Welcome to the French Riviera

Bah oui. Ze French Riviera….

It actually is as beautiful here as in the postcards. But don’t take my word for it – a picture says more than a thousand words.

One of the streets in the old city of Hyères

Hyères will be my home for the next three weeks – I am the artist in residence at LMStudios where I have the run of a quirky, centuries-old little house in the historic part of town. This includes a gallery on the ground floor where I exhibit my own works.

The gallery sitting aspect of this residency is my least favorite part. I find it quite excruciating to represent and sell my own work. Give me another artist’s work that I admire and I can be an amazing salesperson. I believe people fall into three categories as far as galleries go – first you have the totally oblivious passerby like this gentleman below who stood for a good five minutes at the entrance of the gallery reading his daily!

The majority of passersby fit into the second category – those who look in through the glass vitrines but are deathly afraid to enter – either from fear or discomfort. And lastly there’s the tiny minority whose radar is open to the existence of art and dare to step foot inside!

Because I just arrived, the work I hung in the gallery are small format works I brought with me until I start producing work here (I’m not sure yet what direction my works will take). The surroundings need a while to simmer. A very interesting local gentleman  popped into the gallery on my first day.

My multi-media series on African women appealed to him greatly. My first sale of the morning was from that series. See below.

Au revoir until next time!

 

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Miami Nice

Detail of Juan Gatti’s hyper-realist work at the Faena on Miami Beach. So real you could almost pet it – which I did!

Juan Gatti’s over-sized paintings in the luxurious Faena resort’s lobby are so…Miami. Big, brash, over-the-top, oozing with fabulous detail and dripping with gold. They are pretty fabulous and apparently each mural panel cost one million dollars! As you stroll through the lobby (referred to as ‘The Cathedral’) towards Faena’s private beach, the path splits when you get to ‘The Mammoth’, Damien Hirst’s gold-dipped and encased mammoth skeleton. It’s quite a sight.

Every detail at the Faena has been tastefully curated to create a seamless blend of art, architecture and design. Even the hotel doors are glitzy.

And then there’s the Jeff Koons work upstairs at the entrance to the resort’s signature restaurant. But just up the road on Collins Avenue, the Bass Museum of Contemporary Art offers a more serene and contemplative style of art in the form of Sheila Hicks’ fiber art. 

Born in Nebraska in 1934, Hicks has had an expansive career. Her resume reads like an artist’s wet dream – Yale University, Fulbright Scholarship, Venice Biennale, Whitney Biennial, solo shows in Tokyo, Korea, Israel and on and on. Impressive to the point of intimidating. Oh, and she divides her time between Paris and New York just for good measure. But you can’t begrudge Hicks her success because she deserves all the accolades and more. The current exhibition is loosely centered around the theme of landscape. Her creativity with her medium knows no bounds.

Installation created with mesh bags filled with rainbow-colored skeins of silk thread. Its’ scale is mesmerizing. You just want to dive in and get swallowed up in it. 

Detail of hair-like waterfall of thread (above)

You don’t have to wait for Miami Basel to see some great art in Miami. Hicks’ exhibition, Campo Abierto (Open Field), is on through the end of September, 2019. It’s a winner.

Love is in the air

 

Tour Eiffel     Lilianne Milgrom

Whether you’re celebrating your spouse, significant other, your offspring or your pet, who’s to question the healing power of Love. Here’s a quick slideshow of a few of my more romantic works to put you in the mood.

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ART BASEL MIAMI: PART II

As promised in Part I of my Art Basel post, here’s is a quick kaleidoscopic view of some of the innumerable artworks that caught my eye. Enjoy the tour at your leisure 🙂

(This is a painting. Yes, believe it or not)

Brilliant statement of our times…

Another exquisite painting…

Azerbaijani artist rethinking traditional rugs…Superb 

And of course, there was people-watching galore…

CHECK OUT PART I ART BASEL MIAMI FOR AN EYE-OPENING POST ON UNUSUAL ART HERE

 

 

Art on steroids: Art Basel Miami

Miami: Hub of the rich and famous, home of art deco, Cuban-style hot rods, Latin culture, palm trees, blue skies and blue waters. It is also one of three international  cities to host Art Basel. For the uninitiated, Art Basel is one of THE most important annual events in the artworld. Galleries, artists, collectors and art lovers from all over the globe descend for a week of intense – and I mean intense – art immersion. I’m talking about hundreds of exhibiting galleries and over 100,000 visitors. If you get saturated after visiting a museum, you might want to think twice about visiting Art Basel!!! For me, though, it was Heaven.

It would be impossible to relay the scope of paintings of every type, size, and subject, sculptures big and small of every material conceivable, photographic works and digital compositions. So for digestibility, I will focus on artworks that use unconventional materials. It’s a trend I found incredibly interesting and one that demonstrates the infinite creativity that artists bring into our lives. I challenge you, my readers, to guess what medium the following artworks are made from. (NB My sincerest apologies to those artists whose names I failed to record.)

Ian Berry  Club Deuce

Nice nostalgic scene, right? Well, there’s a bit more to the artist’s method: used jeans!

