Showing posts with label Museum. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Museum. Show all posts

April 18, 2024

Amerind Museum Art Gallery
(Juried Exhibition & Art Sale 2024)

Daisies Unite was juried into the museum art gallery exhibition!

Original artwork by Christy Olsen

Daisies Unite.
Pastel (dry medium) over ink. On archival paper. 18x24.

Museum Juried Exhibition & Sale

Thirty paintings will be exhibited in the Amerind Museum art gallery and priced for sale. Each fine art piece captures the artist's inspiration to create an original using the traditional medium of pastels in our modern world. The collection of works will demonstrate the unique beauty of pastel painting, truly revealing "The Power of Pastels." Thirty juried pieces include a wide range of subject matter, such as landscape, figure, abstract, or still life.

Dates

June 1, 2024 - November 30, 2024

Admission

This event is open to the general public. Admission to the museum is required for any dates and times.

Artist's Reception

Saturday, October 5, 2024 (1:00 PM - 2:00 PM)
Light snacks and refreshments will be served.

Exhibition Invitation

About the Host

The Tucson Pastel Society (TPS) is a non-profit 501 (c)(3) organization established to advocate and promote the pastel medium, unite pastel artists, and organize professional development and artistic growth opportunities that increase the community's awareness of the versatility and value of pastel fine art. Find them online at tucsonpastelsociety.org.


Juror

Nancie King Mertz is the internationally recognized fine artist and master pastelist, who will jury the fine art pastel pieces admitted into this exhibition.

Plein Air Activities

Members from the Tucson Pastel Society will be painting from life around the museum grounds before lunch on the day of the reception, and they welcome anyone to watch them paint. Note that if you plan to stay all day, bring lunch. There are no restaurants close by.

About the Gallery and Museum

Explore Amerind, a museum of Native American art, history, culture, archaeology, and Western art. Amerind is an academic research center, museum, art gallery, historic property, scenic destination, and community gathering place where you may learn about Native American history and their contemporary lives. Indigenous communities share their traditional knowledge with all who visit.


Since 1937, they have been dedicated to preserving and illuminating the cultural objects and traditions of the Native Peoples of the Americas. What began as founder William Shirley Fulton's passion for archaeology grew into decades of research advancements and cross-cultural understanding. Find them online at Amerind.org

Address

2100 N. Amerind Road PO Box 400,
Dragoon, Arizona 85609

Directions

Amerind is located in Cochise County, Arizona, one mile south of I-10, an hour east of Tucson, between Benson and Willcox.
Take Exit #318, Dragoon Road (I-10 to Exit 318)

The Amerind entrance is on the left (just past mile marker 1)
2100 N. Amerind Road, Dragoon, Arizona 85609

Gallery Hours

Tuesday through Sunday, 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM
Closed: 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM for lunch each day
Closed: Mondays and any Major Holidays

February 5, 2023

The Power of Pastel in Ironwood Gallery
(Juried Exhibition & Art Sale 2023)

Was accepted into the show!

Pastels have been a long-established medium in art history since its beginning in 16th-century Europe. Even as trends and tastes ebb and flow with the times, pastels have remained a constant among artists of every age for their versatility of use and effects.

Pastel on sanded paper by Christy Olsen
Rush Hour in Caye Caulker. 9x12. Pastel on sanded paper by Christy Olsen.

Pastels are unique in that their matte finish, with its painterly quality, is combined with the immediacy of drawing. This powerful combination makes this medium a staple in the contemporary artist's toolbox.

Juried Exhibition & Art Sale

This event is open to the general public. Artist's reception is at no charge. Admission to the museum is required for other dates and times.

This juried exhibition showcases the unique characteristics of pastels, as each artist expresses their inspiration through landscapes, structures, still life, portraits, and abstractions. Some works are created en plein air, rendered quickly with their subjects in real-time, while others are painstakingly executed in the studio over considerably longer periods. This collection of works by members of the Tucson Pastel Society truly reveals "The Power of Pastels."

Sixty-six paintings were accepted out of the one hundred and five submissions from multiple art guilds. Subject matter genres include landscapes, culture, structures, still life, etc., not necessarily limited to the Sonoran Desert region. The exhibition showcases some of Arizona's most accomplished pastel artists.

