Photographs: Remembered, Retold, and Dreamed

With his latest series, "In A Big World Wandering" making its national tour, artist-photographer, Bryan David Grifffith is gaining recognition for his traditional methods and poignant and challenging perspective. His process, lifestyle and reasons for making artwork are captured in this artist profile written by Deanna Wulff:

With his fingers icy and red, Bryan David Griffith holds his breath and watches the play of light and snow in the aspens. He has hiked up to the base of Mt. Humphrey’s, the highest peak in Arizona—in the middle of a blizzard. The wind blows up a white plume of frost, and he opens the shutter for a long exposure, counting the seconds aloud while shielding his lens from the snow. “For every exposure I make, I spend many days in the field just observing, waiting for that rare moment when the season, time and weather add up to just the right light,” he says.

He uses old-fashioned large format sheet-film cameras, which are larger, slower and more difficult to operate than 35mm cameras. “The large film produces incredibly detailed, nuanced images unattainable by any other means,” he says. “The world of photography is changing, but this process still produces the finest prints possible.” Griffith’s newest work delves even further into analogue techniques, using low-tech equipment and the nineteenth-century platinum palladium printing process. “It’s my attempt to get at the core of my reasons for making art, through using really basic equipment,” he explains. “The images have a blurry quality of being remembered, or recalled. A lot of them are metaphors for my life as an artist, but I try to make them deliberately open-ended and ambiguous, so viewers can fill in the narrative with their own experiences.”

A self-taught photographer, Griffith left a successful career in management consulting to pursue photography full-time. It was a riches to rags transition for the first couple years, with Griffith essentially living out of an old van, traveling across the country and saving every cent for film. Since then, his portfolios have won numerous awards, including two first place awards in photography at the Sausalito Art Festival—ranked the top art fair in America—and three first place awards at the Scottsdale Arts Festival, ranked the top art fair in Arizona. His work is also held in several university, corporate, and private collections, but Griffith feels most honored by the hundreds of “ordinary people who’ve given my work a place in their homes and lives.”

IN A BIG WORLD WANDERING is currently showcased at Translations Gallery through September 28th. There will be a closing reception for In A Big World Wandering on Wednesday, September 28th from 5-8:30pm where published books of the exhibition can be purchased and signed by the artist.

Do You Speak "Figures"?

The May 19th opening of Translations' new show, Figuratively Speaking brought together a fantastic group of artists working in media from sculpture and painting to mosaic and charcoal drawing.

The only real criteria for the work, as the show's title might suggest, is that it be based on figures - needless to say, the range of pieces the show contains is quite broad, allowing the featured artists to stand out for their individual styles.

The opening was a very pleasant combination of beautiful work and good company - there was also a lot of delicious food there, which certainly contributed to the collective good mood (as snacks always do).

People came and went happily throughout the evening, drinking mint juleps and trying to shove other people out of the way of their view of the artwork.

Several of the show's featured artists attended the opening as well, giving people the chance to speak with them about their work.

(Artist Brian Curran discussing his work - or his education or his car or his childhood - anyway he was discussing something).

The "figure" pieces varied wildly, from abstract to concrete, black and white to color. The wide array of styles - Brian Curran's beautifully rendered charcoal portraits hanging next to Lance Green's colorful, fluid, slightly abstracted paintings and Sandhi Schimmel Gold's mixed media mosaics - somehow all seemed to fit together, their differences enhancing the best qualities of each artist's work.

(And an abundance of mint juleps never hurts a sense of cohesion either).

25 Years of Lance Green (Figuratively Speaking)

Lance Green, one of Translations Gallery's newer artists, currently has a retrospective exhibition showcasing 25 years of his paintings, drawings and sculpture on display in Manitou Springs. The show celebrates Green's artistic evolution, beginning with his childhood in Los Angeles and traveling through his life as an artist, ending up at his current life and work in Colorado. To complement the show, Green will also be giving an art talk at the Business of Art Center's Venue 515 on May 11. The show, titled Bringing it All Back Home runs through mid-June, and leads right into Translations Gallery's upcoming show Figuratively Speaking, which will also feature work by Green as well as other artists represented by the gallery.

Lance Green, from Bringing it All Back Home

Figuratively Speaking will, as the show's title suggests, focus on sculptural pieces, paintings and other media with an emphasis on figure and form - one of the cornerstones of Green's work, which often reinterprets images taken from painful stages of life as new and beautiful objects.

Lance Green, Street Dancer #3

Lance Green, Icarus Dreaming

Will Day at WealthTouch

Denver's WealthTouch offices recently received an artistic overhaul when art by Will Day, whose work is represented by Translations, was installed there.

18 of Will's pieces were chosen to be showcased throughout the WealthTouch offices. Translations is excited to be able to make work by various artists available in professional and public spaces.

