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Welcome to the Art Guild
Archivies!
September 6 - Oct 15 - Larry Garza Exhibit at Carleen
Bright Arboretum, Woodway
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.
October 1 - Don Magid
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.
October 1 - Don Magid
- The Play Factor in Creating
and Learning
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, re taining
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. A nd
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.
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