Juror

Desmond O-Hagen
Fine artist and master pastelist.

Exhibition Dates

March 11, 2023 - June 4, 2023

Artist's Reception

Friday, March 10, 2023 (4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.)

Refreshments will be served. Admission is free to the reception. If you go to the reception, enter through admissions and tell them you are there to see the show. They will admit you at no charge. You may also park in the side parking lot that is closer to the gallery. Directions are listed below.

About the Host

The Tucson Pastel Society (TPS) is a non-profit 501 (c)(3) organization established to advocate and promote the pastel medium, unite pastel artists, and organize professional development and artistic growth opportunities that increase the community's awareness of the versatility and value of pastel fine art. Find them online at tucsonpastelsociety.org.

Tucson Pastel Society (TPS)

Web

TucsonPastelSociety.org

About the Gallery

Ironwood Gallery is an upscale art gallery and beautiful space that is transformed for each unique exhibit. It is located on the grounds of the Sonoran Desert Museum in Tucson, Arizona, which includes live plants and animals to further the conservation message of its exhibits.


Inside Ironwood Gallery

Location

Ironwood Gallery
On the grounds of the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum
2021 N. Kinney Road, Tucson, Arizona 85743

Ironwood Gallery

Available Parking

Parking for the artist's reception will be available.

Parking for the Artist's Reception
Friday, March 10, 2023 (4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.)

Gallery Hours

Daily (10:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.).

Sale

Artwork may be purchased during the show but must stay hung throughout the exhibition.

For Purchasing Information:
Phone +1 (520) 883-3024

Collaborative Challenge Piece

The challenge piece was accepted into the show!

One collaborative piece featuring nine different interpretations of a shared subject is featured. This final work is for sale during the show. Proceeds benefit ASDM and the TPS.

Pastel on paper by Christy Olsen
Art challenge. 8x8. Pastel on paper by Christy Olsen.


The Event

Image from the installation.

Opening Artist's Reception

Framed Collaborative Piece

Opening Artist's Reception

Opening Artist's Reception

Opening Artist's Reception

Honors

Received and honorable mention award from judge for Rush Hour in Caye Caulker.

Rush Hour in Caye Caulker received an honorable mention award.

October 18, 2014

Review by Pastel Society of New Mexico (PSNM)
(Oct. 2014)

Christy Olsen was the guest speaker for the Pastel Society of New Mexico (PSNM) general meeting in September 2014. The PSNM newsletter published a review of the demonstration.

Published Article

2014 September Program Review

Written by Pat Oliver,
Published by the Pastel Society of New Mexico,
October 2014. p. 3-4.

Our presenter, Christy Olsen, is a third-generation artist who played under her mother's easel growing up and developed an appreciation for art at an early age. Her aunt, mother, and grandmother were all artists. She received her formal education from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where she studied the Old Masters and graduated with a degree in Art History and Anthropology.

Christy's work has been shown in exhibitions across the United States, including the "2014 Best and Brightest" exhibition at the Scottsdale Artist's School and the Porter Hall Gallery at the Tucson Botanical Gardens in 2013. She was also a finalist in the "2014 Richeson 75 Still Life and Floral" art competition and the "2014 NOAPS International Juried Open Exhibition." Christy lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she is very active in the local arts community of Southern Arizona and teaches studio art classes. She is a member of the Tucson Pastel Society. See Christy Olsen's website at ChristyOlsen.com.

Christy Olsen holds several jobs — Drawing Teacher, Teacher of Pastel Classes, and Systems Engineer. Also, early in her career, she did drafting by hand. While these pursuits may seem unconnected, Christy has found that they complement each other in her painting. Drafting taught her how to think in three-dimensional space. Drawing taught her how to take complex ideas and simplify them. Systems engineering disciplines her to combine all the aspects (line, value, shape, size, space, texture, and color) into a system. It is a "highly complex process with many elements to consider." Her purpose this day was to show us how to work through the elements in the context of relationships rather than in isolation (as is sometimes evidenced when a modification to one thing makes everything else seem "out of whack" The systems approach is to take complicated systems and work them into smaller pieces, then see how the pieces work together. The stages of a painting are (1) drawing, (2) painting, i.e., adding color, and (3) refinement.

