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Autumn Art Auction 2011
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A u t u m n A r t A u c t i o nV o l u m e 1 3 , 2 0 1 1
N o r t h D a k o t a M u s e u m o f A r t
The 2011 Autumn Art Auction is underwritten by
Valley News Live
The North Dakota Museum of Art
is grateful to our sponsors who have
given generously to guarantee
that the arts flourish.
Front Cover: Walter Piehl, Khoas Kat: American Minotaur, 2006. Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 inches. Back Cover: Guillermo Guardia, Mama Cora, 2011. Ceramic, 23 x 15 x 10 inches.
Auction PreviewOctober 13 until auction time in the Museum galleries
Monday – Friday, 9 to 5 pm, Saturday – Sunday, 1 to 5 pm
All works to be auctioned will be on display
Auction Walk-aboutLaurel Reuter, Auction Curator, will lead an informal
discussion about works in the Auction
Thursday, November 3, 7 pm, in the galleries
patronsAll Seasons Garden Center, 48
Clear Channel Radio, 71
Grand Forks Herald, 65
Guesthouse International, 47
Hugo’s, 72
Leighton Broadcasting, 67
Minnesota Public Radio, 55
Office of Academic Affairs, UND, 68
River City Jewelers, 49
Salon Seva, 50
WDAZ TV, 73
William F. Wosick, MD, 45
Independent Radiology Services, Ltd.SCRIPTA, LLC
HermesVelox, LLCIn2shapefitnessfargo, LLC
SponsorsBremer Bank, 64
Dakota Harvest Bakers, 60
SupportersAmazing Grains Natural Foods Market, 76
Avant Hair & Skin Care Studio, 78
Badman Design, 74
Blue Moose Bar & Grill, 58
Chad Caya Professional Painting & Historical Restoration, 52
Chester Fritz Auditorium, 58
Frandsen Bank & Trust, 63
Grand Forks Country Club, 56
Greater Grand Forks Community Theatre, 48
HB Sound & Light, 56
Ellen McKinnon, 69
Midcontinent Communications, 54
Museum Café, 70
Auction Supporters continued next page
North Dakota Museum of Art
A U T U M N A r t A u c t i o nS a t u r d a y , N o v e m b e r 1 2 , 2 0 1 1
Wine and hors d’oeuvres 6:30 pm
Auction begins at 8 pm
Autumn Art Auction isUnderwritten by
Valley News Live
Page 59
2
SupportersNorth Dakota Quarterly, 66
Rhombus Guys, 54
Sanders 1907, 46
Special Olympics North Dakota, 70
Summit Brewing Company, 57
Curtis Tanabe, DDS, 76
Duc Tran, DDS, 51
Wall’s Medicine Center & Health Mart Pharmacy, 75
Waterfront Gallery, Northern Plumbing Supply, 75
ContributorsAcme Tools/Rents, 79
Alerus Financial, 77
Altru Health System, 79
Ameriprise Financial, Debbie R. Albert, 69
Archives Coffee House, 78
Camrud, Maddock, Olson, & Larson, Ltd., 78
Capital Resource Management, 51
Demers Dental, 47
Chelsea R. Erickson, DDSPaul Stadem, DDS
Greater Grand Forks Symphony Orchestra, 77
Happy Harry’s Bottle Shops, 74
Mayport Insurance & Realty, 46
Norby’s Work Perks, 53
Gregory J. Norman Funeral Chapel, 70
Opp Construction, 77
Praxis Strategy Group, 66
Rhapsody Spa & Salon, 53
Simonson Station Stores, 52
Sterling Carpet One, 74
Swanson & Warcup, Ltd., 47
Kelly Thompson, Greenberg Realty, 79
Trojan Promotions, 46
Valley Oral & Facial Surgery, 63
Xcel Energy, 57
You Are Here Gallery, 51, 77, 79
Zimney Foster, PC, 63
AdvertisersArtwise, 52
Brady Martz & Associates, PC, 53
Browning Arts, 53
EAPC, 69
Edward Jones, Mark A. Larsen, AAMS, 64
Forks Chem-Dry, 52
Gate City Bank, 51
GoodInsurance, 57
Skip Greenberg, Greenberg Realty, 69
Meland Architecture, 53
Monarch Travel & Tours, 64
Reichert Armstrong Law Office, 66
Rite Spot Liquor Store, 60
Robert Vogel Law Office, PC, 60
Shaft, Reis & Shaft, Ltd., 57
David C. Thompson, PC, 53
Valley Car Wash, 66
Vilandre, 79
Buy local. Read the sponsor pages
to learn about those who
invest in the Museum.
Almost all are locally owned
and operated.
— David Blehm, ChairmanMuseum Board of Trustees
3
Ross Rolshoven is a many-sided man. Foremost, he is
an artist who works in assemblage, hand-colored photography,
and painting. Among his exhibitions was a solo show of
assemblages at the North Dakota Museum of Art in 2002. The
work was based in the iconography of the West, in historical
myths and representations of cowboys and Indians. These themes
overlap with family and relationships and contemporary life.
Rolshoven is a collector of early Western settlement and
American Indian art and artifacts. He is completing his fifth year
on Medora’s North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame Board of
Directors. He has been a volunteer for numerous civic events and
charities over the past thirty years, including the North Dakota
Museum of Art.
In addition to making and collecting art, Rolshoven collects and
restores vintage boats. He is North Dakota’s only professional
boat racer, having finished as high as fourth place in the National
APBA tournament in Kankakee, Illinois—and totaled a boat or
two along the way.
In everyday life, however, he is a legal investigator who handles
high profile cases involving corporate, civil, and criminal
matters. He owns and operates Great Plains Claims, Inc., along
with his brother Reid, in Grand Forks, North Dakota. His work
routinely takes him across the Upper Midwest—a boon to his
collecting and his need to acquire endless numbers of objects for
making assemblages.
Rolshoven is a Summa Cum Laude graduate of the University of
North Dakota with a degree in Business Administration. He has
three children; his oldest daughter, Ashley, is a professional barrel
racer living in Texas. Daughter Jensen and son Carsen attend
school in Grand Forks.
Ross Rolshoven, Auctioneer Auction Chairs
COURTNEY “DOC” DOCKEN (above left) is an Advertising
Executive with Midcontinent Business Solutions. His passion for
art started when he began to meet local artists. “I was totally
amazed how my first purchase energized my surroundings and
added another dimension to my life.” This inspired Doc to
become involved with the North Dakota Museum of Art and the
Empire Arts Center to help them receive various grant
opportunities. Doc enjoys sharing his experience and interest in
art with others and how it has influenced personal design in his
living space.
MOJDEH MARDANI (following page) teaches Electrical
Engineering at the Univesity of North Dakota School of
Engineering and Mines. She is also the faculty advisor for the
Society of Women Engineers at UND. Mardani is originally from
Iran. Her family is spread over three different continents. She has
traveled near and far but still has a long list of places to visit and
experience. Mojdeh treasures her two kids and wonderful family.
She enjoys working out at the local YMCA where she teaches
belly dancing. Mardani has performed annually at the UND
Feast of Nations.
KELLY THOMPSON (above right) is a realtor with Greenberg
Realty in Grand Forks as well as a co-owner of Ink, Inc.
Screenprinting and Urban Stampede Coffeehouse. He’s the father
of three active teenage children, Navy, Fiona and Beck. Kelly is
also an artist and one of his recent paintings is featured in this
auction.
4
Rules of Auction
• Each registered guest will receive a bidding card as part of
the price of a ticket. Upon receiving the bidding card, each
guest will be asked to sign a statement vowing to abide by
the Rules of the Auction listed in this catalog.
• Absentee bidders will either leave their bids on an Absentee
Bid Form with Museum personnel in person or by phone, or
bid by phone the night of the auction. Absentee bidders, by
filling out the form, agree to abide by the Rules of the
Auction.
• Each bidder will use his or her own bidding number during
the Auction.
• All sales are final.
• In September 2002, the Office of the North Dakota State
Tax Commissioner determined that the gross receipts from
the sales made at the Auction are subject to sales tax at
6.75 %. This does not apply to out-of-state buyers who have
works shipped to them.
• In the event of a dispute between bidders, the auctioneer
shall either determine the successful bidder or re-auction
the item in dispute.
• Purchasers may pay for items at any point following the
sale of a work but must pay for all art work before the
conclusion of the evening—unless other arrangements are
in place. Absentee bidders will be charged on the evening of
the Auction or an invoice will be sent the next business day.
• Works of art in the Auction have minimum bids placed on
them by the artist. This confidential “reserve” is a price
agreed upon between the artist and the North Dakota
Museum of Art below which a work of art will not be sold.
Auction Chairs
Auction Committee
Jan Heitmann
Adam Kemp
Tara Johnson
Bryan Hoime
Sally Opp
The Autumn Art Auction serves many purposes, not the least of
which it allows me to visit artist studios as I personally select all
of the work that is included. As I began the process this year, I
looked back at last year’s results. Finally, we are truly developing
a buying audience for art and artists. I am grateful to all of you
who came on board with your support and your money. As you
know, this auction set the precedent for paying artists before
paying ourselves.
The Museum has never asked artists to donate work—although
some do. Instead, we allow them to establish their minimum
prices, an amount the Museum guarantees. The rules of the
game: The artists first set a minimum price, which they are
guaranteed to receive. If work does not reach minimum, it will be
brought in by the Museum and returned to artist. Any amount
over the reserve bid and the Museum’s equal match is split 50/50
between the artist and the Museum. For example: If a reserve bid
is $200, and the work sells for $395, the artist receives $200 and
the Museum receives $195. If the same work sells for $500, the
artist and the Museum each receive $250.
I have been pleased to see other auctions in the region have
adopted our policy. Therefore, instead of always asking artists to
donate, they now can count on actual income from auctions.
And, bless you; you have not forgotten that this is also a benefit
for the Museum so are generous in your bidding.
Each year we widen our pool of artists with ties to our region and
Museum, thus creating a richer environment for art to flourish.
Not all of the artists live locally but they all have some
relationship with either the Museum of Art or the region.
Each summer I receive a stream of visiting artists who are passing
through North Dakota. Many long-term relationships begin this
way. This summer Jon Goodman came by. Who is he?
Photogravure’s unquestioned contemporary master, the man who
taught himself the photographic process that had been lost by the
early years of the twentieth century. He was sent my way by
Bernice Ficek-Swenson, a former Museum employee and now a
noted photogravure artist in her own right. I decided to introduce
you to this marvelous art form through Bernie and Jon’s work.
(See page 61 for more about Jon Goodman and photogravure.)
Also, if you turn to page 80 in the catalog, you will find my
interview with John Colle Rogers, another introduction this year.
John grew up in Grand Forks, where his father was the first Dean
of the College of Fine Arts. He returned this summer as the first
Visiting Artist at McCanna House, our new Artist-in-Residence
compound left to us by Margery McCanna.
We could not publish this catalog without the underwriting of
our sponsors. Please take your business to these companies and
individuals; thank them for their significant contribution; and
note how many are locally owned and operated. Sometimes they
say, “I don’t care if I get an ad, I just want to give to you guys.”
Supporting cultural life is not in the interest of most chains but
rather has become the business of the butcher, the baker and the
keeper of bees—and of Ellen McKinnon who buys her own ad
because it pleases her.
Remember, when you buy through the Auction, the price
includes framing or presentation. Frames are often custom made
by the artists or the Museum staff who use archival materials. This
alone adds significant value to most of the Auction sales.
—Laurel Reuter, Director
From the Museum Director
If we don’t support them,
who will?
5
Lot #1
James O’Rourke(1934 - 2011)
Visby (Red Cathedral), 1966
Oil on Masonite
38 x 62 inches (image)
Range: $1,500 - 3,000 framed
James O’Rourke was born 1934 in Langdon, North
Dakota. Always interested in art, he studied under Cy Running at
Concordia College in Moorhead before moving to the University
of Idaho to pursue French and architecture. Five years in the U.S.
Army, Second Cavalry Division, followed. That took him to
Nuremberg for three years where he could look at art in all of his
off-hours. And he painted. Finally, in 1960 he stumbled into his
life work. He and his late brother Orland Rourke founded the
Rourke Art Gallery on June 18, 1960. (In the 1950s, James
reclaimed the full family name after the “O” was dropped during
immigration to the United States.) In 1975, O’Rourke partnered
with the Red River Art Center and formed the Plains Art Museum.
O’Rourke served as the director until resigning in 1987. The
Rourke Art Gallery on South Fourth Street in Moorhead was later
joined by the Rourke Museum in the old Post Office building on
Main Street when it was vacated by the Plains Art Museum,
which moved across the River to Fargo.
And he painted. The work in the auction was based upon his
travels around Sweden. Visby is the capital of Gotland, the
country’s largest island, which has been inhabited for more than
7,000 years. Visby was invaded by thirteenth century Germans
who left behind spectacular medieval churches, including the
cathedral painted here by Jim O’Rourke. Today Visby is a
UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of Sweden’s best-
preserved medieval cities.
And he nurtured artists. When Jim O’Rourke died, the High
Plains Reader printed responses, including Jonathan Twingley:
I’ve often thought that making paintings and drawings for a living
is a ridiculous notion, and most of the time I’m right. But then I
think about James O’Rourke and suddenly it doesn’t sound like
such a crazy proposition after all: Poetry, Music, Art — yes! —
YES! — these things matter, these things matter more than matter,
these things add up to more than a life, each and every one of
them are once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. Like James O’Rourke.
Twingley concluded, James O’Rourke always called me “Mr.
Twingley.” I always called him “James.”
All proceeds from this sale go to theNorth Dakota Museum of Art forenhancement of its collection.
7
Lot #3, #4, #5
John Colle RogersOakland, California
Glow Sculptures, 2010
Welded steel coated with
Glow-In-The-Dark powder
Each 3 x 3 x 3 inches
Range: $75 - 125 each
Lot #2
John Colle RogersOakland, California
There Goes the Neighborhood (Giant
Egret, Never Get Out of the Limo), 2009
Giclee reproduction of watercolor
13.25 x 11.2 inches
Range: $50 - 100
John Colle Rogers grew up in Grand Forks, but
currently resides in Oakland, California. After years of creating
multi-media installations, he has recently decided to make
smaller, more intimate works. The tiny whimsical sculptures are
inspired by modernist sensibilities, and their humor is
accentuated by the glow-in-the-dark powder coating covering
them. “Yup, they seriously glow in the dark!” maintains the artist.
