I'm Proud of My Brother, Jason

Jason Freeman, Amy LaVere, Craig Brewer, John Still, Jeff Pope(l to r)

The Company: from the Memphis Flyer #939

Craig Brewer's local actors keep their feet on the ground.

By CHRIS DAVIS

Photographs by JUSTIN FOX BURKS

Craig Brewer so badly wanted Kim Richards to play Christina Ricci's mother in Black Snake Moan, he had his people search far and wide to find the retired, relatively obscure actress who seemed to have dropped from the face of the earth. He wanted to use Richards for one reason: He'd had a terrible crush on her since 1975, when the child star played the role of Tia, a magical alien in Disney's sophisticated kid flick Escape to Witch Mountain.

"After shooting, [Kim and I] took a walk, and while we were walking I kind of put my arm around her," Brewer says playfully. "And I remember wishing I had some way to go back in time and find that chubby kid I used to be and tell him everything that was going to happen to him."

Success has its privileges, and, thanks to Hustle & Flow, Brewer now has the ability to indulge his inner child a bit as well as the clout to recruit A-list actors such as Ricci and Samuel L. Jackson. But after three feature-length films showcasing the work of Memphis actors, artists, and musicians, there's still nothing that revs him up like talking about his adopted hometown and the underappreciated talent it attracts.

"Whenever I come home after working on a project, I can't help feeling this sense of look at what we made together," he says. "I get completely giddy with this feeling that [Memphis artists] are finally leaking out."

Though set in rural northern Mississippi, the faces in Black Snake Moan look an awful lot like Midtown. Veteran stage actresses Kim Justis and Jo Lynne Palmer take a pair of delightful turns as an easily shocked waitress and an impeccably coiffed Southern matron. Fifteen-year-old Overton High School student Neimus K. Williams plays the pleasantly surprised victim of Ricci's amorous advances like an old pro, while Brewer alums John Malloy and T.C. Sharpe say more with a stupefied look than most actors can accomplish with a monologue. John Still, the seedy chop-shop boss from The Poor & Hungry, plays a drunk and disgruntled ex-Marine. Jeff Pope, a horny trick from Hustle & Flow, pops up in Black Snake Moan as a suburban drug dealer, while Claude Phillips, Hustle's memorable junkie, makes an equally memorable impression as the owner of a stripped-down Mississippi juke joint.

Set to gritty blues riffs arranged by Memphis musician Scott Bomar and recorded by artists such as Jim, Luther, and Cody Dickinson, Charlie Musselwhite, Roy Brewer, Kenny Brown, Jason Freeman, and Alvin Youngblood Hart, all these contributions make up a part of the bigger picture. Like the stock players assembled by directors such as John Ford and Preston Sturges, Brewer's local talent brings an abundance of quirkiness, color, and authenticity.

"It reminds me of my ancestors," Brewer says of his local human resources. "Some of them sold eggs. Some of them got into milking cows. All the way back to the Civil War, they were always looking for something different. I can imagine them saying something like, 'Well, it looks like ol' Craig's on to a new cash crop.' Conversely, as Brewer takes long walks with his childhood fantasy and imagines Memphis culture as an exportable commodity, his actors refuse to become starstruck.

"I would really just like to be a steadily working character actor," says musician and occasional stage performer Jeff Pope, whose character supplies the drugs that send Ricci's already out-of-control character into a three-day blackout. "I remember when Craig invited us all up on stage at Sundance," he says. "I felt overwhelmed, because I didn't think I'd really done anything special."

"I'm going to the Black Snake Moan premiere, and I'm going to wear a pair of zebra-striped shoes when I walk the red carpet," says Amy LaVere, the throaty singer whose resemblance to rockabilly sex symbol Wanda Jackson landed her a role in the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line. "I'm wearing them in honor of Jim Dickinson's Zebra Ranch," she asserts. Like Pope, LaVere has always wanted to act but found music to be a more accessible mode of expression. Even now, recording and touring come first.

"I'm just not in a position to go to L.A. and find an agent," she says. "I've got a new record coming out in May, and I have a responsibility to support that record to help recoup costs. So acting is something I can't aggressively pursue."