A Systems Approach to Painting - About the Demonstration

Christy said she likes to paint bigger pictures because she doesn't like to do the framing herself. Bigger paintings can be fragile, so she ships them with Plexiglas. Her favorite paper is the French Sennelier paper (LaCarte), but she has found it is not completely consistent in color. She likes the mid-tones that "help pull out the lights and darks. "She uses the Dakota box for her pastels because the pastels don't break if the box drops. Christy added straps to her box for carrying and also for strapping it to her easel. (She weighs it by hanging her purse from it to hold it steady.)

In the demo, she used a computer image of a vase and flowers displayed on an iPad for reference because it is better than a photo. However, working from life is best. She said, "I like to work from life; otherwise, it is flat."

First, Christy started her drawing using charcoal (Nitram charcoal regular HB - Nitramcharcoal.com) because "it is a very forgiving drawing tool. If I make a mistake, I can just take it off." She starts with design elements and uses a plumb line to measure the subject. She doesn't like to box it in at the beginning, but "just get something going so you can manipulate it," i.e., doing a gesture drawing just to get it in. As she worked, she emphasized that she didn't want to "get it too tight too fast" but was "blocking in gestures, looking at the proportions, and checking that the objects are in the right place."

Once the gesture drawing was on the paper, Christy took a mirror and looked back at the drawing over her shoulder to make sure it didn't tilt to one side and to see what to adjust. Still using charcoal, she looked at the values before getting into color. Then, she begins shading in the darkest darks.

Question: Do you worry about charcoal polluting the colors?

Answer: No, because my pastels are opaque. It will show through them as darker values so long as I don't blend too much. When using charcoal to draw, it's not so intimidating. It feels freer.

In regard to specific colors, Christy said, "I have no idea how it (the color) will end up. As soon as I put it down, it was affected by the color of the paper, which is the effect of simultaneous contrast (everything is affected by everything around it)." Because of this effect, she tested each pastel color on a side strip of paper before using it. As she applied the pastel colors, she emphasized that she was not rubbing them in but keeping them loose and fresh. She usually works only two to three hours at a time to keep the painting fresh. She uses the edge of pastels to get the right hue, chroma, and value for an impressionistic approach (versus rendering).

Pastel Demonstration by Christy Olsen

Christy likes Unison half-sticks, but her favorites are Henri Roche. They cost more but last a long time because she is not pressing or blending (to blend with Henri Roches, she would use a brush). The closest to Henri Roche she has found are Diane Townsend's pastels. She loves the pumice in these pastels because it gives them a little texture, a breathiness, or airiness.

At this point, Christy was starting on the lights, a warm yellow for the flowers. Also, she was softening hard edges so they would recede. She doesn't completely cover the paper, using the color of the paper as part of the painting. She said, "For a long time, I didn't submit work to shows because I didn't cover the entire surface. Then Richard McKinley told me that's old school." Christy said she likes a lot of paper to show through. In her finished paintings, the paper is part of the painting. She also uses a cloth to "fuzz out" the background.

She was using Great Americans for the softened areas because they are a lot softer. She said, "Sometimes they are too textured, so I take a Holbein to work it in a little, to put texture more in the foreground." As she continued, she said she was "painting in the negative—adding neutral around the flowers, for example, and using cloth to soften the transitions." Because time was limited, Christy showed an earlier study of the same painting she was demonstrating to illustrate how the process proceeded. She concluded that it is important to spend time on the drawing and that "color is the icing on the cake."

About the Host

The Pastel Society of New Mexico (PSNM) is a nonprofit art guild or organization formed in 1989 by a small group of artists seeking to promote the appreciation of the soft pastel medium and contribute to the growing arts community in New Mexico. Although PSNM is based in New Mexico, its membership now includes artists from more than half the states in the nation. For more information, visit www.pastelsnm.org.


Event Date & Time

September 13, 2014 (10:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.)
Refreshments served.

Location

Albuquerque Museum (Auditorium)
2000 Mountain Rd NW, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87104

Admission

This event was open to the general public and art guild members. Admission was free.

Photo from the event