This Week @ BINDERS - July 20-26

ART CLASSES • WORKSHOPS • EXHIBITS

Monday, July 20:
Guided Open Studio with Kay Powell
10:30am-2pm • Every Monday
Fee: $15/session. No sign up needed. Please pay the instructor.

Guided Open Studio with Kay Powell
6:30-8:30pm - see details above.

Tuesday, July 21:
Painting - Design and Technique with Charles Y. Walls
1-4pm, Tuesdays, July 21-August 25 • Fee: $140 per 6 session series • Open to all levels. • Sign up now!

Painting - Design and Technique with Charles Y. Walls
6-8:30pm - see details above.

Wednesday, July 22:
Express Yourself with Allison Smith
1:30-4:30pm, Wednesdays, July 22-August 12 • Fee: $120 per 4
session series. • Sign up now!

Painting Without Frustration with Frank Bannock
6-8:30pm, Wednesdays, July 22-August 26 • Fee: $160 per 6 session series. • Sign up now!

Thursday, July 23:
Visual Liberation with Pastels with Ryan Doss
6-8:30pm • Every Thursday • Fee: $25/session • Sign up now!

Friday, July 24:
Paint & Sketch Models - Depicting the Human Figure • Charlotte store only
9am-8pm • Every Friday until August 14 during our extended summer Friday hours

Saturday, July 25:
Chinese Brush Art with Gail Racy
11am-2pm • 8 sessions, Saturdays July 11-August 29 • Fee: $150

KIDS ROCK THIS WORLD!
Weekend Workshop with Miss Em
11am-3pm, Saturday, July 25 and Saturday, August 1 • $60 per day or $100 for both days • Supplies included.
Sign up now for Sat. July 25, Sat. Aug. 1 or for both days

Sunday, July 26:
No event planned. Regular store hours.

See all upcoming Art Classes and Workshops at BINDERS

Please note: Classes on this schedule are in our Atlanta store unless otherwise indicated. For more information please contact: Kristina Breneman at 404.237.6331 ext. 203.

EXHIBITIONS AT THE LIMELIGHT GALLERY

Open to the public during store hours

Showing Through July 31:
Dunwoody Fine Art Association: An exhibition of work by DFAA members. The art is for sale! The public is invited to a Reception on Sunday, July 19, 2-4 PM

Visit the BINDERS website at www.bindersart.com!

Receiving, and Giving Back, the Gift of Art

“Giving the gift of art is just as wonderful as receiving it.”

That’s what artist Barry Sons says after mentoring a 9-year-old boy and his father who first visited Atlanta from Alabama last spring. Barry was at his gallery-studio at Tula, setting up a new painting, when the father and son just happened to come by.

The father asked Barry to explain to the boy what he was doing, and Barry was happy to demonstrate some of his skills. He treated the boy to an intense course in painting, including the principles of aerial perspective, and color harmony. Barry even had the boy apply paint to the beach scene he was working on.

After about an hour, the father and son thanked Barry and left. Barry went back to his painting, feeling good about the lesson.

But that’s only the beginning of this heart-warming narrative.

Barry Sons picks up the story, starting with a flashback:

“I am a child of the Alchafalaya Basin in south Louisiana, America’s largest swamp wilderness. Having been raised as a fur trapper’s son, the beauty of these coastal waters, the ever-changing lights, sounds and smells still resonate in my memory as if they were yesterday. This is where I learned about art.

“One steamy summer when I was ten years old an itinerant painter came to town and I watched him paint a picture of our neighbor’s shrimp boat. I was amazed at how he could make that dirty old boat look so beautiful!

“Through half a century of living, the memory of watching that painter create a work of art has remained vivid in my mind and heart. That painter’s name is Sam Fisher, and when I grew up we even got to paint together.

“Last March I was pleasantly surprised when a father and son stepped into my studio. I was pleased to comply when the father asked if I would mind explaining to his son what I do. I showed the boy how I first sketch in the subject, explained a little about my working method and color palette, and even handed him brushes and painting knives so that he could ‘help me paint.’ He was quiet, but a quick learner.”