Detail

This next artist creates large and beautifully composed abstract compositions from….

…collaged pieces of chipped paint collected from crumbling buildings all over the world!

By far one of my favorite work was by Italian artist, Andrea Salvador. These gorgeous works below blew my socks off – wait till  you see what they are made of…

The big reveal:

Salvador creates his photorealistic works from hand-chipped glass mosaic. I met the Venetian glass blower who created the custom glass colors ordered by the artist. Wow.

There were numerous artists whose works used traditional craft methods like quilting and embroidery to create fine art works that took the craft to a totally new level:

I’m pretty sure you’ll never guess what material the next artist used to create this huge watercolor-like painting that had me stumped until I got the lowdown from the gallerist:

Give up? Plastic bags fused onto a huge canvas…

And another head scratching work…

Jorge Otero  Untitled

Cuban artist Jorge Otero’s lifesized work was striking and fascinatingly unique. Venture to take a guess at how he achieved this beautiful effect? Woven photographs!

I’m willing to bet that no-one recognizes the elements used in the following wall hanging:

Used and stained computer keyboard keys…

If you aren’t wowed by now, I don’t know what to say. I’ll leave you on a lighter note with an artist who has playfully and successfully ($2500 a piece!) re-purposed vintage bowling pins.

Check out my next blog post ART BASEL MIAMI PART II where you’ll find a broad range of art that caught my eye. In the meantime, wishing you all a wonderful Holiday Season. You can find out more about all the satellite art fairs here and  here.

MIAMI BASEL – A TEASER

WYNWOOD WALLS BASEL

Art Basel Miami is THE North American art event of the year. It’s hard to overstate its hype and importance in the art world. Over 250 international and US galleries are represented, drawing more than 70,000 visitors to Miami. Every establishment in the city hitches a ride on this massive event. It’s an opportunity for anyone involved in art, food, culture and fashion to shine. I got a sneak peak at one small sliver of Art Basel at Wynwood Walls.

WYNWOOD WALLS

Wynwood is the artsy/funky/upcoming neighborhood in Miami that boasts wall art that goes way beyond graffitti. In fact some of these magnificent wall paintings are protected 24/7 by uniformed guardians. I came across a number of selected artists for Wynwood Basel hard at work completing their giant commissions.

There were some truly magnificent walls. Here is a small selection.

Wynwood Walls

One of my favorites was a clever take on Picasso’s famous bull composed of found objects:

Another 20′ wall was painted to advertise an exhibition at a nearby gallery. Impressive.

Next year I hope to get more than just a tiny taste of this global art destination.

Let’s welcome the New Year in with a smile. Say cheese!

Au revoir, Auvillar

View from a lookout above Auvillar looks like an 18th century French landscape painting.

My time at the VCCA artist residency in Auvillar is sadly coming to a close. There will be much to miss. Roasted chestnuts/bedding airing on windowsills framed by blue shutters/ children who pass you in the street and greet you politely with a Bonjour, madame/the accordion music that drifts out of the house by the bend in the road/the long, silent hours of uninterrupted writing/the sharing of creative trials and tribulations/the weekly communal meals/the telling of time by the tolling of church bells rather than the screen of an iPhone.

And of course, the gorgeous countryside. I sometimes feel like I am on the set of a French version of Frances Mayes’ Under the Tuscan Sun. Come and join me on the bike ride I took this morning and you’ll see what I mean. Allons-y!

I had a very productive writing residency here, and I also completed a labor-intensive painting, entitled Les murs, The Walls. Walls in medieval villages like Auvillar speak of the passage of time. They reveal glimpses of centuries gone by, the marks of masons and artisans long gone who added to existing layers rather than destroy what came before. In this painting, I have left traces of multiple layers in the hopes of creating a textured, timeless piece. The result pleasingly resembled a fresco – another wall association!

Oh, and if you’re headed this way tomorrow night, please drop in on our literary salon:

Please join us this Monday, October 30th at 18h30
at La Maison Vieilhescaze at le Moulin à Nef
16 Esplanade du Port, Auvillar

Artist and writer Lilianne MILGROM will introduce the project that she is working on while in residence. She will show us the artwork by Gustave COURBET that has inspired her writing and then read an extract of her novel in French and in English.

Lilianne Milgrom says “My life revolves around art – creating art, looking at art and writing about art. My work can be found in both private and institutional collections worldwide.”

 

“The current residency in Auvillar is the first residency in which I am concentrating primarily on writing rather than painting. I am working on a novel, inspired by Gustave Courbet.”  www.liliannemilgrom.com/

 

Poet Kathryn LEVY will introduce her work in French then read several of her poems in English as well as a couple in French. 

Kathryn LEVY is author of the poetry collections Losing the Moon and Reports, a finalist for the 2014 Midwest Book Award. Her work has appeared in various journals including Slate, Hanging Loose and Seattle Review, among many others. Her numerous writing fellowships include awards from Yaddo, MacDowell and VCCA. 

http://kathryn-levy.com/

Au revoir, Auvillar. I hope to be back!