May 21, 2012
Mark Peterson & Lynn Whitney

   

Mark Peterson

My intent is to take an ordinary view of specific but possibly anonymous site and expose a hidden composition within it. Fundamentally, this is a matter of framing, which for me is the principle contribution of the photograph. Composition is not possible with eyesight alone but requires a frame. I hope to make the composition formally obvious, possibly to the point of absurdity.

If the site is sufficiently banal and the composition sufficiently elegant, then the photograph may be very ironic.

To unveil the composition I often use a very long lens in order to bring shapes up against each other more tightly --an effect I call automatic montage. I find that very early morning light also emphasizes composition by making the lines more definite and by providing more angular shadows.

To place the site in its situation I attempt to make explicit the color of the ambient light, the angle of viewing, and the quality of diffusion of the light. When viewing a scene in person, these elements tend to be computed out after looking at any scene for more than a few moments. The job of the eye-brain is to deliver the real color and real shape of any object and therefore to compensate quickly for the yellowness of the morning light and for quirks of perspective --for instance. In my photographs I try to arrest the earlier, what I consider primary, moments of seeing before these adjustments are made. With a photograph there is an opportunity to capture the situation as first encountered and then to hold it there more or less indefinitely less practical but potentially very entertaining.

The particular temperature of light at transition, the beginning or end of the day, is especially fleeting. It evokes not only a specific time but also the moment of reflection in solitude that often accompanies the awareness of this time. Photographs can hold and then multiply these moments.

Locations of most of the pictures in the gallery are self-explanatory. A couple exceptions. . .

Hartford City is Hartford City, Indiana, where I grew up.

Karakoy is a village in Turkey, which was essentially abandoned as a result of the 1923 population exchange, a scheme whereby Turks in Greece and Greeks in Turkey were to be exchanged back to their correct homeland. (This became known in Greece as the Asia Minor Catastrophe.) A wonderful and terrifying account of this event is Louis de Bernieres' novel, Birds without Wings.

 

Lynn Whitney

Lynn Whitney is a well-known photographer. Some of her most famous photographs document the project to replace The Craig Memorial Bridge that is suspended over the Maumee River in Toledo, Ohio connecting Interstate 280. Captured with an eight by ten large-format camera, these black-and-white formal studies of this massive structure depict remnants of the old bridge as well as the new. Whitney's photographs document not only the change that the bridge is undergoing, but also the transformation of the overall landscape. Her pictures comment on how the bridge's magnitude and construction impose upon the landscape, workers, and residents of the surrounding area.

Lynn Whitney was born in 1953. She received a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art (1984) and an MFA in Photography from Yale University, New Haven, CT (1986). Whitney's work is held in the collections of institutions including the Toledo Museum of Art; Yale University's, Sterling Memorial Library; and the Southeast Center for Photographic Studies, Daytona Beach, FL. She has exhibited at venues including Jinan Art Museum, China; the Toledo Museum of Art and the University of Florida, Ham Museum of Art, Gainesville, FL. Lynn Whitney is currently an Associate Professor and Area Head of Photography at Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH.

Lynn Whitney at MoCP

April 30, 2012
Anna Heringer

Anna Heringer

Anna Heringer is an architectural designer from Salzburg, Austria. Her work focuses on the use of local materials, skills and energy sources to create buildings that are distinct and undeniably from their place. In 2005-2006 her diploma project, a school in Bangladesh built from mud and bamboo, was realized in the village of Rudrapur. This is the place where she lived in 1998 as volunteer of the local non-governmental organization, Dipshikha. The construction of a vocational school and a pilot project on rural housing in Rudrapur with students from Bangladesh and Austria followed in 2007-2008. The time in Bangladesh was a great learning process where she experienced at a grassroots level that architecture is a tool to improve lives. Building the confidence of people the craftsmen, the local community, the youth - and revealing the trust in their endogenous potentials, strengthening cultural identity, supporting local economies and fostering the ecological balance through architecture is the main aim of her projects.

