Berkshire Visual Arts

Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) will present “I, Too, Can Create: Art from American Prisons” on Wednesday, March 12, in the Amsler Campus Center room 324, at 5:30 p.m. The lecture is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served. Berkshire resident and author of “Cellblock Visions: Prison Art in America,” Phyllis Kornfeld, will present the lecture. She is an internationally known expert on prison art, and has been a painter and a teacher for a number of years. Since 1983, Kornfeld has been conducting visual art programs for prison inmates, from county jail to death row, and curates exhibitions of the art. “Prisoners are human beings with the same potential for good as the rest of us. The evidence is this art, born in the penitentiary, art that challenges stereotypes of inmates,” said Lauren O’Neal, MCLA arts management professor. “Kornfeld speaks from her personal experience with the artists, their processes, and the prison environment in which the work was created.” The lecture is co-sponsored by MCLA’s Fine and Performing Arts and Sociology departments. For more information, go to [ http://www.mcla.edu/ ]www.mcla.edu , or [ http://www.cellblockvisions.com/ ]www.cellblockvisions.com/.

MCLA Artist Lecture Series 6-8pm
The Creative Process
115 State Street, Bldg. 1, Heritage State Park, North Adams, MA
Speaker: John MacDonaldAnyone who creates–artists, writers, scientists, business entrepreneurs– tends to follow a similar process from ideation to manifestation. The creative process can be as humbling or frustrating as it is exhilarating as we encounter obstacles and roadblocks to our creativity. John MacDonald, a practicing artist and certified creativity coach will explain the nature of the creative process and how we can learn to recognize, understand, and manage those persistent blocks to our creativity

From the Advocate Weekly:
Painting with a camera

Local artist’s struggle with cancer has opened a new world of art

By JUDITH FAIRWEATHER

When people are faced with their own mortality, they all react in different ways.
One local artist has chosen to take that life-changing experience and express her reaction to it by “painting with a camera.”

Vaal London Kane has just opened a monthlong hanging of 18 of her photographs, titled “Motion Pictures: Photography,” at the Ferrin Gallery at 437 North St., Pittsfield. The exhibit, which opened Saturday, will be on display through March 8.

The photographs were shot last autumn at peak foliage season from the passenger window of a moving car, Kane said.

“I really feel life is movement and is consistently moving on many levels. Trees are not just standing still, but moving also, just in their own nature and at their own pace,” she said.

Kane had been working on this project for a couple of years, but it had never really progressed past the “idea” stage for her.

“I had no visceral connection or spiritual tie to it,” she said - “until I came out of the hospital.”

‘A wake-up call’

The hospital she referred to was Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Last summer, Kane experienced what she thought were stomach cramps. She went to the doctor, who thought it was just a stomach virus, as did she. Three nights later, the pain was so intense that she drove herself to the hospital. There, she was operated on for colon cancer, and she had part of her large intestine removed, as well as her appendix.

Eight days later, she awoke from a coma to find that she had been sent by helicopter to the intensive care unit at Brigham & Women’s. When she woke up, she found she was surrounded by friends and loved ones from all over the globe, including London.

“They really thought I was going to die, I guess,” she said with a smile.

Her tree photographs, which had been only an idea of what they could be before this, suddenly “became very real and a very promising body of work,” she said.

“Being faced with your own life span forces you to look at everything and consider its life span,” she said.

The pictures were shot between noon and 3 p.m., when the sun was pretty high, out of the passenger window of the car, up into the trees and the light.

“I probably ruined over 100 rolls of film before I figured out the formula,” she said. “The photographs are very colorful and more true to what Berkshirites might consider really great fall foliage.”

After her illness, as many do, she began to consider her own life span.

“What really clicked for me was things that live for a long time - I pondered whether that had something to do with the timing of their growth,” she said.

Trees, for example, grow and change and move, but at a very slow pace.

“This was a wake-up call for me in that I needed to slow down and live. I worked a lot but I forgot to live. I wasn’t doing my art. I had to realize that I was out of my body, just in my head. I admire trees because they have a long time to contemplate. I find it intriguing enough to want to do work about it,” she said.

