When I started writing #saturdayartreview, my intention was to inform people about some of the great artists I’ve found here on G+.  As time went on, it became apparent that my interest in environmental topics and the natural world was influencing my choice of artists, and how I view the artists’ artworks.

This is true of the artist for this Saturday, Donna Marsh.  Donna lives in a foreign place for me, Montreal Island, Quebec, Canada.  By “foreign,” I mainly mean that she lives in a bioregion quite different from my beloved Sonoran Desert. What captivates me about her work is her unique approach to her subjects.. In her many paintings of urban structures, she addresses the important issue of how humans are changing the natural world.

Donna Marsh’s distinctive palette includes bright primary colors, especially a wonderful red that ties everything together and gives each of her paintings an primal life-force kind of energy that we don’t usually associate with cities. Urban areas are constructed, not grown, and we usually associate them with machines, technology, and a lot of very stressed humans scurrying this way or that. In her painting shared here, Balconies (posted 4-15-12) note the curving, tilted perspective that almost creates a sense of vertigo – the kind of vertigo that we might feel when climbing high above the city street. The life force behind the walls of the apartments seeps through, but there is also an unbalanced sense about the piece, as if we humans were not really all that comfortable living in the places we live, and in the way we live.

She often takes on subjects that painters rarely find worthy, and she does a masterful job of making them both beautiful and oddly compelling.  She paints the kinds of things we see in our urban environments all the time – parking lots, bridges, storefronts, and freeways – all done with brushwork that makes them flow to the point that they almost become abstractions. She paints subjects that we have typified and that we don’t really “see” anymore. She forces us see the city around us because we cannot resist both the beauty and the truth of what we have made.

One of the most poignant of her recent paintings (posted 4-17-12) is a landscape in which we see a small, barely noticeable developer’s survey marker. She tells us that later that a structure went up in that spot and a landscape was changed forever. In effect, Donna Marsh is documenting the landscape and how humans affect it through urbanization. And because she leads us to really “see” the urban areas, the greatest value of her work may be her ability to make us be completely present and to really notice what is there in the city we’ve constructed. And this makes us think also of what we are doing to the natural landscape, so often very mindlessly.

I also want to mention that +Philip Hartigan has a wonderful blog about artists and he recently featured Donna Marsh in his blog and on a video on YouTube. Check it out at:

http://philiphartiganpraeterita.blogspot.com/2012/04/six-of-best-part-6.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rBjwrMc3jI

See more of Donna’s work at http://dmarsh.artspan.com/home or on Google + at https://plus.google.com/101657906811975723043/about

http://www.whitmanpondcharlesvanheck.net/3/category/cj%20shane7b91ab3e2c/1.html

An Interview with C. J. Shane, Artist, Author, Educator

I met C.J. Shane, Shane as she prefers to be called, last year on Google+. Over the months, I have come to appreciate her as a person and as an artist. A native Texan, C. J. Shane has worked as an academic reference librarian, a freelance indexer in the publishing industry specializing in biological sciences, and a college instructor. Shane has written/edited six anthologies on historical topics. As a journalist, she has authored numerous freelance news and feature articles. Her seventh book, about Chinese young adults, will be published in 2012. Eleven years ago, Shane went to China to teach English as a second language. Shortly after her first visit, Shane established YingwenTeach to take teams of teachers to teach ESL and to learn more about China. Her fascination with and respect for the Middle Kingdom is evident in her creative work. Currently, she resides in Arizona. An ardent environmentalist and gardener, Shane can be found attending her garden when not painting or writing.

What follows is our brief conversation. I encourage you take the opportunity to visit her website. When possible, do see her exhibits.

Q: When did you first become interested in painting?

A: I have been drawing and painting all my life. I can’t remember when I didn’t do art. Painting became much more important after I moved to Tucson.

Q: You attended the Penland and Haystack art schools. Who were some of the teachers that influenced and mentored you?