From October 2008 to May 2011 Anna led the studio BASEhabitat architecture for development at the University of Arts in Linz, Austria. She lectured worldwide and conducted international workshops in Bangladesh and Austria. Since 2010 she is honorary professor of the UNESCO Chair Earthen Architecture.Her work was shown at MoMA in New York, la Loge in Brussels, Cité d`architecture and du patrimoine in Paris, the MAM in Sao Paulo, the Aedes Galery in Berlin and at the Venice Biennale in 2010. She recieved a number of awards such as the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (2007), the AR Emerging Architecture Awards (2006 and 2008), the Archprix Hunter Douglas Award (2006) and most recently the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture in 2011.

At the GSD Anna will study construction methods based on natural materials and human labor focusing on their impact on society, environment and building culture.

www.anna-heringer.com

March 26, 2012
Sue Standing & Laraine Armenti

   

Sue Standing

Sue Standing, featured poet in Issue 1, permanently resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but travels as much as she can. She has been awarded a Pushcart Prize for her short story, Fast Sunday, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bunting Institute, and is currently on a Fulbright Research Scholarship at the University of Toulouse in France. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and literary magazines, including Agni, The American Poetry Review, American Scholar, The Atlantic Monthly, Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, and Southwest Review. Her poems appear in several anthologies, including Conversation Pieces: Poems that Talk to Other Poems, Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad, and The Poetry of Solitude: A Tribute to Edward Hopper. She teaches creative writing and African literature at Wheaton College, in Norton, Massachusetts. Her most recent collection of poems is False Horizon (Four Way Books, 2003).

Laraine Armenti

Laraine Armenti is an oil painter working in still-life and landscape from direct observation on a personal scale. Her paintings are done from daily life, places and things sought out, inherited, or accumulated. She orchestrates beautiful color, careful drawing, and elemental design to create sensuous images using thick, calligraphic paint. Light, atmosphere, color, and pattern are constantly on the move. The eye, heart, and mind adjust to shifting perceptions.

Armenti grew up in New England. She has a B.F.A from Rhode Island School of Design where she majored in printmaking with a focus on etching. Her course work included painting, drawing, photography, and art history. She has received fine arts grants from the Massachusetts Council for the Arts and the Artists Valentine. She is a Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and has been a resident artist at the Vermont Studio Center. Her paintings are held in private collections in the United States and in the permanent collection of Meditech Corporation.

Concurrent with her work as an artist, she was an illustrator and graphic designer in the computer industry at Digital Equipment Corporation, followed by self-employment in conference presentation graphic design. Her painting studio is in Massachusetts.

www.larainearmenti.com

November 28, 2011
Aaron Naparstek & Inga Saffron

   

Aaron Naparstek

When Aaron Naparstek launched Streetsblog.org in the spring of 2006, New York City transportation policy was stalled in gridlock. While cities like London, Paris, Portland and Chicago were rolling out transportation policy reforms and long-term sustainability plans, New York's streets were still mostly ruled by a 1950's traffic-engineering mindset aimed at maximizing the city's capacity to accommodate motor vehicles. While other world cities were reclaiming their streets with new bike infrastructure, pedestrian plazas, bus rapid transit and congestion pricing, New York City still seemed to view traffic as something akin to the weather a force beyond the control of mere mortals.

Streetsblog helped to change that. It did this by establishing a new journalistic beat covering a range of stories from the intense neighborhood-level battles over bike lanes and parking spots to the macro-level questions around how cities are addressing the challenge of long-term sustainability; by educating policy makers on urban planning and transportation best practices; by creating a vibrant online community; and by serving as a city government watchdog. Published by the non-profit technology organization OpenPlans, Streetsblog quickly emerged as a daily must-read among advocates, the press, policy wonks and City Hall insiders. Today, under the leadership of Janette Sadik-Khan, New York City's Department of Transportation is pursuing a bold new program to create sustainable streets. The agency is transformed, and widely considered a leading example for transportation agencies in other U.S. cities. Streetsblog helped to make that so. Prior to founding Streetsblog, Naparstek worked as a journalist, interactive media producer and community organizer. He is author of Honku: The Zen Antidote for Road Rage, a book of humorous haiku poetry inspired by the unique brand of motorist sociopathy observed from his apartment window in Brooklyn. As a community organizer, Naparstek's work has contributed to growing New York City's bike network, eliminating motor vehicle traffic from city parks, and the installation of public plazas, car-free streets and traffic-calming projects.

