Fabian Lopez, in his studio

Waddell and Lopez are both from Los Angeles and in fact they both went to the same school undergrad. They both came to Philadelphia for an MFA from Tyler.

Fabian Lopez, Next Evil, 36x48" each, oil on canvas

Lopez, who is the son of Mexican immigrants, makes works influenced by what he saw growing up in his house (religious paintings on the wall — big iconic works with a strong central image). His oil paintings have a big-sky affect and many of them contain a strong, iconic central image, although it might be abstract.

Fabian Lopez, one of his drawings

The artist, who teaches drawing at Tyler and color theory at Rowan University, is also drawing a lot, which is quicker and more immediate than a painting, and something you can do when you’re spread thin and don’t have that much studio time.

Fabian Lopez, new work based on two religious paintings at the PMA

His drawings of late are influenced by Goya and the turbulent street life he sees around his apartment on Girard near the Crane.
In a new painting, the artist is trying something different — a large oil based on two religious paintings from the PMA collection. He said he’s been studying them for some time now, making trips to the museum. But the artist said he will take the color out of his version of the paintings….denuding them of some of their power–making them more abstract. Well, he thinks that’s what he will do.

Shanna Waddell in her studio

Shanna Waddell, Lopez’s friend, studio-mate and fellow Los Angeleno, works in a more directly intuitive fashion. Waddell gets obsessed with things and then paints up a storm in graphically representational and thickly impasto’ed oils. Currently she’s channeling religious cults, with their charismatic leaders whose often murderous ways include killing their followers and others who stand in their way of world domination.

Shanna Waddell, painting in studio, based on cult leader Marshall Applewhite

Unlike Lopez’s measured and iconic semi-abstractions, Waddell’s works are full of anger and overt passion. In fact they seem like paintings made by someone in a cult (they’re not, she isn’t).

Shanna Waddell, Trans-cient, 78x96" oil on canvas

After some prompting by Lopez, Waddell told me she had had a solo show in New York at Thomas Erben, the dealer of Dona Nelson, one of her teachers, who had advocated with the dealer on her behalf. Waddell said she’s painting for a new show with the gallery next February.

Lopez says he wants to organize a show with Los Angeles artists and Philadelphia artists, maybe raise money to have it in the Icebox, do it up right. Sounds like a great idea.

Cut paper artist Joe Boruchow‘s solo show at Bean Cafe (it closes today), is the second show of his we’ve seen there. Bean loves Joe and Joe loves Bean and he’s shown there a bunch of times since 2002.

Boruchow’s narrative cut-outs are great, and he seems to march to his own drummer. We wanted to meet him and hear more about his art and him, so we paid him a visit.

Installation detail of Fire Sale, Joe Boruchow’s most recent exhibit at the Bean Cafe.

In Philly there are several cut paper artists (Hunter Stabler, Natasha Bowdoin among others) and we just saw a show of cut paper by Robert Cumming at Janet Borden in New York (see post). We think that Boruchow is among the best working the medium –his content is edgy and his technique is pristine. Like everyone we know who works in paper, Boruchow applied for the Pew this year. We have many folks to root for and he is one of them.

Little Gray Hat, attention hog and bat catcher, flopped down at our feet for a belly rub.

We visited him Nov. 19 at his home studio in the South Philly rowhouse he’s lived in for two years (the Washington DC native has been in Philly for 12 years!). He met us at the door, his white cat following him. The cat, Little Gray Hat, followed us everywhere in the house. She’s an old lady but clearly is loved by her owner, who told us not only was she a great mouser but she caught a bat out of the air when he was living in a warehouse in North Philly. Clearly a seminal moment in their relationship, Joe told us he made a children’s book about the cat and the bat.

Bikes fill the living room, which still has the last owner’s mirror on the wall.

Joe’s house, which he shares with a friend, is neat as a pin and about a third of the living room is taken up with bicycles which he assembles himself; he’s a bike afficionado. He buys art and his collection includes hobo art and original works by big name artists like Keith Haring and Phillip Evergood, the latter two given to him by his late father, a psychiatrist, who collected art. His mom’s a psychiatrist too. His dad had a woodshop and when Joe was a kid he spent lots of time there making messes. He says his mom is fastidious and he’s like her.

Bookshelves in the studio

He was an English major in college until he dropped out of school. He went to Kenyon for two years and UVA for the blink of an eye (he hated its conservatism). Now he writes quirky songs for the Nite Lights, his 6-year old band that recently played upstairs at Johnny Brenda’s.

Joe Boruchow, Fairy Clown Babies for Obama. Joe papered his neighborhood with posters about McCain and Obama.

A voracious reader of classics and poetry (Melville, Cervantes, Cather, Mordechai Richler, Stevie Smith…) he is also political and sometimes makes political posters–xerox copies of his cut paper originals–and puts them up around the neighborhood.

Joe Boruchow, Litterbugs. This one upset one of the neighbors.

The neighbors often don’t like them, as he found out at a recent neighborhood meeting. He said he liked that the neighborhood had more than one opinion.