Still is an actor without an agent who refuses to attend cattle-call auditions. In the early '90s, the voiceover artist best known for his work with WKNO-TV and radio decided to try his hand at acting and took classes so he wouldn't sound so much like a radio announcer. Shortly thereafter, he landed a lead role in Brewer's first completed film, The Poor & Hungry, and went on to play smaller featured roles in Hustle & Flow and Black Snake Moan.

"I just don't have good audition skills," Still says. "But Craig thinks I'm a good actor and he's an actor's director. He knows how to get the performance he wants from me."

Freeman doesn't appear on camera in Black Snake Moan, but his work is crucial to the film's success. Freeman, a moaning roots musician who got his start busking on Beale before breaking out with his jug-grass ensemble the Bluff City Backsliders, helped to teach Jackson how to play his purple Gibson guitar.

"This isn't the sort of thing I ever sat down and visualized myself doing," says Freeman, who fell in love with the blues when an older brother brought home a copy of Muddy Waters' Hard Again. "But it doesn't completely surprise me either. I always knew I'd be -- well, not famous but involved in interesting and creative things."

"I'll never forget when Claude Phillips first auditioned for Hustle," Brewer says of the renovations contractor turned character actor. "I had somebody else in mind, but this guy really looked like an old sessions player for Stax. I felt his desperation when he was trying to sell this keyboard [for a bag of weed], and that's when I realized that [the lead character] DJay could be staring straight at his own fate. Even if he had success as a rapper, he could hit the juice or smoke too much weed and end up in the same position. So I cast Claude ... and everybody from Chris Rock to Spike Lee has asked me about him."

"One time when we were shooting, Craig just hollered out, 'I love seeing Memphis people in my movies!'" Phillips recalls. "And let me tell you, that was a real turn-on."

Date created: 02/22/2007
URL for this story: http://www.memphisflyer.com/memphis/Content?oid=24924

David Comstock @ L Ross Gallery

David Comstock

L Ross Gallery

5040 Sanderlin Avenue

Suite 104

Mphs. TN 38117

March 2

6-9 PM

call the gallery for more information: 901.767.2200

Melissa Dunn @ Material, February 23- March 23

In My Yard, acrylic on canvas, 2006

For immediate release:
February 21, 2007

Contact: Hamlett Dobbins, 901.219.1943, hamlettdobbins@hotmail.com or Melissa Dunn, 901.276.9691 or lemissadunn@yahoo.com.

Material is excited to announce its second exhibition of the 2007 season: Melissa Dunn: Foster Avenue Paintings

Foster Avenue Paintings will run from February 23rd to March 23rd.

The opening reception for Melissa Dunn: Foster Avenue Paintings will be on Friday, February 23rd from 6-8 pm.

This is the second exhibition for Melissa Dunn at Material. Hers was the inaugural exhibition at the space in December 2004. For years in the late nineties Dunn maintained a studio at Marshall Arts. Five years ago she moved her studio and began painting in her home. The paintings for her last show at Material, 38 N McLean Paintings, were made in her small studio in her apartment on North McLean. The new batch of paintings feel more open, reflecting her larger, brighter studio space at her home where she has quietly and diligently worked for a little over two years now. Dunn’s work has been featured in local shows at Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts, Otherlands, and Plan B Gallery as well as an exhibition in Regensburg, Germany.

About the show Dunn commented that this show is building on the last show she had at Material. It’s a deeper exploration of abstraction in all its parts: subject, place, color, form and composition. “I feel like I could be working like this for another ten years and maybe then I'll get closer to success.”

Material is located at 2553 Broad Avenue, two doors west of the now defunct, but still world famous, Beer Joint. Parking is available on both the north and south sides of Broad Avenue.

Following the reception the exhibition will be open by appointment only by contacting the artist at 901.276.9691 or lemissadunn@yahoo.com

image: Melissa Dunn, In My Yard, acrylic on canvas, 2006

See Commercial Appeal Review here.

Gallery news

I just got some good news. Starting next month I'm going to be represented by a gallery in Dublin.
I spoke with them on Friday and they want nine drawings/paintings on paper and four paintings in the summer. It looks like a one person show won't be happening until 2009 though.