During his Fellowship, Naparstek hopes to build relationships with people who are working on the cutting edge of progressive urban planning, policy and technology.

naparstek.com
www.honku.org

Inga Saffron

Inga Saffron, the architecture critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, has been writing about urban design issues for over a decade. She has reviewed some of the most memorable new projects of the era - including Gehry's Disney Hall, Koolhaas' Seattle Library and New York's High Line. But her primary interest is in writing about the less-heralded places that people encounter in their daily lives offices and casinos, parking garages and parks. Inga became a design critic after working for many years as a news reporter, and she melds a critic?s sensibility with a reporter's ability to ferret out a story. For her, that story is Philadelphia's struggle to maintain its urbanity, livability and distinctiveness in the face of pressure from a homogenizing, car-oriented culture. She writes about that effort in a weekly column, Changing Skyline, and has been influential in shaping the public conversation in Philadelphia about design and planning issues. Her advocacy was instrumental in convincing city officials to focus on Philadelphia's neglected Delaware waterfront. She has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize three times since 2004, and received the Gene Burd Urban Journalism Award in 2010.

Before becoming the Inquirer's architecture critic in 2000, Inga spent several years as a foreign correspondent for the paper, based in Belgrade and Moscow. While abroad, she covered two wars and witnessed the destruction of Sarajevo and Grozny, two events that strongly influenced her thinking about cities. After returning to the U.S., Inga published the cultural and environmental history, Caviar: The Strange History and Uncertain Future of the World?s Most Coveted Delicacy. She has also written for Metropolis and Dwell magazines.

As a Loeb Fellow, Inga plans to delve deeper into how cities can retain their distinct identities in a globalized, interconnected world, while remaining viable places to work and live.

Changing Skyline

October 24, 2011
Mercedes Nuñez & Jerald Walker

   

Mercedes Nuñez

Cuban born visual artist, Mercedes Nuñez's body of work is in painting, mixed media works on paper, and artist books. Nuñez studied art at Pratt Institute and has a MFA from the University of Miami. Her work is in the permanent collection of Bridgewater State College, and in private collections. She has been the recipient of grants several of which were in support of an Antarctic expedition, and in support of a return to her native Cuba. Her paintings, mixed media works and artist books have been exhibited throughout the U.S. Presently, her work can be seen at PIK NIK Art and Apparel, www.piknikmv.com; Oak Bluffs, Martha's Vineyard, MA. Nuñez is a Professor of Art at Bridgewater State College, Bridgewater, MA, and currently resides in Bellingham, MA, located in the historic Blackstone River Valley.

mercedesnunez.com

Jerald Walker

Jerald Walker was born in a Chicago housing project and raised, along with his six siblings, by blind parents of modest means. Seen as a boy of great promise by parents and teachers, he found himself drawn to the streets, and by age seventeen was a school dropout, a drug addict, and a gang member. Walker is now an associate professor of English at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts.

Walker received his MFA in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he was a Teaching/Writing Fellow and James A. Michener Fellow, and he received his PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from The University of Iowa. Dr. Walker is the recipient of two of Bridgewater State College?s major awards: the Class of 1950 Most Distinguished Research Award, and the Martha D. Jones Award for Most Outstanding Dedication to Students. In addition to founding the Annual Festival of Arts, Dr. Walker is founder and co-advisor of the literary/arts journal, The Bridge. Since its inception in 2003, The Bridge has won more than sixty national honors, including numerous Crown Awards from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association, and a Pacemaker from the Associated Collegiate Press.