(For more information on Translations Gallery's Corporate Art Leasing Program, contact the gallery at info@translationsgallery.com)

Lance Jackson at the Bentley Exposition

Do you know what is an awesome combination? We will tell you - ART AND CARS! In honor of this glorious pairing, Translations Gallery recently installed work at Denver's Bentley dealership for the March release of Bentley's new Continental GT.

Several artists were represented in the temporary exhibition, including Lance Jackson, who has been showing his work with Translations since August of 2010.

Lance Jackson, City Rain

As anticipated, the art-car-collaboration was a smashing success, making the event both speedy and aesthetically pleasing. Translations is thrilled to have participated.

WE LOVE NEW ARTISTS! (Part I)

Translations Gallery is proud to announce that we are expanding!  Expanding our artists, that is.  We have recently begun representing 21 new artists, most of whom live and work in Colorado.  These artists work in a wide variety of media, including paint, metal, ceramics, fiber and other materials.  They have collectively created a vast body of beautiful work.  We would like to introduce them to you.  Because there are 21, however, which is really quite a lot, we will be approaching these introductions in a series of blog posts, of which this is the first.  So here are the stats on 7 of the brand new artists Translations Gallery is thrilled and proud to represent.

- PATRICIA AARON - 
     The recent winner of Best in Show at the This is Colorado exhibit, Patricia Aaron's mixed-media encaustic works are truly stunning.  Her pieces tend to be based on scenes remembered from her Ohio childhood, the abstract works evoking the kind of gritty, grey urbanism you feel when standing in the middle of a busy city that has been polluted by industry.  Aaron approaches these landscapes with a lovely combination of honesty and nostalgia, the combination of which produces work that is fascinating in its ability to simultaneously project both order and chaos.

  

Youngstown, Circa 1964

- ANA MARIA BOTERO - 
     Ana Maria Botero's work as an artist began as a hobby - background for a prominent career in the field of architecture.  Her passion for art, however, eventually won out as her dominant interest, and Botero has been producing work consistently since.  Botero's semi-abstract and abstract paintings focus on pulling emotion from viewers through experimentation with color, texture, and other elements designed to elicit excitement and a sense of drama.

Longhorn

- PATRICIA BRAMSEN - 
     Painter, drawer, poet - Patricia Bramsen's work draws from numerous avenues of creativity to form her overall vibe as an artist.  Because the Artist Statement on her website is a poem (please see http://www.patricia-bramsen.com/statement.html - it is really very lovely) we will discuss her work with a Haiku:

simply quite complex

color and form exalted

portraits in feeling

Inaudible Dialogue

- JUDY BROWN -

     Inspiration, potential, possibility - these words describe the driving forces behind Judy Brown's work.  Her awareness of her surroundings, and of the way in which she and others interact with the natural world around them forms the basis of both her technique and her aesthetic.  Her work with metals and jewelry is informed by what she sees occurring naturally in the world around her, and she constantly strives to maintain a balance between the world as it is and the effects that humans have upon it.

- BRIAN CURRAN - 

      Brian Curran's charcoal drawings are intricate, delicately detailed and remarkably realistic.  His images of well-known figures from the world of celebrity stand out as strikingly different from the work of other artists.

Jimi Hendrix

- WILL DAY - 

      Will Day's journey to his current career as an artist has taken him to numerous countries, through higher-education programs and other vocational opportunities, and to an exploration of various creative outlets and artistic media.  Following time in the Peace Corps, extensive personal travel, and a career in architecture, Will Day came to the conclusion that what he really wanted to do was paint.  Paint a lot.  Big.  With many colors and varied textures and materials.  And that is precisely what he did.

Rescue

- BARRY GILLESPIE -

      Architectural forms, the concepts of space, light and pattern - these elements have become incredibly important to Barry Gillespie's recent works.  His earlier, more abstract works certainly contained versions of these elements, but it is only recently that Gillespie has begun to introduce a new sense of intensified realism into his art.  Focusing on local buildings and locations, he methodically captures the play between light and architectural form, giving a new perspective on familiar objects.

The Condo Range

Patricia Aaron - Best in Show!

This is Colorado, an exhibit held each year to showcase the work of Colorado artists, is currently being held at the Madden Museum of Art.  It's a new location for the traditional show, though the rest of the tradition seems to have remained intact.  This is Colorado is a "juried exhibit", meaning that the works are judged by locals and then awarded the art equivalents of gold, silver and bronze.  "Gold", in this case, is actually called "Best in Show", and we are thrilled to announce that the gold medal goes to...Patricia Aaron!

