July 6 – September 30, 2013.

Playing on the words Ad Astra from the Kansas state motto, Laura Berman decided to call the show of her most recent work at Pioneer Bluffs “Ex Astris”—not to, but from the stars. It indicates that, in this phase of her artistic career, she feels uniquely connected with stars, novas, supernovas, the ever-changing cosmos. Earlier, Laura already received much recognition with her “rock art” prints and installations (one of her shows was called “Between a Rock and an Art Place”); at the time, her rocks showed their relationship with the earth. Now she connects her rocks to the sky.

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A logical development, says Laura. “As far away as the middle of Kansas is from other places, it is one of the most ideal locations to connect with the sky, with the stars, with ‘greater things.’ I find its remoteness actually closer to everything, the universe, than most places I have ever been.” Rocks grow from under ground… stars circulate above earth… eventually the stars make the rocks. She made the rational decision this time to concentrate on these stellar linkages.

Laura’s rocks, in whichever connection, as prints as well as building stones of installations are playful, humorous, sometimes ironic—and foremost extraordinary colorful. It must be her background. Born in Barcelona, Spain in the 1970s, her roots are equal parts traditional and hippie/disco; she credits her infinite love for saturated color and bold pattern on these stylistic eras and her cultural relationship with Spain, where she returned many times including as artist in residence in El Bruc, near Mont Serrat, where she found so many of the real rocks with which she built her enormous collection. The fact that she studied art in festive New Orleans may also have contributed to her development as an ardent colorist. “I am fascinated by the plasticity of color. In plastics, color is really infused in the material and not dependent on the material itself, like a bark of a tree would be. In man-made processes we can infuse and put in any color we want. That’s what I am doing—and I am working with color that is not nature-based.”

Laura just wanted to paint rocks. Still wants to. “These inanimate objects are not asking me questions, they don’t need anything from me, they are just there for me and my experiments.” She focuses on relationships and recombination of forms, which relates to her nomadic history of relocation and travel; and she outfits her rocks truly in bursts of color. Although a printmaker par excellence (since 2002, she is an Associate Professor of Printmaking at the Kansas City Art Institute), Laura’s work includes many site-specific installations. “All She Ever Wanted Was Everything” (2009) was an expansive polymorphic wall installation consisting of nearly one-thousand hand-cut intaglio prints of rocks; it appears climbing walls, or hovering way above the floor. In 2013, she hopes to realize a new installation in situ on the prairie near Matfield Green, as one of the participating international artists in an experience called EARTH – Sites and Structures; the working title for this project is “Form Field.”

Laura Berman’s rock collection has already travelled with her through thirty-something dwellings–in ten states and two countries. Hundreds of artifacts document and archive her life’s trajectory and memories. A series titled “Re-Collection” features vividly colored prints inspired by her rock findings and other discoveries. Again, she uses color to transcend what the images are.

At Pioneer Bluffs, Laura’s work is dominated by dynamic relationships of color, pattern and natural-themed imagery. Included are two new series of prints—one of monoprints with flat colors and layers related to supernovas and having an “exploding” composition; and one suite of flower prints related to floral patterns from her childhood clothes. Together with her rock collection imagery, these prints tell a strong story of an artist connecting to her own life through past and present interests.

March 30 – June 30, 2013.

Bill McBride is a sculptor and naturalist living in the Flint Hills of Kansas. He has no heavy statement of intent; his artworks are simple totems expressing amazement and joy of existence in nature. They are derived from emotion rather than intellect, and from instinct rather that principle. His work welcomes viewers to relax, have fun, and feel at home in the world.

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Created from both natural and man-made objects, his work resonates with the beauty and mystery of the relationship between nature and human creativity. His studio is filled with odd, sometimes mysterious, and seemingly discordant objects discovered in his explorations in the tallgrass prairie – bones, sticks, stones, wire, rusty metal. Brought together these create new, unexpected, and intensely beautiful forms. McBride collaborates with his materials. His creativity lies in understanding their primal and evocative character and assembling them as new forms. “The act of creating art makes me feel ‘at home’ with nature and allows me to express the wonder of our inclusion in the grand scheme of the universe.” He connects objects as simply and directly as possible just as distant ancestors would have. “Using my hands allows me to get to know the objects I am working with.”