An architectural blacksmith by trade, Rogers is left with many
“drop” pieces of tubing and angle iron. The works are created
with these leftovers, minimally manipulated and combined
spontaneously.
Lot #3
Lot #4
Lot #5
There Goes the Neighborhood (Giant Egret, Never Get Out of
the Limo) above is a giclee print from a watercolor series in
which unicorns populate empty freeways bearing witness to the
odd goings-on around them. The title is a spoof on a scene from
Apocalypse Now where the character of Chef, after being
frightened by a tiger, repeatedly screams, “Never get out of the
boat!” The giant avenging egret is a nod to the waterfowl who
grace Oakland’s industrial waterways, wading amongst the
broken concrete and submerged shopping carts. And the
unicorns look on . . . .
See page 80 for an interview with
John Rogers by Laurel Reuter
8
Lot #6
Andrew StarkFargo, North Dakota
Winter Light, 2005
Oil on canvas
24 x 48 inches
Range: $400 - 500
Andrew Stark says of his paintings, The surface texture,
color, line and content of this painting is intended to visually
express my reaction to the northern landscape. I am interested in
reinterpreting the traditional Modernist portrayal of the sublime
while directly confronting the optical nature of the painting
experience.
Born in Two Harbors, Minnesota, Andrew David Stark grew up
in Fargo, North Dakota, and has pursued numerous artforms
since childhood, including theater, music, drawing, painting and
sculpture. He attended Minnesota State University in Moorhead,
Minnesota, where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts. In the
spring of 2009, Andrew completed a Master of Fine Arts with a
concentration in painting at the University of North Dakota in
Grand Forks. He is currently an instructor at Minnesota State
University Moorhead and lives and works in Fargo.
Lot #7
Don KnudsonBemidji, Minnesota
Bed Head, 2011
Poplar and pine
48 x 60 x 3 inches
Range: $400 - 600
Lot #8
Marlon Davidson &Don Knudson
Bemidji, Minnesota
Barn Board Quartet, 2011
Mixed media
64 x 1 x 3 inches
Range: $700 - 800
Marlon Davidson & Don Knudson have
devoted their lives to art, first individually and ultimately as
collaborators. The work in this Auction results from over a dozen
years of working together in wood and collage to make relief art
of varying sizes and shifting configurations. Their collaborative
art works are in private and public collections throughout the
United States and Europe.
Both artists also work separately. For example, Don Knudson
incorporates his familiar stick constructions into functional
furniture, such as the bed headboard in this Auction.
Davidson and Knudson were both born in northern Minnesota
and attended Bemidji State College and the Minneapolis School
of Art (now the Minneapolis College of Art and Design).
Davidson combined his art with teaching, first in public schools
and later at Bemidji State University in the Visual Arts
Department. Knudson has worked since the late 50s as a
sculptor and furniture maker.
We are lifetime artists. We have worked for more than four
decades, both in the Twin Cities and later in Bemidji where we
have lived for nineteen years. We think of our lives as an artistic
statement. The great art historian Bernard Berenson wrote
repeatedly about “life as a work of art.” Whereas one never
arrives at that state, we find it a worthwhile journey. Making art
objects is an everyday part of our lives. We think of our art as a
way of explaining ourselves to ourselves. Through it, we try to
understand our culture, and to live actively within it. We also
explore the past through our art—especially the history of art.
While we use a variety of materials, our main source of
inspiration is nature and historical art.
We worked and lived for twenty years in the Twin Cities and are
aware that our work is informed by the art and artists we knew
while living there.
9
Pirjo Berg suggests that color, texture, and shape are at the
core of her paintings, which are inspired by the lines, repetition,
texture, and geometric forms she sees in the familiar and mostly
Finnish textiles she lives with in her home. The rhythms,
contrasts, and lines of Yellow Wind reinforce the idea of textile
just as her thick application of paint is tactile, beckoning the
viewer to touch.
This Finnish artist was born in Helsinki and grew up there. She
moved to Seattle in 1991 with her geologist husband, returned to
art school in Finland from 1996-2000, and rejoined her
husband in Seattle in 2000 after graduating with a BFA in
painting from the School of Art and Media, Tampere, Finland.
She also studied with the EDGE Program, Artist Trust, Seattle,
Washington, in 2005.
Lot #9
Pirjo BergGrand Forks, North Dakota
Yellow Wind, 2011
Oil on canvas
56 x 40 inches
Range: $800 - 1,100
Career highlights include the six-person exhibition “Paint Local”
at North Dakota Museum of Art (2009); a solo show in Seattle’s
Gallery 63Eleven, which was reviewed on NPR’s Washington
affiliate by critic Gary Faigin (2008); and a three-person exhibit
at Seattle’s Nordic Heritage Museum (2007). Commissions
include one by the NBBJ (architecture firm) for Valley Medical
Center in Renton, Washington, and another by the Max-Hotel.
(Seattle artists each created work for one guest room. Catalog
produced.) She was invited on the curatorial team for “Nordic
Artists Northwest,” an invitational exhibit at the Nordic Heritage
Museum, and Convergence–Ballard Building C Artists (where she
maintained a studio and helped develop the Ballard ArtWalk). In
August 2010, Berg opened a two-person exhibition at the Vanhan
Suurtorin Galleria, Turku, Finland.
Sponsored by
Leighton Broadcasting
Lot #10
John SnyderDecorah, Iowa
Choir Studies, 2007
Diptych
Woodcut
17 x 13 inches each
Range: $600 - 800
John Snyder for decades has wanted to find a “golden plot
of land” upon which to build a chapel or grotto. In 2008 he
moved back home to northeastern Iowa from North Carolina. A
year later he took a step closer to fulfilling that longing by
purchasing a home in the country which he hopes will be his
golden plot of land. In “No Lo Se,” his 2010 exhibition at the
North Dakota Museum of Art, he explored the themes, signs, and
symbols of that life-long quest.
In the artist’s dream chapel one thing remains constant. There will
be a choir; maybe a whole section of the chapel will be filled by
a choir. The singers might be painted or sculpted, he isn’t sure.
Back in 1994, he spent six months as an artist-in-residence in the
foundries of the Kohler Company. I tried to cast the choir
members in porcelain but only two remain of that early
experiment and I never had another opportunity to work on that
scale. I did think about concrete. Somewhere along the way, he
decided to make woodcuts of singers—maybe six, maybe
10,000; maybe as a group, maybe individually. The two works in
the Auction are his beginning. The artist imagines that they could
be hung in the chapel if it ever “goes on the road” as an
exhibition. And come winter, he will begin to carve members of
the choir from his accumulated pile of basswood logs.
Snyder says his personal struggle has been to come to terms with
his upbringing within a middle-of-the-road Protestant church
(Presbyterian), and his journey from a Western attitude toward
spirituality toward the mysticism of the East.
The artist’s current body of work, including these two woodcuts,
grows out of his passion for Oceanic and African art, Buddhist
cave temples (in particular the Grottoes of Mogao, a World
Heritage Site on the Silk Road located near the ancient town of
Dunhuang in northwestern China) and from the Northwest
Coast, a Nootka Whalers’ Washing Shrine, now in the collection
of the American Museum of Natural History. Snyder came across
linocuts in the Hirshhorn Museum by Nigerian artists Rufus
Ogundele and Adebisi Fabunmi and realized that he could have
made them. Those early prints made in the early 1970s are
echoed in Choir Studies.
John Snyder was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1956. He
received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
in 1980, having first completed two years at Colorado State
University, Fort Collins. His first major exhibition was at the
Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1992. The catalog essay
begins, John Snyder recently referred to himself, jokingly, as an
‘Iowa corn-bred mystic,’ a perception confirmed more than ever
by the direction of his current work.
In 2003, Snyder showed at the Weinstein Gallery in
Minneapolis. One of the three major paintings in that show, The
Communion, was purchased for the North Dakota Museum of
Art by an anonymous Museum donor from Minneapolis. After a
seven-year break, Snyder opened “No Lo Se” at the North
Dakota Museum of Art in August 2010. Two exhibitions followed
at Art Haus in Decorah, Iowa (2010) and the Bockley Gallery in
Minneapolis (2011). The artist gave four woodcuts and a large
painting on paper to the North Dakota Museum of Art during his
2010 exhibition at the Museum. 11
Lot #11
Zhimin GuanMoorhead, Minnesota
Memory of Home, 2011
Oil on canvas
32 x 32 inches
Range: $1,800 - 2,200
Zhimin Guan: For the last few years, I have been
experimenting with creating landscape paintings on various
surfaces and scales. My intention has been to blend traditional
landscape painting with expressionism, conceptualism and the
aesthetics of Oriental philosophy. Each summer I return to China,
where a couple of years ago I began to paint the streets and
traditional houses of my childhood home in Anhui.
The houses depicted in the auction painting were built during the
Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) in what has become known as the
Anhui style, reflecting a combination of scholarly impulse and
business. Six hundred years ago, Anhui was a wealthy center of
shipping. Still today, the narrow walking street is paved with
maroon flagstones. Two- or three-story buildings flank the street
built in the local Anhui style of stone base, brick construction,
and black tile roof. The thick walls are made of durable brick
shingles coated with an earthen paste, not unlike adobe, but
painted white. The layout of these buildings commonly is
configured with shops in front, while residences and workshops
are to the rear. According to Museum Director Laurel Reuter,
“this is a most successful painting for the artist in that he has
married his loose, abstract handling of paint with the depiction
of a classic architectural subject dear to him.”
Zhimin Guan was born in China in 1962. He started to paint
when he was nine years old, influenced by his father, Chintian
Guan, a traditional Chinese calligrapher and ink painter. Guan
received rigorous training in calligraphy and traditional ink
painting before he was fifteen years old. At the same time, he
developed a strong interest in the Chinese philosophy of Taoism
and in ancient Chinese poetry. During his BFA studies at Fuyang
Teachers College in China, he concentrated on oil painting and
again received intensive training in drawing and painting in the
Western classical style. From 1985 to 1994, he taught painting,
drawing, and design at Dalian Institute of Industrial Design in
Dalian, China. Besides teaching, Guan devoted himself to his art
practice. Then in the spring of 1995, Guan moved to the United
States. Since 1998, he has been a professor of art and design at
Minnesota State University Moorhead and visiting professor at
China Dalian University of Technology, School of Art and
Architecture; Anhui Normal University; School of Art, in Wuhu,
Anhui Province; and the Dalian International Institute of Art and
Design, among others.
Sponsored by
River City Jewelers
Lot #12
Samuel JohnsonSt. Joseph, Minnesota
Wood-fired Coil Jar, 2005
Wood-fired stoneware
21.5 inches high, 21-inch diameter
Range: $800 - 1,200
Samuel Johnson: I used a method of coiling and
paddling to make this jar, that is, I construct the form with snake-
like coils and beat the surface with a textured paddle. The
paddling compresses the walls, defines the form, and leaves
behind textured marks on the surface. Because I’ve used multiple
paddles, each carved by hand to leave distinct marks in the clay,
there is a variety of patterns on the exterior. There is a second
pattern on the interior of the jar. Here, I’ve used an anvil made
from the cross section of a pine branch. The pattern of concentric
rings comes from the growth rings of the branch. The anvil is
pressed against the interior of the jar while the exterior is
walloped with the paddle during the final stages of forming.
After forming, this jar was placed in a wood-burning kiln without
additional glaze or surface decoration. The colors and patterns
you see are either a direct result of the forming method, clay, or
the firing itself. Marked by ashes and charcoal, the jar takes on a
patina of somber hues. The shiny glass-like areas are from ashes
melting on the surface of the jar. During its three-day firing, ashes
lift and float through the kiln like snow, gently landing on the
shoulder of the jar where they eventually melt and form a
primitive glaze. There are also dark pitted markings on the lower
portion of the “face” of the jar. This is the side that was pointed
toward the fire in the kiln. The dark areas are where burning
embers came in contact with the clay jar and dripping, melting
ash. The clay has started to bloat a bit – a testament to the heat
and violent conditions of the firing.
This jar has a feeling I much admire in pottery. It possesses a
tension that exists between strength and vulnerability. Like our
bodies, its scars tell the story of its nobility and long endurance.
My family and I are moving to Beibei, China, this fall. I’m
teaching at Southwest University. Later in 2012, I will build a
wood-fire kiln and develop new glazes from straw and wood
ashes using sunflower ashes from the Red River Valley and wheat
ashes from my home towns of Breckenridge, Minnesota and
Wahpeton, North Dakoa. Both yield interesting high silica glazes,
which produce creame-colored surfaces.
Samuel Johnson was born on the eastern prairie of the Red River
Valley in 1973. He graduated from the University of Minnesota
Morris in painting and ceramics before undertaking almost four
years of apprenticeship in Richard Bresnahan’s pottery studio. In
2000, he was invited as a guest of Denmark’s Design School
while also working at the International Ceramic Center in
Skaelskor and as an assistant in private porcelain studios. He
lived in New York before leaving for Japan as a studio guest of
Koie Ryoji. In 2005, Johnson earned his MFA from the University
of Iowa. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at the
College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University.
Sponsored by
WDAZ
13
14
Lot #13
Adam KempGrand Forks, North Dakota
Wood Duck and the Weeds, 2006 -11
Acrylic on board with artist’s frame
48.5 x 61 inches (framed)
Range: $1,800 - 2,200
Adam Kemp: I sketched out the painting in 2006 but didn’t
finish it until this summer (2011). It was the most successful of
three I made of this man-made landscape. The painting looks
eastward on the Greenway along the Red River. I have
incorporated the foot bridge at the Lincoln Park Golf Course. It is
part of a larger series “Where would we be if we didn’t have
bridges?” After the Greenway was landscaped, wild flowers crept
in to mingle in the plantings. The City still sends a tractor in to
spray the dandelions, which makes me laugh. I think the
meadow of dandelions in full bloom is stunning. This is the first
year I saw a wood duck on the Greenway in a big cottonwood so
I painted it in the upper right.