September 26, 2011
Maggie Stern, Aparna Agrawal, Anthony Russo & Susan Pilgrim Waters

Maggie Stern

Maggie Stern is a sculptor and fiber artist whose work is playful, yet speaks in a profound way about the tenderness of relationship. She is a former children's book author who has moved solidly into art-making and had two one-woman shows within the last year.

www.maggiestern.com

Aparna Agrawal

Originally from India, Aparna Agrawal is a sculptor and multi-media artist whose work often evokes the gestures of the body in its fragile, transient state and the visceral elements of wind and water, the teeming life of Nature all around. Her work will be featured in a show at Simmons College this fall.

www.aparnaart.net

Anthony Russo

Internationally recognized illustrator and painter Anthony Russo has been featured prominently in the prestigious American Illustration annuals. His distinctive graphic style blazed trails of bold simplicity. His clients include The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The New Yorker and many others. He is well known for his book cover illustrations.

www.russoart.com

Susan Pilgrim Waters

Susy Pilgrim Waters has drawn since she could hold a pencil. She is an illustrator, designer and painter whose work is used extensively in print advertising, book and magazine publishing, and commercial licensing. Her signature style combines color, shapes, and wit, for vibrant evocative results. I love being an Illustrator, each project, brings a new challenge and chance to explore and use ever evolving materials. I just wish there were more hours in a day.

I have a range of styles and approaches to my work. Sometimes a client will be quite specific about a particular piece that will give me a direction, or I am just sent the text and given free range! (well almost) I love to paint, used mixed media, wood, fabric, printing (wood cut, mono print) I am a huge processor, I like to keep a few sketch books going at the same time.

Having completed murals for restaurants, the New York city library and other large scale commissions, nothing is too big or small for Susy to work on.

Originally from England, SPW lives in Boston with her husband, Keith, their dog, Tillie, 2 cats and 2 bunnies. They have 2 children.

www.pilgrimwaters.com

April 25, 2011
Andy Cao & Pamela Painter

   

Andy Cao

Andy Cao came to the US from his native Vietnam in 1979. After studying Landscape Architecture at California Polytech in Pomona, he began the Glass Garden with the help of his business partner, Stephen Jerrom.

His first Glass Garden, a stylized Vietnamese landscape utilizing 45 tons of recycled glass, debuted in 1998. Since then, Andy has received two full fellowships to Pilchuck Glass School in Seattle; he was the only American designer to participate in the 2001 famous garden festival at Chaumont-sur-Loire, in France; and in 2002 he was recipient of the prestigious Rome Prize Fellowship in Landscape Architecture.

Andy is currently involved in design commissions for hotels, private residences, stores and museums. Glass Garden is working with city governments to purchase recycled glass to make 100% recycled glass bricks & pavers in their own hot shop--a full service glass blowing and casting facility.

caoperrotstudio.com

Pamela Painter

Pamela Painter is the author a new book of short short stories entitled Wouldn't You Like to Know. She is also the author of two story collections, Getting to Know the Weather, which won the GLCA Award for First Fiction and was reprinted as a Classic Contemporary by Carnegie Mellon, and The Long and Short of It. She is also the co-author of What If Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers, now in its third edition. Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper's, Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, Ploughshares. Her short short stories have appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Iron Horse Literary Review, Mid-American Review, and Quick Fiction, among others and in numerous short short story anthologies, such as Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction, Flash Fiction Forward, MicroFiction Sudden Stories, and You Have Time for This. She has received grants from The Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts, has won three Pushcart Prizes and Agni Reviews The John Cheever Award for Fiction. Painter's newest collection of short short stories, Wouldn't You Like to Know, is now available from Carnegie Mellon. Painter lives in Boston and teaches in the Writing, Literature and Publishing Program at Emerson College.

