Saturday, October 8th
All levels, emerging to mid-career
How to write an artist’s resume, statement and bio for publication, applications and grants.
Stand out from the crowd with professional materials that support and promote your work.
1pm - 2pm
laptop recommended but not required

Saturday, October 15
All levels, emerging to mid-career
1-800-ASKNANCY
Wish you had a professional artist on call who is not an employee of the art store trying to sell you the most expensive thing - who could answer your questions when you are faced with a million choices of painting and drawing materials? Always wanted to stretch your own canvases to save money but never learned how? Would love to start using a new painting or drawing medium or support but not sure what to buy?
Come see a demonstration of proper canvas stretching technique with tips on how to buy canvas and stretcher bars, how to tell the different kinds of drawing implements and paints, paint brushes and paint mediums apart and choose the ones right for you, and ask a professional working artist for advice on painting and drawing studio practices.
1pm - 2pm
laptop recommended but not required

Saturday, October 29
for beginners who would love to draw but don’t know where to start
1-800-SKETCH: Drawing 101
Learn the basics of sketching from life. No experience necessary, just the desire to try. Is there an artist inside you just waiting to be nurtured? Take a chance! You never know, you might just be the next Picasso waiting to be discovered. Children with long attention spans and a proven interest in art welcome.
1 pm – 2 pm
Small sketchbook, ordinary lead pencil and eraser required. No wet media please.

NJAI Members may purchase three classes for $40
Non-Members may purchase a 3-class series (your choice) for $65
individual classes $15.00
Email cberman@njai.org to register

NEW  ART SLAM for Visual Artists  New

Feeling isolated in your art studio in the ‘burbs? Bring your artwork to

First Mondays ART SLAM for Visual Artists

 a juried forum for sharing artwork with the NJ arts and art-lovers community 
Held on the first Mondays evening of each month at 7:30pm. 
Artists will be chosen by peer review from an initial entry of 5 jpg’s by a rotating invited panel of professional NJ based visual artists. Each artist chosen will have the opportunity to present up to 20 images of their work in jpeg format to an audience of peers and art lovers.  Presenters will have 15 seconds per image to talk about their work for a total of five minutes - 9 presenters per 40 minute program.  All artwork must be the artists own work. 
Please do not bring actual artwork to the studio – submit JPGs ONLY
Send jpegs (72 dpi, no more than 1200 pixels in each dimension) to artslam@njai.org.  Please send jpegs, image list describing medium, size and year completed and a short bio of one or two sentences about the artist in an email with the subject heading “First Mondays ART SLAM” by the 15th of each month for inclusion in the following month’s program.
FREE for NJAI Members
$5 entry fee for 5 images - Non-Members
Questions:  cberman@njai.org
Nancy Gail Ring received her Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting from The University of the Arts and her BFA in Studio Art from Syracuse University’s School of Visual and Performing Arts. She is an award winning artist who has shown and sold her work nationally and is the recipient of numerous awards for her paintings and works on paper. Most recently, she was an artist-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center where she received a 2011 Artists Fellowship Award in Painting.
Nancy’s solo exhibition of her paintings and drawings will be opening in November of 2011 at New Jersey Arts Incubator.  Watch the NJAI website for details – www.njai.org.

see also: Dining Room Art

Make the dough in the morning or the night before and fridge it. Slow rise is actually good for bread dough. Tastier. Take it out from the fridge when you get home from wherever it is you go all day. Let it sit while you heat the oven to 400 degrees F for roasting vegies and other toppings of your choice. That said, it is very quick to make pizza dough upon arriving home from work if you’d rather. While the oven preheats is a good time to check email, greet family members, pet the dog, meditate, read, flop down on the couch for 15 to 20. Chop up some toppings, toss them in olive oil and kosher salt (eggplant, potatoes, tomatoes, etc.) Spread them on baking sheets, pop into preheated oven and set a timer for 20 minutes. Go do whatever else prevents you from cooking each day . . . come back and get the toppings out, or set the timer for a few minutes more if necessary. Punch down the dough. Shape it. Let the toppings cool for a bit while the dough rises a bit. Do some more chores or cross a few more things off your to-do list, or sit down and zone. Top the pizza (kids love this part) and bake it. There, it’s done, and you probably had fun too. Enjoy.

see also: Tomatoes at my Front Door

One, because this extraordinary child is by far the deepest thinker I have encountered among children these days, and a counterpoint to the prevailing dumbing-down of society. He paints, he hates texting because he says it is no substitute for interacting with the human presence, and he reads “tons of books of poetry.” I am heartened by this child. I hope he is a harbinger of the future.

Secondly, the portrait I did of him was one that I nearly finished and then in an act of utter risk-taking, destroyed by going back into it and failing. Even though this child was crestfallen not to be able to see or have his portrait since it is now gone, he immediately agreed with me that one learns more or as much from failure as one does from success. In art, this is thinking of the highest order, where ideas are honored even if there is failure along the way. The idea (and it’s ideas that the author of the above article is most concerned about losing in the rush of information) is that one puts in one’s best effort and lets go of the outcome. The idea survives, and is even strengthened along the way.