Kemp was born in Ugley, Essex, England. He recieved a BFA
from Newcastle upon Tyne in 1986 and earned a MFA from the
University of North Dakota in 1989. Kemp considers himself
“mostly” North Dakotan and certainly American. He wants to
extend a special thank you this year to his wife, Farmers Union
Insurance, Rotary Noon Club, Ruth Meiers Adolescent Treatment
Center, Turtle River State Park, Nelson County Art Council, the
North Dakota Museum of Art, and NOVAC. This last year Kemp
had solo shows in Grand Forks at the Third Street Gallery and at
Frank and Lucy Matejcek’s barn north of Grand Forks.
Below: Lot #14
Suzanne FinkGrand Forks, North Dakota
Snow Too Soon, 2011
Oil on canvas
27.5 x 34.5 inches (image)
Range: $400 - 600
SuZanne Fink describes her painting process: I try to
simplify landscapes to the experience of being in it. I often
choose the outdoors as subject matter because it is always
accessible, be it wilderness, farmlands or cities, broad vistas or
intimate spaces. I prefer to paint on site; however, with our
winters, I sometimes substitute drawing and photography as my
reference. I paint with oils because I paint slowly and want the
long drying time to solidify the surface, layering and mixing
while I paint. To achieve my most essential statement, I abstract
15
Lot #15
Dan JonesFargo, North Dakota
Meyers Pond, 2010
Oil on canvas
24 x 24 inches
Range: $1,400 - 1,600
Dan Jones, who lives and works in Fargo, is among North
Dakota’s few artists able to make a living from their art. He has
long practiced plein aire painting, gathering with a group of
fellow artists and going to the countryside to sketch and paint.
The landscape of the Red River basin provides him with endless
subjects. In the summer of 2007 Jones joined fellow plein aire
painters Carl Oltvedt and Robert Crow at the Plains Art Museum
in the exhibition “Personal Journeys on Common Ground.”
On April 7, 2009, Dan suffered an aneurysm. He was airlifted to
the University of Minnesota hospital where he stayed until May
1st. After a month at MeritCare, Fargo, he was admitted to a
skilled nursing facility specializing in brain trauma rehabilitation
located in Mandan, North Dakota. Due to the severity of his
injury, Dan was unable to pick up a paint brush or a pencil for a
long time. Finally, however, he has fully recovered. According to
Reuter, “Dan has returned to painting with renewed vigor and
deeply-felt gratefulness for another chance at life. I have always
been a big fan of his drawing, considering him the best in the
entire region, especially with charcoal. Recently I challenged
him, ‘Dan, I will give you a solo drawing exhibition,’ to which he
replied, ‘Okay.’” The show will open within the next eighteen
months.
The artist’s paintings are included in many museum, corporate
and private collections including the National Endowment for the
Arts, the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, North Dakota, and the
Rourke Art Museum, Moorhead, Minnesota. His work is handled
by Ecce Gallery in Fargo.
the original drawing, which is often quite realistic. I turn the
canvas, scrape it, experiment with color and try to challenge the
way I organize and frame a scene, coming close to and
sometimes creating an entirely new landscape painting.
This piece was started in 2010 and finished in the spring of 2011.
The title Snow Too Soon was both a lament that the trees had not
even yet lost their leaves before it snowed, and that I wanted to
be outdoors painting, not in my studio.
Suzanne Fink received her BFA from Pacific Northwest College of
Art, Portland, and has studied at Oregon State University
(Corvallis) and University of Minnesota (Minneapolis). As Director
of Education at the North Dakota Museum of Art, Fink develops art
programs for all ages. Specifically, she is instructor and
coordinator of the Summer Arts Day Camps as well as children’s
classes throughout the year. She works on Program Curriculum
Development for the Museum’s Rural Arts Initiative and Director
of ArtSmarts for at-risk teens. Through her efforts the Museum
received President Clinton’s Coming Up Taller award. In 2009, she
won the University of North Dakota Frida Kahlo Phenomenal
Woman Award for her work as an educator and artist.
Fink has always been a working artist, but in 2009 she moved her
studio from her home to a rented space in downtown Grand
Forks. She has shown regionally in venues throughout Oregon
and in North Dakota at such places as Grand Forks’ Empire Art
Center and the Urban Stampede; the Northern Lights Gallery,
Mayville; James Memorial Art Center, Williston; Cando Art
Center; and the University of Mary, Bismarck.
Sponsored by
All Seasons Garden Center
William Charles Harbort, a.k.a. Billy Chuck, is
originally from New York where he worked as a commercial
artist, a package designer for a major cosmetics company, an art
director for a children’s educational software company, and an
automotive magazine illustrator. Harbort is currently a professor
in the art department at Minot State University. Happy with his
life in North Dakota and with teaching, he says, being a college
professor has provided me the opportunity to explore painting;
my commercial art background taught me the importance of
marketing, sales and hustle. Harbort has an active exhibition
record and regularly shows in many “lowbrow” art galleries.
His painting is often inspired by pop culture and bits of
ephemera. Paint-by-numbers, coupons and clip art, are just a few
ingredients often found in our visual culture and in his art. Bill is
fascinated with individual ingredients and the infinite messages
that can be expressed by combining and juxtaposing them
through collage. It is through their relationship that he discovers
meaning and expresses thought. Allusion, suggestion and
investigation become an important part of the viewing
experience. Love, true-love, lust, temptation, luck, loss, life, and
death are recurring subject matters in his work.
Harbort is known for his generosity, his belief that ordinary
people should be able to afford his paintings, his wife family of
wife, boys and greyhounds, and for founding NOTSTOCK, a
rollicking three-day event where students and pros come together
to produce posters, print editions, and experiments in silk
screening. They are joined by some of the hottest modern,
alternative, and local rock bands. At the heart of it all is Billy
Chuck, an associate professor of graphic arts at Minot State, who
knocks out silkscreen posters with the best of them.
Lot #16
William harbortMinot, North Dakota
Head Over Heels, 2011
Mixed media with collage
36 x 28 inches with artist-painted frame
Range: $600 - 800
Lot #17
Brian PaulsenGrand Forks, North Dakota
Street No. 4, 2011
Watercolor
3 x 4.5 inches (image)
Range: $350 - 450 framed
Lot #18
Terry JelsingRugby, North Dakota
Vanishing America, 2005
Oil on paper
17 x 23 inches (image)
Range: $450 - 550 framed
Terry Jelsing, a native North Dakotan, creates art that is
spiritually tied to the prairie landscape. He says, Although my
work often references a common place shared by people who
live in rural environments, I am more concerned about exposing
the internal and private environments of one’s life. I try to make
the viewer aware of common, universal relationships by
depicting this energy in painting, sculpture and drawings.
Born December 10, 1954, in Rugby, North Dakota, Jelsing’s
artistic abilities appeared at an early age. By the time he
graduated from Rugby High School he had several public
commissions to his credit. Before enrolling in the BFA program at
the University of North Dakota, he completed a three-year tour
of duty with the Army in Europe. He later returned to Europe to
study at the Institute of European Studies in Vienna, Austria,
where he was strongly influenced by the German expressionists.
In 1986 he completed his MFA at the University of New Mexico.
During that time he was part of the first American post-modernist
movement, experimenting with time-art studies and conceptual
projects. His graduate exhibition, “Circus for Matthew,” received
national media coverage and was published in Artspace.
After graduate school, Jelsing taught multimedia courses at the
University of North Dakota, served as director of Beall Park Arts
Center in Bozeman, Montana, and became curator and then
Director of the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, North Dakota. Later
named executive director, he guided the museum’s
transformation of an historic International Harvester branch
house into an award-winning arts facility.
In 2000, Jelsing established Eye In the Heart Studio in Fargo and
began teaching art and design at North Dakota State University.
In 2006, he relocated his studio to Rugby and began teaching art
at Rugby High School. In 2011 he left teaching to work full time
as an artist. His studio is a former granary on his family’s original
homestead outside of Rugby, where he lives with his wife Cathy.
Brian Paulsen makes small paintings incorporating
places he calls home. He hails from Seattle, where, as a child and
then a young man, his environs were circumscribed by his
bicycle and later the public bus system. The work in the Auction
springs from this early environment.
According to the artist, I saw a miniature juried show advertised
somewhere. I have been rejected from such exhibitions in the
past because my small works were slightly larger than the rules
allowed. So I made Street No. 4 as a true miniature, 3 x 4.5
inches. Actually I made four paintings, all based in Seattle.
When I am in Seattle I take photographs of various neighbor-
hoods, especially the immigrant neighborhood of my youth with
its blend of Asians and Jews, Italians and American Indians, and
a mix of Northern Europeans. It would be boring to just copy the
photograph in a painting so I add objects that seem to relate but
which fit no narrative.
I was raised with geometry all around me especially in the
materials of carpentry, building, repairing, making, and all those
other useful occupations. My grandfather was a sign painter and
a muralist. My father was an inventor and builder of houses,
cabinets, and boats. My studio was in the same space as his
wood and tools. The realm of Popular Mechanics—a service
magazine founded in 1902 to present clearly written technical
material to the average American man—schooled my
imagination. I came to know illustration as practiced by
professionals, a world given form and order through signs and
symbols and hand lettering. Still today, Paulsen hand letters the
exhibition titles on the walls of the North Dakota Museum of
Art—maybe the last museum in America to be thus graced.
Paulsen, one of North Dakota’s important painters, taught at the
University of North Dakota until 2007. UND named him a
Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor, its highest honor. In 2007,
the North Dakota Museum of Art mounted a solo exhibition
which resulted in a book about Paulsen’s work (2008). He has
been visiting artist at dozens of colleges and universities and
shown in more than 100 juried exhibitions, eighty solo shows,
and 200 invitational exhibitions.
18
In 1928, Barr was appointed Chairman of the Art Department at
the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, a position he
held until his death in 1953. In December 1938, thirty-one of
Barr’s fifty-six Badlands paintings were exhibited in Memorial
Hall of the North Dakota State Capitol Building in Bismarck.
Described by then–Governor William Langer as a “visual record
of one of the state’s greatest scenic assets,” the paintings had such
titles as Breaks of the Little Missouri, East Rim: Painted Canyon,
Teddy Roosevelt’s Horsepasture Road, and Ranchhouse in the
Badlands. When parts of the exhibit toured in the East, viewers
were said to have expressed surprise at the organized pattern of
light, shade, texture, and vivid colors (such as blue skies, purple
rocks, scoria-colored buttes, and green plateaus) that Barr used
as well as disbelief that such scenery existed. The scenes were all
too real, however, to those who were familiar with them.
Barr died in late 1953 at the age of sixty-one, having suffered a
cerebral hemorrhage as a result of a stroke. His work lives on,
though, in private collections all over the country, including that
of the International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation, the
North Dakota Museum of Art, and the North Dakota Governor’s
Office. His book North Dakota Artists, a collection of
biographical sketches on notable visual artists from North
Dakota, was published posthumously in 1954.
In addition to painting, Barr was also a lecturer, teacher,
illustrator, and poet. He served as State Chairman for American
Art Week, has been added to the Honor Roll of the American
Artist Professional League, and co-authored with Eugene Myers
the art textbook Creative Lettering.
Lot #19
Paul E. Barr1892 - 1954
California Hills, 1939
Oil on Masonite
20 x 32 inches
Range: $1,000 - 1,500 framed
Paul E. Barr saw and painted many scenes of North
America and Europe between the time he left the Tipton County,
Indiana farm where he was born (1892) and raised, and the time
he died of a stroke in Grand Forks, where he had served twenty-
five years as Chairman of the Art Department at the University of
North Dakota. During his career, he painted in more than half of
the states in America and in more than ten foreign countries. He
maintained studios in New York City, Paris, Colorado, and
Indiana and attended eight different colleges and universities
including the Art Institute of Chicago, Sorbonne University of
Paris, and the universities of Colorado, Chicago, and Indiana.
Subjects of his paintings included architecture, landscapes, and
other scenery of Holland, Switzerland, and Mexico along with
rivers, woodlands, southwestern landscapes, and national parks
and mountain ranges, such as the Rockies, Grand Tetons,
Catskills, Alps, and Tyrolese Alps. During the summer of 1938,
Barr spent six weeks and traveled 2,000 miles in North Dakota’s
Badlands to produce fifty-six paintings of the area.
Something of a prodigy, at the age of eleven he exhibited in the
Louisiana Purchase Exposition at the World’s Fair in St. Louis, and
in 1916 he became an annual exhibitor at the John Herron
Galleries in Indianapolis. He painted steadily, exhibiting his work
in the Marshall Fields department store and the Hoosier Salon
and Galleries in Chicago; the Indiana Artists Club and Pettis
Galleries in Indianapolis; the Fort Wayne Art Museum; the
Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach, Florida; the William
Rockhill Nelson Gallery in Kansas City, Missouri; and
Rockefeller Center in New York City, among other places.
All proceeds from this salego to the North Dakota
Museum of Art forenhancement of its
collection.
19
Guillermo Guardia (Memo) was born in Lima,
Peru, in 1975. He hails from an ancient pre-Colombian ceramic
tradition. From the time he was little he was steeped in the
images and materials of those early potters. In particular, he
loved the work of the Mochica culture, a pre-Incan civilization
that flourished on the northern coast of Peru from about 200 BC
to AD 600, known especially for its pottery vessels modeled into
naturalistic human and animal figures. The work in the auction,
Mama Cora, is the Incan name of the wife of an Incan Emperor.
I have always admired Renaissance art. When I was a teen I
wanted to be like Michelangelo and sculpt the human body and
all of its beauty. Back in Peru I took numerous anatomy classes
and learned to draw and model the human body, Guardia said.
When I began my MFA degree at University of North Dakota, I
knew I wanted to continue using the human figure as my main
form of art. After building numerous figures in clay, I concluded
I was failing to create the figure I had envisioned. I was not
pleased with any of my new works, unsure of what direction to
take my artwork. My frustration was compounded by the fact that
it was my first time in the United States, and my first time out of
Peru. Everything was new for me. I had problems communicating
with my peers, as it is different to learn English in a Spanish
speaking country than practicing it in the United States. Some
days I went home with painful headaches.
In 2003, I turned my attention to building clay figures that looked
as if they were thinking (The Thinker by Rodin was a big
influence). I quickly finished my first new figure. The new work
looked good, but again, it didn’t match the image I had in mind.