Now, back to working on the drawings for my show with Dwayne!

Stephen Gilbert: Obituary

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/obituary/0,,2012367,00.html

Obituary: Stephen Gilbert

by: Alastair Grieve

Wednesday February 14, 2007

Gilbert did not perhaps receive the recognition in this country that he deserved.

The artist Stephen Gilbert, who has died aged 96, did not perhaps receive the recognition in this country that he deserved. He was himself partly responsible for that, since he was self-effacing and worked for most of his life abroad. He had scant regard for local chauvinisms, preferring international groups in Ireland, Paris, Denmark and Holland - as well as in England.
He was born near Perth, in Scotland, of English parents, the grandson of the sculptor Sir Alfred Gilbert. From 1929 to 1932, he studied painting at the Slade School, London, where he befriended Roger Hilton and met the sculptor Jocelyn Chewett, whom he married in 1935. The couple established themselves in Paris in 1939, but the following year, Stephen having been turned down for military service, they left for Ireland, where they spent the war years.

It was in Ireland that Stephen painted a series of small canvases of spectral insects with staring eyes and ferocious mouths, and of human hydras. Described by Edouard Jaguer as "la peinture de paroxysme", these were anguished paintings, usually with a balance of wings or heads, on either side of a central body. They were inspired partly by Masson's surrealist art and by reading Jung, Nietzsche and Jakob Böhme. Stephen showed them with the White Stag Group in Dublin in 1944.

The Gilberts returned to Paris in 1946; it was a tough environment and they lived extremely frugally. A decisive moment came in 1948 when his paintings at the Salon des Surindépendants attracted the attention of the Danish artist Asger Jorn, who invited him to join the recently formed radical group, Cobra. Apart from William Gear, Gilbert was the only British member. He held an important position within Cobra, painting a central wall in the house they decorated with murals at Bregnerod, near Copenhagen, in 1949, and being the subject of a monograph in the series Petite Bibliothèque de Cobra. He also worked with the Dutch member, Constant Nieuwenhuys, in Amsterdam and Paris.

Together, in 1950 and 1951 Gilbert and Constant developed from the febrile imagery of Cobra to an abstract art of loose geometric forms and restricted colours, chiefly black and white. In Holland they studied Mondrian, Malevich and Rietveld, and, in the face of the rising tide of tachisme in Paris, structured their paintings of 1952 to 1953 with clear geometric planes coloured with strong primary colours on white grounds.

Wanting his colour planes to occupy real space, Gilbert moved from painting to three-dimensional, orthogonal constructions in 1953 to 1954, precisely made from painted aluminium sheet and angle. His move linked him to the English group of constructivist artists gathered around Victor Pasmore, including Anthony Hill and Kenneth and Mary Martin, and he showed with this group in London in 1954. In Paris, he joined André Bloc's Groupe Espace. Strongly influenced by De Stijl ideas, he aimed to destroy closed volumes and activate open space by means of rhythmic placing of coloured planes on an architectural scale.

In 1955 Gilbert moved further towards an architectural realisation of his ideas with a model for a house to be built in Yorkshire by an enlightened developer, Peter Stead. Further projects followed for blocks of flats made of mass-produced coloured metal and glass panels but, in the end, only two houses were built, and without Gilbert's collaboration. But he continued to develop his constructions, and in 1957 abandoned rectilinear frames and let coloured planes, in reacting curves, stand on their own. By 1960 he had ceased to use colour, relying on curved planes of polished metal, spreading from a central stem, to reflect the light and the environment in which they were placed.

He achieved some fame with these works, winning first prize for sculpture at the Tokyo Biennale in 1965. By the end of the decade, he was producing more earth-bound constructions of welded tin or copper. His wife died in 1979 and, perhaps in homage to the forms of some of her carvings, he began a group of tall copper pillars with subtly modulated edges.

These were his last major sculptures and by the mid-1980s he had returned to painting. Using India ink, pastel and watercolour he painted a long series of loose abstracts with, at times, hints of imagery of the kind he had invented in Ireland. His last exhibition was organised by the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds early last year. He is survived by a son and a daughter, two grandchildren and one great grandchild. A full retrospective would be a revelation.