A: I’ve had several great teachers. For papermaking and book arts, there was Betty Oliver and Bonnie Stahlecker at Penland and Hedi Kyle at Haystack; for printmaking, Ke Francis at Penland and Andrew Rush at the Drawing Studio in Tucson; and several painting teachers, among them Lorenzo Chavez.

Q: What movement or painters most influenced your early work?

A: My earlier paintings were more modernist in style, and were influenced by Milton Avery, Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove, and Maynard Dixon. As my work became more abstract and color-field, Helen Frankenthaler, Rufino Tamayo, Wolf Kahn, and especially Mark Rothko have been influences. For artists’ books, there have been too many to name.

Q: Dove spoke of his type of abstraction as “extraction” in that he extracted the vital forms from nature for his abstract paintings. And Dixon’s method was to refine the elements to remove the unnecessary in his compositions. Your style and technique expresses a similar appreciation for the mystery and quiet aspect of nature by removing elements. Are you consciously eliminating while observing your environment in preparation to paint, or does that process take place while working?

A: I understand what Dove and Dixon speak of when they talk about extraction or removing the unnecessary. I would say that occurs naturally for me while I am working. I’m not interested so much in realistic portrayals of landscape. I am more after the “sense of place.” To me, that means painting the essential elements – earth, sky, wind, and water – and the energy held in each.

Q: You live in the Sonoran Desert. There is a spiritual element to the quiet in your paintings. Does that silence a viewer observes in your work, and is asked to engage in, develop from your interior dialogue with your environment? How do you want your viewers to participate in that dialogue?

A: Historically, seekers went to the desert to find answers to spiritual problems. The desert is a wild place, beautiful, rich with life, and fundamental in its simplicity. If one takes time to engage, the desert has the ability to create a profound serenity in the viewer. That is my hope for those who view my work.

Q: You mentioned Helen Frankenthaler. Her technique involved not preparing the canvas; instead she directly applied the paint. There was a comment she made when she saw Jackson Pollock’s Number One, 1950, Lavender Mist. She said, “It was all there. I wanted to live in this land. I had to live there, and master the language.” Your landscapes, with their rich fields of color, transform Arizona from a harsh terrain into a place that invites the viewer in. In your Rain Series, the quiet is so rich that one can almost hear the rain fall. How do you maintain a balance between creating that space for the viewer to create with you and telling them a story? Is there such a balance?

A: Frankenthaler is an interesting artist for many reasons. You refer to the “soak stain” method which she introduced and which Jackson Pollack later adopted. So it’s not surprising that she would respond positively to his work! She was not credited for this innovation until much later although it was adopted by many male abstract expressionists of her time. At that time women were seen mainly are crafts persons, and were thought to be incapable of producing meaningful paintings. Later feminist scholars were able to set the record straight and credit her for her contribution to the Abstract Expressionist movement. Personally I prefer her to Pollack, Hans Hoffman, Clifford Style and others in this movement because of her “color field” paintings (she was a master of color), and because of the references to the natural world in her paintings.

Regarding my work, I don’t really attempt to tell a story to viewers. I firmly believe in “co-creation.” If a viewer sees something in my work, then what they see is just as valid as what I see. To give you an example, a friend told me that one of my paintings makes her think of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. I was thinking of the borderlands. Each is true. She has her story. I have mine. The titles of the paintings are clues to what I think of the painting. But that’s what I think. What the viewer thinks is just as real. I’m always curious to know what people think of my paintings. I learn a lot from them.

Q: You have to juggle various commitments that place limitations on your commitment to art. How do those limits stimulate and inspire you to experiment, to create differently?

I wouldn’t say “stimulated.” It’s a real struggle. I have to juggle time commitments to find time to work on my art. I have to be more conscious of space to work, the cost of materials, storage of finished work, and dealing with marketing art so I can keep going. I’m not alone in this.