I sat in front of it, contemplated for a while, took a carving tool,
and began to draw some lines over the surface. Eventually those
lines crossed each other and became patterns. It made the figure
look as if it was built of individual pieces, becoming the
inspiration for my current puzzle piece series. The first figure in
this series was filled with these puzzle pieces. This puzzle figure
was holding a single piece in his hand as if pondering where it fit
or where it came from. Perhaps the image of the puzzle piece
came from a childhood memory as I remembered my sister
always playing with puzzles, something that was beyond my
abilities and patience.
Most of us have felt the sensation of something missing and not
knowing what it is. We have felt that uncomfortable feeling of
emptiness and are unable to describe it. I don’t believe life is a
walk in the park anymore. It is difficult and complex. The puzzle
pieces represent those little parts of everyone’s life that shape us
as human beings.
Guardia earned a MS and a MFA in ceramics from the University
of North Dakota, followed by a MS in industrial technology, in
the summer of 2008. Currently he works for the North Dakota
Museum of Art as artist-in-residence, teaching ceramics
workshops in schools through the Museum’s Rural Arts Initiative
and continues to exhibit throughout the United States.
Lot # 20
Guillermo GuardiaGrand Forks, North Dakoa
Mama Cora, 2011
Ceramics
20 x 26 inches
Range: $1,800 - 2,300
Lot #21
Bernice Ficek-SwensonMinneapolis, Minnesota
Promise of Water, 2010
Dust-grain copper plate photogravure
Suite of twelve plates printed on
Lanaroyal Paper
8.25 x 10.5 inches (image)
Range: $600 - 800 framed
Bernice Ficek-Swenson has spent the last decade
learning the photogravure process, to much success. She
explains, My photographic explorations are used to create
copper plate photogravure etchings and have resulted in several
suites of related prints: Putting Out Ashes, Vessels and Vestiges,
Pyre and The Promise of Water.
Since 1995 I have been exploring the theme of elemental forces
of nature, photographing still-life materials of stones, ashes,
cremated bones and most recently, water. I’ve become
particularly interested in active aspects of nature, both
regenerative and catastrophic. Elemental materials such as fire
and water portray processes of destruction, as well as
transformation, implying a metaphor of deep geologic time.
Stones are collected by all of us and belong to our “collective
unconscious.” In researching about “stones”, I discovered that it
is the only material that transcends time to convey the same
meaning to all cultures. Use of stone conveys the notion of a
deep spiritual connection to earth. These materials are also used
to suggest an inherent spiritual and/or ritualistic sensibility.
Pyre is a series of 12 related photogravures—two of which are in
the North Dakota Museum of Art Collection. I’m interested in the
duality of life that the fire represents, simultaneously conveying a
sense of catastrophe and of life rejuvenating forces. Change is
inherent with fire, with the process of destruction begins the
cycle of renewal. Each print is intimate in scale and when
grouped together the images create a large presence,
thematically building on each other. The backdrop of stones and
the structure of the flames take on a more naturalistic appearance
and are intended to be ambiguous. The suite ends with a single
flame hovering in a black field. This last fragment of fire invites
the viewer to contemplate whether the fire will perish or persist.
In the series I am currently working on, The Promise of Water,
I’m exploring metaphors of purity/purification, water as
venerated source. Smooth white stones are arranged on
ambiguous clear ground, which is free of specific associations to
land, country, or time. The stones are separated with water
melting or washing over each. Water tears rock, thus becoming
soil, implying an act of weathering, of reducing substance to
their fundamental parts. I think of water as the blood of the earth.
Native North Dakotan, Ficek-Swenson is a Professor of Art,
University of Wisconsin–River Falls where she teaches
printmaking and drawing. She also presides over the University’s
International Traveling Classroom. Other teaching experiences
include conducting a Polymer Photogravure Workshop at the
Athens School of Fine Arts in Greece and sessions in the
exchange “Wisconsin in Scotland” at Edinburgh.
Her education included a BA and MFA from the University of
North Dakota, Grand Forks, and an MA from State University of
New York, Oswego, New York. Before teaching full-time, she
was Co-Director of Land Mark Editions, a fine-art print atelier in
Minneapolis which she founded with her husband, Master
Printer Jon Swenson.
She has exhibited widely, including in solo shows at Camera
Lucida, Galerie Domus, Universite’ Claude-Bernard, sponsored
by Galerie Par-ci Par-la, Lyon, France, and the Gallery of
Technohoros, Athens, Greece.
21
Lot # 23
Jon GoodmanWilliamsburg, Massachusetts
Pictographs, Whitcomb Wash,
Grand Canyon, 1991
Photograph/dust-grain photogravure
10.75 x 13.5 inches
Range: $750 - 1,100 framed
Lot # 22
Jon GoodmanWilliamsburg, Massachusetts
Amaryllis Past Its Prime, 2002
Photograph/dust-grain photogravure
11 x 14 inches
Range: $750 - 1,100 framed
Jon Goodman is a photographer and printmaker. He has
concentrated on reviving the dust-grain photogravure process
(printing the photographic image from an etched copper plate in
ink) for more than thirty-five years. Today he is considered the
Master of Photogravure on several continents. His personal work
can be found in major collections in the United States and
Europe, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art and The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Bibliothèque National,
Paris. He operates a small studio in New England specializing in
the production of dust-grain photogravure.
In my personal work, I prefer to work with landscapes and
natural forms. Why is that? I don’t really know. It is an
environment that I am very comfortable with. I find that, in some
way, I am able to project something I sense about the work from
the inside onto the external form. I am most attracted to those
regions where the elemental interfaces occur: light and darkness,
earth and water, water and sky, movement, and stillness. I don’t
generally work from a place of making documents. I subscribe to
the more out-of-fashion idea of “romanticism” where I try to
communicate something through the medium of the subject, an
emotional resonance on some level with the viewer.
Why photogravure? For me, photogravure is very beautiful.
There are some things that I can do, in terms of tone, which I
could not do by any other method. It is not the technical
difficulties that interest me, but the end result. It is not a fast
process, so I cannot be prolific. I rarely have time to do many of
my own images. By modern standards and means, photogravure
is somewhat antiquated. The prints on paper don’t jump out at
the viewer. If the time, however, is taken to further study the
images, the viewer may be touched in an unexpected way.
See pages 61 to follow Jon Goodman’s rediscovery
of the 19th century process of photogravure,
which turned him into the contemporary master.
His work in the Auction joins that of
Bernice Ficek-Swenson,
who worked at the Museum
while an undergraduate at UND.
Above: Lot #24
Gary ThomtonBemidji, Minnesota
Memory Box, 2008
Curly Maple, Cocobolo, and Walnut; felt-lined interior
17.5 x 15 x 3.25 inches, with legs that remove to wall hang
Range: $300 - 400
22
Left: Lot #25
Gary ThomtonBemidji, Minnesota
Harp Leg Table, 2010
Hard Rock Maple, Redheart, Jatoba, and Walnut
32 x 47 x 21 inches deep
Range: $2,200 - 2,500
Gary Thomton makes furniture within the fine art
tradition. He explains, After fifty-two years building and
designing, I have decided to turn my attention to smaller projects.
Furniture and furniture design have long interested me and give
me an opportunity to work with fine woods and finishes while
incorporating my sense of design.
My first experiences included creation, repair and refinishing
while working at a cabinet shop and furniture store. During the
time I was in construction, I began to design and draw plans for
homes and additions, paying special attention to details like
fireplaces and stairways.
A large part of my education took place at a prestigious
architectural firm in Edina, Minnesota. I worked closely with
many architects and designers and learned about their creative
process and sense of design. During this time I attended design
and architecture classes at the Minneapolis College of Art and
Design to further refine my skills.
My work is simple, clean, and functional modern furniture. It is
unique in style and well crafted in fit and finish. I maintain my
studio in Bemidji where I occasionally exhibit work. Often I work
from commission, but I also make work and later sell it.
Lot #26
Duane PerkinsWinnipeg, Manitoba
Untitled, 2011
Porcelain
13.5 x 8 inch diameter
Range: $700 - 900 framed
Duane Perkins has been working as a full-time studio
artist for thirty years. Born in 1947 in Chicago, he lived there
until he moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, to attend Bethel College
where he majored in art and philosophy. During his last year he
needed another credit so enrolled in his first ceramic class. A few
months later he graduated and moved to Winnipeg with his
future wife and immediately set up his ceramic studio.
In the summer of 2007, the Winnipeg Art Gallery celebrated
Perkins’ sixtieth birthday with a large exhibition about which
they wrote: The vessel form is a constant within Perkins’
production. Wheel-thrown and then reduction-fired, the works
are beautifully composed both formally and decoratively. The
firing technique leads to muted and subtle colour variations
within the glazes, skillfully worked into abstracted designs
recalling vegetation such as scattered leaves, twisting vines, and
unopened buds. In other instances. . . . the rich colours and
patterns of oriental fabrics are suggested. Over the last decade,
the dimensions of Perkin’s work have increased as he creates
broad-rimmed platters, flared bowls and vases of soaring heights.
In contrast to their considerable sizes, the vessels’ decoration
mirrors the delicacy of the porcelain body, prompting one writer
to characterize his work as “noble vessel forms decorated with
lush surfaces.” 23
Lot # 27
Duane ShoupBemidji, Manitoba
Untitled Table, 2011
Walnut top, White Oak legs,
Cherry bow tie
28 x 46 x 14 inches
Range: $1,200 - 1,800
Duane Shoup, grandson of a carpenter, grew up in
Maryville, Indiana, south of both Gary and Chicago. By his late
twenties, he felt the urge to break out so he went fishing in
Minnesota. This self-taught furniture maker ended up buying
forty acres near the small town of Shevlin, building a house and
all its furnishings, and embedding himself in Northern Minnesota
deep woods. Here he could find the hardwoods he needed to
establish his studio, Wildwood Rustic Furnishings.
Shoup elaborates, I use only renewable woods—oak, ash, cherry,
walnut, maple, and pine as well as downed and damaged trees
that showcase the color and featured wood grains only nature
can produce.
Inspiration for my work flows from the natural world all around
me and the north woods I call home. Each log, slab, twig,
bentwood, or free-form composition represents materials
purposefully selected on site and processed at my own mill,
giving me complete control of the creative process from forest to
final form. Finished pieces preserve the force of nature in
furnishings and have the potential to become family heirlooms.
He follows in the footsteps of Sam Maloof who also created his
own private world where he made furniture masterpieces known
for their simplicity and practicality. As his own master, Shoup
does what he wishes, challenges his already-formidable skills,
handles beautiful woods, and makes a living in the process.
Sometimes he incorporates the bark into the design, sometimes
he strips the bark away to achieve a more polished work as in the
table in the Auction. Note the bow tie that embellishes the table
top while stabilizing the sizable plank from which it is made.
Advice from Duane Shoup: If you buy the table, take it home andwax the surface. Sam Maloof developed the finish I used on thetable: equal parts of polyurethane varnish, tung oil, and linseedoil. You add the final wax.
Sponsored by
Guesthouse
International
25
Vivienne Morgan’s Typologies were created in the last
year under a 2010 Artists Initiative Grant from the Minnesota
State Arts Board. It allowed her to travel to England to photograph
in the Lake District in Cumbria, an area she hadn’t seen which
shares some of the same characteristics as Bemidji, Minnesota,
where she lives.
According to the artist: I am an English woman who has lived in
Bemidji for longer than I have lived anywhere else, and yet my
sense of identity with a place I call home has not been Bemidji.
My identity has for a long time been tied to the landscape, and
in particular English landscape. Recently I have realized that this
“home” is no particular part of England, just certain landscapes
and certain views which for me have become iconic.
Since 2005, I’ve looked for some sense of home in the local
landscape and found it in the clipped topiary of Bemidji’s
Greenwood Cemetery, and from there I made a body of work
called “Between Two Lands.” I continued looking for the familiar,
a sense of England in my neighborhood, and this time I found it
in the morning light amongst long grasses or in a hilltop view.
This work became an exhibit at the North Dakota Museum of Art
called “A Sense of Place.” These works are matched pairs, often
two views of the same place just feet and minutes apart because
it seems to me that in order to gain a sense of place, one should
look closely, and look more than once.
In the past year I have expanded these pairs in Lakes to Lakes,
and I have traveled back and forth to Cumbria, an area new to me
in England, in search of more connections. This ongoing body of
work is a collection of typological landscapes, pairing similar
environments of lake and wood in Beltrami county, with those in
Lot # 28
Vivienne MorganBemidji, Minnesota
Passages: Nature/Nurture, 2011
Archival digital inkjet on Museo Max
17 x 42 inches framed
Range: $400 - 500
Cumbria, in the North of England. These typologies categorize
the familiar: a dock on a lake in the early morning, a woodland
path, or the expanse of an open field. They are the quiet and
understated places that will be familiar to many Minnesotans,
perhaps to the point of not seeing them anymore. To me these
places have also become iconic, and because I see them both in
Cumbria and Northern Minnesota, I am drawn to them. They
define for me a sense of place, a sense of belonging in two far
apart but similar worlds.
In these typological pairings, England and America meld in
subtle ways: a similar composition, different light, different
weather, different trees. This melding reflects my own slow
journey in becoming an American citizen. This March I became
an American citizen, now I am a part of America’s long history
of immigrants who have sought out similarities to their native
country, looking for familiar climates, similar farmland, to settle,
and while an exact match may not have been found, many found
a permanent echo of their former lives.
Kelly Thompson is a Grand Forks native who left the
area after graduating from UND in the ‘80s, but returned several
years later with a fresh perspective, launching several of his
businesses including Ink, Inc., Urban Stampede, and a real estate
sales practice with Greenberg Realty. A life-long artist, he mostly
paints at the family dining room table while directing the traffic
of three busy teenage kids.