February 28, 2011
Andy Newman & Sue Standing

   

Andy Newman

Andy Newman is an American painter who was educated in London and took his degree in Modern History at Trinity College, Oxford. After training and working as a lawyer in Washington, D.C., he began painting in earnest in the early 1990s. He has exhibited in London since 1992, including on several occasions at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and has visited St Ives since the 1970s, where he has friends. He is represented by galleries in the United States, Canada, France, Italy and Portugal and he has had also solo museum exhibitions in Portugal and Macau.

His 1998 New York exhibition prompted critic and art historian Donald Kuspit to observe, "There is a ghostly, dreamlike quality to Newman's pictures, making their narrative all the more haunting and evocative.... Newman's pictures are on the emotional cutting edge."

Now Andy Newman has his studio at the Emerson Umbrella for the Arts in Concord, Massachusetts.

www.andynewman.net

Sue Standing

Sue Standing, featured poet in Issue 1, permanently resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but travels as much as she can. She has been awarded a Pushcart Prize for her short story, Fast Sunday, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bunting Institute, and is currently on a Fulbright Research Scholarship at the University of Toulouse in France. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and literary magazines, including Agni, The American Poetry Review, American Scholar, The Atlantic Monthly, Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, and Southwest Review. Her poems appear in several anthologies, including Conversation Pieces: Poems that Talk to Other Poems, Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad, and The Poetry of Solitude: A Tribute to Edward Hopper. She teaches creative writing and African literature at Wheaton College, in Norton, Massachusetts. Her most recent collection of poems is False Horizon (Four Way Books, 2003).

January 21, 2011
Eric Garnick & James Kennedy

   

Eric Garnick

I majored in both ceramic studio art and biology at Antioch College hundreds of years ago, after which a long stint in marine ecology and mathematical ecology somewhat derailed my career in art. I nevertheless continued to experiment during that time with various media, including ceramics, sculpture, painting, and performance art (which lengthened my graduate studies to near record duration).

Finally realizing my true inclinations 17 years ago, I effected a major career change and took up free-lance computer work in order to concentrate on making art. I have since focused intently on oil painting and would cite as major influences the mid-twentieth century abstract expressionists (to whom I was first drawn at the age of 11), including most notably Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Cleve Gray, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, and Barnett Newman.

I am particularly interested in the visual rhythm created by the juxtaposition of forms, so, although my work is resolutely non-representational, my inspiration often comes from such sources as neolithic standing stones, industrial relics (e.g. fences, old piers and pilings), figures in landscapes, and newspaper photographs.

James Kennedy

In my paintings I try to explore how geometry can be used as a neutral formal structure capable of infinite variation, that is at once universal and at the same time able to elicit deeply subjective responses. My concern is with discovering the ways in which different geometric structures and configurations can evoke memories, experiences, places and feelings.

November 22, 2010
Doug Kornfeld & Brian Knep

   

Doug Kornfeld

Doug Kornfeld's business card is a squat black figure with an enormous orb for a head. The word ARTIST is printed in a white font where the forehead might be. The neck is nonexistent and the arms dangle stiffly. It's a glib distillation of the sculptor himself: a small man with a burnished scalp, thick-rimmed spectacles, and a habit of accenting his words with energetic gestures. Everything I do is trying to get you to think about symbols, he says, striking the table with the edge of his palm. To notice how they represent us and how they don't. For the past two decades, Kornfeld has been making art installations that examine modern iconography. His latest creation, Ozymandias, was completed in late May and sits on a prime patch of real estate outside at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park. The 18-foot-tall sculpture is a great red slab that appears to be sinking into a swath of lawn. Ozymandias is shaped like a giant man - more precisely, the smooth-edged, cartoonish species of man that is plastered on countless bathroom doors around the world.

Now 54, Kornfeld was wandering through the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston more than 20 years ago when he stopped to use the restroom and saw a symbol of a dapper little figure in a tuxedo. I remember thinking, "Oh, I'm not well-dressed enough to use this bathroom," he says. "Then I started thinking, "What are the symbols we use today? And do they really represent us?"