McBride grew up in Ohio with a love of nature and instinctive interest in sculpture. These interests never abated in his formative years at Harvard College, Harvard Graduate School of Design, and in Stockholm, Sweden as a Harvard University Sheldon Fellow. Yet, expectations and training lead to a professional life as an architect rather than a sculptor. In 1980, he founded the Chicago-based architectural firm of McBride Kelley Baurer. The firm’s mission is “to embrace the power of design to create places that serve people, delight the senses, and celebrate our bonds to the earth and to each other.” This statement also reflects McBride’s core values as a sculptor – creativity, visual delight, and the unity of man and nature.

During his years as an architect he maintained an interest in sculpture winning first place in the Chicago AIA’s Art By Architects competition (1995) and with numerous works donated to charity auctions, such as ‘Hey Diddle Diddle’, the cow jumping over the moon, at the Wrigley Building, for Cows on Parade (1999). In Chicago McBride also pursued environmental interests as a board member of Friends of the Chicago River and co-founder of Riverbank Neighbors, a grass-roots effort to restore native habitat and welcome people to five blocks of riverbank on the City’s northwest side. In 2004, McBride followed his instincts and moved from Chicago to Matfield Green, Kansas to be a sculptor and to live surrounded by tallgrass prairie.

March 30 – June 30, 2013.

“You go with what you know. I’ll accept the fact that some artists can spew forth images like they are locked in time as a child where the creativity hasn’t been stifled, yet. Or musicians where melody churns in their brains constantly. Well, somehow I manage to visualize convection currents and pressure differentials instead. Science is what intrigues me more than what other artists did and do. I think I am shaped by a mix of Mark Rothko and Kenneth Noland and Kenneth Snelson and Rube Goldberg. My contribution is something like physics or fluid dynamics turned into an image.”

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Lee Shiney, a self-taught artist from Kechi, Kansas, lets technology intertwine in the creative process. His production techniques use turntables, cam drives, and other handmade devices to manipulate paint and move canvas and board. Making the devices that make his art is an integral part of his entire creative process. His is the art of making a machine making art. “I had cancer, which to me translates as ‘Life is too short.’ I didn’t want to muster up the patience in my early drip paintings, to perch Michelangelo-style on a scaffold with the paint dripping from overhead. So, I speed things up by using tools. It’s applying a bit of objectivity to a usually subjective, if not sacred, process. And ultimately, part is about knocking art off its high horse. ”

Lee works in traditional media, but also uses discarded pallets, primitive motors, old power cables, and mismatched or returned paints from the big super stores. “It is a challenge to sometimes work on a near-zero budget and transmogrify someone else’s cast-offs into something that is hopefully kicked a couple of notches back up the food chain.” Lee’s studio looks like a laboratory. Strange, handmade yet evidently smart machines, without producing a sound, are producing paintings. They turn boards and canvasses around in different patterns; paint is squirted out of tubes in delicately set and varying thickness. Lee watches the process and adjusts “the controls” or changes paint colors and squirt force any time he believes he has reached what image he had in mind before starting, or any time during the process he detects a better road to travel. The machines listen carefully to his directions; in a way the process is similar to what robots do when directed to make a computer board or cut out a complicated pattern in steel. “These things of mine are like robots. But my high tech experiments with computer-driven parts generally fail me. I like things simple. See, these arms are parts of pallet lumber cut to size. Practically everything we buy arrives on a shipping pallet; so it arguably should replace the eagle as a national symbol, don’t you think? These here are skateboard wheels. All hardware, all elements are simple and can be made and assembled in any garage. The simpler my constructions and devices are, the more I recycle or repurpose, the better I feel.”

Lee keeps exploring and experimenting with new mediums and equipment, such as loose canvas, tarps, instead of stretched canvas. “If art is about experimentation and breaking rules, then why should I be confined to rigid rectangles?” asks Lee. “Portability is an essential quality of tapestries, of Gobelins. Le Corbusier called them ‘nomadic murals’. They made artwork portable for kings-on-the-go and doubled as insulation in cold and wintry castles. Present-day tarps are the utilitarian cousins of tapestries. They got the job of covering and protecting once they were water-proofed to last forever.”

But what else than mechanics drives his art? Lee Shiney: “In Genesis 5 we can find a repetitive, archaic use of ‘begat’. In that chapter a visual picture is painted of the continuum of family history stretching over time. I contemplate this, because in my studio one painting process begets another. There’s a logical sequence of revelations in the process of art making, of trial and error, of cause and effect. Everything is interrelated and yields what I do as an artist. I grew up in rural Kansas. I drove tractors and combines and gazed at the horizon that was everywhere. There was time to think under that big sky. Going around and around and around, is all part of that history. My works are that four-way intersection of looking ahead and looking back, balancing the tangible and intangible. It’s a grounding process.”

