Slideshow of Hugh Gibbons Art Exhibit, June 11

The Waban Library Center invites the community to celebrate the beginning of Summertime in Waban with the Opening of its Summer 2011 Art Exhibit – “Abstract Sculpture in Bronze” by Artist Hugh Gibbons (see www.hughgibbonsstudio.com) on Saturday, June 11, from 4-6pm at the Waban Library Center, 1608 Beacon Street, Newton.  The evening will include live classical music performed by violin soloist, Jessica Klett.  Wine and light refreshments will be served.  Suggested donation of $10 at the door.  All proceeds benefit the WLC’s programs and operations.  The WLC is a non-profit, community organization with an all volunteer staff and depends upon the support of patrons like you.

Artist’s Statement: Hugh Gibbons

Most bronze works begin life in an additive medium – clay, plaster, or wax. The resulting shapes tend to be organic: people, animals, wraiths, nymphs, and so on. I’ve done some of that kind of work, generally starting with stone, from which rubber molds are made that will shape the wax originals in the lost wax process.

A few years ago I began exploring a different approach, making one-of-a-kind castings from original sculptures that I executed in redwood. You could call this approach the “lost wood” method, where the wooden original plays the same role as the wax in the standard “lost wax” method. To make the ceramic mold that the molten bronze will be poured into, the wooden piece is dipped into a liquid ceramic slurry a number of times until a thick coating is built up. The whole thing is then baked at high temperature until the ceramic is vitrified and the wooden piece is burned out, leaving a void in the mold that will receive the bronze.

The difference between these two methods has a profound effect on the esthetics of the resulting sculpture – the medium is the message, so to speak. The lost wax method economizes on the bronze in the sculpture because the walls of the sculpture can be kept to a few sixteenths of an inch in thickness. Many people are surprised at how light a big bronze piece, which looks solid, really is. Not so with the lost wood technique. Since there is no rubber mold, the mass of the piece is exactly the same as the mass of the original – if the wood is one inch thick, the bronze will be one inch thick. It doesn’t take many cubic inches of bronze in a piece before it becomes immovably expensive.

So the lost wood piece must be crafted out of wood that is very thin. That, in turn, means that it will be composed of flat pieces of wood. That requirement sacrifices one of the great strength of bronze casting: its ability to reproduce any shape, however torqued, twisted, and detailed. It is that stricture on the creative process that generates its unique esthetics, for there are radically fewer ways of creating a powerful shape out of flat pieces, than there are if one is free to work in any direction without limitation.

This limitation fits my own inclinations, for I found early on that if I had a complete spectrum of tools to work with the resulting piece was overworked and tedious. I found, for example, that if I restricted myself to black and white – no color – my flat works were far better. Similarly, I worked for years in stone, where I had no control over color and limited control over shape. The limitations of the lost wood bronze casting technique feel comfortable to me. I need to work and rework every idea in my mind, being ready to cast aside any that cannot be executed within pretty severe limits. Fortunately, I can see the piece full size before I cast it, so ideas that seemed promising can be discarded when the reality fails to measure up. With material as durable as silicon bronze, one must avoid creating a ghastly mess, for the mess will be around for very long while.

About the Musician:  Jessica Klett

Jessica Klett received her Masters degree from the New England Conservatory in piano performance in 2009.  She has appeared as soloist in the M. Steinart and Sons Steinway Solo Piano Recital series as well as with the Wheaton Conservatory Symphony Orchestra, performing Stravinsky’s Petrouchka.  As a chamber musician, she performed with Trio Sophisticate throughout the Chicago area.  As a violinist, she has played in numerous orchestras and performed in various solo and chamber settings in both the United States and Japan.  In addition to classical music, she has studied and performed Hungarian fiddle. Jessica currently maintains an active teaching schedule in the Boston area.

Dr. Atul Gawande’s website

The Waban Library Center was the setting Sunday night, May 15^th, for a book talk by the renowned surgeon and medical  writer, Dr. Atul Gawande.  The husband of library volunteer, Kathleen Hobson, Dr. Gawande generously donated his time to the Waban community. It was clear that many in the crowd were new to our library, and very outspoken in their praise for its visual beauty, and its  reopened status after a hiatus of a year.

Before a crowd of 80 rapt attendees, Gawande spoke for about 40 minutes and then entertained many questions from the clearly captivated and knowledgeable guests. Many of the questions concerned the book he chose to talk about, his third, The Checklist Manifesto. Most of the audience seemed well versed in the issues this book so eloquently considers – quality of patient care, control of infection in the hospital especially during surgery, how to teach doctors to think as part of a team, rather than lone “cowboys,” and how to change the system of medical care in the US now.

While none of these issues are “answerable” in the span of a two hour book talk, given that they are some of the thorniest social and political  problems faced by politicians and medical practitioners alike, Dr. Gawande was able to present them as solveable, or at least manageable.

At the end of the evening, which included Dr. Gawande’s signing his book for thirty five lucky buyers, we acknowledged that this was indeed a highlight of our reborn library and cultural center.

See the Artist’s web-site at www.marjorieminkin.com .

Artist’s statement

Spectacle of Light

It is an honor to have this opportunity to exhibit my work at the Waban Library Center. The center takes on special historical meaning to me as this exhibition allows myself and others to make an important civic contribution to the Newton community which has been a part of my life since childhood. This show allows me to share my rich artistic journey with the Library’s community of benefactor and friends.

Although my career has taken me throughout the US, Europe and South Korea, it began here in Massachusetts. My earliest paintings were motivated by the desire to express the affects of light in nature. Growing up first in Boston and then in Brookline offered many opportunities to observe the interaction of light with the natural world around me especially the reflections of light on water. As a young child I was taken on family excursions to remote areas of the Atlantic coast from Maine to the south shore of Boston. During these trips and later while spending summers at our family beach house in Nantasket, I was fascinated by the appearance of the ocean’s light on a sunlit day, a foggy morning, or after a storm on the rough sea. Such vistas ripened with glowing sunsets over the ocean, indigo evenings by a calm sea and falling stars more visible away from the city. It was this, the New England of my youth, which led me to dedicate my life’s work to the advanced study of light, color and form.

After moving to Sudbury as an adult, I made sketches of the Sudbury River from the bridge above which became studies for paintings completed in my studio. Eventually, my approach shifted to painting abstractly in order to focus more on freedom of expression and experimentation with materials. For me painting is an inner process which allows amplification of experiences arising from significant moments of my life.

I do not paint light illusionistically with traditional painting techniques or copy things as a realist painter would. I utilize acrylic pigments that reflect and refract light as in nature including iridescent pigments and interference colors which change hue with the angle of light illuminating them. To further my exploration of the appearance of light, after painting on canvas for several years I added Lexan, a clear industrial plastic, as a surface on which to paint. I mold the plastic with heat creating topographical reliefs before painting on them.

Sometimes I focus more on the Lexan reliefs, which allow me to work with cast shadows and reflections through the translucency of the material. Other times I focus more on the canvases in which I am able to explore a wide range of shifting colors suspended in the new acrylic mediums. Each approach informs and inspires the other. In both the canvases and relief works, expressing the contextual nature of color and its dependence on movement and variations of light is crucial to me. The works reveal perceptual shifts of color as the viewer’s vantage point changes. This is much like our experience in nature and nature’s ever-changing atmospheric conditions.

I hope the viewers of this exhibition will see the inspiration of nature and its relevance to my work. The paintings are directly connected to things we see and allow viewers an interpretative opportunity to reflect personally on similar experiences they may have had looking upon the world’s “spectacle of light.”

Marjorie Minkin
May 2011