This was ice sculpture day – unfortunately it was in the 40s most of the day and the sculptures were melting into the night. I was watching Don Chapelle carve his ice in front of Thornes during lunch and he was really a pro – he had all sorts of high-tech ice sculpting equipment. He was making some alcids from the looks of it.
Heather and I headed out later on and stopped at Living Art Tatoo where there were some paintings by Michel Bellici. But nobody was there, it turns out the opening was a month earlier and the artist is in New York. The paintings were really interesting – large abstract nudes and smaller studies. They were very dream-like.
I have an idea (after watching the Ed Hardy documentary) to have tattoo artists do little drawings in a book–kind of like a graffiti writer black book. The guy at the tattoo shop suggested I go to tattoo conventions and bring the book, then all the tattoo artists would do a little quick signature and I could build up a collection quickly. I could bring some of my own drawings and trade them if they didn’t want to do it en gratis.
We wandered over to Market Street but there wasn’t anything open over there tonight. Then we ran into Dave Huckins. He is in an upcoming show at FOE. Leah Moses is having a 3 day show in March at WhooSpace. It is going to be an installation of Yumyos – I am looking forward to that show. We only have one Yumyo and it is lonely.
Then we met up with our friends Kim and Brian and went over to FOE Shop to see the Garamaniacal show. It was interesting to see all the different artist’s takes on Garamon. It was crowded show with lots of great artworks.
Michael Nordstrom from Garamania was wearing an incredible Garamon costume. It was almost too real and triply. I liked the GiL piece he did. It had Garamon looking like Johnny Rotten. The mask was hand-created specifically for him.
Then we headed over to APE Gallery where Katy Schneider had a large body of work of portraits (two decades). They were really nicely done. They almost had a Vermeer quality – perfect sense of light and value and economy of brushwork. The paintings were glowing.
At Michelson Gallery there was the Richard Yarde tribute show. It was nice to see the paintings actual size – a lot of the reproductions don’t do them justice. I think he showed once at Pahana Gallery in Northampton. Either that or Bob had one of his paintings. It was also cool to see Barbara Spencer‘s sculptures. There is a lot of inspirational artwork in there. I was watching a video of Leonard Nimoy taking photos. It was wicked funny.
Then we dropped by Unite to check out Ramiro Davaro-Comas‘ show. They were smallish portraits– there was one of the Statue of Liberty that I liked. His art is somewhat reminiscent of Ralph Steadman, but a little darker and more interesting. He said that he has a bunch of residencies coming up in Europe–in Berlin and Amsterdam. He will be missed in Northampton.
The last place we went to was the Dynamite Space in the basement of Thornes where there was an interesting group show sponsored by C3. Each artist basically did some art once a day in January, then they showed all the pieces in the show. So it was like a group show of art for each artist in the group show. It was cool to see. A lot of it was conceptual, and a lot of it was kind of riffing on a theme, and some of it was really nicely executed.
I didn’t get all the artists names in the show, but a few things I liked included a collage of tea wrappers in a big frame, photos of numbers from different things for each date in January, a series of haunting portraits of different people with some prose next to them, and some drawing of birds–some were fanciful and imaginative, but others were real species like kinglets and gallinules.
Mimi Lempart had some zentangles that were really nice. Her style has really evolved – they were in color and had really intricate lattices and dimensionality to them. I was enjoyed seeing them.
Then we saw that one of the artists, Miranda LaPolice, had some photos that included shots of Northampton street art, and of course I recognized all the obscure graffiti. We had a lot of fun talking about Northampton street art. She suggested we go to Brattleboro and check out that scene.
Perhaps the most interesting art I saw all night was a recent sticker by Alased. Interesting to me because I don’t recall seeing a signed Alased sticker before, so it was a serendipitous encounter. I have to check all my photos to see if any other stickers look similar.
All in all a memorable evening in Northampton.
