Midday Veil (Mostly) Unplugged

Midday Veil is giving a stripped down, mostly acoustic performance tonight at Gallery 1412 with Noise Poet Nobody and The Precambrian (Aphonia Recordings co-founders Ben L. Robertson and Andrew Senna). I hope to see you there!

Opening Tonight

It’s First Thursday, and it also happens to be a beautiful day to be out and about.  I’m looking forward to Jennifer Towner at 4Culture, Alice Wheeler at Greg Kucera Gallery, and Cara Barer at Foster/White.  I wrote a much more indepth list of recommendations over at PubliCola.  Joey Veltkamp has more on Best Of. See you tonight!

Jennifer Towner. Fecundity (detail). Slip cast porcelain, 2009.

PubliCola Art Nerd

Last week I wrote a review of the Moore Inside Out for PubliCola.net, the new local news and politics website begun by former Stranger news editor Josh Feit (and now featuring former Stranger writer Erica C. Barnett).  As it turns out, it will be the first of many such features for PubliCola:  I have accepted an ongoing gig as their “Art Nerd,” part of a stable of writers charged with the task of spicing up the news feed with information about local happenings and events.  

If Translinguistic Other is your favorite blog (and how could I blame you if it is!?) then you might be wondering: how will this affect my writing?  Well, hopefully not much.  The idea is that I’m responsible for one substantive review or essay for PubliCola per week, with a few smaller items throughout the week.  I will provide links to all my reviews here on TLO so you can still keep up with my art writing by subscribing to this feed.  In addition, I will continue to use this blog for all content that doesn’t “fit” within the general interest parameters of PubliCola.  Rest assured, the crackpot theories, observations and antics you have come to expect from me will remain thoroughly unchanged.

There will be some changes, but hopefully for the better.  As Regina Hackett often laments, one consequence of the paradigm shift away from newspapers and toward blogs on specialized topics is that art writers increasingly find themselves preaching to the converted.  By contributing content to a website with a growing audience of people with a committed interest in mainstream Seattle news and politics, I hope to foster broader awareness of things going on in the Seattle art community.  (If you’re a local visual art space or artist doing something you think I should know about, please feel free to send me your press releases.)

Turn That Heartbeat Over Again

I’ve been regaling guests with this Andy Kaufman-inspired “Steely Dan Interpretive Dance” for some time, but just committed it to video last night in honor of Michael Jackson.

Augustin Lesage (French, 1876-1954)

Last week I was pointed in the direction of some paintings by French Spiritualist artist Augustin Lesage (1876-1954).  Lesage is one of the most fascinating figures associated with Art Brut, yet I can’t find an English bio for him anywhere on the web.  The one on Wikipédia Français is fanciful, but it sure makes me want to believe every word!

Augustin Lesage. A Symbolic Composition of the Spiritual World. 1923

According to Wikipédia, Lesage was born in Saint-Pierre-lez-Auchel in northern France, and spent his early life as a laborer in the coal mines.  Then one evening in 1911, when he was thirty-five years old, he heard a voice underground that told him “Un jour, tu seras peintre” (One day, you will be a painter).

A year later, partly through his involvement in Spiritualist circles, Lesage began communicating via automatic writing with “spirits,” including one he believed to be his sister Mary who had died in childhood.  The spirits told him,

The voices you heard were real.  You will be a painter.  Fear not, and heed our advice.  You will find it ridiculous in the beginning, but we are the ones tracing through your hand. Do not try to understand.

The voices proceeded to tell him which colors and brushes to buy, and where to order a canvas.  Lesage ordered a small canvas, but when it arrived, it measured three meters square.  He wanted to cut it into smaller pieces, but the voices stopped him.

Augustin Lesage in the studio.

For the next two years, he came home from the mines every night and went to work, letting the spirits guide his hand.  He began in the upper right corner and gradually filled the entire canvas (which is now in Jean Dubuffet’s Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne).  The composition was built by filling in small areas at a time.  The spirits did not let him evaluate the work in its entirety:  part of the canvas remained rolled as they guided his hand.  ”It was like working without working,” the artist recalled.

Augustin Lesage. Oil on canvas, 1926-1954.

In July of 1913, Lesage interrupted his work in the mines to do some faith healing; a move that got him in hot water with French authorities who charged him with illegally practicing medicine.  The testimony of his dozens of successful clients helped acquit him in 1914 and later that year he was deployed for WWI, where he continued to make drawings on postcards.

In the years following the war, Augustin Lesage was visited by Jean Meyer, director of the Spiritualist journal La Revue Spirite.  Meyer became his patron, and in 1923 Lesage was able to quit working in the mines and devote himself to painting.

Augustin Lesage. Title not known.

Like the paintings themselves, Lesage’s position within art history is peculiar.  Though held in high esteem by the Surrealists, Lesage’s legacy is strong but obscure: of the 800 canvases he left behind, most have seldom been exhibited abroad.  English-speaking audiences are hard pressed to find any information on the artist.  (I just ordered a French exhibition catalogue from a 1988 retrospective.)