This is Colorado featured Aaron's ink-and-encaustic work Youngstown, circa 1964.  The piece is a large-scale cityscape rendered in a vibrantly colored, abstract combination of beeswax, India ink, graphite and other materials on a birch panel.  The result is a brilliant mish-mash of colors, movement and shapes that simultaneously pull the viewers eye in different directions, which actually recreates the bustling, stimulating feeling of being in the middle of a crowded, industrial urban area.  In looking at the abstract work it is almost possible to make out the blurred outlines of buildings against the grainy, gray sky that framed Aaron's childhood in the industrial city of Youngstown, Ohio.

(Underwater Maze, archival ink on plexiglass)

Aaron's work will next be featured in Translations Gallery's upcoming show New Perspectives.  The show will present the work of artists who approach familiar topics in unexpected and non-traditional ways - in Aaron's case, cityscapes and personal history done in a slightly wild, somewhat unsentimental, abstract yet comprehensible style.  The show opens at Translations on February 16th and runs through April 2nd.

Yee Haw, Cowboys...and Girls. Contemporary Art says Howdy.

Last week began the annual Denver Stock Show.  As usual, it commenced with a parade involving several covered wagons, a variety of Western-style beauty queens, lots of people on horses wearing chaps and fancy hats, and, inexplicably, several old-school fire trucks.  There was also a somewhat unnerving mascot dressed as Woody the Cowboy.

As a huge crowd of pedestrians, some of whom possibly just got caught up in the shuffle on their way to lunch, stood around chatting and blocking traffic, a crowd of stampeding longhorns was shepherded down 17th Street by cowboys-and-girls (cowfolk? cowpeople?)

Suppressing an unexplained fear of farm animals, we braved the crowd and observed as the clamor moved uptown.  

The whole parade experience was extremely patriotic.  Pedestrians of all ages cheered and waved flags and cowgirls in fancy outfits smiled blindingly (and really, who isn't a sucker for a sparkly cowboy hat?)

All in all, an hour well spent.  

In honor of the stock show, Translations is currently featuring artists influenced by the culture of the American West.  The show is wide-ranging, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, jewelry and photographs, and showcasing both abstract art (traditional for Translations) and realistic work.  While the show certainly features traditional images of the west, bucking broncos are not the only offerings.
 rainbow-colored rust on an old Dodge

Bryan David Griffith
701 Dodge Print #3










an incredibly detailed rendering of Johnny Cash

Brian Curran
Johnny Cash










semi-abstract longhorn skeletons

Paula Hudson
17th Street Canyon






and traditional western landscapes approached in a thoroughly nontraditional manner give the show the element of surprise and open it up to viewers who may not necessarily be interested in conventional western art.  Even if Cowboys-and-Indians isn't your thing, there's probably something here for you anyway.  We love Bryan David Griffith's crazy colors, Paula Hudson's unusual approach to traditional subject matter, Jillian Pate's lace-like metal work, and the stunning digital prints done by Izah Gallagher.  (For the show's full catalogue, click HERE).  
Contemporary Western Art will be showing at Translations from January 6, 2011 - February 12.    

Do You Know Laura Carpenter? 100,000 People at D.I.A. Do.

Don’t worry - getting your work an audience of 100,000 people a day is simple. To accumulate this volume of viewers, you can either broadcast on the Times Square Jumbotron, which sounds costly, or you can get Denver International Airport to hang your work in one of its terminals.  Laura Carpenter, an artist with Translations Gallery since April of 2010, is taking the latter approach, participating in DIA’s Shows Promise, exhibited on level 6 of the Jeppesen Terminal East.  True, the airport is not a typical exhibition space for fine art, but it has proven surprisingly adept at housing the work of well known artists around Denver, allowing a massive audience to view the artwork each day as they mosey through the airport terminal (or sprint depending on how late they are for their flights and how long the TSA screening lasted).

Carpenter, a Colorado-based artist who is also a Masters of Fine Arts student at Colorado State University, is getting a huge amount of exposure from the Shows Promise exhibit.  The show emphasizes Colorado’s landscapes and history while providing artists seeking higher education with an audience of international viewers who get to see the work hassel-free as they travel across the terminal on one of those moving sidewalks.

Path

oil on canvas

2010

Carpenter’s work moves effortlessly between concrete objects and abstract images.  Her pieces are surprising and unexpected; partially realized representations of woods and houses are rendered in vivid colors that seem oddly at home in the work despite the noticeable contradiction of Carpenter’s bright blues and bold yellows with the muted

greens and browns typically imagined to be the base colors of the Colorado landscape.

Inside/Outside

oil on panel

2010

These works are a seamless combination of natural and imagined elements, combining traditional Colorado scenery with Carpenter's dreamlike execution, making her work fascinating to view.  Her work will next be featured in Translations Gallery’s upcoming Contemporary Western Art show, which begins January 6, 2011 and runs through February 12.

Shows Promise will be up in DIA until February 2011.