in the form of lesson plans and the students teach me every single time just how diverse and creative the artistic process can be. I am blessed with the opportunity to work with these spirited, talented individuals. We have a lot of fun in the art room - but don’t tell anybody! I’m pretty sure learning is supposed to be serious business.

Regardless of the medium we are using - I really get into it. Drawing is an absolute favorite! I can sit and draw for hours with a pencil. But, then, anything that makes a mark is great - pastels, ink, markers - you name it. Painting is fascinating as well - and challenging. Oh, and I love printmaking in all it's forms. Weaving is fun, and can even be relaxing. Mixed media has so many directions you can go. Anything 3D has me hooked! Clay - wow! I love sculpture. Several years ago I received a Lilly Teacher Creativity Grant to study bronze sculpture and that has set me on the path of a dream I always wanted to pursue.

While I devote the school year to the students, summer is my time to recharge my artistic “batteries”. When I decided to do this show I was having a hard time deciding just which medium to pursue. So, I decided this show would just have to include many different things I like to do in art. I hope you enjoy looking at it as much as I enjoyed making it.

Unzicker Bros. Pottery

Posted on | Thursday, August 16, 2012 | No Comments

Opening Reception Friday, August 17, 6 - 8pm

Unzicker Bros. Pottery:

 Tom Unzicker began making pottery in 1987 while in college, then spent a year (87-88) working on a pottery project in Tanzania. Tom returned to continue his college education and received a B.A. in art from Goshen college in 1991. After working production pottery and firing his own wood kiln during and after college, he lived in Botswana managing a pottery project there for three years. He began his MFA work in 1997 and finished his degree in 2000. Tom has since moved to Thorntown, IN and operates a pottery with fellow potter and brother Jeff.

Jeff began making pottery in college in 1993 and graduated from Goshen College in 1996. During and after college he worked with various production potters and fired his own work for art fairs and retail. In the fall of 2000 he joined with Tom to operate Unzicker Bros. Pottery.

Tom and Jeff make a range of functional and decorative pieces with an emphasis on large vessels. The majority of their work is fired in a wood burning kiln which hardens the pots and creates a unique natural wood ash glaze.

Welcome to Slumberland.

Posted on | Tuesday, July 31, 2012 | No Comments

illustration by Andrew Taylor
Welcome to Slumberland
Sept. 26, 1869 (approximately) - July 26, 1934
Who wouldn’t want to get lost in their own dreams? Tumbling and turning through your own slumbering mind and having adventures that you can only imagine. This is Slumberland and it’s creator would have an earth-shattering effect on comics with his style and use of artistic perspective.
That creator’s name was Winsor McCay.
McCay’s origin is quite odd.  His biographer claimed that he was born in 1861 in Canada, but McCay claimed that he was born in 1871 in Michigan. Although his origin was overcast with mystery, Zenas Winsor McKay grew up with loving parents who hoped for a long and prosperous future for their son. McCay’s father had high hopes for his son to be a man of business and Winsor McCay, who dropped “Zenas” and changed the family name to “McCay,” went on to attend Cleary Business College. Although it was a dream of his father’s, it definitely wasn’t a dream of McCay’s to attend Cleary. He skipped classes and spent his time drawing portraits and caricatures for his fellow students.  This helped with his practice of drawing before an audience.  While he never graduated from Cleary Business College, he did catch the eye of Michigan State Normal School Professor John Goodison who taught drawing. Goodison improved McCay’s style by teaching him perspective and geometry in drawing.  These were McCay’s first professional lessons.  Goodison then advised McCay to attend the Art Institute in Chicago.  McCay didn’t think it was for him and then decided to go into advertising.
 McCay created various advertisements for museums and other such places, but McCay’s style bloomed from the advertisements he created for local circuses that rolled into Cincinnati, Ohio.  Here McCay honed his quirky, whimsical, and wonderful style that led to what is widely considered to be his magnum opus--a comic strip entitled Little Nemo in Slumberland. When in October, 1905,  The Herald Sunday chronicled the dreams of a young boy named Nemo (who was modeled after McCay’s son), the public became enthralled with McCay’s wondrous visual tales that were riddled with overpowering amounts of detail that one person had difficulty catching the first time around.  That was my experience when I first looked at one of the Little Nemo strips. I remember looking through some old books one day and found this little comic of a young boy atop a walking bed that was striding over a magnificent cityscape. I was completely captivated from that first panel and have been a fan of Winsor McCay’s ever since. 
I was further amazed when McCay turned out to be the father of modern motion picture animation.
Back in the golden age of Vaudeville, McCay tested the feats of moving pictures by making some of his own. In these films McCay worked tirelessly to create over a thousand hand-drawn plates so that they would work like a giant flip book in order to make the pictures move. Some of McCay’s first animations featured his beloved Little Nemo and other characters from the comic, but there was one that I particularly like. In one of his motion pictures was an animation, and Vaudeville act, that he made called Gertie the Dinosaur. I remember watching it for the first time and laughing as McCay would command this animated dinosaur to do various tricks. If Gertie didn’t do the trick or was simply distracted, McCay would scold Gertie and she would cry. I can only imagine how revolutionary it was back when McCoy performed it before a crowd, presenting the magic of animation and planting the seed which would later be cultivated by animators like Ub Iwerks & creative minds like Walt Disney. McCay created great works of art through his use of detail and perspective that had never been seen in the realm of American comics.  He has been nothing but inspiring to artists who came after Winsor McCay, including this scribbler.



