Allie Eagle

Sometimes New Zealand seems to be such a small place that you appear to know every second person who lives here....virtually. Just check out the friends of the friends you have on Facebook, and you'll find that you really are only two degrees away from many well-known people, or from a host of other NZeders.

I'm always getting invitations (though not often via invitationbox.com party invitations) to link up with somebody who seems unfamiliar until I discover they know people I also know - and it's sometimes a surprise to find which of my friends know each other.

And then on another day, you discover someone you've never heard of, someone, that you ought, you think, to have heard of.

TVNZ 7, which focuses strongly on the artistic community in New Zealand, (and which we've only been able to access since we got Freeview included with the new telly) is great for bringing the names of artists in front of you who are quite unfamiliar. (Or, as in a piece yesterday, where they talked about the thriving comicbook community in NZ; thriving in the sense of there being plenty of people working at it, and interested in it, but not in the sense of it being a lucrative area to work in.)

Or in another situation entirely, you meet someone who again ought to be familiar, you'd expect, and isn't. (We had the privilege of having artistic neighbours who ran their own gallery when we were young parents, so we became familiar with a lot of up and coming NZ names and works then.)

I came across the NZ artist, Allie Eagle, (not to be confused with the American artist, Ellen Eagle) who was at a conference I attended yesterday. "Attended" in the sense that I went to the morning sessions, and the first half of the afternoon, and then had had enough of sitting and went home, getting soaked in the rain in the process. Having had enough of a conference before it's half finished is normal with me these days: I can't sit comfortably for that long, and my concentration goes mid-afternoon...

I'd never heard of Allie Eagle at all, that I can remember, but the short introduction to her art - and to herself - yesterday was plenty enough to make me want to know more. [The photo shows her in front of a work she produced for the Waitakere City Council’s chamber building in 2007.] Eagle was strongly (and angrily) involved with the women's movement in the 70s, but has moved some of her thinking around in the last number of years. I warmed to her as a person and an artist. She often works collaboratively these days (using the 'atelier' method of employing other artists to work on different sections of large works - see the article the photo accompanied) and is doing a series of portraits of men, getting to know each individual sitter in a detailed way.

A 54-minute DVD has also been made about her life and art and is available through her website.
I didn't have the money on me yesterday to get a copy, but I think I will.

Art processes again

Not being random again, I meant to mention in the last post that I’d found a site where they describe the giclée process in reasonable detail. There’s certainly a lot of work goes into getting the pictures as near the original as possible, always a difficult task when you’re working with digital cameras and computer printers. But obviously it does work, and its increasing popularity amongst art enthusiasts testifies to this.

Art processes

A couple of weeks or so ago I wrote about the giclée process in which original art work is reproduced to such a high standard that it’s almost identical to the original painting. And I spoke about atelier too, where the artist adds real paint and real brush strokes to a copy. Curiously enough, when I entered the two words into Google just now I came across a painting called Mon Atelier by Lucie Attinger, done in the giclée process.
What reminded me of this is that I was visiting the site I’ve written about before called Coupon Chief, and found that a company called Brushstrokes is producing ‘original’ works in this way, although they don’t actually mention either of the words Giclée or Atelier.
Brushstrokes have a number of specials going at any time - up to 50% off. Quite a deal on an almost original painting. And I like the way their site works: when you roll your mouse over a picture it automatically enlarges. I’ve seen this before on some other art sites, and it’s very effective.
Brushstrokes sells both old masters and original works by artists like Gary Holland, Curt Walters, Charles Pabst, Alexei Adamov and Julia Klimova. (For your first purchase you can get 10% off the price.) Some of this work is a bit too sentimental for my taste, though at least it doesn’t sink to the level of Thomas Kinkade!

Giclée and atelier

I discovered the word, giclée, when I was in Northampton. I checked out an Art shop there, and kept finding the word on all the labels attached to paintings around the shop. Had to ask what it meant and was surprised to discover that these wonderful reproductions were printed on laser printers.
And the same word turned up in the Bedford where we also visited an Art shop (it turned out to be a kind of sister shop to the other one), by which time I was au fait with giclée.
Art works done in this fashion tend to be very pricey: that’s not surprising, as the process of making them is rather more complex than older print approaches. An article on Wikipedia explains how it’s done in more detail than I can comprehend (not really, I just couldn’t be bothered reading it properly), but doesn’t mention another print approach that’s also changing the face of art works. This is called ‘atelier’.
Now the word atelier has long had connections with the art scene, but here it seems to be being used in a different way again. I inquired of the proprietor of the first art shop what they meant by atelier being listed on some of the paintings. She said that they were produced in a similar way to the giclée, but then, to give them the feel of real paintings, the artist or an assitant reproduced the actual texture of the painting, so that real brush strokes appear on the works. This is particularly effective in the work of an artist like Alexander Millar, who does thickly painted pieces centering on ‘gadgies,’ little old men in cloth caps and old suits, and their womenfolk.

Check out the link to Alexander Millar for a number of examples of his amusing and delightful paintings.