Surprisingly for such an urban hipster, the artist is an outdoor type. He loves to hike and told us his last trip was to the Shenandoah Mountains. He climbed Old Rag Mountain at peak colors in the fall. “It was gorgeous. Before that, I went to Oregon, to the Rogue River Valley.”

Elvis and Dave in the house.

He wanted to showed us around his house. In the kitchen we saw a copy of the latest New York Review of Books on the table, and on top of the refrigerator a painted bust of Elvis. An autographed photo of Dave the Wendy’s guy sits on the wall near the fridge.

The pine-paneled basement with a stack of drums.

The pine-paneled basement is a band practice room with drum kit, amplifiers, etc, although it’s not the recording studio. Boruchow has a guitar upstairs in his art studio, which is where he writes his songs. “There’s a symbiosis between doing this and doing my song writing.” He got his first guitar when he was 12 — it was electric.

When he left school, Boruchow moved here with his sister. She has moved on to New York, but Joe stayed in Philadelphia.

Joe Boruchow, Couch Nap

artblog: You didn’t want to move to New York?

Joe: I’m not a big fan of New York. I’m going up on Saturday to Zoe Strauss‘s opening (at Silverstein Gallery). Zoe has been very encouraging to me.

artblog: How did you meet Zoe?

Joe: At the Bean Café

Bean Café and the cut paper process

Early cut paper poster for the Nite Lights

Boruchow comes to the Bean Cafe a lot, he says, because he works nearby, at Tattooed Mom. Joe has a tattoo (we saw it peeking out of the cuff of his shirt–and we noticed another one peeking up from the back of his collar) and when he said where he worked, we assumed Tattoed Mom was a tattoo parlor and that he was a tattoo artist. He laughed and said everyone thought that but, no, Tattood Mom is a bar, and he’s a bartender there.

artblog: Do you do your cut paper at Bean Café?

Joe: I do the cut paper at the studio. It’s the only place I’m comfortable. I can’t work outside my studio. I do thumbnails on the road.

In his his studio work covers the walls hanging in grids. He’s got a bookshelf full of books, including his favorite graphic novels. We ask about his process.

artblog: How do you make these? Do you just sit down and begin to cut?

Joe: I start with drawing. Then, when I’m done cutting, I put white paper behind them and I spray them to cover the pencil marks. That’s how I get the negatives [on the white paper]. I keep them [the negatives]. They’re easier to handle as a back-up reference to the work.

A wall of negatives. Joe Boruchow’s cutout images serve as positive stencils for the negatives.

artblog: Where do you save the cutouts? They are so delicate.

Joe: I keep them in flashers. [He shows folders made of paired sheets of foam core, between which he stores the work.]

Joe Boruchow, An earlier spray-paint stencil drawing

artblog: What came before cut paper. Did you draw or paint?

Joe: I was doing spray-paint stencils. They were political. I had to make them. I’m hoping I won’t have to be making them now (that Barack Obama has won). He made stenciled posters for the Nite Lights, too.

Joe Boruchow, one of his cut paper political pieces, in his studio, along with advice to himself

Then he shows us his first graphic novel, a children’s story, “The Unexpected Guest,” about Little Gray Hat catching the bat.

The Unexpected Guest.

Joe: I completed the bulk of a graphic novel, too. It has 100 cutouts. I would love to have them in an art show.

We hadn’t seen his show at the Bean so he drove us up there in his minivan–a vehicle he loves. The car has a mean streak–makes an unearthly loud noise that scared the you know out of us when the doors locked. We think Joe should make a song about the car.

artblog: How long does it take you to make a piece?

Joe: The cutting is 8 or 9 days, 4 to 6 hours/day, plus the study and the drawing. I always make a thumbnail. Just to get to the cutting takes hours. Most of my time is spent doing this.

Thumbnail sketch for Abundance.

The very beginning is the worst part, looking at the paper on the wall.

I used to work from the center out. I like to look at pieces in the mirror. Randall Sellers taught me that – he was in the Bean with a mirror out, looking at his work. I take pictures (of the work). When you look at something small you can see things. I now do the parts that are the least fragile, first. I sit with the cutting board on my lap.

Joe Boruchow, Abundance

We ask about a complicated cut paper piece he calls Abundance. He was working on pieces for a show, Vanitas, at Wexler Gallery. At about the same time, he was blown away by the Turner show at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. A series of Turners called The Deluge were a turning point that led Boruchow to do a series of watery pieces for Vanitas. Some flood pieces are in his show at the Bean. We mention Kara Walker‘s exhibit, After the Deluge, about Katrina, that was at the Met.

The negative of Abundance.

Joe: The Vanitas show (at Wexler) was not (about) Katrina. I was bummed that Kara Walker did it and I kept waiting for someone to ask. But it was meant to be personal.

artblog: What’s next?

Joe: The book [graphic novel]; I need to redo about 20 of the pages. My style has changed over time–simplified. And the characters became more realized. It took two and a half years to do and there are major inconsistencies…

artblog, undisturbed by the inconsistencies, thought it looked great.

Art collection and influences

Joe shows us some graphic novels he admires.

In his studio and other rooms he shows us pieces he’s collected and some graphic novels by Lynd Ward, Peter Kuper, and Frans Masereel. Kuper is the only contemporary in the three.

