Noland and Malloy artwork featured in M Magazine - March, 2015

Artwork by Michael Noland and Clare Malloy is featured in the March issue of M Magazine!

Farm Fresh

A NEW MEQUON HOME HAS A MODERN FARMHOUSE LOOK BLENDED WITH AN ASIAN FEEL

BY GUY FIORITA  |  PHOTOGRAPHY BY DOUG EDMUNDS

    
The built-in shelving in the office uses white exterior and walnut stained interior to provide contrast to the striking custom-made desk, which works perfectly with the white office chair.

Michael Noland, NOW THERE WERE THREE, gouache on paper, image 8 x 12 inches

In the powder room, an Asian altar table is repurposed into the sink vanity while the walls are covered in stunning stacked slate floor to ceiling. The window inset lends a farmhouse feel to the space.

A multifunctional entertaining space for the whole family, the Edison bulb fixtures and the red powder-coated metal stools at the bar were chosen to satisfy the homeowners’ desire to add some industrial elements to the space. The owners’ grandkids can gather all the way around the bar, which doubles as a game table.The homeowners chose light cabinetry in the kitchen to maintain the modern feel throughout the home while not overpowering the space between the kitchen and living room. The large, purple chairs anchoring each end of the dining table draw the eye to the expanse of windows overlooking the backyard. The concrete table top ties in nicely with the concrete pendant lights above the island.

The room’s color palette of reds, oranges and purple tones is drawn from the traditional rug the owners brought from their previous home.Perfect for a kid’s bathroom, the trough sink is functional, low maintenance and has a paintable bottom that coordinates the color with the space. The Royal Porthole Medicine Cabinet gives the room a nautical appeal while providing needed storage space due to the lack of countertops.

Clare Malloy, GRAIN ELEVATOR, pastel on rag paper, image 26 x 23 inches

Before construction ever began, the owners of a new home in Mequon made two things very clear. The style should be modern farmhouse, and they wanted it to incorporate some of their favorite furnishings. Achieving that look started with the design of the exterior. “We broke the house up into several distinct parts so it looks like a true farmhouse, which normally have additions built over time to help the home adapt to changing needs and lifestyles. We then modernized it by adding clean lines and simple geometric shapes,” says Todd A. Rabidoux, director of architecture at Lakeside Development Company.

Inside, the open concept offers a comfortable balance of space for entertaining with an integrated kitchen, great room and dining area, while a separate office and master suite lend needed privacy for work and retreat. The difficulty of giving proper definition to individual spaces within an open floor plan is solved through a use of color, materials and light fixtures to bring attention and definition to each of the spaces.

According to interior designer Karen Kempf of Karen Kempf Interiors, part of the challenge included incorporating some of the homeowners’ traditional and Asian-style furniture and accessories into the new plan. “We found ways to freshen up the look of those pieces and have them blend into the new surroundings. For example, in the living room, the owner wanted to use a traditional-style rug she already owned. The color palette of the room and the furnishings were all chosen to complement and contrast the rug. Also, in the master bathroom and powder room, the vanities are made from converted Asian altar tables. They add an unexpected and fun element to the spaces.”

Kempf says the homeowners took design risks and were brave with their selections. “I always say, no guts, no glory, when it comes to design. That made the difference here. This could have been a very ordinary home but their gutsiness took it to another level and gives the home a look that is uniquely their own.”

CHROMA featured in Milwaukee Magazine - January, 2015

The exhibition CHROMA was featured as a "Best Bet" in Milwaukee Magazine's January issue. Here is what editor Clare Hanan had to say:

Tom Berenz, GARDEN ABOVE THE LAKE, Acrylic, Oil, and Spray Paint on Canvas, 60 x 72"

Color Rush

Bright, permeating and myriad colors can often be curative in an oppressively cold environment. This month, works of all shades fill Tory Folliard Gallery, including those of metal sculptor Richard Taylor, along with Jason Rohlf’s geometric, dizzying acrylic paintings and Derrick Buisch’s oil abstractions. Jeremy Popelka’s amoeba-like glass sculptures will provoke and perplex. And Mark Ottens’ multilayered, psychedelic paintings will offer a study in painstaking self-discipline. Collectively, it’s a remedy with just enough burn to get those neurons firing again. (Claire Hanan)

➞ Chroma (Jan. 9-Feb. 28). Tory Folliard Gallery. 233 N. Milwaukee St., 414-273-7311, toryfolliard.com.