----illustration by Andrew Taylor of Andrew Taylor
Andy Taylor is a young, local artist - an inspiration! Please come back for more posts from Andy.

What's Happening at Athens Arts!

Posted on | Monday, July 16, 2012 | No Comments

• Beat the Heat Brown Bag Series!

FREE!!!!
Wednesdays at Noon - bring your lunch we will provide refreshments!

• July 11 - Jody Franklin Topic: Surrealism
• July 18 - Marianne Ballenger Topic: Lost Wax Casting
• July 25 - Judy Smith Topic: Everything You Wanted to Know About Abstract Art
• August 1 - Alice Harpel Topic: Outside the Paint Box; Using miscellaneous tools to create paintings
• August 8 - Bob Foote Topic: Woodturning Basics


• Poetry Reading - 
Saturday, August 11, 4:30 - 6:15pm

Gerburg Garmann along with colleagues and friends will recite poetry of their own creations - creating works of art with words. Also still on exhibit is Garmann's exhibit "Poetics of Imaging" feauturing her expressive paintings and audio tracks on cd, a truly multi-media experience. Please join us!





the "Poetics of Imaging" - featured artist Gerburg Garmann

Posted on | Friday, June 29, 2012 | No Comments

July - mid Aug 2012
Gerburg Garmann
"Poetics of Imaging"
on exhibit in the special exhibit room at Athens Arts!


Opening reception -
Saturday, July 7th, 6-8pm.


As an addition to this show, there will be a poetry reading on Saturday, August 11. Time to be announced.



"From chemical imaging to thermography, imaging spans a multitude of methodologies and technologies. What if we thought of imaging as an act of human visualization, more precisely, an act of poetic reception, allowing us to create, store, shift (and add to) our personal experiences of art?"


Gerburg's poetic compositions for each respective artwork will be available for listening, providing a heightened interactive experience.


Visitors are invited to use headphones and listen to the performance piece while/before/after looking at the artwork. 
Music, poetry, and, of course, the artwork itself will be "displayed' in a truly multimedia fashion.


JOIN US!  


Gerburg Garmann’s main medium is acrylics. Stylistically, she favors Abstract Expressionism.

Of Flying Ships & Cycling Fish - Andrew Taylor

Posted on | Monday, June 18, 2012 | 1 Comment


illustration by Andrew Taylor

Of Flying Ships & Cycling Fish
Whenever my family and I ventured to the northeast to visit the other side of the family tree, my sister and mother would do what they considered an art--shop. My dad and I were about as good at shopping as a badger is good at performing Macbeth, so, naturally, we sat on a bench waning away the hours until they came back with enough souvenirs to sink a battleship. When I was thirteen, I noticed a bookstore across from where my dad and I sat. The name eludes me, but I remember it being a quaint little shop with shelves packed with books in alphabetical order and in their proper genres. I, at least, know how to shop for books. I went immediately to the fiction section tucked in a small corner of the shop and scanned the various titles: Harry Potter, Narnia, Howl’s Moving Castle, etc. Stormchaser from a series entitled The Edge Chronicles caught my eye. It was about a boy who finds himself in the company of sky pirates. Naturally, it became one of my favorite stories (Are you seeing a pattern here?). I quickly became a fan of the author, Paul Stewart, and a lifelong fan of the illustrator, Chris Riddell.
Born in South Africa in 1962, Riddell spent his youth in England where his talent for drawing started. Riddell had once drawn a cartoon entitled “Winegums” which told of how, during his father’s (a vicar) sermons, one of the old women of the congregation would give the child Riddell a piece of paper, a pencil, and candy called winegum in order to keep Riddell quiet. Later, The illustrators of the Golden Age of Illustration (1880’s-1920’s) like John Tenniel (the original illustrator of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking Glass) and William Heath Robinson (famed for his wacky and wonky gadgets in his cartoons) inspired Riddell. After he studied at Brighton Polytechnic (1981-’84), he became a political cartoonist, a position he holds to this day. After earning steady pay as a cartoonist and writing a couple of children’s books, he attended a school program for one of his children where he met author Paul Stewart who was taking his child to the same program. Chris Riddell and Paul Stewart became fast friends. While doodling one day, Riddell sketched out a map of a land entitled “The Edge” that sparked an idea. He gave the map to Paul Stewart and basically asked him to create a story about what happens in that place called “The Edge.” After some rough drafts, which can drive writers mad, they finally emerged with the first book in the series, Beyond the Deepwoods. After the collaboration on The Edge Chronicles, they continued with another series entitled The Far-Flung Adventures, which chronicles the adventures of three children dealing with fearsome pirates, unscrupulous clowns, and cycling fish.
Riddell’s work really helped mold my own style of drawing, mainly because his illustrations seem almost like real people, but exaggerated to the nth degree. Even his political cartoons evoke that sense for me. In a video that he did for the Guardian, a UK newspaper, he said that he likes to “draw quite politely, but I like to be quite rude.” What I also think is interesting in Riddell’s method is that he uses a brush and ink instead of a pen because he doesn’t want to “attack the paper” like a dip pen does. His illustrations have a quirkiness to them that are reminiscent of Dr. Seuss, Arthur Rackham, and W. Heath Robinson. Yet, they can be so life-like that they seem to be detailed caricatures of an actual being. Since the day I purchased Stormchaser, Riddell’s style of drawing still inspires me. I hope that he inspires whoever cracks open one of his lavishly illustrated books.