In many of Lee’s paintings the land, the prairie, shows up in unmistakable forms – waving grasses, crop circles, the Kansas skyline—“so dominating and rarely hidden.” Lee in his ongoing project ‘105 Horizons’ is revisiting his roots by exploring the landscapes of each county in the state. “It is a process of traveling, observing, documenting and interpreting through art making; and of listening quietly to what the land is saying. These fresh experiences are interwoven with my own Kansas background. It is appropriate that the search for visual inspiration brings me back to basics and back to my own history. Back to where I belong.”

March 30 – June 30, 2013.

Gerco de Ruijter lives and works in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He captures a hawk eye’s view of the landscape with his camera secured to a kite. Gerco documents the landscape by abstracting the land as formed by volcanoes, winds, water and human intervention from 150 to 300 ft above the earth. At Pioneer Bluffs, work is exhibited that was selected from many trips to the American Southwest and Midwest. These detailed and beautiful landscapes, devoid of horizon, are carefully selected and installed in a grid which further abstracts the viewer’s perspective.

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De Ruijter’s photography and the landscape have been called the perfect match. “The arrangements are Mondrian-esque… What makes the photos so exciting is their perpetual tumble from figurative to abstract and vice versa… The images are transformed completely by the most minimal changes of perspectives… Gerco’s photos unveil the landscape as an abstraction and make it look like the wildly applied colorful streaks of paint and mud of Art Brut… Yet at the same time there may be enough figurative elements for the observer never to forget the photographer’s model, which is just a few hundred yards square.”

Gerco’s body of work is dominated by the so organized Dutch landscapes. But he took his kite and cameras to such extreme landscapes as the (well-organized) rice paddies of Java, Indonesia, and Iceland’s rocks and flats (rough and untouched by man) as well. By taking his kite to carry his camera to the low and the high desert of New Mexico, California’s Death Valley, and the plains and prairie in Kansas, he once more laid himself open to all the risks that are inherent in empty space offering little or nothing to hold on to. But “that doesn’t mean these vast landscapes have no ‘Gestalt’ at all… A new tension takes over from the tumble between figurative and abstract… Nothing explains what is detail, what is large scale… Doubt accompanies the observer—is he looking at a macro shot of a fossil or a shot of the moon as seen from Earth?”

The images are again almost fully abstract, but in the pin-point sharp images enough real landscape can be detected to confuse the observer. They demand to look even closer and wonder what is the measure of things. “Nothing is for certain in these photographs. Just as great art should be.

(Quotes from ‘Oversized’ by Peter Delpeut, filmmaker, author.)

At the heart of any good photograph is the photographer’s vision or how that photographer “sees”.  In this workshop participants will be encouraged to look beyond the expansive terrain of the Flint Hills to see and photograph the finer details of the landscape.  Workshop participants will travel into the prairie, where they will have the opportunity to get off the roads, and immerse themselves in the prairie.  Each day there will time to edit and process images and at the end of the day the group will review and discuss their best shots.

©Eric Finck

Participants should bring their digital camera (and the owner’s manual for their camera).  In addition if you have a laptop with photo editing software bring that too.

MEALS: Lunch will be provided on both Saturday and Sunday.

ENTRY FORM: DW-workshop entry form September 2013

This workshop is intended for photographers as a basic introduction to Camera Raw and Photoshop Elements.  Participants will be introduced to the basic tools within Camera Raw and Photoshop elements most used by photographers, and essential for the digital dark room.

The workshop will begin with a basic workflow including adjusting white balance, exposure, and initial sharpening of digital images in Camera Raw. Then workshop participants will be introduced to image enhancement techniques in Photoshop Elements including the use of layers (adjustment layers and layer masks), making selections, and retouching of images.

Participants should bring their laptop with Photoshop Elements and Camera Raw installed.  Adobe allows you to download Photoshop Elements with Camera Raw for a 30 day free trial period.

Lunch will be provided.