Kelly’s current work is heavily influenced by the horizontal,
minimal imagery that surrounds the Red River Valley. His
fieldscapes, lakescapes, and even tablescapes, all share the
commonality of a strong horizontal division of wide open spaces
that lead the mind’s eye to wonder what is just beyond its ability
to see. One of my favorite travels is between Grand Forks and
Fargo, a route that so many abhor, but I find peace and balance
and awe in that emptiness, which for me is not unlike standing
at the edge of the ocean where farmhouses, like islands, nest
amid the cottonwoods. The recent work is mostly acrylic on
Lot #30
Kelly ThompsonGrand Forks, North Dakota
The Lilac Hedge 2011
Acrylic on wood
12 x 72 inches
Range: $600 - 900
Lot #29
PunchgutFargo, North Dakota
Red Skies, 2011
Acrylic spray paint on canvas
24 x 24 inches
Range: $600 - 900
Punchgut’s work can be found on everything from a slew
of beautiful but disparate screenprints that mirror a midwestern
gravel road to limited edition gig posters for Americana bad
asses, the “Drive-By Truckers.” Also look for his prolific images
on bookstore shelves in The Art of Modern Rock, Gig Posters Vol
2, The Art of Electric Frankenstein, Rockin’ Down the Highway
and stapled to light posts and record-store bulletin boards near
you, or save yourself the gas money and check
www.punchgut.com. This Fargo artist shows up at various North
Dakota Museum of Art events for which he has created limited
edition posters. He extends his usual greeting, Thanks I always
look forward to being involved in the NDMOA world. Gut Bless.
wood boards. I like the strength that the wood offers, allowing
me to build layer upon layer of paints and textures with
aggressive knife work, and also the serendipitous nature of the
wood’s grain that often leads to unexpected, organic results.
This particular piece is from my Fieldscape Series, showing a
stark panorama of the changing, late-summer crops under a
moody and shifting sky. In contrast, the settled farmhouse
remains steadfast on the horizon.
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Lot #31
Carl OltvedtMoorhead, Minnesota
Between the Strawstacks, 2003
Oil on canvas
13.75 x 13.24 inches
Range: $800 - 1,200
Carl Oltvedt: The work in the auction, Between the
Strawstacks, began in response to my point of view in relation to
the stacks, the compression of the space between them, and the
one round bale in the distance. My memories of the experiences
I had in visiting Stonehenge, Avebury, and lesser known sites in
England, Scotland, and Ireland immediately surged forward in
my mind. Those are intentioned arrangements, while this was
serendipitous, and only carried that significance based on my
prior experience; in my mind, however, this arrangement now
has a similar monumentality and is reflective of how we relate to
nature in an attempt to understand our place in the cosmos.
The artist continues, I am moved to begin drawing or painting by
the power of form suggested through a subject in a particular
light and formatted to a shape specific to the needs of my
expressive intent. This is an emotive state, where the subject
carries meaning beyond what it is as a person, a dog, a bicycle,
and so on. It is very similar to the experience of an individual
being moved to a particular emotional state by the relationship
of notes/sounds in a piece of music. Embracing this aesthetic
feeling is imperative in creating a work of art which transcends
the material, and sincerely reflects my most intimate feelings
about life.
Carl Oltvedt has been teaching at Minnesota State University at
Moorhead since August of 1983. He is currently a full professor
in the Department of Art and Design. He has worked as a guest
artist in regional schools, and abroad at the Glasgow School of
Art and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Scotland. His
most recent solo exhibition was held in January of 2008 at
Groveland Gallery. He also participated in the annual MSUM
Department of Art and Design Faculty exhibition held in the
Roland Dille Center for the Arts Gallery. Oltvedt’s paintings and
drawings are included in the permanent collections of the Rourke
Art Museum, the Plains Art Museum, the Honolulu Academy of
Arts, the North Dakota Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute
of Art, and the Minnesota State Historical Society. He received a
Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Fellowship in 1991 and a Lake
Region Arts Council/McKnight Fellowship in 2002. Most
recently, his work was included in the Plains Art Museum “Big
Country” exhibition, in which he exhibited Blue Flag Irises; at 40
x 128 inches it is the largest painting he has completed to date.
Carl lives in Moorhead, Minnesota, and maintains a studio in
neighboring Fargo, North Dakota.
Sponsored by
Office of Academic
Affairs, UND
Lot #32
Michael MadzoExcelsior, Minnesota
A Shapely Consolation, 2011
Machine stitched and painted paper
29 x 22 inches
Range: $1,000 -1,100 framed
Michael Madzo: According to Los Angeles dealer,
Darrel Couturier, there is an unmistakable air of mystery to the
collage paintings of Michael Madzo. This enigmatic ambiance
suggests the atmosphere of Marc Chagall and the visual
construction of Picasso. But Madzo’s work is original and unique
in terms of both method and substance. Madzo takes art history
as his literal material and starting point, cutting up reproductions
of classic paintings and reassembling or “suturing” their visual
elements back together in faintly disturbing and dreamlike
configurations which he then paints over with deft matching of
color values and textures. A blatant and poetic device of the artist
is to stitch on a sewing machine the disparate patches of the
original cutout sections. This Frankenstein touch reinforces both
the visual trickery and the meaning behind these tantalizing and
elusive images. There is also something monstrous about this
stitchery. It is a poetic affront to the spectator, an insistence upon
an apparently necessary honesty, and an important reference to
the assembled and man-made nature of this art. Finally, Madzo’s
mutations achieve the sublime by prodding and eluding our
attempts to understand them.
Michael Madzo hails from southwest North Dakota where he
and his artist-brother David Madzo have built a home near
Medora on the family ranch. He graduated from Arizona State
University with a BFA. Since 1987, he has been represented by
galleries in Los Angeles, New York, New Mexico, and Paris.
Lot #33
Nathan MastrudFargo, North Dakota
Liz, 2011
Mixed media on board
35 x 16 inches
Range: $350 - 450
Nathan Mastrud is a North Dakota native located in
the Red River basin of Fargo. Nathan earned a BA in Painting in
2002 and a BS in Art Education in 2006, both from Minnesota
State University Moorhead. His passion for tactile art has led
him on numerous paths from glass blowing to sculpture and
finally finding his rightful place as a tattoo artist at Addictions
Tattoo & Piercing, where he creates lifelong pieces of art.
Mastrud loves to evoke an emotion by his underground
contemporized art. He will put a spin on the image or idea to
change the thoughts of the spectator. This image of Elizabeth
Taylor in this auction painting was sensual and erotic, but after
he painted Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) lines on her she
takes on a new role. Her beauty transcends to a new level so that
one almost doesn’t see Elizabeth in her eyes.
Lot #34
Shaun MorinWinnipeg, Manitoba
Untitled, 2011
Mixed media (collage, pen, ink and
acrylic paint on paper)
19.5 x 15.25 inches
Range: $700 - 900 framed
Shaun Morin was born in 1979. He graduated from the
University of Manitoba with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2004 but
he was already on the way to becoming an artist.
Well entrenched in the practices of young artists is the instinct to
join together in collectives. It began in 1996 when the Royal Art
Lodge came into being and went on to win international success.
They came to the North Dakota Museum of Art in 2000 with
their exhibition Garage Video. (Just as bands are formed in the
family garage with instruments bought at garage sales for $10,
beginning video artists work in borrowed spaces on a
shoestring.) Morin was too young to belong but he followed in
the Art Lodge’s footsteps.
Morin became a founding member of 26, or two-six, Too-Sicks,
etc. Too-Sicks collective is a group of artists that work
individually but together, they share ideas and feed off one
another. Members of the group offer each other someone to talk
to about work and give criticism.
The collective 26 had its first exhibition together in 2002 at the
Graffiti Gallery in Winnipeg, two years before Morin graduated
from the University of Manitoba. Just as he jump-started his
exhibition career, Morin won many scholarships during his
college years beginning in 2001 and 2002 with the National
Aboriginal Achievement Foundation Fine Arts Scholarships.
Morin is also known as The Slomotion, which is his street art
nom de plume. According to the artist, My work ranges from
outdoor illegal installations with custom hand-painted signs to
oil and acrylic paintings on canvas to small hand-made booklets
and also mixed media works on pieces of paper. Each medium in
art that I use has its own way of communicating, which keeps me
exploring new ideas and ways to evolve as an artist. In painting,
my goal is to establish an alternate reality, a place where visual
poetry is conducted. I choose to paint figurative still lifes using
metaphorical iconography to create narratives. My work
sometimes deals with autobiographical content and strange
imaginative ensembles of mundane objects congested together. I
work intuitively throughout most of my art by trusting the
unknown, looking for freedom and searching for my truth.
Painting this way allows me room for experimenting with new
ideas as well as gives me the chance to make discoveries.
Likewise, Morin has been successful in establishing his
individual career with solo exhibitions in Winnipeg, Montreal,
and Toronto where the Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art
Gallery handles his work. He continues to live in Winnipeg.
Sponsored by
Clear Channel Radio
29
Lot #35
Ingrid RestemayerMinneapolis, Minnesota
Spring Fish, 2010
Mixed media print with fiber
50 x 20 inches (image)
Range: $2,500 - 2,800 framed
Ingrid Restemayer is a printmaker and fiber artist
originally from North Dakota but now living and working in
northeast Minneapolis. Influenced by generations of fine crafters,
Restemayer’s work reflects traditional embroidery techniques
while incorporating other process-intensive mediums through
collage. Her latest body of work features recognizable imagery
(koi fish in Circling in Bad Weather) in the form of intricate
etchings on handmade papers, successively collaged with fine
printmaking papers and punctuated by mock-paragraph forms
made from hand-stitched threads. Restemayer’s work has for
years had a hint of storytelling or narration with the use of her
intaglio images as pseudo-illustrations for a kind of story when
paired with code-like paragraph shapes formed from her hand
embroidery.
Restemayer has spent nearly two decades growing and
developing her unique combination of printmaking and fiberart
techniques. She studied overseas in Auckland, New Zealand. In
1996, she earned her BFA in printmaking, fiberarts, and mixed
media visual arts from the University of North Dakota.
Restemayer is heavily involved in the Minneapolis arts
community. She is an active member of the Northeast
Minneapolis Arts Association, and has served as an officer on its
board of directors. She has also spent time on the boards of
prominent Minneapolis galleries, the Northeast Minneapolis
Chamber of Commerce, and as a lead committee member for the
development of the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District.
Sponsored by
Salon Seva
30
31
Lot #36
Guðjón KetilssonReykjavik, Iceland
Engineering (Coffee Drawing), 2009
Drawing with coffee on paper
11.4 x 11.4 inches
Range: $1,500 - 1,800
Guðjón Ketilsson made this coffee drawing during a
long train ride from Venice, Italy, to the shores of Northern
Europe enroute home to Iceland. Instead of ink, he dipped his
pen into strong coffee and let his imagination fill the pages, not
unlike a Leonardo da Vinci drawing centuries earlier.
Ketilsson is not new to North Dakota Museum of Art audiences,
as he was one of seven artists included in the Museum’s 2010
exhibition “Into the Tussock: Contemporary Icelandic Art.” He
was the artist who made an installation of all the hats in Bruegel’s
The Peasant Wedding, which he carved life size. He also built the
installation Shell shown opposite. Guðjón will return to North
Dakota in the spring of 2012 to conduct a week-long workshop
through the Museum’s Rural Arts Initiative.
The artist was born in 1956 in Reykjavik, where he continues to
reside. Between 1974 and 1980, he studied at the Academy of
Icelandic Art, Reykjavik, and at the Nova Scotia College of Art
and Design, Canada. Guðjón primarily works in drawing and
wood sculpture. He has had over thirty solo shows and has
participated in numerous group shows in Iceland, the Nordic
countries, Holland, Spain, the United States, Canada, and
Australia. He was selected as one of two Icelandic artists to
participate in the 4th Beijing Biennale in September 2010.
Guðjón has taken part in various international residencies and
numerous competitions for art in public spaces. Among the
prizes he has received are the DV-Cultural Prize in 2000 and the
Einar Jónsson Art Museum Award in 2001. He has illustrated two
children’s books for which he was awarded the Author’s Library
Grant (2000) and the Children’s Choice Award for book
illustration (2004). In 2010 he showed at the Luise Ross Gallery
in New York City. In October 2010, Guðjón Ketilsson was
published by Crymogea in the illustrious Dungal Art Fund Book
Series on Icelandic Contemporary Artists. It is the third
monograph in the important series.
The next three pages offerrare opportunity
to own a piece of Iceland from artists who participated in the
Museum’s 2010 exhibition“Into the Tussock: ContemporaryIcelandic Art.” After opening in Grand Forks, it toured to three
North Dakota and Minnesota cities.
Helgi Thorgils Fridjonsson is a singular
painter who long ago went his own way. While his art is
anchored in Icelandic nature, it is deeply informed by the history
of European painting. His broad surfaces, rounded monumental
forms, and clear colors harken back to the work of Giotto, the
artist who launched the Italian Renaissance.
Initially, Helgi Thorgils’ paintings can appear naïve.
They are not. Surrealistic? Certainly. Otherworldly? Yes, but it is
the world of Iceland in its pristine, glorious, and
natural state, or the world of the artist’s imagining mind. And
along the way to developing his private vision and individual
voice, Helgi Thorgils became one of Iceland’s most widely-
recognized, contemporary painters.
The artist was born in 1953 and grew up in rural Iceland. He
earned degrees from the Icelandic College of Art and Crafts,
Reykjavik (1976); De Vrije Academie, Haag, Holland (1977); and
Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, Holland (1979). One of the
pioneers of New Painting in Iceland, he held his debut solo
exhibition at Gallery Output in 1975, followed by more than
forty solo shows since. Key exhibitions include “XLIV La biennal
di Venezia,” Icelandic Pavilion (1990); “Outside of a Dog,” Baltic
Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom
(2004); “Frederik Roos Collection,” Moderna Museet, Stockholm
(1995); “Prospect 93,” Frankfurt am Main (1993); “Thick Air,”
Fodor Museum, Amsterdam (1983); and “XI Biennale de Paris,”
Lot #37
Helgi Thorgils FridjonssonReykjavik, Iceland
Man and Giraffe, 2005
Watercolor and ink on paper
19 x 13 inches
Range: $1,000 - 1,800
Lot #38
Helgi Thorgils FridjonssonReykjavik, Iceland
Three Angles, 2001
Oil on canvas
16 x 20 inches
Range: $4,000 - 4,500
(1980). In 1979, he opened The Corridor Gallery in his own
home in order to introduce international artists not otherwise
seen in Iceland. He was one of the founders of the Living Art
Museum and currently serves on the Board of the National
Gallery of Iceland. He has taught at the Icelandic College of Art
and Crafts for many years. His many awards include the DV
newspaper’s annual cultural prize. Helgi Thorgils’s works are
found at all major museums in Iceland, many public collections
in Scandinavia, and private collections throughout Europe. He
resides in Reykjavik. Recently the North Dakota Museum of Art
added Helgi Thorgils Fridjonsson to its permanent collection.