Stephen Gilbert, artist, born January 15 1910; died January 12 2007

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

Studio Views: Dun Laoghaire

Views of my laundry room/ studio...

Artist of the Month: Sinead Ni Mhaonaigh

From Kevin Kavanagh Gallery website...

***images and writing © Sinead Ni Mhaonaigh & Catherine Leen, respectively***

Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh: Eatramh

Intervening time or space, interval or even lull in weather are all translations of the resonant title of Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh's second solo show, Eatramh. This title explicitly links her latest exhibition to her previous one, Deoraíocht, which featured a painting of the same name. Eatramh marks an important departure from the first show, however, which was based on the literary source of Pádraic Ó Conaire's Scothscéalta and its theme of exile. The importance of the space in between has expanded in Eatramh to become an exploration of the medium of painting itself.

For Ní Mhaonaigh, the desire to capture space, time, emotion and experience cannot be neatly captured on a canvas, with the result that her works are suggestive rather than representational. There is a suggestion throughout of flux and a strong sense that the journey towards an image, rather than the creation of a fixed, specific representation, is key. The works Stage I and Stage II capture the notion of an event about to take place through unpeopled spaces that seem precarious and delicate without their customary activity. Similarly, Platform conveys a sense of expectation and unrealised drama.

Despite the artist's refusal to take recourse to the creation of easily identifiable forms, the works do not reject the allure of painting. Ultimately, Ní Mhaonaigh's sensitivity and skill combine to create a unique style that blends the language of painting with the performative and the philosophical.

- by Catherine Leen

2006A catalogue with an essay by Catherine Leen has been published to accompany the exhibition. For further information please contact the gallery. Title: Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh: EatramhISBN: 0-9552525-4-7

Dublin's Ha'Penny Bridge: Better With Robin

The Weekend

I've had a good weekend so far.

Yesterday I took the train down to Greystones to have dinner with Sioban and John. I was very glad to see them and I knew it would be my first non-frozen meal since Robin left last week.
It was great to catch up with them---last weekend they rented a cabin in Sligo to celebrate John's birthday.

It's about a twenty five minute walk to the train station from their house so I left in time to catch the 11:10 (the last train from Greystones) to Dun Laoghaire. But when I got to the station they said that the trains were cancelled because wires were down over the tracks.

Luckily they were sending a shuttle bus to drive the route so I didn't get to Dun Laoghaire station much later than I would have normally. As I got out of the shuttle I just had time to sprint across the street to catch the last #7 bus going up the hill to the Sallynoggin stop. I've walked that distance many times now but last night was cold and very wet so I was glad to get that bus!

Today I woke up around 11:30 just before Sioban's cousin Shiela Gorman called. She wanted to bring by some old catalogs of her brother, Richard Gorman's, shows. She knew I would appreciate them. I had about ten minutes to frantically tidy up the place and put a kettle on before she arrived. We had a great talk about Her brother's, hers, and my work before going down to Georges Street for the open air market in People's Park. We walked around talking for awhile before I purchased my usual Sunday hot apple cider fortified with whiskey---then we got a table outside (cold but sunny) and talked art and travels for about an hour. I said my goodbyes and headed over to the newsstand to get a paper and a Modern Painters before heading back up the hill towards home.

It was great for Shiela to give me those catalogs. She's a very nice, interesting lady and has promised to come visit us in the states. I'm going to her brother's show in Limerick on the 22nd. If he's half as nice as she is I'll really enjoy meeting him.

Robin's Here!

Images in and around Dun Laoghaire Harbor.

Paintings on Paper

Lain York @ The Cheekwood Museum of Art

Lain York at Temporary Contemporary Gallery, Cheekwood Museum of Art, 1200 Forrest Park Drive, Nashville, TN.
opening reception 6 - 8 pm, Friday, January 19, 2007
artist's talk is at 6:30 pm
show runs through April 8th

Untitled from Family Grouping Series, mixed media on panel, 2007, 24" x 16" (above)

artwork is copyrighted by the artist

Lain York's latest body of work, Family Grouping, is influenced by documentary photography found in museum and auction catalogues. York describes the work as paintings of sculpture using buried and applied elements to "activate" them. The images are inspired by African, Mayan, Middle Eastern, Greek Archaic masks and figures. These images appeal to the artist as a record or evidence of the way a society or culture tries to make sense of the human experience through art and ritual.

