Found-photo and Ephemera Portraits

Opening reception: December 7, 6 - 9 pm

Show runs two weeks, December 7 - 22, 2012

 Selected works from the Utrillo's collection of thrift art. This show features found photos of people, ranging from a tiara-crowned little girl to a disturbing montage of backwoods kinfolk. Utrillo's was a thrift art and framing shop, on East 10th Street, Indianapolis, which was founded by artist Greg Brown in the early 1990s. Also on display, portrait sketches by Harry Blomme.

“My plan was to show a fairly straight-forward presentation, but the work defied standard arrangements. In the end, I mixed everything together, and added even more disparate works. And so heart-melting children's photos hang next to the har-har hairdo photos, next to the haunting 19th century Russian couple. The scary mountain folk snapshot collage and Randy Wyatt's O.J. Simpson painting, are corralled from the children by vertical grouping. Harry Blomme pencil portraits cover one wall, and Georgia Kraus watercolors grace the opposite corner. The absurdist approach tempers the emotional extremes, bringing the freak and the sweet onto more common ground.” Carla Knopp 12-1-12 

Most works will be for sale, proceeds will be donated to Gleaners Food Bank.

Found-photo and Ephemera Portraits opens tomorrow

Some installations shots of the current show. It opens tomorrow and runs December 7 - 22. Most of the art is for sale, with proceeds being donated to Gleaner's Food Pantry, Indianapolis. The works include magazine clippings, found photographs, thrift store paintings, as well as work by Georgia Kraus and Harry Blomme. Price range $5 - $50. We can authenticate your purchase with the official "Utrillo's" stamp, if you like.

I'm really enjoying this show. I hadn't planned a curated approach, at least not beyond basic arranging of the work. It did go beyond that, and it was a very intriguing process. I'm not sure I can impose my own vision, to this degree, onto the work of active, living artists. But I'm certainly more open to that scenario now. 

More images of the show are here.

"Kinkade Meets Turner Paints Sci-fi With Fanbrush"

  Carla Knopp presents

current landscapes from her studio 

November 2 - 24, 2012

Dewclaw founder Carla Knopp presents current landscape paintings from her studio. She revisits her earlier working methods, using a wet-into-wet application to intuitively conjure new imagery. Many of these paintings use a high-keyed palette and imagery that steer them toward the realm of kitsch. These choices also give the paintings a new aesthetic look, creating new paths of reference. The results range a bit, from the raucously saccharine and playful, to poetic, wistful, and ominous.

These paintings start from similar intentions and methods, and then become independent explorations. 

 IMAGES from show

"An Apotropaic Symphony"

Richard Nickolson

October 5 - 27, 2012

Reception IDADA First Friday, October 5, 6-9 pm

Back Door to Baghdad, 2004

3 3/8" x 4 1/2"

Dewclaw welcomes guest artist Richard Emery Nickolson for October. He will present "An Apotropaic Symphony", a selection of watercolors on paper which reference pictographic symbols, both historical and current. Richard served as a Professor of Painting, Drawing, Foundations Studies and Critical Thinking at the Herron School of Art and Design, IUPUI, from 1973 to 2010.  

"The sources and inspirations for these paintings arise from certain pre-historic sites such as the ‘alignements’ in Brittany in western France, the site known as ‘newspaper rock’ in Moab, Utah and finally to carvings from the very northern reaches of Alaska and the Canadian Rockies.  These were of course examples of pictographs from very different cultures, prior to the invention of language.  They have now been combined with more immediate references to elements in American art and history.

Straight or jagged lines easily become signs for rain or lightening bolts. House shapes from either the Philadelphia carpenter’s guidebook or Indiana Amish quilts appear as both representational and abstract. These works, all watercolors on paper, seek to bridge this gap between traditional oppositions. They function in the very same way that elements in early modern painting were meant to be symbolic. The short essay by Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater titled “Thought Forms” proposed these and other symbols and their use in painting. This form of abstraction has also been a powerful influence on my current work.

From “An American Frame” to “The Reliquary for the Language of Lost Birds,” this series of paintings seeks to explore and synthesize a variety of responses to both contemporary issues and historical references.  As a contemporary painter, I often have the feeling that I am a reincarnated transcendentalist, living in and witnessing the death throes of the post-modern era." 