So stop texting or tweeting or watching TV for ten minutes to read the article and think. You never know. In that ten minutes, you might have the most amazing idea of your life.

see also: Harris Lieberman: A Painting Show or My Once in a While Not About Food Post

Well, it turns out they are some of the biggest names in contemporary painting right now - painters like Amy Sillman and Cecily Brown - and I am floored because I have this theory. My theory is that sometimes your view of work is colored by the fame of the name; for instance you see the wall text saying it’s a Lee Krasner and then right away you think, before you even really look at the work, that it’s going to be amazing. It’s a theory that has made me wonder if I can ever see work objectively when it has someone’s famous name on it. So here was proof positive that it’s the work that speaks, and not the name.

But there was more: as I’m reading the list of artists, I notice they are all women. Nowhere on the gallery walls nor on the poster advertising the show is it mentioned that this is a show of “women painters.” And contrary to what you might think, this makes me really happy. I believe it does not serve women well to be what has come in the art world to be known as “ghetto-ized” - to be put in a category by ourselves as if we are only of any significance compared to each other, or somehow representative of only women’s experience. I tell the art gallery director this and commend him on not calling attention to the fact that these are all women, and he replies, most tellingly, that they set out only to find the best paintings for the show and that it became clear pretty quickly that a lot of the best paintings right now were being done by women. So, yes, though it may seem to contradict some of what I just wrote, I do feel some pride in that, being a woman. Because I’m proud of my gender and our accomplishments considering the obstacles stacked against us throughout history but ultimately I want what is right for women. And what is right for all artists, including women and any other subgroup, is to be equal and free to express any experience of the world that is authentic for us as unique human beings.

As for the show, you can go read the “art-speaky” description of it on NY Art Beat, which in my opinion tells you nothing you need to know about why this show is so compelling, or you can just go, which is what you must do if you love paintings. The painting above, by the way, is not in the show. It’s just one of my favorites by Susanna Coffey, and it’s the best example I could find of why I feel so strongly about this show: Painting today is about the larger ideas embedded in it and not just in the accurate presentation of things of the world. This can be confusing to people not familiar with its language. It’s become exclusive. This is unfortunate, because visual language is a passionate, quiet, gorgeous language that once plumbed, yields immense pleasure and joy, and sometimes even insight. It is poetic and surprising. It is revelatory. And it expresses something about human experience that just cannot be expressed any other way.

So what I love about the Susanna Coffey is this: You see the image, which is painted in a way that obviously has a conversation with the way painting was done in the past. But Coffey gives you clues to let you know that this painting is about more than a portrait and a war-torn landscape. Immediately, the viewer starts to ask questions. How can the woman stand with her back to this terrible scene, with her eyes closed? Is this about disconnection in general, or is the woman centering, finding a place of calm despite the state of the world? Then something else happens for the viewer - unable to answer these questions because any meaning we bring to a painting is ultimately our own fiction, our own compulsion to find meaning (which is partly what art is about) the viewer then looks for the larger poetic metaphors that transcend the particulars of this one image. Disconnection. Danger. Inner states of being. Psychological and emotional as well as literal light and darkness.

The one thing I do not like about this painting is that everything is recognizable. Coffey does not leave us anywhere to ponder the indecipherable quality of being a human being on this planet. No blurry patches, no ambiguous shapes, no color out of place. And that is what is so great about “A Painting Show” because it contains paintings that do just that - they offer us nonsensical images, odd arrangements, conceptual puzzles, surfaces that glitter or drip or undulate or lie on the floor or question just about every tenet established in the art world.

I’ll leave you with a painting that is by an artist in the show - Amy Sillman - though this is not the exact painting she has in this particular exhibit. But don’t settle for the jpeg. If you’re anywhere near NYC go see it and quick, its closing in 6 days (closed Sunday). Don’t look at the images online only - that’s like watching fireworks on TV. And who wants to do that?

Amy Sillman, oil,

see also: Dining Room Art

Funny, when I googled Greek recipes, the first thing I found was this blog devoted to sororities and fraternities. If you want cookie cutters in the shapes of Greek letters, this is the spot for you! Otherwise stick with Erasmia’s recipe here, adapted from from an updated one (chorizo and chile in your Greek dish, anyone?) Saveur magazine’s.

From Erasmia:

I was invited on Thursday by some other Greek moms to a house in Secaucus to do some baking together.  It was fun, but also a bit of a disaster.  The cookies (koulourakia) would have been a disaster, had I not in the end forced some creative changes (adding mastiha liqueur, orange rind, and lots more butter!!) But the tsoureki was a real disaster - the loaves did not rise at all, and the taste was horrible!  The bittersweet part of this was that it was obvious to me that we were all trying to be “our mothers” AND trying to preserve a Greek tradition that we have not been taught how to maintain.  I can’t tell you how many times that day someone would say “my mother used to do _______”.  And yet, it was clear that nobody had any real experience actually doing it, because we’re all American, working moms - never really groomed to be “housewives”!  I felt so nostalgic at the end of the day, but at the same time, moved by our “collective” and determined mission!

So now I really want to learn how to make tsoureki!  Maybe one day we can make it together.

Good luck with the pastitsio!

erasmia

When there’s no table space . . . do as the pianists do . . .