----illustration by Andrew Taylor of Andrew Taylor
Andy Taylor is a young, local artist - an inspiration! Please come back for more posts from Andy.

The Imagist & the Novice - Andrew Taylor

Posted on | Monday, May 28, 2012 | 4 Comments

illustration by Andrew Taylor


The Imagist & the Novice


(1894-1978)

A casual observer may take “The Triple Self-Portrait” for a photograph, at least from afar. But, upon closer examination, you can see strokes of paint. Then an epiphany strikes like a bolt of lightning, “Dear Lord, it’s a painting!” This is the trademark of the great imagist of American illustration, Norman Rockwell.
illustration by Andrew Taylor




Rockwell was a tremendous inspiration to me as a kid in elementary school. Art class, was my favorite place because I could doodle without being harped at by my teachers. I remember one particular project in which we had to draw from laminated prints of famous paintings like da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Homer’s Snap of the Whip, and many others which I no longer recall. I gravitated to a painting called Outward Bound by Norman Rockwell of an old sailor with a small boy in a Navy uniform looking out to the sea. I imagined them to be grandfather and grandson. I think that I decided to try to draw, emphasis on try to draw, that picture because I was born in New England and loved the sea and sailing and PIRATES! I soaked up all the books on Rockwell I could find and studied every detail. In college, an assigned essay drew me once again to Rockwell where I discovered similarities between him and me: He was inspired by another artist as I had been with him.


Born in New York City in 1894, Norman Percevel Rockwell and the entire Rockwell family thrived in the city. But it was the countryside that Rockwell called “heaven” that provided a pleasant getaway and inspiration for the young artist. He found solace in painting and drawing. He found inspiration from the Golden Age American illustrators like Howard Pyle, Maxfield Parrish, and N. C. Wyeth (basically artists who attended the Brandywine School in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania). He particularly admired: J. C. Leyendecker who was famous for his advertising art (e.g. the Arrow collar company) and paintings that adorned the Saturday Evening Post (particularly during each New Year where Leyendecker painted a baby to signify the next year)--something Rockwell would go on to do after Leyendecker. Rockwell was so obsessed with Leyendecker that he even moved to New Rochelle in 1915 just to be within the vicinity of Leyendecker’s studio. A comparison of Rockwell’s early work for the Saturday Evening Post, with J. C. Leyendecker’s work, reveals an almost rigidity in the figures and brushstrokes resembling hatching and cross-hatching. Over time, Rockwell began to hone his own very detailed style as seen in the twenties and the Great Depression. Afterwards Rockwell’s stylistic and idealized paintings became what we recognize today--art riddled with details to such an extent that they take on a life of their own. Rockwell’s caricatures captured life in America at its most simplistic, most sympathetic, and even its most complicated and troublesome times. While Rockwell inspired my artistic side, he also made me want to be an all-around better person. Paintings like the one with the Golden Rule (1961) printed at the top, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, reveal a set of morals that show how the world should be, how the world should be without prejudice or racial bigotry; how the world should respect and care for one another. Rockwell tried to help the world through his paintings, be they humorous or serious. He sought civility, and I admire that. In combining both Norman Rockwell’s artistic talent and his morality, he gave us Americana at its finest.
----illustration by Andrew Taylor
Andy Taylor is a young, local artist - an inspiration! Please come back for more posts from Andy.