-  R.Nickolson, September 2012

In addition to his professorship, Richard received an MFA from Indiana University, a BFA from the Maryland Institute, and was assigned to the Office, Chief of Military History and the United States Army Combat Artist Team XI in 1970-1971.

In 2002, His work was featured in two solo shows at the Indianapolis Art Center as part of a program series, "The Art of Combat: Artists and the Viet Nam War, Then and Now".He received a Creative Renewal Fellowship in 2005-6. He served as a Visiting Professor of Painting, Drawing and Journaling at the Pont'Aven School of Contemporary Art in the summers of 1995,1997,2000, and 2007. Richard has served as Artist-in-Residence at St. Mary's College of Maryland, St. Mary's College, Millay Colony, Austerlitz, NY, the Ossabaw Island Project, Savannah, Georgia, Alfred University, Alfred, NY, the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, Vermont, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Sweet Briar, Virginia. In the spring of 2010 the Board tof Trustees of Indiana University voted to award him with the title of Professor Emeritus at the Herron School of Art & Design.

Nuvo Review of "An Apotropaic Symphony"

Here's a great review of Richard's show by Nuvo's Dan Grossman.

"An Apotropaic Symphony" - Richard Emery Nickolson

A short clip of October First Friday, featuring Richard Emery Nickolson's "An Apotropaic Symphony". More images on Richard's web site.

Greg Brown Tribute Show 

August 3 - September 15, 2012

Reception IDADA First Friday, September 7, 6-9 pm

Dewclaw is currently presenting work by Greg Brown, who passed away in July. This selection of works is a summary show; an informal grouping of Greg's visual art endeavors over the years. Much of his art is closely connected to his writings and his person-to-person outreach interactions. We look forward to organizing more in-depth presentations in the future. For now, please join us for this tribute showing of Greg Brown's visual art. 
 

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Greg Brown opened Utrillo's Art in Indianapolis in 1994. This space served as a picture and frame shop, a thrift art store, a poetry and music venue, and a gallery exhibition space. He produced the 1990s cable access show, Utrillo-vision, which showcased artists and events. He presented artists from diverse backgrounds, with wide-ranging artistic motives.

He later focused on writing and distributing pamphlets, which reflected his ongoing interpretations of biblical parables and the synoptic Gospels. These works became entwined with his visual art, his community outreach, his thoughts on subculture and dominant culture dynamics, and even his physical abode. Utrillo's eventually became House of Jsu, an interior and exterior installation of sorts. Greg indicated that the House of Jsu was a physical symbol of subcultural identity. He wanted to preserve this concept of independent identity, and through his storefront and writings, offer a symbol for others seeking an alternative to the dominant culture.

He seemed to use the parable teachings to find gentle and kindly paths of revolution.

From the end of his 3/30/10 artist statement draft:

"...The ‘church’ of a sign of Jsu is the uncomplicated presentation of the teaching.  The art of it, in this case, is one Hippie’s take on crackpot evangelism.  But even as sign painting has been given free hand, the religious  symbols and pamphlets have been carefully constructed over long periods of time.  The effect being to forge lasting connections between the symbols and the ideas they represent.  The act of religious teaching; writing, and symbol making happens all along the porous, disputed, border between the tangible and intangible realities.  It is a tradition that is filled with unnamed participants from far away places.  Parable doctrine itself is an anonymous work that draws directly from the work of other anonymous scribes.  More identity has been allowed the writers of the parable doctrine commentaries and applications,  but only as a way to track a single individuals line of thought.  Even at that, Hala Maloki and Alez Alatofo are both aliases for the same writer.  The use of different names signals the change of emphasis from religion to art, from the intangible to the tangible reality.  There always have been some alternative subculturals who never do assimilate all the way into either the dominant culture or the dominant subculture.  The combining of alternative religion and art serves to strengthen them and help them endure.  The alternative subcultures have over a century of history now.  And even though the Hipsters are the sixth assimilated generation, each new generation has come into their own as unassimilated.  Our ‘alter.’ should be maintained to help the next generation, should they wish to continue in this tradition."