Flash forward to a week later:
Barry got a call from the boy’s schoolteacher in Alabama, asking if it was true that the boy had indeed “helped you paint a picture.” She told Barry how excited he had been, telling everyone in class that he painted a picture with a real artist. She asked Barry to please send a picture of the painting for a show-n-tell. It would be good for the boy, she said, because he previously hadn’t said two words all year, and now she couldn’t get him to stop talking about painting. Barry said that he would take a picture of the painting and send it.

But just a few days later the boy’s father had suddenly died! The teacher said it was a very sad and difficult time for the boy, and she needed that picture to help him get through it.

Barry answered that he wanted to personally come to the Alabama school to surprise the boy and also to do a painting demonstration with him in front of the class. The teacher agreed, and within days Barry arrived at the classroom.

And what a surprise it was! The boy jumped into his arms with joy.

Over the next several hours, Barry and the boy worked side-by-side to paint a picture right in front of the entire class, which also included several teachers and parents. For Barry it was an especially rewarding experience.

Why would you do all this for a boy you had only met once? “Because his father would have wanted it for his son, just as my father would have wanted it for me,” Barry replied.

“I am grateful to have had this opportunity. Someone gave me the gift of art when I was a child,” he said. “Who knows, perhaps someday this child will become an artist too, and maybe he will give the gift of art to someone else.”

Visit the BINDERS website at www.bindersart.com!

Blogging about “Art Baloney”

It’s not easy to write about art. Here is splendidly awful proof from a major art publication:

“This juxtaposition of abstraction and objective representation demonstrates that he is less interested in the opposition between the two than in producing an ambivalent, almost musical, formalized pictorial space, in which line and plane melt into irregular, multilayered patterns.” ?!?!

That is baloney, any way you slice it.

It seems that well-intentioned writers of art reviews and museum catalogs, and even sincere artists themselves, can get lost in the complexities of trying to describe what is often indescribable. When that happens the result is a bloated, convoluted and nonsensical jumble of verbage — unsuitable for human comprehension.

For more, go to Art Baloney Blog, a “collection of the most egregious and pretentious art speak or outright BS” it can manage to unearth. And they invite readers to email fresh (or stale) art baloney.

If you enjoy this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing you will enjoy.

Visit the BINDERS website at www.bindersart.com!

This Week @ BINDERS - July 13-19

ART CLASSES • WORKSHOPS • EXHIBITS

Monday, July 13:
Realistic Portrait Painting with Marvin Mattelson
10am-5pm. Workshop continues!

Guided Open Studio with Kay Powell
10:30am-2pm or 6:30-8:30pm • Every Monday
Fee: $15/session. No sign up needed. Please pay the instructor.

Lecture with Marvin Mattelson - Modeling Factors: Turning the Form
6-8:30pm. Open to the public at $50 per lecture.

Tuesday, July 14:
Realistic Portrait Painting with Marvin Mattelson
10am-5pm. Workshop continues.

Wednesday, July 15:
Realistic Portrait Painting with Marvin Mattelson
10am-5pm. Workshop continues.

Lecture with Marvin Mattelson - Marketing and Promotion
6-8:30pm. Open to the public at $50 per lecture.

Copperplate Calligraphy with Anne Elser
6-8:30pm • Wednesdays, 6 sessions, June 10-July 15 • Fee: $140

Thursday, July 16:
Realistic Portrait Painting with Marvin Mattelson
10am-5pm. Workshop continues.

Visual Liberation with Pastels with Ryan Doss
6-8:30pm • Every Thursday • Fee: $25/session • Sign up now!

Friday, July 17:
Realistic Portrait Painting with Marvin Mattelson
10am-5pm. Workshop continues.

Paint & Sketch Models - Depicting the Human Figure • Charlotte store only
9am-8pm • Every Friday until August 14 during our extended summer Friday hours

Saturday, July 18:
Realistic Portrait Painting with Marvin Mattelson
10am-5pm. Workshop continues.

Chinese Brush Art with Gail Racy
11am-2pm • 8 sessions, Saturdays July 11-August 29 • Fee: $150

Sunday, July 19:
No event planned. Regular store hours.

See all upcoming Art Classes and Workshops at BINDERS

Please note: Classes on this schedule are in our Atlanta store unless otherwise indicated. For more information please contact: Kristina Breneman at 404.237.6331 ext. 203.

