Door County Captured In Cliché-Free Photography By Rolf Olson

Photography with artistic aspirations in Door County can be a hazardous undertaking. Pretty much every attractive scene has been photographed a dozen times, and that’s just this year.

So it was a pleasure to see that Rolf Olson’s show at Door Peninsula Winery in Carlsville had no lighthouses or images of Cave Point.

One path he has taken to beautiful images is to focus on close-ups, often with a great eye for delicate textures. “Waiting the Wind” is a closeup of an open milkweed pod whose threads are ready to catch the next breeze.

Direction of Spring is a very funny image that arose from great observation. It is of grasses and perhaps trees bending into a pond and a branch and shadow in the middle that forms a nearly perfect triangle pointing to the right, like the start button on an Internet or YouTube screen. Really good.

Other photographs show how a carefully edited approach can avoid the cliché which so often lies in wait for photographers. “Reefing the Royal” shows a crew member up on a spar taking in a sail, but shoots him in shadows against a darkening sky.  Most photo manuals would say that is the wrong direction to shoot or at least requires flash, but the image is deeply mysterious. In another, The American Century, Olson has shot a laker, again from the shadowed side with the name clear but not highlighted, and the sun hitting the bow and lighting it up in a reddish profile that runs down the front of the ship.

Does he edit out the obvious before shooting, or does he cut it when selecting images to print? I have no idea, but the show is full of interesting subtle images like shadows cast onto the textured side of a barn by nearby trees, shades of soft red and light black. Another barn side is the setting for a long hand-made wooden ladder hanging and casting a shadow, the whole effect could be black and white except for the tell-tale strip of green grass along the bottom. In “Winter Harvest” an old tiller sits on white snow against a gray sky. Old farm machinery in empty fields is hardly a new subject for photographers or painters; this, however, captures the cold gray winter’s day well enough to invoke shivers.

“Evening Harvest” is is full of reds and blacks in a stunning abstraction that even after extension examination left me clueless about its location. Olson’s show is a great example of capturing Door County with fresh vision.

Pamela Murphy in "Studio Life" Book by Sarah Trigg

Pamela Murphy, the Sister Bay artist, is included in a new book from Princeton Architectural Press on American artists and their studios.

The book, entitled Studio Life -- Rituals, Collection, Tools and Observations on the Artistic Process, includes pages on 100 of the 200 artists across the country that Trigg talked to. The project, which she figured would take one year, consumed three.

Sarah Trigg, an artist who grew up in Appleton and has been living and working in Brooklyn, recounts how an artist friend looked around her studio as she prepared to move out of her DUMBO neighborhood and remarked that a chunk of foam sitting on a window sill was like a mascot.

Trigg decided to visit studios across the country to talk with artists and photograph their stuff -- mascots, collected objects, makeshift tools, rituals, residue and habitats. Portraits and images of their actual art is available elsewhere, she noted.

She knew some of the artists before she started and then relied a lot on references from  artists to avoid relying too much on galleries and other sources tied to the market, she writes. She found the studio visits illuminating.

“...in a few cases I was familiar with the work but understood it much more clearly after the visit.” She notes that artists rarely have other artists visiting their studios; .more often they see collectors, gallery owners or curators.

In 2011, partway through her residency at threewalls in Chicago, she writes, she visited her father who has a home in Sturgeon Bay, and asked him about artists in Door County. The next day, on his suggestion, she ended up in Murphy’s studio.

“In tandem with her studio practice, she lives off the food grid by maintaining a vegetable garden, beehives, and a ten-acre animal farm with goats, chickens, rabbits and geese,” Trigg writes.

Trigg’s photographs show Buddhist prayer flags that Murphy brought back from her studies in India and Pakistan, drawers of the vintage photographs that inspire many of her large, often layered paintings, and her miniatures. She is represented in Door County at Fine Line Designs in Ephraim. The book also includes pictures of Murphy’s goats and geese and explains her decision to live outside a big city.

“I wouldn’t be able to get any work done and live the kind of life I want to live. I started thinking more seriously about it and thought, Pam, you got the land, the space, the  buildings, and you’ve got the lifestyle that allows you to work here. So I can have animals, but it’s a second full-time job.”

Trigg also interviewed Craig Blietz who recently had a one-man show at the Miller Art Museum, and he is on her site, http://www.thegoldminerproject.com/wordpress/artists/, but without any biographical information or photos yet. In her book Trigg said she made an effort to include a fair representation of women and different ethnicities.