"York's work may be heady, but on a purely visual level, it's also stunning, with a fine attunement to craft and detail. The artist has been a steadfast presence in the local arts community since the early 1990s, and without his tireless support and guidance, visual art in Nashville wouldn't be as vital as it is right now. " Jonathan Mark, The Tennessean, Sunday, January 14, 2007

For more info on Lain's work...

zeitgeist gallery
www.zeitgeist-art.com
phone: 615-256-4805

Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!

I had a very low key Sunday.

Got up about 1pm and walked into downtown Dun Laoghaire. The sunday farmer's market was still going on so I walked around for a while. They had tons of trailers that sold everything from hot apple cider (shot of irish whiskey optional) to cheeses and all sorts of cooked foods and vegetables and fruits.

I sat on a bench with my hot cider (with shot) and people watched for awhile before heading over to a news stand to get the Sunday Times.

With paper in hand I walked down Georges Street to Scott's pub for a pint of Bulmers and a hot plate lunch of turkey, mashed potatoes, roasted potatoes, dressing and greens.

Paris was playing Wales in the rugby match on tv and the barman tried to explain some of the rules to me. I rooted for Paris just because of their bright pink jerseys and socks! And they seem like a close knit group of fellows. Don't they?

Are you still holding? Emily Walls @ the P&H Cafe Art Space

Don't forget to stop by and see Emily's new work at the P&H Cafe tomorrow night.

Emily Walls

are you still holding?

@ the P&H Cafe Art Space

1532 Madison Avenue

8-10 PM

Friday, January, 12

Memphis Flyer review.

New Drawing

no. 230 and detail.

Dublin Castle, Trinity College, St. Patrick's and the Stag's Head

For a non-believer I sure do enjoy the religious imagery now and again.

Turner Prize Winner,Tomma Abts

U.K. Guardian article on Tomma Abts, the first woman and the first painter to win the prize in almost a decade.

...and from the Tate's website:

Tomma Abts
Tomma Abts’s paintings are the result of a rigorous working method that pitches the rational against the intuitive. She works consistently to a format of 48 x 38 centimetres in acrylic and oil paint. She uses no source material and begins with no preconceived idea of the final result. Instead, her paintings take shape through a gradual process of layering and accrual. As the internal logic of each composition unfolds forms are defined, buried and rediscovered until the painting becomes ‘congruent with itself’.
Abts describes the finished works as ‘a concentrate of the many paintings underneath’, each functioning as an autonomous object revealing the visible traces of its construction.
Abts creates a complex interplay between the painting’s physical surface and the form that it describes. Planes that appear to be located in the foreground also remain embedded within the structure of the painting itself; shapes are both overlapping and integrated. Abstract elements might hover on the edge of representation but are then undermined by an incongruous perspective or colour scheme.
While each work develops within its own parameters, hung together in the gallery one is aware of formal and tonal relationships between canvases, reflecting the way Abts works on many at once, allowing ideas to migrate from one to another. Her titles are derived from a dictionary of first names and the process of naming marks the work’s completion.
Tomma Abts is nominated for her solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland, and greengrassi, London, that revealed her rigorous and consistent approach to painting. Through her intimate and compelling canvases she builds on and enriches the language of abstract painting.

Sound the Alarm

The alarm system here at the house is really getting a workout.

A few days after I first got here I set off the alarm as I was coming home because I left one digit out of the code and couldn't get it right before my 30 seconds were up and the alarm sounded. On the bright side this did allow me to meet several neighbors and begin my relationship with the dispatcher at the alarm company.

Then, on New Year's Eve, Jim, Nina, and I were going downtown for dinner. I set the alarm properly and off we went. Problem was I left the laundry room door ajar and the alarm went off! The tenants next door had to call Sioban who had to get in touch with the alarm company to get it shut off. Who knows how long the poor neighbors had to listen to it before it was silenced.