There’s a beautiful cut paper silhouette in a frame. It’s delicate and intricate. “I think it’s by Lotte Reiniger,” he said. “She does it with scissors!!! A friend got this for me at Freeman’s.”

He also shows us the Keith Haring his father gave him–it’s not a print, but an original paint pen drawing signed “To Joe.” He met Herring once when he was with his father in New York looking at art.

Joe: That piece informs everything I do. My dad bought it for me.

We visited Bruce Wilhelm at his South Philly house/studio on Halloween morning before going to the Phillies parade. Wilhelm is a recent transplant to town from Richmond, VA. The young artist, 27, a Richmond native, is unusual in that he’s making more money on his art than on his day job, from which he just got furloughed due to the economic turndown. But he’s represented by ADA Gallery (he has a show there right now, up until Nov. 30) and since they do five art fairs, he says, it’s like having five solo shows a year.

Wilhelm lives here with his girlfriend Maddy Hoch and their three cats. The cats’ shenanigans entertained us while we were chatting in his living room. We first saw Wilhelm’s work at ADA’s booth at one of the New York art fairs a few years back. More recently, a couple of his videos were at Vox Populi in a group video show curated by Josh Mosley. So we were excited to see he had come to town. Hoch’s family is in the Philly region, which is how they arrived here. The couple graduated with BFAs from VCU in 2004.

Bruce Wilhelm, new painting showing the stripes made with his painting machine.

Wilhelm’s art right now deals with horse imagery appropriated from old master sources like George Stubbs. His paintings – many are on paper affixed to canvas – are notable for holes he’s torn to create weird abstract passages that suggest some voodoo rite has transpired and savaged them. It’s a classic strategy, making a mess of a pristine image. And Wilhelm confessed to being a mess-maker himself, coming from a family of pack-rats and mess makers.

He also said he loves science, and especially YouTube videos about science, which he loves to watch. He’s got a blog about his science love.  And he steered us to his favorite site YouTube, zuke696.

He also plays chess and plays to win—although he’s more interested in watching his opponent sweat than in the game itself.

We got in touch with Bruce through Rob Matthews who had met the artist at a gallery in Richmond before Bruce moved to Philly.

Detail of painting by Wilhelm–it’s 3 wood panels with lots of mirror imagery (this shows a part of two panels side by side). The grids and strips inset in the works reminds us of Lee Arnold’s video, Die Farben, in which he inserts moving abstract fields into a still image.

We know your videos …did you start out as a video maker?
I am a painter. Videos are an outgrowth of the paintings. I could continue making videos but… I want to keep that (for later) and make it grow into something else. I use Photoshop and jpeg images. I work on Windows movie maker. I could spend a week on something and find out, wow, this is just useless. I was working for a year (on a video). Now I realize I could have done it quicker.

I’ve been watching Japanese cartoons from 1930s. They’re very strange, and all of a sudden I understand why Pokemon exists …all that odd morphing into things.

Round painting on the right was created from a larger, 6′ work, the artist said. That’s Wilhelm’s treatment of The Last Supper on the wall at the left.

You have plans to get an MFA?
VCU was pressuring me (to go for an MFA)…You have to do this (they said)….so I interviewed at Yale. I didn’t know if I wanted to do this and I said that at the interview. They were like What??!! They asked me what I thought…was painting dead? (he didn’t have an answer). But we were chuckling by the end of it. They said, We like your work; we want you to reapply.

You like to play chess? do you play on the computer?
I play in the real world. I like watching the other guy make a move. I like to see my partner sweat. If he looks happy, I start sweating. My little brother works in robotics/AI. He should be a great chess player. I beat him a couple times in a row….

Bruce Wilhelm, The Last Supper. It’s made of layers of paper with a stratified hole in the middle.

So you like the head game?
I’m addicted to games.

Did you play Nintendo growing up?
The first simple games, yes. But I didn’t keep it up. I used to watch people play a lot…(so I know the games without actually playing them). It’s vicarious. It’s like when you’re watching someone make a touchdown and in your mind you’re the one making the touchdown.

There’s a video of a monkey eating a peanut and his head is connected to electrodes and you see his brain light up. Then the monkey watches a video of a monkey eating a peanut and his brain lights up…

Bruce Wilhelm, a very recent painting. There’s a lot of collage here–those abstract shapes are made of many separtate cut parts.

It’s on youTube. It may not be real science…What’s the next painting?
It’s kind of sculptural. My next project involves frames. …My mom taught crafts one summer…The neighborhood kids came to our house and we tie died and paper mache’d, and I was off. She’s creative. She does great doodles in the phone book. I think three dimensionally. I started with 3-D stuff. Painting came later.

This is an experimental shaped work we saw in the studio. The mini diorama illustrates how three-dimensionally the artist thinks.

When did you start painting?
I started painting in my first year of high school. When I was a teenager I got into lots of different things and found myself stuck in the house for long periods of time (grounded). So I did a lot of painting then. The ultimate way of getting back at grounding you is enjoying it!

What did they your parents think of art as a career?
My father was an accountant. He’s chief financial officer of a company now. and my mother does accounting work now. When I was a child and it looked like I was going into art, they said, So, basically, you’re choosing not to make money.