EXHIBITIONS AT THE LIMELIGHT GALLERY

Open during store hours

Showing Through July 31:
Dunwoody Fine Art Association: An exhibition of work by DFAA members. The art is for sale! The public is invited to a Reception on Sunday, July 19, 2-4 PM

Visit the BINDERS website at www.bindersart.com!

This Week @ BINDERS - July 6-12

ART CLASSES AND WORKSHOPS

Monday, July 6:
Realistic Portrait Painting with Marvin Mattelson
10am-5pm. Workshop starts today!

Guided Open Studio with Kay Powell
10:30am-2pm or 6:30-8:30pm • Every Monday
Fee: $15/session. No sign up needed. Please pay the instructor.

Introductory Slide Lecture with Marvin Mattelson
"Everything I know about Painting I learned at the Met" which outlines the historical precedent for the ideas that are laid forth in the workshop.
6-8:30pm. Open to the public at $50 per lecture.

Tuesday, July 7:
Realistic Portrait Painting with Marvin Mattelson
10am-5pm. Workshop continues.

Lecture with Marvin Mattelson: Color Theory
6-8:30pm. Open to the public at $50 per lecture.

Wednesday, July 8:
Realistic Portrait Painting with Marvin Mattelson
10am-5pm. Workshop continues.

Lecture with Marvin Mattelson: Color Mixing & Palette Set-Up
6-8:30pm. Open to the public at $50 per lecture.

Copperplate Calligraphy with Anne Elser
6-8:30pm • Wednesdays, 6 sessions, June 10-July 15 • Fee: $140

Thursday, July 9:
Realistic Portrait Painting with Marvin Mattelson
10am-5pm. Workshop continues.

Visual Liberation with Pastels with Ryan Doss
6-8:30pm • Every Thursday • Fee: $25/session • Sign up now!

Friday, July 10:
Realistic Portrait Painting with Marvin Mattelson
10am-5pm. Workshop continues.

Paint & Sketch Models - Depicting the Human Figure • Charlotte store only
9am-8pm • Every Friday until August 14 during our extended summer Friday hours

Saturday, July 11:
Realistic Portrait Painting with Marvin Mattelson
10am-5pm. Workshop continues.

Chinese Brush Art with Gail Racy
11am-2pm • 8 sessions, Saturdays July 11-August 29 • Classes start today • Fee: $150

Sunday, July 12:
Realistic Portrait Painting with Marvin Mattelson
10am-5pm. Workshop continues.

See all upcoming Art Classes and Workshops at BINDERS

Please note: Classes on this schedule are in our Atlanta store unless otherwise indicated. For more information please contact: Kristina Breneman at 404.237.6331 ext. 203.

EXHIBITIONS AT THE LIMELIGHT GALLERY

New Exhibit Coming Soon!

Visit the BINDERS website at www.bindersart.com!

The Most Expensive Painting in the World

We cannot say for certain who owns this painting. But we do know that it cost more money than any painting ever sold.

1. “No 5, 1948” by Jackson Pollock, sold in 2006 for $140 million. Inflation-adjusted price $149.6 million.

Jackson Pollock was a major figure in the Abstract Expressionist movement in the mid-twentieth century. He left a lasting imprint on art and artists, owing to the combined forces of his meteoric career, volatile personality and habitual alcoholism. The fact that Pollock died tragically young at age 44, when he crashed the convertible he was driving during a drunken binge with two women in the car, added to his myth as a bad-boy artist, forever sealing
his place among the flawed deities of art.

Pollock lit out from Cody, Wyoming, ended up in New York in 1936, got a pad in Greenwich Village, enrolled at the Art Students League and hung out with other hungry artists. His subject matter then was totemic animals and human figures, although he never was a good draftsman.

An Experimental Workshop introduced Pollock to what were at that time a novel medium called alkyd enamels, the fluid paints he later used to develop his unique "drip" technique.

With his canvases laid out on the studio floor, Pollock used stiff brushes, sticks, and even basting syringes to drip, flow, splash, squirt, flip and fling paints onto the canvas. His unique painting style is thought to be one of the origins of the term “action painting.” Time magazine later dubbed Pollock "Jack the Dripper.”