Here is a quote that relates to this: “You know, music, art – these are not just little decorations to make life prettier. They’re very deep necessities which people cannot live without.” Pablo Picasso.

I think Picasso meant this to apply to everyone. We need arts because they make us human. But I also think that people who are not artists do not fully realize how absolutely crucial the doing of art is for an artist. The doing of art is a requirement for an artist to feel that s/he has a real life, and to feel that our existence has meaning. Keep that in mind if you have a child or a spouse who needs to be doing art…and I do mean “needs.” Please respect this and give them time and space to work. Don’t dismiss their work as a “hobby.” Actually it is an essential spiritual pursuit.

Q: You were the director the Yingwen Teach, teaching English as a Second Language in the People’s Republic of China. How long were you there?

A: .“Yingwen” means “English” in mandarin. I’ve been to China several times. I could write long passages about the experiences I’ve had there, and all the things I’ve learned. Suffice it to say that one in every five persons on the planet is Chinese, and it would be good idea for all of us to learn more about this ancient culture. The two-minute sound bites on the evening news are often very misleading. Let me just say that the Chinese have a very intact culture that is not as influenced by the West as we would like to think, they are on their own trajectory of change and development, and the solutions that they come to for their problems will be uniquely Chinese solutions, and not a copy of our traditions and institutions. You can learn more about YingwenTeach at www.YingwenTeach.com

Q: Theoretically, do you think this experience in China changed how you perceive the objects that you paint?

A: Yes, and in ways that I am constantly discovering. One influence has been the paintings from China’s Qing dynasty that always show humans as very small compared to the surrounding landscape. In other words, humans are put in their proper place. My work portrays a big, dramatic landscape that overwhelms the human inhabitants. I’ve found at art openings that the individuals who look the closest at my paintings and who like them the most are either other artists or immigrants from China, Korea, or Japan.

Q: You are learning to grow vegetables in the desert. Have you had any luck growing vegetables in that environment?

A: I bought the place I’m in now about 18 months ago because it has a large yard – nearly a quarter of an acre. Since then I’ve been learning to take into consideration the primary limitations for gardeners in the Sonoran Desert bioregion – not enough water, a sun that can be brutal in summer, and poor soil. I’ve learned to harvest water. I have four tanks with a capacity over 400 gallons. I use the local Native Americans (Tohono O’odham) gardening techniques including sunken beds and seeds adapted to arid lands. I am now producing more than I can eat, and I give away a lot. So far I’ve grown the following vegetables: Swiss chard, green beans, gai lan (Chinese broccoli), onions, Malabar spinach, tomatoes, eggplants, chilis, green peas, bok choi cabbage, carrots, black-eyes peas, watermelon, okra, zucchini squash, mustard greens and both culinary and ornamental sunflowers. The goldfinches like the ornamental sunflowers. I also have velvet mesquite trees that produce edible beans to make flour, and I have shrubs that provide food for hummingbirds like the baja fairy duster.

You can see her art at www.cjshane.com and at http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/cj-shane.html

For interviews with individual artists, click on “Interviews” under Art Ink.  Don’t miss #saturdayartreview here on this website under Art Ink and also on Google Plus for reviews with images of G+ artists from around the world.

My sincere and profound thanks go out to Ryn Shane-Armstrong who designed my original website, then completely redesigned into the site you are now enjoying.  Here’s Ryn with his dog Sunday (the little gal looking at the camera) and my dog Yuma (the big boy looking for a rabbit).

All the work on my website is available for purchase unless it has  “Sold” after the title. Email me and I’ll send price and shipping information.

January 27:  Flux Contemporary Art Gallery will host a fundraiser for Arizona’s Children Association on Friday, January 27 from 5:30 – 8 pm.  All the Flux artists, including me, will be showing and selling work, and contributing 30% of the sale price to the children’s association.

Contact Shane at  shane@cjshane.com

Students Hard at Work in one of Shane's papermaking/book arts workshops

'E' by CJ Shane