Do you have a day job, or do you make it on art alone?
I’m working for a company called Humankind Design, run by two women, Kate and Jill. They do proposals for huge sculptures and they do kitchen countertops. Before, I worked constuction in Richmond, though after a while you get construction hands. I’d pick up a wallet and then drop it. It makes your hands kind of numb. I’ve never noticed it affected my paintings.

Bruce Wilhelm, another new work with the background made using the painting machine (top photo).

I only made $400 from Humankind Design. The rest I make from art. ADA does the art fairs, so I get the equivalent of five mini-shows a year. But it gets kind of confusing. I have ideas, but I have to finish things quick for ADA for the art fairs.

Celestine Wilson Hughes drives a school bus. She gets up at 4 a.m. to get to the job on time. And while on the break between driving the students to and from school, she wraps the edges of her bits of glass in foil to prepare them for use in her work.

The glass is sharp and her fingers hurt. The irregular pieces are mostly tiny–many of them smaller than half an inch. Weekends she’s in the cellar studio, assembling the bits and pieces into complex compositions.

Hughes in her living room.

Hughes didn’t discover her inner artist until she was nearly 50. Growing up, all she knew was that she was different.

Here’s her story:

She went with her friend to a stained glass class, and made a little boat. She was 49 years old. “I knew I was home. When I saw the colors, I was absolutely spellbound. I didn’t know how to do it, but I got in the studio and did it.”

Not that long after the eye-opening class, She was talking to artist Martina Johnson-Allen, who said, I’m looking for artists for a show. “She asked, Are you an artist?

“All I had was my little glass boat, but I said Yes.”

Then Hughes scolded herself. “Oh my god, What did you do Celestine?” Then she put her foot even further in her mouth: “…I work in glass.”

Yesterday, I went on a studio visit–well, really a home visit. The first thing Celestine showed me was a photo of her mother, a beautiful, strong-boned women with an aureole of white hair, who has Alzheimer’s. Memories of her mother’s strength are very much on the daughter’s mind.

Inside Celestine Wilson Hughes’ house, where her work fills every available space.

But besides some family photographs, the house is mostly filled with Celestine’s work. It’s in every nook and cranny–stored under the sofa, tucked behind the furniture, hanging on every wall and from the ceiling, resting on every surface. It’s bursting from its bounds in every way. So is she. While I can see African art references in the work, this is beyond categorization.

It has the intense monomania of outsider art, with wires and beads poking out, with raw edges that jab and meander. Crowned birds perch here and there; irregular heart shapes, snaky metal dreadlocks, and all kinds of shards break from the surface. It’s fabulous.

When I first met Celestine a couple of months ago at a dinner party, artist Charles Burwell told me her work was wild. We were at a dinner/salon event organized by independent curator A.M. Weaver, and Celestine said that photographs didn’t do the work justice. She showed me a photo and I was interested. But I dismissed her comment because all artists complain about how their work looks in photographs.

A view of Hughes’ work filling her house.

But she’s right. Taking a picture of her stained glass work is like taking a picture of the universe. It’s hard to describe where it begins and where it ends, and what about those edges? In Hughes’ work, the crusty surfaces and the wild planes undulate and layer in ways that are not friendly to two-dimensional records. There’s not a 90 degree angle in sight. Looking at this work is like going on a treasure hunt.

Anyway, Hughes promised Johnson-Allen a piece for the exhibit Healing Sack at the Philadelphia Free Library in 2000.

“I remembered when I was pregnant [with her son Abdul, who's now 37], I was the happiest person. I’d take off my clothes, look in the mirror and see him moving around. It was amazing that I had life inside me.”

On Hughes’ business card is an image of her first stained glass sculpture, Bearer of Fruits, inspired by memories of her own pregnant body. It is 40″ x 19″ x 9″ (includes base).

Building on that memory, she made her first stained glass piece, Bearer of Fruits–a stained glass sack on a stick, that’s also a woman’s torso.

Celestine Wilson Hughes, an as yet untitled piece, with a big “onion” butt. The surface undulates, and the woman is surrounded by birds and flowers.

In all her work, Hughes transforms a tropical goddess of plenty and strength into something highly personal, a woman whose body smashes stereotypes of beauty and who takes charge of her own life. She’s a wild woman, depicted in a manner that cannot be contained. The Bearer of Fruits was only the beginning. She shows me a piece, shrouded in plastic, that she still hasn’t named. It’s a life-sized woman with a big “onion” butt, and birds all around. It’s huge and confident.

Celestine Wilson Hughes, a cut metal piece, with a rooster shitting hearts.

“We are all interconnected–plant life, human life and animal life. I use birds in my work. I use flowers, lots of flowers. I use lots of hearts.” She also uses lots of other traditional symbols like hands and eyes. Sometimes the symbols are incorporated in the main body of the piece. Sometimes they are attached with wires to orbit beyond the edges.

This womb in this piece is a heart shape.

She says of the heart-shaped womb in one piece that that’s where a woman’s heart really is. “My work has a lot to do with women. Starting late in life, one of the things I keep asking myself is what is my purpose, what do I want to do with my work? I want to bring women to the place where they recognize, we’re really great people.

