Beasecker to speak on ceramics, inspiration
Clay mesmerized Peter Beasecker when he was in high school, watching another student work in the school’s tiny ceramics studio….
Clay mesmerized Peter Beasecker when he was in high school, watching another student work in the school’s tiny ceramics studio….
In the late 1980s, Bryan Hopkins was a mathematics major until he enrolled in a ceramics class to fulfill an art requirement. After that class, he switched majors and began a career in ceramics that he continues to this day.
Stanley Lewis has served as a visiting artist at Chautauqua Institution’s School of Art each year for the past 25 years, but he’s interested in far more than his own work. [w/ SLIDESHOW]
In her first trip to Chautauqua Institution, visiting artist Julie Heffernan will paint a poster for an environmental protection campaign.
Amber Scoon was a student at Chautauqua Institution’s School of Art in 1999. She returns to Chautauqua to discuss her first book, which came out in May. Scoon dedicated the book to Don Kimes, artistic director of Visual Arts at Chautauqua Institution, for introducing her to the world of contemporary art and to art as an academic study. She also studied with Kimes while earning her master’s at American University.
David East, a visiting ceramist at Chautauqua Institution’s School of Art, grew up in a ranch-style home in the suburbs, and that house design has proliferated his work ever since. East uses ceramics, sometimes coupled with plastic figurines and wooden tables, to talk about Americana and its legacy.
On one of sculptor Brenda Garand’s many trips to the province of Quebec, she spent time in Tadoussac, where a merchant and French navy captain acquired a fur trade monopoly. Oral history and the legend of a place interest Garand; she said most of her ideas for her sculptures come from a psychological sense of history and a physical sense of place.
Joe Nicoletti calls himself a representational painter.
“It’s a fancy way of saying, ‘I paint stuff,’ ” Nicoletti said. [WITH SLIDESHOW]
Julie Langsam’s latest series features paintings of the floor plans of famous buildings, realized as a combination of colored rectangles that look like an updated Piet Mondrian piece.
When Errol Willett took a post as a ceramics instructor at Syracuse University, he and his wife, Jen Gandee, searched for a place to live. They eventually settled on an old hardware store in nearby Fabius, N.Y. The couple purchased the store and converted the second story into an apartment and the first story into a gallery, complete with a community classroom and studio space. Gandee Gallery now represents ceramists from all over the country and also exhibits jewelry, painting and photography.