During his free-form drip period which lasted only four years (1947-51), Pollock shifted away from figurative images. He used numbered titles because numbers are neutral. Pollock wanted viewers to see his paintings for what they are, pure paint dripped onto a canvas or panel. Pollock did paintings, not pictures.

At the peak of his fame, Pollock abruptly abandoned drip painting. He reintroduced figurative elements into his work but the art world paid scant attention. His death was in 1956.

In 2006, news reports said that David Geffen, co-founder of Dreamworks, privately sold his Pollock “No. 5“ for a record price of $140 million, the most money ever paid for a painting.

The well-heeled buyer? At first, it was said that a Mexican-born financier, David Martinez, bought it, ostensibly to help decorate his recently purchased $54-million Manhattan penthouse. However, Martinez’s P.R. firm has denied that he is the owner. Another rumor is that the current owner is an unnamed German businessman and art collector.

Whomever! What the lucky owner got for $140 million is a classic among Pollock's drip paintings, a densely tangled thicket of brown, yellow, white, maroon and black squiggles and yarn-like skeins, unleashed onto a 4 by 8- foot sheet of fiberboard. Controlled chaos in paint.

The significance of Pollock’s drip paintings were unclear even to him. Some think his golden age marked the end of a long revolution in art started by the Impressionists a century earlier. As one observer noted, Pollock “blew traditional notions of academic skill to smithereens, and he gave abstraction an edge of danger by both confirming and undermining its credibility once and for all.”

Love it or hate it -- this is how Jackson Pollock changed painting forever -- for better or worse. The shadow of Jack the Dripper continues to looms large over art, especially in America.

Previous Top-10 Listings. Read more>

Visit the BINDERS website at www.bindersart.com!

This Week @ BINDERS - June 29 - July 5

ART CLASSES AND WORKSHOPS

Monday, June 29:
Guided Open Studio with Kay Powell
10:30am-2pm or 6:30-8:30pm • Every Monday
Fee: $15/session. No sign up needed. Please pay the instructor.

Tuesday, June 30:
Painting - Design and Technique with Charles Y. Walls
1-4pm or 6-8:30pm • Tuesdays, 6 sessions, May 26-June 30
Fee: $140 per 6 session series

Bookmaking with Anne Elser
6-8:30pm • Tuesdays, 6 sessions, May 26-June 30 • Fee: $140

Wednesday, July 1:
Copperplate Calligraphy with Anne Elser
6-8:30pm • Wednesdays, 6 sessions, June 10-July 15 • Fee: $140

Watercolor Landscape Painting with Susan Bradford
6-8:30pm, Wednesdays, 6 sessions • May 20 - June 24 • Fee: $120

Thursday, July 2:
Visual Liberation with Pastels with Ryan Doss
6-8:30pm • Every Thursday • Fee: $25/session • Sign up now!

Friday, July 3 at BINDERS store in Charlotte:
Paint & Sketch Models - Depicting the Human Figure
9am-8pm • Every Friday until August 14 during our extended summer Friday hours • Charlotte store only

Saturday, July 4:
Happy Fourth of July! Have a Blast but Play It Safe!
No activities planned - stores are CLOSED for the holiday.

Sunday, July 5:
No activities planned - stores are open regular hours.

UPCOMING WORKSHOP

Monday-Saturday July 6-18:
Realistic Portrait Painting with Marvin Mattelson - 12-Day
Workshop
10am-5pm • Fee: $1800 (includes 5 lectures) or $900 to audit all workshop sessions and lectures without painting in class.
Sign up now to paint or audit!

See all upcoming Art Classes and Workshops at BINDERS

Please note: Classes on this schedule are in our Atlanta store unless otherwise indicated. For more information please contact: Kristina Breneman at 404.237.6331 ext. 203.

EXHIBITIONS AT THE LIMELIGHT GALLERY

Showing Through June 30:
Videre Art Show. The 5th annual art show featuring Dawn K Martin’s art students - a great opportunity to collect new work by Atlanta's rising artists!

Visit the BINDERS website at www.bindersart.com!