“There’s not an empowerment of women. Give women the power they need. I feel I know about being a woman. You can hear about menopause, but until you go through it, you have no idea what it means. For me it’s a point of liberation. My mother wouldn’t even talk about it.”

She starts to talk about the copper sculpture she did for the Village of Arts and Humanities, in Germantown, for the Bottle Tree exhibit (Roberta’s post here). She set out to make something using a material she hadn’t worked with in quite this way. (This is definitely a pattern in her approach to things). She had to battle the material all the way.

“Again, this is that [female] shape. It’s in honor of Lucretia Mott, a Quaker and an abolitionist. She became very vocal. I wondered how she became that way. Not everyone was like that at that time. Somehow, she came out of that same culture…and she found her feet.

“It’s like me coming up as a young child, not knowing where I was going, and raising a son. I found my feet–not know where I was going but then finding a sense of who I am. I think some of us get there faster than others.

A bird detail from a sculpture by Celestine Wilson Hughes

“In August I turned 60. It’s kind of a scary time. But you know, let’s see what 60 brings. Bring it on.”

In her brief time as an artist, Hughes has shown at the African American Museum of Philadelphia, at the Noyes, and at Penn State. I wonder if she’s been to art school. No. She took a welding class at UArts. She took the stained glass class. And she’s married to Ed Hughes, one of the artists now up at Woodmere in the exhibit of work from the Louis Tanner Moore Collection exhibit.

She shows me a small, brilliantly colored abstract landscape by Hughes with a frieze of cut metal figures above the image. I ask and learn from her that he went to the Academy, and he is doing the public art component on the rebuilt 56th Street El station.

Ed Hughes may be the trained artist, but the house where they live seems to be almost totally hers. She creates pieces that grow organically as she makes them, never doing the planning on how they will hang or hold together. Her husband would prefer that she plan the hanging systems, she said, but as she works, her pieces change, and she can’t quite imagine how should could be limited by something so mundane as a structural plan.

Hughes shows me a book someone lent her of work that inspires her–by outsider artist Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, a 2004 MacArthur Fellow, who makes exuberant fiber and mixed-media works. The relationship between their work is clear.

I ask if Hughes has been to the Gee’s Bend exhibit at the Art Museum. She hasn’t but she’s looking forward to it.

Celestine Wilson Hughes, Women of the Universe, Do not Drown in Three Feet of Water, stained glass

Hughes shows me a reliquary of sorts, called Women of the Universe, Do not Drown in Three Feet of Water. She turns a large curling red piece of stained glass to unlatch the doors, which open only so far. Behind them hides a stained glass figure of a woman.

Celestine Wilson Hughes, Women of the Universe, Do not Drown in Three Feet of Water, detail, stained glass; the words are scribbled on the partly visible body of a woman, who is behind the scalloped edges of the two doors.

“I feel like religion has made women second class citizens. No matter what country you’re in, Iran, Iraq, Africa, religion has made them second class citizens. They become the ones who see the [oppressive] practices are carried through.

Celestine Wilson Hughes, Women of the Universe, Do not Drown in Three Feet of Water, detail, stained glass

“When I was growing up, nice women did not wear red. It meant you were whorish. That color was dangerous, emboldening. All these things that named women as something they weren’t–those ideas where you can’t take things on in the real world, that’s what my work is. In art you can make it a little more even.”

As works on paper go, Philly artist Miriam Singer‘s work–talismanic cityscape-maps that record time and place and daily life in layers–is not so much on paper as of paper. And that makes these combination prints/drawings a good fit with all the paper cutting and 3-D paper work that’s been filling the galleries lately (see post).

I paid her a studio visit a earlier this month, and learned she will be in The Rolling Canvas Art Collective, an exhibit and art auction at MBN August 1, of bike-related art presented by Fuji Bikes, Jinxed and R.E.Load. Also among the 20-plus participating artists are Adam Wallacavage, Ben Woodward, and Leanne Biank.

Singer’s studio is in the same building that houses Vox and Copy and the Khmer Art Gallery. It’s a section of a large factory loft space she shares with others, including Ryan Beck, who just had an exhibit at 222 Gallery.

I asked Singer about her education–she attended a post-bac at Brandeis (“It was awesome!”), Massachusetts College of Art (MFA), Yale, Brandeis (BA) and RISD. [Oops, not Yale and RISD--see comment at the end of the post from Miriam--Libby].

Singer added how her passion for cities and planning brought her to Harvard’s School of Urban Design, where they told her, “‘You should just stick to painting.’”

Miriam Singer in her studio

L. What about cities that interests you?

M. The density, warehouses, the gritty quality. I got really frustrated with Boston looking so cleaned up. I like a dense landscape. I live in the Intalian Market area. I like the mish mash of things. I think it’s also multiple histories in the raw.

I went from painting landscapes, and I started thinking about impressionism and light. I’d been thinking about my family. My mother died of cancer. I was 23, and felt I’d made enough work about it.

There’s so much subject matter in there–the mix of cities and my imagination, just interpreting what I’m seeing and still being intuitive.

