Page 13 - the NOISE February 2013

Symphony In the Desert by cover artist Raina Gentry is among the works in her new series.
WAtER
This month’s cover is a painting entitled Water by Prescott Artist Raina Gentry.
“I painted it about 9 or 10 years ago, and was inspired by the work of JW Waterhouse, one of my favorite artists,” she tells me. “I think he is one of the best painters of all time, and yet most people have never heard of him. His work is exceptional. My painting actually appropriates a woman from one of his paint- ings, The Danaides, from 1904. My piece is called, Water for two reasons: because it is about water, and because it is a tribute to Waterhouse. This piece was created with ink, oil paint, used tea bag paper, and gel transfer. It is one of my many paintings that focuses on women in nature. Although I have not been including the human form in many of my recent paintings, I will be returning to that theme in the future.”
It has been almost a year since the last time I spoke with Ms. Gentry about her art and she fills me in on how that year has transpired. “This last year has been a pretty good one, creatively,” she says. “Getting my work into West of the Moon Gallery helped. The show in August was a great success, and my work seems to be well received in Flag- staff. I am in West of the Moon year round now, and it has been going quite well. I did take some time off from painting since the August show, as I usually need a break from it after a big push like that. Now I’m back in the studio and working on a new body of work. The new work definitely has a similar feel to
my previous work, but will be very different work from the “Boulder series,” which was the theme of my last show. It is still very much focuses on nature, but is more complex and abstracted than some of my previous work. It feels kind of rushed and a bit stressful to be having another show so soon after the last one. To create a whole body of new work in such a short period of time feels pretty crazy, especially with the type of work I do, which is very intricate and painstaking. I am a glutton for punishment though, and seem to work best under pressure, so there you go!”
“It’s in My Nature,” a new collection of art by Raina Gentry, is coming to West of the Moon in March of 2013, but for now we’ll leave you to be enticed by her painting on the cover, and with a promise of a more de- tailed glimpse into “It’s in My Nature,” in the March issue. Raintree-studios.com
SCEnES AnD SPACE
“My Art could be best described as surre- alistic space art,” Artists’ Coalition of Flag- staff member Nancy Robertson tells me. “I like to look at scenery with interesting rock formations and that’s what starts me up. I ei- ther take picture of the scenery or remember it and I modify it considerably.”
I ask Ms. Robertson when she first be- came interested in art. “It started when I was five,” she shares. “I started drawing and I begged my mother for anything to draw on. I began at that time and continued to draw off and on.”
She tells me more about herself: “I was born in New York and my parents moved around a lot, as my dad’s business necessitat- ed our moving to different places. I grew up mainly in the Midwest and finally moved out west because of my climbing habit. I went to graduate school at Berkeley and I came to Flagstaff in 1990.”
The scenery she sees and the art of person- ally influential artists inspires Ms. Robertson’s creativity. “There’s some places in Nevada, when I’m driving to Las Vegas, where I see these very interesting mountains in their re- lationship to the plains. When there is cloud- iness, that adds more interest,” she explains.
“I sometimes photograph these scenes, but for the most part I memorize what I’ve seen. Everything is done from memory. Alterna- tively, I completely make up my scenery. I put canyons and moons and other things in them. I also look at calendar pictures, and that has motivated me. They are well modi- fied. There are some places that I would never be able to go to and you would never recognize as the original place that I derived the paintings from.
“I do have one painting that’s a favorite. It’s in watercolor and I think I’ll bring that to put up in the show,” Ms. Robertson tells me. “It shows some nice rock formations. There’s a red sun in the background.”
Ms. Robertson’s paintings will be featured this February at the Artists’ Coalition of Flagstaff’s Gallery, located at 13 N. San Francisco. Flagstaff-arts.org
PAPER WOnDERS
This January, and into early February, Co- conino Center for the Arts welcomed art- ist and curator of “Underneath it all,” Diane Bronstein as its Artist in Residence.
I meet Ms. Bronstein on a slightly warmer January day at Coconino Center for the Arts and she gives me a personal tour of the show,
“Underneath it all,” walking with me through- out the gallery, telling me about the many women artists involved. Lingerie made from metal, paper, and sometimes ingredients as odd and curious as poodle hair.
Ms. Bronstein’s work is lingerie sewn from her own figure sketches. After being moved so much in the sewing process, the newsprint that she sketched upon begins to look like a delicate fabric. They hang from a clothesline in the gallery and move ghostly in the gentle breeze generated by the heater.
Thus far in her residency, Ms. Bronstein has worked with some local organizations, and recently visited Flagstaff Arts & Leadership Academy, where the students made person- al boxes after the work of Joseph Cornell.
“I did a little presentation to the students about Joseph Cornell,” she tells me. “We spoke about symbolism and what’s impor- tant to them. What do they collect, why is it symbolic, and what is it symbolic of? How will other people think of it as being symbol- ic? I wanted them to really think about what they were putting in the boxes and not just filling it up with anything they could find that looked cool. They were doing a fabulous job
thenoise.us • the NOISE arts & news • FEBRUARY 2013 • 13