He went home and cut a stencil of the classic female figure on the restroom door, with her triangular skirt and impossibly round skull. He spray painted it onto a canvas. Though he has since abandoned the two-dimensionality of paint in favor of the messy bulk of wood and paper and steel, his signature icon is still the same.

Doug Kornfeld's Website

Brian Knep

Brian Knep is a new-media artist who uses science and technology to explore change, healing, struggle, and acceptance. Knep lives and works in Boston and is represented by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NY and Judi Rotenberg Gallery, Boston.

I strive to create work that pulls people out of their daily experience into a new way of feeling, understanding and seeing the world. Using the tools of our time I explore universal themes in particular the interconnected and impermanent nature of the world and in the process, address the role of science and technology in our lives.

Before focusing on art I spent fifteen years studying technology, learning its potentials and limitations. Flexible and powerful, digital tools have an enormous pull, promising productivity and happiness. Yet they have a way of leaving us cold and removing us, rather than connecting us, from our environment and ourselves. Behind all my work is a desire to explore and address these conflicting themes by using cutting-edge science and high-technology to make works about connection and change. I write software that is logical, coherent, cold and rational to create organic, life-like, never repeating pieces that react, and thus connect, to their environments.

To create work that feels organic, I often borrow from emergent processes in biology and mathematics. Emergence describes a complex system that arises out of lots of relatively simple interactions, like the way flocking arises out of the individual behaviors of many birds. I use these systems to pull complexity out of simplicity, the infinite out of the finite, the organic out of the inorganic, and explore the boundaries between.

Brian Knep's Website

October 18, 2010
Julia Talcott & Ladette Randolph

   

Julia Talcott

Julia Talcott is a printmaker, illustrator and teacher, born and raised in Brookline and now living and working in nearby Newton. A graduate of Williams College and the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills Michigan, she currently teaches relief printmaking techniques at her studio and at the Arsenal Center for the Arts in Watertown, MA.

Her medium is primarily relief printmaking: woodcut and other experimental printmaking techniques, including collage. It aspires to combine color, line, layers and textures to create ambiguous spaces that show movement, ask questions and create moods.

Recently made a member of the Boston printmakers, she has shown her work in various group shows both in the Boston area and nationally. Her work is in private, museum and corporate collections.

juliatalcott.com

Ladette Randolph

Ladette Randolph is the author of the novel A Sandhills Ballad and the short story collection This is Not the Tropics as well as the editor of two anthologies: A Different Plain and The Big Empty. She has published stories and essays in numerous literary journals.

Currently the editor-in-chief of the journal Ploughshares and on the faculty at Emerson College, she was, for many years, an acquiring editor at University of Nebraska Press and prior to that the managing editor of Prairie Schooner. She is the recipient of three Nebraska Book Awards, a Rona Jaffe grant, a Pushcart Prize, a Virginia Faulkner award, and has been reprinted in Best New American Voices. A long-time Nebraskan, Ladette spent her childhood in the same part of west-central Nebraska where her family lived for five generations. She now lives in Boston. She is married to Noel Eicher and is the mother of three grown children: Leif, Jordan, and Bronwyn.

www.ladetterandolph.com

September 27, 2010
Tommy Heinsohn & Leigh Montville

   

Tommy Heinsohn

Tommy Heinsohn, a scoring machine for the Boston Celtics during their eight championship seasons in the 1950s and '60s and the feisty coach of their two championship teams in the 1970s, is as comfortable around the canvas as he is the parquet floor. In fact, he's been an artist longer than he's been a hoop star.

“I've been interested in painting since I was a kid," says Heinsohn. Painting actually provided a safe haven for Heinsohn while he was growing up in Jersey City, N.J. "I was the only German in an Italian-Irish neighborhood during World War II," he recalls. "I used to fight my way home from school. My mom worked so I was by myself and I started drawing just to amuse myself. It became my best friend. And it kept me out of trouble.”