ENTRY FORM: DW-workshop entry form July 2013

]]> http://pioneerbluffs.org/gallery/2013/03/03/flint-hills-photography-workshop-with-don-wolfe-july-20-2013/feed/ 0 http://pioneerbluffs.org/gallery/2013/03/01/flint-hills-photography-workshop-with-don-wolfe-may-18-and-19-2013/ http://pioneerbluffs.org/gallery/2013/03/01/flint-hills-photography-workshop-with-don-wolfe-may-18-and-19-2013/#comments Fri, 01 Mar 2013 20:56:32 +0000 antoniaz http://pioneerbluffs.org/gallery/?p=853 “Layers”

Approximately 250 million years ago, when most of the Midwest was covered by a shallow sea, the foundation for the Flint Hills was formed.  The alternating layers of sedimentary rock, limestone, and shale can easily be seen along road cuts, creek beds and the numerous outcroppings that line the hillsides.  The rocks are but one example of the intricate strata that occur in the Flint Hills.  During this workshop participants will spend time on the open prairie photographing the many layers that form the Flint Hills.  Each day photo images will be edited and processed, and at the end of the day the group will review and discuss their best shots.

 ©Don Wolfe

Participants should bring their digital camera (and the owner’s manual for their camera).  If you have a laptop with photo editing software you are encouraged to bring that also.

MEALS: Lunch will be provided on both Saturday and Sunday.

ENTRY FORM: DW-workshop entry form May 2013

If you’ve ever tried landscape painting on location, you know it can be a frustrating and challenging yet exhilarating experience. This Masterclass is designed to give participants the opportunity to learn about plein air oil painting in the great prairies of the Kansas Flint Hills alongside landscape painter, Lisa Grossman.

Grossman will offer oil painting instruction and demos in the Pioneer Bluffs barn as well as group painting sessions on the prairie. The class agenda will focus on practical tips and strategies for on-site work as well as more advanced techniques for creating strong compositions, capturing a sense of distance, mood, and drama, as well as expressing the quality of light and color. Topics of discussion will also include the use of materials, canvas or panel preparation, and other basics depending upon class interest.

Originally from Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, Lisa Grossman came to the Midwest in 1988 to work as an illustrator for Hallmark Cards, in Kansas City. She soon discovered the magnificent prairies of the Flint Hills region and began plein air painting in earnest. She left Hallmark in 1995, finished a BFA at the University of Kansas in 1999, and has been painting and printmaking full-time ever since. Grossman has had twenty solo shows around the Midwest and on either coast, and her work is included in numerous private, public, and museum collections. She was a 2009 recipient of the Kansas Arts Commission’s Mid-career Fellowship.

Grossman is represented by DOLPHIN, in Kansas City, Strecker-Nelson Gallery in Manhattan, KS, EVOKE Contemporary in Santa Fe NM, and The Gallery at Pioneer Bluffs in Matfield Green, KS.

Click here for the entry-form for Lisa’s Masterclass:  LG-Masterclass entry form 2013

]]> http://pioneerbluffs.org/gallery/2013/02/08/masterclass-with-lisa-grossman-april-27-and-28-2013/feed/ 0 http://pioneerbluffs.org/gallery/2012/10/16/richard-kooyman-fall-2012/ http://pioneerbluffs.org/gallery/2012/10/16/richard-kooyman-fall-2012/#comments Tue, 16 Oct 2012 01:29:59 +0000 antoniaz http://pioneerbluffs.org/gallery/?p=615 “Where Poetry Resides”

ends December 30, 2012.

“What does a painting named after the Hubble telescope, a photo of a bison by Eadweard Muybridge, images of the Great Lakes, and the 1970’s music of Neil Young explain about me, a painter from Michigan? Sometimes I am just able to get a real sense of the poetry of it all, and then as quickly as it comes into light it is gone and I am left wondering just what it all means, why do I do what I do? But those flashes, oh those little glimpses are golden. They are the real deal, they are what keeps me working.”

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Kaleva, Michigan painter Richard Kooyman, a graduate of the art program at Ohio State, spends parts of the time in Chicago, Illinois but has his main studio in an old barn in Kaleva. His paintings are informally precise landscapes and cityscapes done with thought and feeling.

Kooyman was born from Dutch immigrant parents. He grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan strongly influenced by his parents’ “foreigners’ mentality” and torn between two languages, Dutch and English. He admits he still doesn’t know the difference between a quarter to twelve and a quarter off twelve. What has this to do with the art he creates? Kooyman says: “This state of uncertainty luckily is one of the places where poetry resides, it is the place where artists straddle with one foot in the conscious and one foot in the subconscious.”