I think a lot about Matisse. I’m definitely into his cutouts. I was doing a construction site about Buffalo, with different cutouts and photocopies.

detail of a piece by Miriam Singer

L. How does that relate to the drawings?

M. The drawings I usually think of them as collages. Ideally, I like to build and build and build to make it seem like a collage. It’s a bunch of memories being together on one piece of paper.

L. When I look at your work, I think about how the pieces are records of time.

M. That’s hard to talk about. I do think about them growing over time. I pretty much work slowly on all my stuff. I pick it up later and I work in layers. You see the mark making, the erasures. There’s an anxiety in the stuff. …There’s an element of overworking.

Miriam Singer, several works, some in progress, piled up

L. How do you know when you’re done?

M. I take it home to my apapertment and spend some time with them, photograph them. When I photograph them, then they are done.

Paper really stops me. Paintings are neverending (quests for perfection). But with paper, I let things go, more. When they are finished, I react with it in a different way.

My drawings come from sketchbook-making. I constantly carried around a sketchbook. But then I started carrying around pieces of paper. They are diary like and came out of not having a studio any more. (Now I have one, but then I didn’t). It was tough making the transition (from school to working). That’s why I started to make these. I also wanted to focus on one drawing at a time. So I carry just one drawing in my bag. And I just need to draw a lot in general.

Miriam Singer, one of her works pinned to her studio wall

L. How do you describe the drawings?

M. It’s a chaotic landscape that I’m always trying to reproduce. It’s the feeling of stress, running around; it’s not peaceful. I’m always trying to pursue peace.

I have been making the same paintings over and over again for the past 10 years, recycling the same images. They’re never finished–[they] can be broken up. If they are broken up, I then concentrate on the small segment and finish it. I do need a huge amount of time to process it.

L. I notice how casual you are in how you handle the paper. [Singer tosses the work around, puts framed images on top of them just treats them like a notebook.]

M. I think they would make great rugs. Just kidding. Only just recently I stopped making them into postcards. Maybe I undervalue them. Each one is very specifiic. I can’t make them again. So why am I not taking care of them more?

Miriam Singer, work with collaged elements added

L. OK, so why?

M. I like to abuse them. In that way it’s also a kind of a mark. If I spilled something on it, I work that spilled moment into them. Sometimes I dunk them in water so the color bleeds together. I’m not interested in aging it, but I am kind of interested in making it look like a Pirate’s map.

L. How do you make I living?

M. I helped paint murals with Shira Walinsky. I like the process of collaborating and making it on the wall. I like how physical they are. I also teach for Mural Arts for the Corps program, working with high school students. I’m not teaching this summer.
I’m a printing technician at Moore College. They won’t let me teach there because I’m staff.

L. What kinds of prints do you use in your drawings?

M. Wood blocks, etchings, silk screen, lithographs, monoprints.

L. Other materials?

M. pencil–Prismacolor, markers, crayons, graphite, acrylic–I add that at the end occasionally.

Judith Schaechter’s computer, with files in Photoshop that store her drawings of heads and bodies for her figures.

While at the computer Judith was demonstrating to us how she mixed and matched heads and bodies on her figures. It was a little like paper dolls swapping clothing and a little like low tech animation. Roberta said “You should animate your works.” And Judith said, “Have you seen my animations?” She proceeded to show us two animations she produced, one of which is now playing on YouTube (and now, here on artblog)! How amazed we were is only to be imagined — this is an artist who works in one of the oldest art materials invented. That she’s highly skilled at computer animation shows her breadth, inventiveness and need to continually make her art new. The animations are a little like her glass works and prints,– narrative, forlorn — but different too. We began to pump her for information on this new branch of her art.

Better Days: Doomed to Obscurity, one of Judith Schaecter’s animations. Music by Doomed to Obscurity. 2007.

“I use Maya. I took an animation course at UArts from Laura Frazure, “an unknown treasure of the Philadelphia art world. She’s a wax sculptor and a genius.”

She took a FormZ course which she said was “for people who are completely “Aspergered out.”

This is a picture of another Schaechter animation–this one is about 30 seconds long she said and it shows one specimen in a jar jumping into another jar for a little specimen love fest.

“Compared to FormZ, Maya is an easy program to learn. I was going to do Maya for the rest of my life. Then I got a bug up my ass to do studio glass again.”

This need to make more glass work might have been fueled by her attendance at a bunch of glass conferences this summer:

–GAS (Glass Arts Society. “It’s just like seeing your friends from high school”
–Glass Week at Wheaton. “Schmooze fest of a dysfunctional family.”
–AGG conferences (American Glass Guild).
There was a stained glass forum in Yahoo that she found. “I Googled myself and knew they were talking about me. I’m not above the ego Google search. I used to do it every day.” So she entered the discussion and pretty much took it over, she said. And before she knew it she was invited to the conference.
–a conference at Northlands Creative Glass in Scotland.

Judith’s studio in her house in South Philadelphia.

Since we were talking shop about glass we asked her about Dale Chihuly’s Pilchuck Glass School. and she said, yes, she’s been to Pilchuck.