She described this exhibit as her best work yet. And how does she know if art is good?

“Because I want to own it,” she said with a laugh.

She did admit, however, to loving “good” bad art: “It’s my favorite - the badder, the better,” she quipped.

The reason she feels this is her best work is because “not only do I like it, but it likes me, and that doesn’t happen all the time,” she said with a laugh.

“This work is bloody gorgeous,” she said. “It’s like hard candy - you want to eat it!”

‘A sense of community’

Kane, who makes her home in North Adams, described herself as a formally trained painter, and considers what she is doing now to be painting with her camera. Before moving here, Kane used the camera extensively, but more as a tool to document her paintings.

“I have realized since living in the Berkshires that I was a photographer who happens to paint,” she said.

She has lived in the Berkshires for seven years, moving here after leaving an executive position at an advertising agency in New York City. Born in Illinois, she studied painting in Texas, living in Dallas for five years before moving to New York.

“I ended up in advertising, climbed the corporate ladder, got to the top, and then two years later, left,” she said.

She has stayed in the Berkshires because it meets her three criteria: “I am not deprived of art, it is small, and it is beautiful.”

She also loves the four seasons and the sense of community here.

“The love that came pouring out when I got sick would never happen in New York,” she said. “Even though I knew the whole city, I would have ended up alone in bed surrounded by takeout boxes. There is a sense of community here like I’ve never experienced.”

Even though she’s focusing on photographs, Kane has not set down the paintbrush for good.

She is currently involved in a project of self-portraits done on a wood veneer with oil stains that she said have a very watercolor feel to them. She would like to partner with a realist who could incorporate masks done in aquatic colors over the faces.

“It’s all in here,” she said, pointing to her head.

While she works on her self-portraits, she continues her struggle against the cancer that led to this body of work. The cancer initially found in her colon is now in her liver, so she is undergoing chemotherapy treatments while she mounts this exhibit. Her outlook is positive and her enthusiasm contagious, however.

She was quick to boast that she just celebrated her 47th birthday on Feb. 13 and that although last year her friends gathered for her death, here she was, celebrating another birthday.

“Motion Pictures: Photography” runs through March 8 at the Ferrin Gallery at 437 North St., Pittsfield. Info: ferringallery.com.

February 13th, Artist Salon: @ Dotties

WUNDERKAMMER: NEW PAINTINGS BY JOSHUA FIELD AT KOLOK GALLERYOpening Reception Saturday, February 16th 6:00-8:00 PM
Exhibition Runs Feb 16 – March 22, 2007
http://www.kolokgallery.com/exhibitions.html

Kolok Gallery is proud to present WUNDERKAMMER: New Paintings by Joshua Field.

This special winter exhibition, which runs February 16 through March 22 features new mixed media paintings by Kolok Gallery artist Joshua Field. Wunderkammer is a German word meaning Cabinet of Wonders. Like the curiosity cabinets of Renaissance Europe, which were encyclopedic collections that brought unlikely objects together, these paintings explore poetic connections between seemingly disparate images and reference a variety of sources including the Voyager Space Probe, which carried the Golden Record, a 12-inch copper disk containing sounds and images portraying life on Earth. As part of the exhibition, Field’s exploration of the Voyager Golden Record includes listening stations where viewers can hear the sounds originally recorded on the Golden Record. The Voyager Space Probe was launched in 1977 and is now more than 9.79 Billion miles from our Sun.

Joshua Field has a studio in North Adams, Massachusetts and has recently exhibited in New York City and Europe. He was included in the exhibitions Contemporary Berkshires and Second Coming at Kolok Gallery in 2007. He holds a BFA in Fine Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland and graduated from the Pinellas County Center for the Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Kolok Gallery is located just four blocks east of Mass MoCA on Route 2 in North Adams in the Historic Windsor Mill. Gallery hours for this exhibition will be Wednesday through Saturday from 12pm to 5pm or by appointment. Kolok Gallery represents U.S. and international emerging and mid-career contemporary artists. For further information contact the Gallery at 413-664-7381 or info@kolokgallery.com, or visit www.kolokgallery.com.