The artist co-curated with Museum Director Laurel Reuter the
2010 exhibition “Into the Tussock: Contemporary Icelandic Art.”
33
Lot # 39
Birgir Snaebjorn BirgissonReykjavik, Iceland
From the Series: Blond Heads Nordic Race
2007
37.5 x 27.5 inches
Acrylic on canvas
Range: $2,000 - 2,500
Birgir Snaebjorn Birgisson began
paint ing blonds over a decade ago. He expla ins , I
can’t remember clearly how it all started. I think I was in my
studio in East London, where I was living at the time. It must have
been the year 1996 or 1997. I heard on the radio some talk about
a comment made by Diane Abbott, the British MP (Member of
Parliament), about too many blond nurses working in the British
hospitals—mainly from Finland and Poland. I found this
discussion a bit strange, but didn’t think more about it (or so I
thought). That day BBC changed my life . . . . A year later, I
decided to make a painting of a group of blonde nurses. It was
only meant to be one piece of work, but the subject and the
content completely overpowered me and I haven’t been the same
since. It’s a big series now.
First he painted nurses, then all of the Miss World Contest
winners since 1951, then blond Nordics of all kinds, including
the young boy in the Auction. The figures are hardly there. Birgir
continues, You can’t see if they’re blonde or not. Of course
they’re blonde. They will always be blonde. The focus is on the
uniform—or the head—and the aura around it. Caring, warmth,
power, and love.
Birgir Snaebjorn Birgisson was born in 1966 and lives in
Reykjavik. He studied multimedia at École des Arts Décoratifs,
Strasbourg, France (1991-93); graphic art at the Icelandic College
of Art and Craft (1986-89); and general art at Akureyri College of
Art, Iceland (1985-86). His recent exhibitions include “Humility”
at Turpentine Gallery in Reykjavik (2008); “Blonde Miss World
1951–” at the Reykjavik Art Museum (2007); “Portraits on the
Edge” at Gallery Boreas in Pittsfield, Massachusetts (2006);
“Blonde Professions” at St John´s Church in London in (2006);
“Touching” at Iceland’s Kópavogur Art Museum (2005); and
“Blonde Nurses,” also at the Kópavogur Art Museum (2001).
Recent group shows include “Wistful Memory” at the National
Gallery in Reykjavik (2010); “Stripped Away” at Tintype Gallery
in London (2010); “Rhyme” at the Reykjavik Art Museum (2009);
“Happy Together,” Estonia’s Tallinn Art Hall (2009); “Painting
Space and Society” at Göteborg’s Konsthall, Göteborg, Sweden
(2007); “Tiere auf Grasshockern” at Kunsthalle, Kunstverein in
Bremerhaven, Germany (2006); “Black Bile” at London’s 3 Colts
Gallery (2005); “Cold Climates” at APT Gallery, London (2004);
and “Stop for a moment — painting as narrative,” Proje4L,
Istanbul, 2002.
Sponsored by
William Wossick, M.D.
Lot # 40
Mike LynchMinneapolis, Minnesota
Moose Junction, The Iron Range
in Northern Minnesota, 1987
Lithograph, folio edition of five
9.75 x 15 inches image
Range: $700 - 900 framed
Mike Lynch’s realist style is rooted in American
Regionalism of the 1920s and 30s. His poetically rendered
Minnesota subjects include urban landscapes such as grain
elevators, taverns by the side of the road, industrial loading
docks, ships in the Duluth/Superior harbor, and small town
streets. The moody romance of these scenes is heightened by his
use of nocturnal or early dawn light.
In 1987, Jon Swenson and Bernice Ficek-Swenson (page 20)
invited Lynch to create a portfolio of lithographs in their Land
Mark Editions studio. The artist would spend up to two days
patiently drawing the image onto the lithograph stone before
turning it over to Master Printer Jon Swenson to print the images.
Moose Junction comes from that portfolio.
In 2003, Mike Lynch won the McKnight Distinguished Artists
Award, Minnesota’s most important honor with its $40,000
purse. Noa Staryk, Chair of the McKnight Foundation, wrote in
the accompanying tribute book: As one of his friends points out
. . . the designation “distinguished artist” doesn’t rest comfortably
on Mike Lynch. Lynch’s painterly world of back streets and
industrial monuments—portrayed in darkness or at dusk, often
just before the wrecking ball strikes—is decidedly ordinary. But,
as rendered by Lynch’s pen, paints, and brush, these mundane
landscapes are extraordinary emotional documents. Dimly
illuminated by a corner lamppost, Lynch’s silent streets attest to
the soon-to-beforgotten moments that make up daily life.
Lynch’s mostly realist art is widely collected by individuals and
corporations throughout Minnesota. He has exhibited at virtually
every major Minnesota art museum. He has won prestigious
fellowships and awards from Minnesota organizations, including
the Bush and McKnight foundations. He has illustrated books for
notable Minnesota writers Garrison Keillor and Jon Hassler. Yet
his name is hardly a household word. Why? Perhaps because he
is so profoundly Minnesotan, in the way we like to think of
ourselves.
He is modestly dedicated to creating his art rather than
promoting it. Fame tends to follow those who are quotable and
flamboyant, who stand out from the crowd. To Lynch, it is the
work, more than recognition, that counts. It is no secret to
anyone who knows him that he has made many sacrifices to live
as an artist, accepting the frugality and insecurity that
accompany such a choice.
Mike Lynch may not feel “distinguished,” but his dedication to
his craft is clear to anyone who sees his work. It is reflected in
sublime quality, which, along with his humility and work ethic,
has influenced succeeding generations of Minnesota artists. The
McKnight Foundation is privileged to have this opportunity to
recognize Lynch. In these unsettled days, his work reveals the
fleeting beauty of everyday life and reminds us to cherish the
time we have.
The Southwest Minneapolis Patch reported that at the age of 72,
painter Mike Lynch traded his brushes for harmonicas and
keyboards. For almost twenty years, Lynch’s hobby has been
playing harmonica and keyboards with Mercs, a local bar band
that performs monthly at Merlin’s Rest on Lake Street in
Minneapolis. Lynch mainly plays harp, a long-time hobby. Later
in life, he took up keyboard noting, I play it like a typewriter; it’s
a good way to figure out tunes. I don’t have the technique in
music that I have in painting; I haven’t worked at it that hard.
Lena McGrath welker’s work in the Auction is a
multi-layered, two-sided, white-on-white, translucent and
transparent print that hangs from a steel frame in a two-sided box
frame. It is from the body of work she named “Navigation
[affinis]” that was in her December 2010 exhibition at the North
Dakota Museum of Art.
The complete “Navigation [affinis]” was composed of thirty large
drawings, fifteen on each side of the corridor between the
Museum’s east and west galleries, suspended from stainless steel
frames hung adjacent to the walls. The installation is made of
small etchings and drawings on thin gampi paper, which are
embedded in handmade sheets of overbeaten abaca. They
contain translucent, very minimal and abstract imagery moving
from references to [flight] into references to [stillness]—the two
bodies of work in the neighboring galleries.
Lot #41
Lena McGrath welkerPortland, Oregon
Sheet from Navigation [affinis] (front and back), 2010
Etching, drawing, with Palladium on gampi paper, suspended
on steel frame, with wood and Plexiglas frame.
31.5 x 39 inches framed
Range: $800 - 1,000 framed In 2004, the artist showed four bodies of work in the Museum
from her on-going Navigation Series. At that time, Museum
Director Laurel Reuter invited her to return with the final
installation of this, her major lifework. Twelve years in the
making, Navigation Series concludes with this exhibition titled
“Navigation [chime]” because chime has poetic and musical
derivation, but it also refers to a system in which all the parts are
in harmony, showing a correspondence of proportion or relation,
according to the artist.
The over-arching theme of Navigation Series, both in the 2004
exhibition and in the 2010 show, addresses ways of thinking
about the accumulation and transmission of knowledge and
wisdom. What gives written language its power? In what ways
does language fail us, and in what ways does it allow
communication to take place?
Lena McGrath Welker continues to reside in Portland, Oregon.
Proceeds from the sale of this work
will be used to publish a book about
the artist’s Navigation Series as shown in the
North Dakota Museum of Art.
35
Lot #42
Robert WilsonWinnipeg, Manitoba
Sliced Antler Vessel, 2010
Deer antler, turned pine form (hollow), resin,
and dark roast coffee
13 x 8 inch diameter
Range: $1,200 - 1,500
Robert Wilson is one of a small handful of Canadian
master wood turners. The prize-winning prototype for the work
in the Auction was included in the touring exhibition Prairie
Excellence, which included work from Manitoba,
Saskatchewan, and Alberta.
According to Helen Delacretaz, Chief Curator and Curator of
Decorative Arts at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Robert Wilson’s
Sliced Antler Vessel is a work defined by its beauty, sensual
finish, and meticulous craftsmanship. The proportions of the
bulbous, high shouldered vessel are unexpectedly balanced by
the delicate, elongated ivory finial. Extremely pleasing to
experience, one is immediately drawn to the stark contrast of
thick slices of organic antler suspended in the dark, ebonized fill
of cast resin and dark roast coffee. The sensuousness of the
medium is at once exotic, opulent, yet polarized. This is a work
that delights in touch, is seamless in its integration, and elegant
in its timelessness.
The artist slices found deer antler to 3/8-inch thickness, which
ends up about a quarter inch as the thin slices are embedded or
secured with a thick paste made of casting resin and dark roast
expresso coffee. The finial is carved from the crown or rosette of
the antler where it is anchored in the deer’s head. Clearly, this is
the work of a Master Craftsman.
Over the years, Robert Wilson has won many Juror’s Awards from
the Manitoba Craft Council. One of his career highlights was
when Princess Anne, visiting Winnipeg for the 1999 Pan Am
Games, chose a piece of his work as a Manitoba memento. Susan
Sarandon also chose a piece of his when she visited Winnipeg for
the movie Shall We Dance. Robert’s work is also in the collection
of Great West Life & Annuity Insurance Company.
Sponsored by
Grand Forks Herald
37
Lot #44
Michael ManzavrakosMinneapolis, Minnesota
Second Revisitation from the Revisitation Suite, 1990
Intaglio, drypoint and linoleum block print
Published and printed by Land Mark Editions
23.75 by 18 inches (paper)
11.8 x 8.8 inches (image)
Range: $500 - 700 framed
Michael Manzavrakos is a Twin Cities artist of
Greek ancestory. In the late 1980s, he visited Greece and was
taken with the symbols carved onto buildings that had been built
by several generations of his family of stone masons. He returned
to create a series of six prints in his Revisitation Suite that was
based upon these symbols.
The artist began drawing the plates in 1988. He created a two-
color intaglio with drypoint on old ochre linoleum he picked up
as scrap—Manzavrakos is known for using an array of cheap
materials. Thus, the prints suggest the worn surface of a much-
used, common work-a-day material. The worn linoleum echoes
the worn stone of ancient buildings. Using traditional drypoint
methods, he “scratched” the lines of the symbols, inking them
with black. Proofing was started in the summer of 1990 at the
Land Mark Editions press in Minneapolis. By October of that
year, Master Printer Bernice Ficek-Swenson completed the
edition.
The artist was born in 1951 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He
studied at the University of Minnesota. Over the years he has had
many exhibitions, starting in 1978 with a solo show at the
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota. In 1989 he was
included in a group exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in New
York. His work is in the collections of the Walker Art Center and
the Minneapolis Institute of Fine Arts. The North Dakota Museum
of Art owns the complete suite, a gift from Jon Swenson and
Bernice Ficek-Swenson, founders of Land Mark Editions.
Lot #43
Michael ManzavrakosMinneapolis, Minnesota
First Revisitation from the Revisitation Suite, 1990
Intaglio, drypoint, and linoleum block print
Published and printed by Land Mark Editions
23.75 x 18 inches (paper)
11.8 x 8.3 inches (image)
Range: $500 - 700 framed
Walter Piehl is a painter who draws and also
incorporates drawing into his acrylic paintings. He does not use
drawing to make studies for paintings but as a primary medium,
either embedded into paintings or as separate works of art. But
ultimately Piehl is most widely known as a painter. His goal is to
make his surfaces dance with subtle variations. Drips, feathered
edges, scumbled paint, and the judicious use of glazes all
contribute to his rich surfaces. His fractured spaces, transparency,
multiple images and their afterimages cause his works to sing
with movement.
Unlike most artists, he was quite young when he decided to
make art from his own life. Born into a family that raised rodeo
stock, Walter rode as a matter of course. Likewise, in a household
without television, he drew constantly. He went on to paint and
Lot #45
Walter PiehlMinot, North Dakota
Khoas Kat: American Minotaur, 2006
Acrylic on canvas
48 x 36 inches
Range: $3,500 - 5,400
draw horses, year after year, never wearying of his subject, never
despairing in his quest to create contemporary Western art. This
master painter, while continuing to live the cowboy life, has
found the means to visually enter the sport. In the process he has
led droves of artists into a new arena called Contemporary
Western Art—but most don’t know that this artist from North
Dakota charted their course.
In 2008, Walter Piehl won the Bush Foundation’s first Enduring
Vision Prize worth $100,000. He earlier received the North
Dakota Governor’s Award for the Arts in 2005.
The artist has twice served on the North Dakota Arts Council,
once on the Board of Trustees of the North Dakota Museum of
Art, and is on the founding governing board of the North Dakota
Cowboy Hall of Fame in Medora.
Sponsored by
Valley News Live
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Lot #46
Marley KaulBemidji, Minnesota
How Does the Moth Know, 2007-08
Egg tempera on panel
27.5 x 19.5 inches framed
Range: $1,600 - 2,400
Marley Kaul’s work in both content and energy
emphasizes his connection with natural forms and poetic
metaphor. Now retired, he was long-time chairman of the Art
Department at Bemidji State University. He continues to paint
daily in his studio near Lake Bemidji, to exhibit generously
throughout the region, and to see his work moving into
significant private and public collections. Kaul’s work has been
collected by almost every major museum in Minnesota and
North Dakota, which speaks to his tireless commitment to his
development as a painter and his desire to explore the world
around him. In 2009, he completed the design for a stained
glass window for the First Lutheran Church in Bemidji, where
in 2001 he had designed another window for the chapel, as
well as creating a painting for the altarpiece. Ultimately,
Marley Kaul is a superb painter with a scholarly bent who has
become widely respected and loved within the region he calls
home.