She subscribes to the trade magazines on stained glass. She knew some of the people on the Yahoo forum, and said some of them “don’t consider what I do stained glass.” We found that unbelievable since to us her work sure looks like what we think of as stained glass. What do they have issues with we wanted to know?

“The copper foil. Content issues.”

This picture was taken over the summer at a wind farm in Scotland where Judith and her students lay down underneath a wind turbine and experienced something like the Pit and the Pendulum effect. The photo, which includes Schaechter — she’s the figure laying down but whose head is raised– is the inspiration for the new glass piece and the print.

This summer Schaechter went to Scotland to participate in a conference and master glass program at Northlands Creative Glass. One of her assistants restored the Lincoln Cathedral stained glass, she said. The experience somehow caused her to have existential thoughts about her own glass practice–and particularly the solution of putting her glass works in light boxes and not in windows. “I knew the lightbox solution was inadequate. When someone speaks about how (natural) light strikes the glass—I felt like a dufus.” She said the lightbox lights “change the color and flatten it out a lot.”

Background

Judith, with Souixsie, one of her five cats. This is the bay window in the studio on the second floor.

We asked the artist about where she was from. We know she’s not a native Philadelphian, so what brought her here? Schaechter told us she moved to Philadelphia because she was in love…. And after that we got a family saga that went back to the 1600s and that sounded a little like an East Coast Laura Ingalls Wilder saga of an American family travelling here, there and everywhere as new opportunities opened up.

Part of her family is Pennsylvania Dutch who “started out in Lycoming County… My mother’s a WASP. Her family came over in (the 1600s) on the St. Francis of Ipswich.” Her father is from Italy — Jewish. Her ancestors moved to Warren County in Northern Pennsylvania where “they clear cut the area and then they moved.” But when oil was found nearby, her grandfather switched to the oil business with Phillips 66 and moved to Oklahoma with the company.

Judith’s mom was a collector of hippo figurines. The artist made her first clay hippo for her mom when she was in first grade. The little figurine has no legs because hippos are usually pictured in water and Judith didn’t know whether hippos had legs.

Schaechter’s father was a professor & chair of microbiology at Tufts which she relates to her art with its mix of science references (bees and honeycombs, other insects and animals) …and to her mix of arts and crafts.

She has a lot of Yankee and New Englander friends but doesn’t feel an affinity with any particular group whether Yankee or whatever. “I just never belonged to a group. I was never quite Jewish enough or Christian enough.”

Schaechter has a brother and her brother is disabled due to encephalitis which damaged his brain. “He’s more normal than me” she says. He lives independently but the damage knocked out his speech function. Then she tells us a story about how smart and empowered her brother is and that he runs the commissary for animals at the Boston Zoo. Also, he’s a rock climber!

Finishing our talk over Panettone cake (delicious!) from the nearby Italian Market we felt like the conversation could have gone on and on. The artist is warm and witty and voluble. And while she may not feel like she fits in any particular group, we claim her as a Philadelphian.

Judith Schaechter with one of her five cats in her South Philly house.

We had lunch with one of contemporary art’s heavy hitters the other day and she made us quiche. Judith Schaechter had just come home from a driving lesson during which her driving instructor was pumping her for information about how to be an artist while she was on Delaware Avenue trying to remember how to brake and steer. Meanwhile, back at home, she tossed the lunch on the table as if it was nothing and started talking. Two and a half hours later she was still chatting about art, life, cats, Scotland and the computer.

Judith’s Joan of Arc, a stained glass piece featured in her recent Claire Oliver show.

Schaechter, feisty as a bantam weight, is funny and charming. Her solo show of new stained glass light boxes at Claire Oliver Gallery just ended. The works sell for 6 figures and when we saw the show Nov. 3, three were sold. The nationally renowned Pew fellow whose art has even appeared on the cover of the New Yorker (1993, cover illustration for Sylvia Plath article, August 23-30) is also a writer. She used to write book reviews for Philadelphia Weekly and she was one of the first contributors to artblog. Every once in awhile — because she’s so passionate about her work, and ideas about art — she gets embroiled in a comment conversation on artblog that goes on for days. She apparently does this on other websites and message boards as well.

The Gynecology Student. Schaechter is an Adjunct Professor at University of the Arts where she has taught in the crafts department since 1994.

Her house with its five cats and weird specimens including taxidermy wonders, skeletal remains and bugs and butterflies in glass cases on the wall is neat as a pin and completely organized. So is her studio.

We’ve enjoyed Schaechter’s stained glass since the first time we saw it. While she works in one of the most ancient of media, stained glass, dripping with religious symbolism, her art is completely contemporary, speaking about modern life, relationships, predicaments but also saintly sufferings. Her focus is on the human and not the religious and that has made her controversial in some circles. But she’s not controversial in ours. We love her work to death. She’s Saint Judith.

And now she’s doing animations, too. More on that later.

Stained glass windows in Schaechter’s Victorian-era house.

We took a tour of the house, a South Philly rowhouse with drop-dead stained glass of its own. The house itself yielded up a number of stories from her. Here below are some tidbits from our rambling conversation which was in many parts a monologue by Judith.

