Welcome to the Art Guild Archivies!

     Member Larry Garza has a one-man show at the Arboretum that is well worth your time to view.  Weekdays 9-5, Saturday 10-2, except when there are events.  It would be well to call before driving over there on a Saturday (399-9204). 

     A couple of examples are shown here; many more are on display there.

Don Magid has been painting and teaching in Waco for a very long time. In his teaching he encourages students to experiment with the media to achieve the results they want, advice that he follows himself. He emphasizes the role of this creative play as an important part of success in all areas, not just in art.

Don will illustrate this approach by using traditional art media such as a stick of charcoal and paper and will show how simple lines, shapes and values can be combined by stages of development into more complex, meaningful forms and structures called images. He will then use red, yellow, blue and white paint to shape these simple elements into more complex, meaningful forms or structures again, images.

This will be introduced as information processing or image making, which he asserts is a universal human ability, one that we should develop in ourselves, and one that we need to encourage in children in order to advance their personal achievement and that of society in general. It is Don's vision of the larger role in society of creative play that should make his presentation especially interesting for us.

 

The first two images above are from Don's last demo for us.  The next is another recent painting.  The last (at the left) is a drawing he titled Conformity.  It speaks volumes about his own commitment to play.

 

Come play with us on October 1 at the Waco Charter School, 615 N 25th Street.  Come at 1:30 for refreshments and conversation.  The meeting begins at 2.  First time visitors are free, and newcomers can join for the rest of the year for $6.  So bring friends along.  Also, bring recent works to share with the group.

 

Don Magid increasingly sees his mission as extending beyond art to all of human activity. In his life of painting and teaching painting he has become acutely aware of the difference between just looking at a scene and really seeing its underlying structure of shape, line and color. In the wider world, he sees the same perceptual differences. Successful innovators see beyond the veil of obvious appearance to perceive the underlying structures and relationships, which they can rearrange to produce new entities, much like an artist arranging the elements of his painting.

This is largely accomplished by playing around with what one is given until something useful appears. This sort of exploratory play is natural to young children, but education often discourages it, demanding conformity instead. Recovering it is a matter of freeing oneself from expecting to follow rules, in order to be able to explore the available possibilities.

To illustrate this, Don used our common ground of artistic creation. Our minds use our visual input to create the illusion of real things. We are so quick to see "things," that we have a hard time seeing the real shapes and relationships in the scene before us. Don finds it useful to use a photograph of the scene, which can be inverted. This makes it more difficult to recognize familiar things, and therefore easier to see the structure of the scene.

Don begins by choosing an original with the elements he wants to use and by preparing a surface on which to work. He almost always covers the surface with a background tint, lavender in this case. Then he sketches the scene, concentrating on larger shapes, and then smaller ones within the larger ones. He then uses acrylics to mix approximations to the final colors, and begins to fill in the larger shapes and the darker areas. Since he was painting a portrait, he mixed light and dark flesh colors and applied them to the face area, alternately darkening and lightening areas until the face emerged.

While the acrylic was drying, he mixed a range of face colors using oil paints. These he thinned and with a painting medium consisting of equal parts of damar varnish, linseed oil, and odorless thinner. He applied this glaze over the acrylic underpainting, retaining the forms and allowing the light and dark areas to show through. Again, he applied light and dark shades alternately, blending them to adjust the forms and make the image come to life. The end result was so convincing that some audience members urged him to keep it in this semi-finished state, rather than fill in more detail and more areas of the painting.

 

Thanks, Don, for your insight.  It was fun to watch you play until you found what you wanted.  Thanks also to Christine Niekamp, Betty Schwartz, Saundra and John Vasek, and Ellen Foster for bringing refreshments, and to those who brought their works for Show and Tell, samples of which appear below.

 

 

  

October 8 - HOT Fair Senior Art Exhibit

The turnout on Senior Day was disappointing.  Only Bill Franklin brought paintings.  In addition, Linda Green brought embroidery and both Linda and Bill brought photographs.  And that was the entire Senior Art Exhibit!  Part of the problem was probably the poor job done to get the information out.  The Trib article just referred you to the web site, which wasn't much help.  And the information obtained by phone proved to be inaccurate.  The entry time given over the phone (8-9) was changed to 9-10.  Also, they said there would be only one 1st and one 2nd place for all of the arts and crafts, but they gave 1st and 2nd in every sub-category.  Because of that, Linda and Bill got lots of ribbons!

                             

The regular adult art exhibit was also pretty slim, possibly due to the restriction to western subject matter.  The grand and reserve grand champion (doesn't that sound so stock show?) paintings were nice, but no better than that of many of our members.  Next year, we'll have to get on top of the entry information and make better use of this venue.