Like Northern European artists of long ago, Kaul paints
domestic life: the world surrounding his home in Northern
Minnesota, his garden, including the daylilies and cabbages in
this painting, the birds who come to the feeders, his
grandmother’s tea pot, and all the other utensils and
accruements of daily existence.
Kaul is probably the only artist in the region who paints
continuously in egg tempera, a slow and ancient process.
Tempera, also known as egg tempera, is one of the oldest
mediums in painting. It consists of dry pigment, water, and egg
yolk. Tempera was used all over the world: for the icons of the
Russian and Greek churches—and still is,—for panels of Italian
painters, for Islamic manuscripts, and even for modern American
paintings. Tempera paintings are long lasting with examples from
the first centuries CE still in existence.
Egg tempera is valued for its crisp, clean colors, its quick-drying
matte finish, and luminosity. Underpainting is an important part
of egg tempera. Each layer that is applied is affected by the
former layer, and it becomes richer as each additional layer is
applied. Marley Kaul is a contemporary tempera master.
Laurel Reuter, NDMOA Director, loves to tell the story of visiting
Marley in his studio on a day he had spent the morning painting.
They decided to drive into Bemidji for lunch. Upon their return,
and much to their amazement, the painting Marley had been
working on just before lunch was gone. The support board was
leaning against the wall as he had left it. The cat had eaten the
painting, savoring the egg yolk that served as the pigment binder.
Sponsored by
Minnesota Public Radio
Lot #48
Herman de VriesWinnipeg, Manitoba
Box Elder Hollow Form, c. 2009
Box Elder wood
7 x 10 inch diameter
Range: $1,000 – 1,200
Doug Pfliger: Doug’s Dogs is the latest body of work in
a series of themes that I have been developing since 1995 when
the series started quite by accident. Originally they were called
“Scrap Pile Dogs.” I used found objects in their construction to
add an intentional folk quality and to give them unexpected
individual personalities.
While their pedigrees may be questionable, their role as faithful
friend and companion is clearly defined. To date one-hundred-
eighty-plus dog forms have been created, but a few cats and
birds are starting to appear as in the work in the auction.
Dog-shaped household objects such as oil lamps and purely
decorative figures of dogs were popular in ancient Roman
homes, and the very Roman tradition of an image of a dog
inscribed with the words cave canem or “beware of the Dog,”
persists today.
I have been working in a number of mediums and themes since
1995. My art tends to be of a humorous, narrative vein that I
want viewers to respond to on a physical level first, and then
contemplate the deeper underlying message—if indeed there is
one. Most of Doug’s Dogs have been adopted by good homes,
for they do not bark or bite, require only an occasional dusting,
and will not chew up your favorite pair of shoes.
Born and raised in North Dakota, Pfliger lived in Minot, North
Dakota for years while teaching art at Minot State University. He
graduated from Minot State University with a BS in Art Education
and taught art in public schools for thirteen years before
completing his MF at the University of North Dakota in 1997. He
taught at Northern State University Aberdeen, South Dakota,
before moving to Minot in 2001. At the end of May, 2011, he
moved to Durango, Colorado, just in time to miss Minot’s
historic flood.
Lot #47
Doug PfligerDurango, Colorado
They Fight Like Cats and Dogs, 2009
From the Sad Circus Series, #156/156A of Doug’s Dogs
Wood, metal and paint
Dog: 11.25 x 8.5 x 5 inches. Cat: 11.25 x 9.75 x 5 inches
Range: $350 - 575
All proceeds from the Pfliger salego to the North Dakota Museum
of Art as a gift from the artist.
Herman de Vries was born at Ochre River, Manitoba.
He received an MA in Music Education from the University of
Sioux Falls and South Dakota State in the 1960s. Today he is a
retired business executive and a former professional singer and
music teacher. A self-taught wood turner, he began in 1997 and
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Lot #49
Jessica Matson-FlutoHorace, North Dakota
Dissolve Diptych, 2008
Oil on canvas
13 x 10 inches each
Range: $400 - 600
Jessica Matson-Fluto was born in 1980 in Spokane,
Washington. She earned her BFA from Minnesota State
University Moorhead in 2006. Two years later she graduated with
an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She is
employed as an adjunct art professor at Minnesota State
University Moorhead and instructs workshops at the Plains Art
Museum of Fargo. She and her husband currently live near Fargo,
North Dakota.
According to the artist, many of the figures in my work are based
upon imagined interpretations of myself and those familiar to me.
I often portray these “beings” as suspended, drifting, or trapped
in space. Such dreamlike images construe my own journey of
self-discovery and represent an ongoing investigation after a life-
altering, physical assault that changed my own perceptions and
ways of seeing the world. That haunting experience prompted an
ongoing series of self-portraits that continue to weave through my
body of work. My images tend to either be strongly pre-
meditated, or come to the canvas involuntarily, guided by my
painting medium.
was teaching classes a year later. Today he makes some of the
most beautiful wood-turned vessels and plates in the region.
The Box Elder Hollow Form in the Auction came from a tree in
North Winnipeg. One day he got a call from someone who saw
the tree being removed. Once de Vries arrived at the site, he saw
the red in the wood and thought, I might be interested. But
already, most of the wood was gone and I only got a few pieces.
It was a very old neighborhood, so the tree was probably planted
100 years ago.
He continues, I never considered wood turning as art. For me it
is a labour of love. For many years I worked with wood as an
amateur furniture maker, developing pieces in our home. It
wasn’t until 1995 that I acquired my first lathe. Immediately, I
was hooked.
A few years later I went to a lonely spot on my parents
homestead where I was born. I saw the old maple trees that my
father and mother had planted in the early 1920s. Some were
dying. Taking the wood from those dying trees and turning it into
a piece of turned art became a way of preserving something that
represented the future to my youthful father and mother. I am
their future, and the tree was their future. If I am able to leave
behind a legacy, it seemed only fair that the tree should be able
to do the same. I only helped a little.
Lot #50
Robert CroweMoorhead, Minnesota
Abstraction #17, 2006
Pastel and charcoal on paper
20 x 27 inches
Range: $600 - 850 framed
Robert Crowe: Plein aire artist, Robert Crowe creates
landscapes that convey the peace, beauty and tranquility of place
and time. His pastel work evokes the rhythmic pattern and
impressionistic atmosphere of the Red River Valley and Lakes
Country. This is echoed in his abstract work, represented by the
work in the Auction.
According to the artist, Having been born into the family who
owned the Bergstrom and Crowe Furniture store in Fargo for
ninety years, I spent most of my early life in retail and interior
design. During this time I was making my own paintings and
doing faux finishes in my spare time. Finally, I became frustrated
with retail and decided to return from Dallas to Fargo to finish a
long overdue art degree at the University of Minnesota [MSUM],
Moorhead. While finishing my BFA, I began teaching at Creative
Arts Studio in Fargo. There I became friends with Robert
Kurkowski, the Studio’s Director, and through Bob I fell in love
with teaching kids. After getting my BA, I decided to pursue a BS
in education, also at Moorhead. Here I became friends with
painting instructor Carl Oltvedt and fellow painter Dan Jones.
Dan and Carl introduced me to plein aire painting—plein aire
painters work on location to quickly capture the fleeting light
effects that occur in nature. But all the time, I continued to make
abstract paintings, I was exploring the same simple shapes and
forms, but without narrative or content.
Robert Crowe lives on the family farm near Comstock,
Minnesota. In the summer of 2007, he showed at the Plains Art
Museum in Fargo in the exhibition “Personal Journeys on
Common Ground: Robert Crawford Crowe, Dan Jones, Carl
Oltvedt.” He is represented by the Ecce Gallery in Fargo.
Madelyn Camrud & Adam Kemp: Native North
Dakota artist Madelyn Camrud—who is also a poet—writes,
Kellys Slough is about thirty minutes west of Grand Forks. A
national wildlife refuge, it supports waterfowl by the thousands.
Ducks and shorebirds abound. It’s a fantastic place to visit,
especially during the migration season. Having grown up on a
farm with a coulee running through, I am particularly fond of
waterfowl. It pleases me a great deal to have wood duck and
mallard nesting and swimming along a tributary of the English
Coulee that flows through my backyard.
This particular scene is from a photograph of Kellys Slough in late
autumn, the clouds heavy, the landscape golden. Just before
setting, the sun breaks through and casts light on the clouds in
the east. A gray, cold time of year, the clouds take on intensity,
warming to a rich Prussian blue.
While a visual arts student in the mid-1980s, I focused on
sculpture, which is probably why, in my paintings, I tend to work
the surfaces I paint on, whether board, wood, or canvas, making
them more palpable with spackling compound, putty, and any
collage elements I can find. I use generous amounts of paint in
a loose manner, glazing and reglazing, and allowing the medium
Lot #51
Madelyn Camrud & Adam KempKellys Slough, 2011
Oil and collage on wood with wood collage
27.5 x 50.25 x 2.5 inches
Range: $1,200 - 1,500
to offer me surprises. I transfer texture to landscapes I know and
care about, most of them on or near farmland where I was
raised, twenty-five miles southwest of Grand Forks. With its long,
lovely horizon line and broad sky, this land I first saw is of special
importance to me.
Weather interests me as much as the land, and in the paintings I
work to recreate the atmosphere or mood of a day in my
paintings, transferring what I recall of the light, clouds, time of
day, and season when I first sensed the scene.
Upon a suggestion by Justin Dalzell, it was my pleasure to
collaborate with Adam Kemp on this piece. It is a joy to work
with Adam on almost anything. He brings to mind poet Thomas
McGrath’s famous line: “North Dakota is everywhere.” It seems
to me, for Grand Forks, Adam Kemp is everywhere. He is at the
hub of the fantastic network of artists in this town. He is a great
teacher for our young people. He is entertaining, ambitious, and
operates mostly on instinct, which, it turns out, is highly accurate
when it comes to making art. He knows what will make or break
a painting. In a relatively short time he made the wood
construction for this piece, choosing shapes, sizes and colors
that are just right. Most importantly, he has attached a catalog of
his wood sources to the back of the work for historical purposes.
Collaborator Adam Kemp declares, I first met Madelyn in 1987
and finally we are collaborating. She made the painting; I made
the wood collage from scraps I have collected over the years
from the old Sanders restaurant lost in the flood, from Alex and
Stephanie Reichert’s Reeves Drive home, and from the old
Norby’s store. (See page 14 for more information about artist
Adam Kemp.) 43
Emily Lunde (1914 - 2003). Lunde’s father died when she
was five years old, and she and her two sisters were raised by her
immigrant grandparents on a farm near Oslo, Minnesota.
Memories of those days are the inspiration for much of her work.
Emily left home at the age of eighteen and went to work as a
maid in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Although always interested
in art, Emily married and raised four children before beginning to
paint seriously in 1974.
Emily Lunde is one of the state’s eminent folk artists and
unofficial cultural historians. She has recorded the life of the
Scandinavian immigrants who settled the prairies and small
towns of the Red River Valley during the early years of the
twentieth century. She collectively categorized her work as a
“satire of human nature as I alternately toast and roast those I
love.”
There was a time when I would paint on anything I could get a
hold of. Any piece of board or paper. It was fun to see what things
looked like. Then I’d take a painting somewhere and I’d be too
bashful to go and pick it up. My first art exhibit was at the
University; I never did find out what happened to the painting.
One of my first endeavors was to paint the farm home. I gave it
to my mother and she hid it in the attic. So I guess it wasn’t too
good, at least she didn’t think so. My husband didn’t like my
work in the beginning either. We got back from Fargo one time
and he said, “Nobody is going to buy that stuff.” So I stuck them
in the attic. I thought I was never going to paint again. But then I
got some calls for the paintings and from then on he would help
me frame them. One time I painted a threshing machine and after
I got my horses all harnessed and everything my husband looked
at it, and he said, “The horses are going the wrong way.” He
could have told me that before.
I paint things I’d seen at grandma’s or in my own home, things I
have attended –– weddings, carnivals, threshing gangs, things
like that. It’s sort of a satire of the old days, some of it’s
affectionate but some of it’s also a put-down. So there’s some
kind of bite in The Gossips and there’s a little bit of hypocrisy in
the one where the preacher comes unexpected. The people
weren’t supposed to do any of the things they do in the painting,
but they did them when nobody was looking. I don’t know if that
is the thin line between comedy and tragedy.
When I sit down and paint I laugh at my characters. They were
like company. It was quiet here, my husband didn’t talk much
and we didn’t go anywhere, so I painted. I don’t know what I
would have done if I hadn’t painted. That and the library.
Painting’s getting to be work now. But then there are times when
there is something I’d like to do. I’d like to do something entirely
different once. But when I do that it isn’t what people want
because they have an idea in their mind about what I do. So then
you go back and make it. I don’t care if I never make a country
store again. I have hundreds of them out, all to different persons.
But they’re so tedious. I wouldn’t sell one for under $100 now.
Emily Lunde, “Amazing Emily: Reminiscences of A Folk Painter” Border
Crossings, September 1985.
Lot #52
Emily Lunde Harvest in the Field, 1989
Acrylic on canvas
20 x 24 inches
Range: $750 - 1,000
All proceeds from this sale go to the
North Dakota Museum of Art for
enhancement of its collection.
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JON GOODMAN
By Andrew Wilkes
No other method of printing multiple copies of black-and-white
photographs compares in subtlety and richness with
photogravure. A continuous-tone process so painstakingly exact
and complex as to be arcane, it produces prints unequalled in
luminosity and dimensional definition. To Jon Goodman—
contemporary photogravure’s unquestioned master—what its
creators were searching for, “the light-drawn image in ink on
paper,” is “a mystery of the highest order.”
First devised in 1878 by the Czech printer Karl Klic—although
the technique also derived from William Henry Fox Talbot’s
photoglyphic engraving—the process reigned supreme until
1918, after which it precipitously lost ground to quicker, cheaper,
mechanical printing methods. By the late forties, despite the fact
that such photographic pioneers as Edward Steichen, Alfred
Stieglitz, and Paul Strand considered photogravure the apotheosis
of the philosophical and aesthetic gesture of making a picture,
the method had become largely a glorious memory—accorded
the same awe as the illumination of manuscripts perhaps, but a
memory nonetheless.