For a bit she discussed her relationships with galleries.

Re Claire Oliver, her current gallerist, in New York:
Schaechter once complained in frustration to Claire over the phone before a big opening that “My hair won’t work!” They were in a hotel and Claire “came down in her slippers, did my hair, and it looked great.”

Re her previous gallerist, Rick Snyderman, in Philadelphia:
“I really like Rick Snyderman. He did great things for me, but I don’t think I owe my entire career to him.”

But switching to New York had its downside. Openings at Snyderman were the best openings, she said. “It’s much better to show in your home town than in New York. It was like a big prom for me.”

Cabinet of curiosities. Judith’s emu head, second shelf.

She showed us a bunch of specimens, including a critter that seemed more imaginitive than real, from Furry Couch. “He had a fanzine. Now he’s at Tattoo Eddies and sells taxidermy.”

She picked up an emu head from a bookcase filled with strange things.
“I did buy that, I bought the emu head. I feel a little guilty about it. …People just give me this stuff!”

Judith pulling back the curtain, ala Charles Wilson Peale, to show us her stuffed coyote in the front window.

Then we walked to the front window, where a dog-like stuffed animal stands perched on a promontory overlooking the street. It reminded us of the way the Remington horse overlooks Kelly Drive. One of us called it a coyote, could have been Judith, could have been us. we wondered, Does it keep people away?

“I think it keeps people from asking too many questions.”

As we walked through the house, we asked Schaechter to tell us which museums collected her work. Here’s an an abbreviated list:
Philadelphia Museum of Art has two, both stained glass
Carnegie–”They have the best one I ever did, and they have it in storage.” (said with a touch of frustration)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, in its contemporary collection

Schaechter’s collection sprawls through every room of the house. Here, above the fireplace in the living room, is a painting by her grandmother, a Rain Harris poison pot, and three specimens, a butterly, a bat, and a spider — and some glass pieces whose authorship we don’t remember.

She also showed off her own, eclectic art collection. Here’s another edited list:
Chris Vecchio
Olivia Shreiner–”I saw it in artblog and went and bought it.”
Astrid Bowlby
Ben Woodward
C.W. Wells
Rain Harris
paintings by her grandmother
her mother‘s hippo collection including a hippo Judith herself made, maybe in first grade. “My first sculpture was a hippo for her collection.”

And here are the names of her cats, while we’re naming names.
Rain (Laraine)
Chong
Tyrone
Siouxsie (after Siouxie Sioux in Siouxsie and the Banshees)
Spock (with a deformed ear, natch)

Before she moved to 11th Street from 15th and Rodman, Judith had a trinity and a separate studio down the street, above the space that is now Bob and Barbara’s. The studio there was bigger, “This is smaller but has windows. …I don’t like clutter.”

Schaechter, assembling the pieces of her current glass project.

She showed us her current stained glass project, a figure resting on sea of grass, looking up at the sky, inspired by a visit to a wind farm in Scotland over the summer, where Schaechter lay on her back under a giant windmill. “It’s not working,” Schaechter opined about the stained glass figure for her image. “She looks segmented–like a turd.”

Schaechter’s current work in progress sitting on the light table in her studio.

Then she fetched some other rejected work. “There’s boxes of things I’ve thrown out.” She showed us a broken bit that had a u-shaped chunk chipped off during shipping from Scotland. “What did they do, did they take a bite?”

We asked how she assembled her stained glass.

She uses copper tape on the edges. She layers. She cuts the glass with a jig saw. And she assembles with a bead of solder (a mix of lead and tin).

“I love lead.”

We wondered about the toxicity, but Schaechter has her levels tested. “My lead levels are lower than average. I’m thinking you have to snort lines to get lead poisoning.”

She did once get glass in her eye–and said she put her fingers in her eye and pulled the glass out. Now she wears safety goggles.

Schaechter, demonstrating how to grind glass in her tool-filled, tidy studio.

Then we admired her grinder (she put her finger to the spinning grindstone to show us how safe it was), her ring saw and her glass fusing kiln. The light boxes for the finished works are built by Kevin Strickland.

She then began to talk about the house with its voluptuous stained glass. “They are the opposite of ecclesiastic works,” she said. “The story is, the house was built for some guy’s mistress.” When Schaechter moved in, she had local stained-glass artisan and artist Bryan Willette restore the glass.

Grass pattern from Mayang website that was the basis for Schaechter’s grass background in a new print.

Schaechter took us over to her computer to show us her drawings and a website–Mayang’s Free Texture Library–with free patterns from which she got the grass that she altered to use in a new print she’s making with Silicon.

Astrid [Bowlby, who makes labor-intensive drawings and who Schaechter calls her bff, best fried for life] came over. I was showing her Photoshop. ‘So it’s not really a time saver, is it?’ said Bowlby. ‘It’s a time waster.’”

For all that, Schaechter loves the computer, especially Photoshop. We spent a good half hour at the computer, while she showed us how she transformed the grass pattern and how her figures get assembled. “I just put my doodles into Photoshop and then start collaging,” she said, while mixing and matching heads and bodies for us.

Read Part 2 of this story. And for more pictures from our studio visit, see this flickr set.