Tom Uttech Painting Featured at Smithsonian American Art Museum - Washington Post Art Review

Art review: ‘The Singing and the Silence’ at Smithsonian American Art Museum

For the Washington Post, by Mark Jenkins, December 18, 2014

Humans have always admired, and even emulated, birds. They want to fly like them, sing like them and, in the finest of clothing, approach the beauty of their plumage.

But humans have also always killed birds, even annihilating whole species.

“The Singing and the Silence: Birds in Contemporary Art” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, ponders both the admiration and the devastation. The exhibition marks the 100th anniversary of the extinction of the passenger pigeon, a species that may have numbered in the billions when ravenous Europeans first arrived in North America. But it also commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, a national effort to preserve untamed lands and untamable animals.

Of the 12 contemporary artists in the show, all of whom are American, Tom Uttech seems most attuned to the wilderness. His vast, sumptuously rendered paintings are inspired by visits to protected forests in Ontario and northern Wisconsin. His visions of mass migrations are realistic in their particulars but fanciful in composition: Huge numbers of birds and mammals rush across the canvas, sometimes observed by a bear seated contemplatively at the center.

Tom Uttech, Enassamishhinjijweian, 2009, Oil on Linen, 103 x 112 inches, From the Collection of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

At the other end of the gallery, and in stark contrast to Uttech’s depiction of abundance, are David Beck’s elegies for the dodo, another extinct species. The artist’s memorials take many forms: pencil drawing, bronze sculpture, even a mini-museum building that’s just big enough to hold a model of one dodo skeleton. What’s constant is the rebuking figure of the bygone creature, whose name became a synonym for “stupid” because it didn’t realize it should fear people.

Beck’s dodos are at one end of the exhibition, near other works of vanished birds. Walton Ford’s exquisitely detailed paintings and drawings include one of a massive flock of passenger pigeons and another that imagines the elephant bird, an approximately 10-foot emu-like creature that once lived on Madagascar. Rachel Berwick’s ghostly “Zugunruhe” is a tree full of translucent pigeons cast in resin, while James Prosek’s full-wall mural shows birds in silhouette, flocking through a forest. The picture is modeled on bird guides but, unlike those books, provides no information on individual species. This is birdwatching for people who don’t carry a checklist.

A passenger-pigeon specimen is one of the birds, both living and mummified, captured in a section of the show devoted to photographs. Joann Brennan, who snapped the lifeless pigeon at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, also photographs research projects that manage avian populations. Lorna Bieber manipulates and rephotographs stock images of birds; Paula McCartney observes the real things in their sylvan habitat; and Barbara Bosworth portrays them perched on human hands. In Bosworth’s poignant images, such tiny species as the blue-winged warbler and the common yellowthroat appear exceptionally vulnerable.

The more fanciful work, Uttech’s included, is on the other side of the gallery. It is there that winged creatures erupt from a center point, feathering the entire canvas in Fred Tomaselli’s “Bird Blast.” With their luxurious detail, gilded shapes and one-dimensional renderings, the artist’s collage-paintings suggest medieval European and classical Persian illuminated manuscripts.

A dodo and a passenger pigeon also perch in an area devoted to sculptural work by Petah Coyne, who incorporates taxidermy birds into bizarre assemblages, and by Laurel Roth Hope, who crochets “biodiversity reclamation suits” to cloak wooden pigeon models. More puckishly, she builds bird models from such components as hair barrettes, fake fingernails, false eyelashes and other items designed to beautify women. After so many birds have yielded their feathers for fashion, it seems only fair that Hope raided the hair and makeup aisles to create her majestic “Regalia.”

Still, the goal of “The Singing and the Silence” is not to celebrate the simulated bird, however artful or amusing. This is one art exhibition in which the work, however deft or affecting, doesn’t seek to upstage its subject. The made objects are secondary to the soaring, fluttering thing itself.

Jenkins is a freelance writer.

The Singing and the Silence: Birds in Contemporary Art Through Feb. 22 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Eighth and F streets NW. (Metro: Gallery Place). 202-633-1000. www.americanart.si.edu. Open daily 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. Free