Lesage’s patterns are unmistakable.  After noting the symmetry of the first large canvas, he began organizing his compositions along a central axis, building complex geometric structures in horizontal layers from the center outward.  An article by Christian Delacampagne quoted on Lesage’s Wikipédia article states (my translation):

The first large painting of Augustin Lesage is one of the most daring in modern art.  Although not, strictly speaking, non-figurative (figures both architectural and anthropomorphic abound), it explores almost all possibilities of abstraction—lyrical as well as geometric—at a time when the latter, among professional artists, was still in its infancy.  They are no less ornamental and decorative than the works of Kandinsky, Lesage’s spiritual contemporary.  Indeed, is the distance so great between the the Theosophy dear to the Russian artist and the Spiritualism embraced by the French?  The former hearkens to Rudolf Steiner, the latter to Léon Denis.

Augustin Lesage. Symbolic Composition of the Spiritual World, 1925.

Augustin Lesage’s “classical period” is the period between 1916 and 1927, when he painted his most representative works.  A growing fascination with Egypt, natural forms, and the ornamental traditions of various cultures gave Lesage a newfound source of conscious influence, diluting the purity of his earlier compositions and creating images that appear more self-conscious and perhaps less directly inspired.  Lesage continued painting until failing eyesight and health forced him to resign in 1952, less than two years before his death.

Augustin Lesage. The Mysteries of Ancient Egypt.

All images via Shawna-bo-bonna’s Flickr photostream.  Thanks to Shaun Kardinal for sending me the images, via butdoesitfloat.com.

Web Updates + Twitter

I updated my website over the weekend, adding a few new works on paper, which may be viewed here.

Emily Pothast. Syzygy. Collage and drawing on paper, 2009. 30 x 22 inches.

I also finally joined Twitter (we’ll see how long this obsession lasts!)  You can follow me at twitter.com/emilypothast.

Haunted by the Living: Moore Inside Out

Mutual applause at the Moore. Photo by David Golightly.

Late last night, like just about everyone else I know, I was immersed deep in Moore Inside Out, the Free Sheep Foundation’s “architectural intervention” at the Moore Theatre.  Then I furiously pounded out my reaction for PubliCola.net, the new online newspaper begun by Josh Feit, former news editor for The Stranger:

Moore Inside Out …represents an interesting shift in focus [for Free Sheep] from the ecstasy of ephemerality to the slow-burning nostalgia of a living monument.  Like the Bridge Motel, the Moore Theatre is full of ghosts, and even a few unpleasant truths…  But it is also full of countless beautiful moments past, present and future.  It feels good to pay homage to an old friend who isn’t dying for a change.

Read my review of the event here.

I Have Learned So Much From God

Via Andrew Sullivan:

I
Have
Learned
So much from God
That I can no longer
Call
Myself A Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim
A Buddhist, a Jew.

The Truth has shared so much of Itself
With me
That I can no longer call myself
A man, a woman, and angel
Or even pure
Soul.

Love has
Befriended Hafiz so completely
It has turned to ash
And freed
Me

Of every concept and image
My mind has ever known.

–Hafiz, Persian poet (1315 – 1390), translated by Daniel Lazinsky.  Thanks to David for the link.

Opening Tonight

There are some excellent art events happening tonight in Seattle.  This afternoon, multimedia artist Wynne Greenwood continues a series of performances marking the end of her exhibition “Sweated” at Seattle University’s Hedreen Gallery.

Derek Larson, studio view. Via crawlspacegallery.com

At Crawl Space, Vermont-based artist Derek Larson (who grew up in Seattle but received art degrees from Indiana University and Yale) is marking the end of his week-long studio intenstive residency with Liquid Crystal, an homage to material nostalgia. Larson is specifically interested in the effect of the digital age on the resonance of cultural artifacts:

As cultural signifiers increasingly exist as digital media rather than artifacts collected at physical events, Larson questions the emotional impact the internet has on its public. What once was the accumulation of things in a room (objects, books, photos, vinyl) is now a digital collection of ideas archived on hard drives. Larson plans to create an archive of his own made up of pre-internet objects culturally significant to Seattle. Using this material, he will build a sculptural installation and video works to reactivate an aura around these artifacts.

After that, I suggest you head down to the Moore Theatre for Moore Inside Out, an evening of free performance and installation, the latest effort by the Free Sheep Foundation (of Motel fame).  The Stranger has a full list of participating artists and projects.

Midday Veil: Queen of the Void

…and while we’re on the subject of making noise, why don’t you download this FREE MP3 ?  It’s a new full-band recording by Midday Veil, recorded live in May and mixed and edited over the past few weeks.

Free MP3: Midday Veil – Queen of the Void

Don’t forget: we’re playing a show this Sunday, June 21 that will be our LAST FULL BAND PERFORMANCE for two months!  More information about this event may be found over at Portable Shrines.