Then, tonight Jim and Nina got back from their trip to Galway and Jim went to bed early. Nina went in the bedroom in the dark---thought she was turning on a bedside lamp but hit the panic button instead!!! I called the alarm company but the gardai were already on their way. They showed up in seconds but were very understanding. As soon as they hear my accent they become very understanding---as if they are dealing with a mentally deficient person. And I have to say I haven't given them much evidence to counter that assumption.

John Daly in the Sunday Times

Here's an article from The Sunday Times about the owner of Hillsboro Fine Arts in Dublin that I posted about meeting the other week. He's a nice guy and told me stories about some of my favorite artists he represents. He's posed in front of a Gillian Ayres.

The Sunday Times

December 31, 2006

Henry Moore 'doodle' sets off a blue-chip art business

by Rose Costello

HOW I MADE IT John Daly, gallery director, Hillsboro Fine Arts

THE bells that ring out at midnight on New Year’s Eve can serve as a wake-up call to many who have ambled onto the wrong path in life. For John Daly, it was the approach of a milestone birthday that set him thinking about what he was doing with his life. “I realised I was hitting 40 and I wanted to do stuff while I still had energy.”
Daly was forging a strong career in publishing, in charge of secondary school books at CJ Fallon. “It was a great job, dare I say a cushy number,” he said. “I could be managing director now had I stayed.”
What little free time he had — he was also studying for an MBA — was spent indulging his passion for art. Since 1991, he had staged small exhibitions several times a year at his home in Drumcondra. In 2002, he went full-time and has now built up a business that enjoys turnover of about €1.2m.
“At 15, I spent the whole summer’s wages as a barman at Fagan’s on an etching by Henry Moore. My parents wondered why I was spending so much on a ‘doodle’. It cost about IR£900.”
After school, he joined his parents’ pharmacy business for four years. “I turned it around and upped turnover. I could have made a lot of money but it was very boring.”
So he went to Dublin City University to study communications and then social anthropology in Oxford before finishing a PhD on James Joyce. This lead to a career in publishing at HW Wilson and then CJ Fallon. “After too much time in publishing, I needed a new challenge. I felt the timing was right. The visual arts culture in Ireland is maturing with astute collectors now expecting informed advice and access to top-quality artwork from major artists.”
The biggest sacrifice he had to make initially was living in straitened circumstances. “I was leaving a well-paid, secure position with great prospects. In addition, I was switching from (a small) gallery business that had little or no overheads to a venture that had no income and huge overheads.”
There are no regrets, however. “I probably put in more hours than ever but it does not feel like a job.”
Daly’s initial step into a new life was a measured one as he continued to operate out of Hillsboro, the family home his grandfather had built. “I got in new floors and lighting, that’s all.”
His next move was to open an 800-sq-ft gallery on Anne’s Lane behind Grafton Street two years later. “It was a great location but the room had no height.”
He has now moved to a restored Georgian building on Parnell Square.
Daly always had an eye to the future. “As the business started to do well, I bought work from each exhibition instead of taking a profit and thus built up a collection that can be viewed on the website now.”
Although he makes sure to have the most up-to-date security systems and shutters, insurance still costs him about €10,000 a year.
Building strong relationships with artists has been key to the success of the business. At a party in the Chelsea Arts Club in the early days, artist and friend Terry Frost introduced Daly to some of Britain’s top painters as the owner of “the best gallery in Ireland”. They took him at his word and let Daly show their work.
When it comes to making art pay, he says it is important to know the rules and when to break them. “For example, I have put on a number of exhibitions that seem to make no business sense but they are crucial in defining the ethos of the gallery.”
This helps to build credibility with patrons, press and artists alike. These exhibitions must be alternated with those that show work that is “accessible and saleable at high prices”.
A gallery owner can keep the coffers full, he says, by making sure to have a balance of “blue chips”, in other words pictures by established artists that nobody has to be persuaded to buy.
Daly is proud of the success he has had introducing important international artists to this country, such as David Hockney, and showing them alongside some of Ireland’s best. He also promotes Irish artists abroad and will have a stand at the Art-Miami fair this week.


Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd.

New Drawing

There's not really enough room (or a space I can mess up) here at the house so I'm concentrating on drawings for the moment.

no. 185

2007, mixed medium on paper, 22x30 inches.