Dubai -- A Fascinating Art Scene

Add Al Quoz has walls decorated with graffiti 

The district looks very industrial

While the galleries inside are spacious

Dubai has two art districts and they are both worth a look. In the Financial District, get to Gate Village, 10 mid-rise towers connected to the Dubai International Financial Center by wooden walkways. It can be pretty quiet on a weekend, but it has fine galleries ranging from large international firms to storefronts.

Check out Opera Gallery, a Paris-based firm with galleries around the world and some very high-end art including Picasso, Miro and Chagall. When I was there in May, Opera was featuring two French artists whom the catalog described as expressionist-surrealist Jean-François Larrieu and illustrator-caricaturist Patrick Boussignac.

Larrieu takes on the towers of global cities in colorful and amusing depictions. I especially like his cityscapes composed of towers plastered in towers in a very flat style  -- flat only in the sense that there is no depth, no perspective. The buildings are done in brilliant colors of vertical and horizontal stripes that would give a headache to anyone looking out over such a scene from a balcony, if such a scene existed in real life. In some images of more traditional landscapes, although done in his wildly colorful nontraditional style, vibrant palm trees tower over what are probably beach-front villas, densely packed four-and five-story buildings celebrate with bursts of fireworks in the sky above and in what could be an Italian hill town homes cluster behind curving hills receding into the distance marked by a dark blue mountain. He also does some great butterflies and a tabletop painting that might remind one of Matisse, but Matisse on drugs. In Dubai, where towers are a way of life, I liked those images the best, and was pleased to see that a similar effort was on display in another gallery.

Boussignac paints unrealistic scenes in a graphically realist style. Ok, maybe realist is the wrong word, except that faces look almost photographic in their representation while the figures recall art deco in their style. Fun images.

Across the way in the Art Sawa, another take on urban towers was called Chromatic Landscape by Karine Roche. In a confusion of colors the lines of skyscrapers are still clear, and the paint suggests the active life of a city.

“The city, cities, noise, people behind the colors, flows and networks, accumulation of activities that is giving stun sensations as being in a jungle,” says the show flyer. I like seeing artists taking on cities like this and creating the sense of jumbled activity, as in Larrieu and Roche, or the mystery and suggestions of romance in Bussignac.

A couple of galleries were closed when I visited, and it looked as if one or two featuring art of the region were about to open. Maybe by Sibos...

The other art district in Dubai is in a warehouse area a taxi-ride away from the DIFC in Al Quoz  which proclaims it is the home to almost 40 creative and industrial organizations. Take Exit 43 off Sheikh Zayed Street. Get a map printout from your hotel -- a lot of taxi drivers and concierges have never heard of the district. Start at one gallery -- I chose Green Art Gallery, and work your way around the block. Some of the galleries are a distance away so you might want to get a group and take a taxi and keep it while you tour.


Green describes itself as a contemporary art gallery focusing on artists from the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, Turkey and beyond. www.gagallery.com.

I ran out of time after just four or five galleries and it was getting past 6...fortunately I caught a taxi within a few minutes, but otherwise I could have walked 20 minutes to  nearby shopping center, I was told.

Highlights include GPP Limited (http://gulfphotoplus.com), which shows photography. When I was there is had a group show based on thousands of entries which had been winnowed down to about 100 great images printed on various types of an archival art paper. I especially liked Alisdair Miller’s images of city towers (do you perceive a theme here) including an image where he had moved the camera vertically to streak the light of the skyscrapers.  The gallery has a catalog and limited editions, so you can take home some art without paying a fortune -- prices range from 375 AED for an 11x14 to 2,500 AED for one of an edition of five large 24x36-inch prints. It uses the tag line “Art photography for everyone,” and it looks to be the place to go for photography equipment, printing, books, and buying images.

Next door, Carbon 12 was exhibiting Austrian artist Philip Mueller, who at 25 has already developed a large body of work. See www.carbon12dubai.com for updates on their exhibits.

Showcase Gallery had some amazing work by a South African artist, Hendrik Stroebel, who uses embroidery to depict scenes, often in the Middle East. The yarn replaces brushstrokes, but with an intensity and tactility all its own as he uses short strokes, an inch or two of the same yarn, to build up a street or wall, much as a painter will use short strokes of a single or distinctive mix of color. He frames the work in ceramic frames that he designs himself. Look him up online if you don’t still find any of his work in the gallery -- the images are superb and show up best in the gallery or in the printed catalog the gallery carries.

The district has occasional opening nights that are coordinated with all the galleries staying open at the same time -- that should be fun.