Then, in the early seventies, Jon Goodman appeared. Himself a
photographer, the Antioch College student found his imagination
caught and held by the mystery and beauty of this all–but
–vanished art. Over the last two decades, he has devoted himself
with almost religious fervor to reviving and perfecting the
method. He is arguably the only photogravurist working today to
realize the dream of making a living solely from it.
THE PROCESS: The French term photogravure traditionally
refers to high-contrast photoetching, which produces a strictly
black-and-white print. A photogravure is an ink print, pressed
onto paper from a copper plate etched from a film positive. The
heliograph, or intaglio photoetching, is a tonal process when
prepared by Talbot-Klic methods as Jon Goodman does.
Of the three main varieties of printing processes, the most
common for five-hundred years was letterpress, which is
typographic; in letterpress printing, a raised surface is inked and
printed, while cutaway areas remain white. Lithographic printing,
the most popular technique today, depends on the mutual
antipathy of oil and water: the image to be printed is ink-
receptive, while the blank areas are ink-repellent. Photogravure
utilizes the intaglio printing process, which obtains tone from
recessed areas on the plate that are etched to varying depths, thus
holding different quantities of ink. The resulting print produces a
continuous range of gray tones, from very light—almost white in
the areas not deeply etched—to rich blacks in the deepest areas,
creating an extraordinary tonal gamut not available in silver
prints. This range seems to become more expansive, its
luminosity more variable, depending upon the ambient light
levels of viewing—from the front, from behind, from a distance.
The varying density of ink creates profound subtleties in the
print; in fact, it is not uncommon for photographers to discover
previously unseen details from their negatives in photogravures.
THE STUDENT: Both as a photographer and gravurist, Jon
Goodman is a self-admitted Romantic in the late-nineteenth-
century tradition of William Morris. He has always resolutely
rejected the current and fashionable in favor of, as he puts it,
“the philosophy of craft—of making something well, of
incorporating an aesthetic and vision which deepens the power
of each picture.” Early on, the young photographer demonstrated
his diametric opposition to prevailing counterculture aesthetics
by selecting the 4 –by–5 view camera over the more popular
35–millimeter model. Struck by the pristine clarity of its
medium-format negative, he set out to master perspective, rise
and fall, shift, tilt, and the swing of the view camera, using back-
country settings as his subjects. But Jon Goodman’s greatest,
most life-altering discovery was still to come.
While in high school, Goodman had been enormously
impressed by Paul Strand’s “Mexican Portfolio”—considered
with Camera Work and the Stieglitz gravures to be the most
important works in photogravure ever done. Then, in 1971, at
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, he was able to view
closely Strand’s original prints. The experience would transform
him: the pursuer of perfection had glimpsed his grail.
Subsequently, Goodman was awarded, through Antioch, the
prestigious Thomas J. Watson Foundation Fellowship, which
funded a year of independent postgraduate study and travel
abroad. His course was clear—he would spend the year learning
photogravure.
Realizing that ambition, however, was far more tortuous than
Goodman could ever have imagined; he wrote countless letters
attempting to locate practicing photogravurists, but was
invariably disappointed. “It was something that was literally
dead,” he recalls, “and such a mystery, that simply trying to find
out where I could go to learn, who knew about it was almost
impossible.” But Goodman was a man with a mission who
would not be denied.
Following his graduation in 1976, he scoured Europe for a place
to study, buoyed by his bible, Herbert Dennison’s A Treatise On
Photogravure (first published in 1865 and reprinted in 1974 by61
Visual Studies Workshop). Eventually, he happened upon the
Centre Genevoise de Gravure Contemporaine in Geneva,
Switzerland, a printmaking establishment that made its presses,
etching room, rudimentary-basement darkroom, and vacuum
table available to him. “The way I learned to do photogravure,”
he remembers, “was to make every mistake possible and find the
solution.” Still, after three frustrating months, Goodman’s vision
quest began to bear fruit: he made a successful gravure plate.
At the end of 1977, Goodman met with the Atelier de Taille-
Douce in Saint Prex, Switzerland. Although the workshop’s
raison d’être was making very fine à la poupée prints—multicolor
engravings made in one pass of a press—the artisans expressed
an interest in collaborating with him on photogravure. They were
engravers and painters, and he a photographer, but working with
them enhanced Goodman’s perspective and versatility in
printing. The aspiring photogravurist was learning his craft.
THE CRAFTSMAN: Intent on making photogravures, Goodman
returned to New York in 1978 and, after talking with galleries,
artists, and publishers, contacted the Aperture Foundation. This
felicitous meeting resulted in an invitation by the Foundation’s
Director, Michael Hoffman, to test the process on a series of Paul
Strand photographs. Goodman felt uneasy about the project,
since up until then he had worked only from his own negatives;
but passion prevailed, and his work commenced.
Goodman’s first Strand gravures, Fisherman, Gaspe and Iris,
Maine, were made in collaboration with Strand’s master printer,
Richard Benson, in Newport, Rhode Island. Strand had died in
1976, but Goodman says, “Benson knew each negative by
heart.” The test, which was to take two weeks, stretched into
three months, at the end of which he had the first plate.
Goodman—with just enough money to feed his dog, if not
always himself—was able to remain in Newport largely due to
the generosity of Benson and his family. Then Hoffman suggested
that gravurist Goodman relocate to Millerton, New York—where
Aperture’s Strand Archive was situated—and talked of
establishing the Photogravure Workshop, to be started up under
the aegis of and with the financial aid of Aperture.
At Millerton, Goodman began resurrecting “The Early Years:
Edward Steichen,” the photographer’s last great project, which
Steichen had asked Hoffman to undertake in 1968. The first plate
had been well crafted and successful, but subsequent ones failed;
ten years later, the portfolio remained unfinished. Goodman
traveled to Germany and Switzerland on a stipend from Aperture
to iron out details, then, back in America, arranged to make the
plates in Benson’s studio. Creating the twelve plates took one full
year. The portfolio was printed at Goodman’s alma mater, the
Atelier de Taille-Douce, where the gravurist stayed for another
year while the work was in process. The production of the
portfolio was an extraordinary feat: twelve plates, six-hundred
prints per plate, totaling 7,200 final prints.
Once the project was completed in 1981, Goodman settled in
Millerton, living in the home of Hazel Strand, Paul Strand’s
widow. Committed to ensuring that the photogravure process so
cherished by her late husband would not be lost, Hazel joined
Aperture as a Goodman patron, helping him purchase equipment
and supplies. It was here that he finally custom-designed and
supervised the construction of a press by a master machinist in
Millerton from old Swiss plans. The Photogravure Workshop had
come to be.
THE MASTER: During the Millerton period (1978-1984),
Goodman produced in collaboration with Aperture the portfolios
“The Formative Years: Paul Strand 1914-1917,” “The Golden Age
of British Photography,” and the aforementioned “The Early Years:
Edward Steichen.” He also produced single gravure prints,
including: The Spinner, by W. Eugene Smith; Migrant Mother, by
Dorothea Lange, and Wire Wheel, by Paul Strand. All the while,
he went on refining his technique, imparting a look and level of
quality unique to his gravures, yet still maintaining fidelity to the
photographer’s vision far beyond what anyone thought possible.
In the fall of 1984, Goodman moved the Photogravure Workshop
to its permanent home in Hadley, Massachusetts, a thriving arts
center affording him both solitude and community. He continues
working with Aperture, having recently produced the Paul Strand
White Fence gravure, made from the original catalog negative
and unpublished to date, and developing the large-format Hill
and Adamson portfolio. At the same time, he pursues such
independent assignments as printing photographs by Robert
Mapplethorpe, Joel-Peter Witkin, Brassai, Walker Evans, William
Clift, and André Kertész, among others. “Somehow or other,
people find me,” he notes. He also perseveres with his own
photography, examples of which appear here.
When asked what has motivated him to struggle so long for
perfection and sacrifice so much to concentrate on photogravure,
Goodman replies, “The pursuit of a mystery: a beauty dreamed
of, the indescribable effect on a man’s soul of the marriage of ink
and paper, born of a technical discipline, but whose magic lies
in its very presence and effect on the viewer. Or,” he adds wryly,
“maybe it’s as simple as stubbornness.”
Text of article printed in Aperture #133, Fall 1993. 62
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Explore . . . Endure . . . Evolve . . .
North Dakota Quarterly, Merrifield Hall Room 110, 276 Centennial Drive Stop 7209, Grand Forks ND 58202-7209, (701) 777-3322 e-mail: [email protected] www.und.nodak.edu/org/ndq
North Dakota Quarterly is proud to
support the North Dakota Museum
of Art’s Autumn Art Auction—part
of our ongoing support of art and
artists in the upper Midwest. North Dakota Quarterly typically
showcases local or regional artists on our covers, and the
painting (left) by Kim Bromley is on the cover of our latest
issue, available at the Museum shop for $8 each. Now in its
76th year of publication, North Dakota Quarterly is a stimulating
collection of essays, short stories, poems, and reviews.Kim Bromley, Wood Duck, 2001.
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John Colle RogersInterview with Laurel Reuter
John Rogers has spent a couple of months this past summer as the
first visiting artist at the Museum’s new Artist-in-Residence
compound, the McCanna House retreat. This is the first time his
work has been included in an Autumn Art Auction. He does,
however, have a work he made in collaboration with his father,
John Rogers, in the Museum’s permanent collection.
LR: John, what brings you to Grand Forks?
JR: I grew up here, and find all this space very calming, a nice
counterpoint to the frenetic energy of the San Francisco Bay Area.
My father, John H. Rogers, was the Dean of the College of Fine
Arts at the University of North Dakota, and I grew up roaming the
halls of the Hughes Fine Arts Center. My mother Ann was his
sidekick when it came to supporting him and entertaining visiting
artists. With her interests in art and literature, they brought a lot
of creativity into my life as well as into the community. My father
passed away in 2005, and I lost my mother this past February
after looking after her for a few years. So now I have a little more
freedom of movement and have come back to the place that is
good for my heart.
LR: Will you come back?
JR: Absolutely. In the same way that many folks here have a lake
home, I would like to find a prairie home for myself. I have been
looking in the Larimore area and will probably buy something in
the next year or so. I plan to spend a month or so here in the
spring and the same in the fall. Take a break from California
Craziness. . . .
LR: Tell me about your life as an artist.
JR: I support myself as a blacksmith, doing gates and railings in
my shop in Oakland. This allows me the freedom to take time off
when I have a big show or, like now, when I feel like I am turning
the corner with a body of work and need some immersion time
to pull the right heart strings to break stuff loose. I oscillate
between making work that is very cerebral and conceptual, to
working directly and intuitively with materials—just goofing
around. There is a pretty strong community of artists out in
Oakland, and we are constantly having shows and lectures and
stuff. I get tapped for many local things as well as putting my
work out there through various curators and contacts.
LR: Did you ever consider not being an artist?
JR: I did my undergrad in Japanese studies and probably would
have taken a very different, very academic track if I hadn't gotten
sideswiped doing sculpture my senior year of college. I've
always made stuff and had studied Japanese brush painting and
blacksmithing all through college to balance out the heavy
studying. I went to Japan part of my junior year, and when I came
back I had the idea to combine the brush painting and the
blacksmithing to make curvy, pointy sculptures that referenced
calligraphy. I got hooked on making stuff and made a conscious
decision to pursue grad school in art rather than a more
academic line.
LR: Tell me about your art.
JR: Much of my work deals with the use and abuse of power. But
I try to infuse the work with humor. Like a bazooka that shoots
rubber chickens. Or the giant model railroad scale dioramas
where two fantastic armies are clashing while glow in the dark
skateboarding zombies zoom around them. Some pieces are
more sober, like the Shot Boxes, which are 3" hollow steel cubes
I shoot with a .44 Magnum, or the Basilisks, which are forged
two headed dragon-like creatures with gothic wings made of
sheet brass or copper. They all deal with the forces we have
harnessed which sometimes get a little out of control.
LR: How have you found the Grand Forks art community?
JR: I turn left at Fargo and keep driving until I see you.
Having seen the love people here showed for the arts in the
1970s and early '80s, I am not surprised by the great turnout at
the Museum events and gallery openings I have attended. People
here know good stuff and are eager to show their appreciation.
There is a lack of distance between the artists and supporters that
I find refreshing. And of course, the artists themselves have
shown a great amount of mutual support and interest in what
each other is doing. I think that even with the internet there is a
feeling of not being grounded to either coast that gives folks here
a creative freedom that is as wide open as the physical space we
inhabit.
LR: Tell me a favorite memory of your childhood in Grand Forks.
JR: I remember playing outside one time and feeling a storm
come in. Even before the sirens went off, my mother had already
phoned up and ordered me home. The wind was picking up and
I was pedaling away like mad when I looked up and the sky was
that crazy yellow-green color. It still sends chills up my spine.
That day would tie with watching the Northern Lights in the
backyard with my folks and a handful of other neighbors.... yup,
the sky.
North Dakota Museum of ArtBoard of Trustees
North Dakota Museum of ArtFoundation
Board of Directors
Evan Anderson
Ganya Anderson
Kjersti Armstrong
Victoria Beard, Treasurer
David Blehm, Chairman
Julie Blehm
Chad Caya
W. Jeremy Davis
Virginia Lee Dunnigan
Susan Farkas
Bruce Gjovig
Kim Holmes
Mary Matson
Dianne Mondry
Laurel Reuter, President
Alex Reichert
Pat Ryan
Lois Wilde
Joshua Wynne
Wayne Zimmerman, Secretary
Corinne Alphson, Emerita
Barb Lander, Emerita
Darrell Larson, Emeritus
Robert Lewis, Emeritus
Ellen McKinnon, Emerita
Douglas McPhail, Emeritus
Sanny Ryan, Emerita
Gerald Skogley, Emeritus
Anthony Thein, Emeritus
W. Jeremy Davis
Nancy Friese
Bruce Gjovig
David Hasbargen
Laurel Reuter
North Dakota Museum of Art Staff
Justin Dalzell
Suzanne Fink
Becca Grandstrand
Guillermo Guardia
Kathy Kendle
Wayne Kendle
Eric Langenfeld
Brian Lofthus
Laurel Reuter, Director
Gregory Vettel
Matthew Wallace
Justin Welsh
Katie Welsh
A dozen part-time, intern, and student employees
and over fifty volunteers