“Not only art is subjective,” says Kooyman. “People are subjective, too, and it is the job of artists to remind us that things are not the way we typically think they are. The music I grew up with in the 1970s represents for me the sound of people who are searching for something, for something different, something more. The Hubble telescope was designed to look where humans were previously unable to look. And Muybridge’s scientific photos were able to show things no one ever had been able to see before. I found these interconnected ideas in the dark, by feeling my way along the walls. It took poetry, a visual type of poetry, to put them together. When you look back on your life, it sometimes seems to make a certain amount of sense; yet when you look forward, you know nothing”.

There was a time when Kooyman thought landscape painting was passé. Kooyman: “Yes, yet over time I learned something. Every day we assume so much in our lives based on what we think we already know. We generalize that a tree trunk is brown. But when you really look at a tree trunk it can be composed of a myriad of colors, including purple. We assume things because it is easier and faster than taking the time to really see something. Seeing is different than looking. Seeing means taking the time to know something well enough that it begins to ground you, and to give you a sense of place. You begin to be able to tell where you are in the world in relationship to those details. And the beauty of place becomes a compass for you.”

“Landscape painting isn’t photography. It isn’t about capturing a scene. Landscape painting is about expressing the poetry of place. A painting that tries to be the place, that tries to be like a photograph, borders on illustration. Illustration by its nature is reassuring and contained and isn’t art because it doesn’t extend consciousness beyond a fixed expectation. To understand art is to comprehend the difference between the words ‘denotation’ and ‘connotation’. Denotation is the literal meaning of a word. Connotation is the idea or feeling a word invokes. Connotation like art is more akin to poetry than prose. Both poetry and prose involve taking the time to look, but poetry asks that you take the time to really see.

Painters explore new combinations, treatments of paint, brush work, and compositions in peculiar and unexpected ways that they may not always understand. Kooyman: “I am led to something new and exciting and even frightening by not knowing where I am going. This is counterintuitive to what I was taught as a child, when I was shown it was important to plan, organize, test, reassess, and have a back-up plan. Some of this I indeed do when I make a painting, but what I really want is to be brave enough to chuck all of it and fly blind. It is only in this type of foggy consciousness, which hovers just above what is subconscious, that poetry is formed. It is our primordial soup. It is the swampy bog of possibilities out of which we crawl to join those who have come before us. T.S. Eliot believed that the poet is formed by the ‘peculiar and unexpected ways’ of the generations that have come before. When the modern poet and the contemporary visual artist put their mark down, they affect all that came before them just as they, in turn, were affected by all who proceeded them. It is like adding your building block to a continuum of changing and growing consciousness. You are formed by what has come before you and you will form those who come after. It is a big, beautiful, cosmic art plan. A big, world changing plan for you, and for me, to participate in.”

Although Kooyman is predominately known as a landscape painter, at Pioneer Bluffs he is showing a body of work he started working on several years ago that is more abstract in nature. The paintings, all oil on mylar, are small poetic abstractions. Some have a landscape influence, some are even titled landscapes. All the work is ultimately about paint and what Kooyman finds so interesting about it.

See also Richard Kooyman’s ‘Connotations on Art– Essays and articles about painting and being an artist’ at:

At the heart of any good photograph is the photographer’s vision or how that photographer “sees”. In this workshop participants were encouraged to look beyond the expansive terrain of the Flint Hills to see and photograph the finer details of the landscape. Workshop participants traveled into the prairie, where they had the opportunity to get off  the roads, and immerse themselves in the prairie. Each day there was time to edit and process images and at the end of the day the group reviewed and discussed their best shots.

[Show as slideshow]

For two days in October a small group of photographers were encouraged to look beyond the expansive terrain of the Flint Hills and focus on the little things, the details that are the fabric of the prairie.  The aim of this workshop was to encourage participants to become more aware of the patterns and textures created by the vegetation, the rocks, the ravines, and yes, even the cow pies.

Each day started with a morning discussion of expectations and challenges followed by two hours of on location shooting.  Saturday, despite the rainy weather, participants were given the opportunity to walk a dry creek bed and photograph the fall colors.  Sunday the group was taken out onto the prairie to photograph the wide open spaces.   Time to edit each day’s shoot was provided in the early afternoon, and each participant was asked to choose four or five of his or her best images for presentation to the group.  Each day ended with a group discussion of the best images of the day.  Besides emphasizing photographing detail, participants were challenged to take their cameras off automatic and shoot on manual.  Setting the ISO, f-Stop and shutter speed to get more control over exposure and depth of field. Additionally, participants were challenged to limit the number of frames shot, to shoot as if they had only brought two rolls of 24 exposure film with them.

We will be planning 3 photography workshops in 2013.