While Heinsohn was traveling as a player, coach and broadcaster, he continued to paint. "The travel also accounted for his penchant for landscapes. "I got into doing watercolors and sketches looking out of hotel windows," he adds.

After retiring in 1965, Heinsohn began his broadcasting career. He also began his formal training as an artist, taking lessons for two years from a teacher who taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Through the years, Heinsohn has formed friendships with other artists and, as a group and they make painting excursions. "Instead of golf trips, we go on painting trips," he says. "We go to Maine, Vermont, Martha's Vineyard." In the Bay State, Cape Ann is a particularly popular spot. "I've studied with very good teachers of landscape painting on Cape Ann," he says. "Every teacher I've had has helped me, but ultimately you become your own teacher."

Heinsohn does see parallels between painting and basketball. "You spend years mastering the fundamentals andgradually you get to incorporate your imagination, your willpower and desire," he says.

Leigh Montville

Ladette Randolph is the author of the novel A Sandhills Ballad and the short story collection This is Not the Tropics as well as the editor of two anthologies: A Different Plain and The Big Empty. She has published stories and essays in numerous literary journals.

Currently the editor-in-chief of the journal Ploughshares and on the faculty at Emerson College, she was, for many years, an acquiring editor at University of Nebraska Press and prior to that the managing editor of Prairie Schooner. She is the recipient of three Nebraska Book Awards, a Rona Jaffe grant, a Pushcart Prize, a Virginia Faulkner award, and has been reprinted in Best New American Voices. A long-time Nebraskan, Ladette spent her childhood in the same part of west-central Nebraska where her family lived for five generations. She now lives in Boston. She is married to Noel Eicher and is the mother of three grown children: Leif, Jordan, and Bronwyn.

March 22, 2010
Stephen Krensky & Suzy Waters

   

Stephen Krensky

I did not have the kind of childhood most people would choose to write about. It was happy and uneventful, with only the occasional bump in the night to keep me on my toes. In my spare time, however, I often imagined taking part in breathtaking adventures -- sometimes as myself and other times as Popeye, Robin Hood or Superman. I always liked to make up stories, especially lying in bed at night before I fell asleep. t was not until I was twenty that I actually took up creative writing. One of my favorite parts of the process was imagining myself in various characters' shoes, even if those characters - dragons for example - didn't wear shoes at all. A year later, in 1975, I graduated from Hamilton College and began a six-month internship at the New York Times Book Review.

Since then I have been a full-time writer for children. I married my wife, Joan, in 1984, and we settled in my hometown of Lexington, Massachusetts. Our two sons, Andrew and Peter, are now off at college. When I feel like I've spent enough time hunched over my computer, I like to play tennis and softball, and read books written by other people.

www.stephenkrensky.com

Suzy Pilgrim Waters

Susy Pilgrim Waters has drawn since she could hold a pencil. She is an illustrator, designer and painter whose work is used extensively in print advertising, book and magazine publishing, and commercial licensing. Her signature style combines color, shapes, and wit, for vibrant evocative results. I love being an Illustrator, each project, brings a new challenge and chance to explore and use ever evolving materials. I just wish there were more hours in a day.

I have a range of styles and approaches to my work. Sometimes a client will be quite specific about a particular piece that will give me a direction, or I am just sent the text and given free range! (well almost) I love to paint, used mixed media, wood, fabric, printing (wood cut, mono print) I am a huge processor, I like to keep a few sketch books going at the same time.

Having completed murals for restaurants, the New York city library and other large scale commissions, nothing is too big or small for Susy to work on.

Originally from England, SPW lives in Boston with her husband, Keith, their dog, Tillie, 2 cats and 2 bunnies. They have 2 children.

www.pilgrimwaters.com

February 22, 2010
Cathy Bennett & Alan Hunter

   

Cathy Bennett

Cathy Bennet, who now lives in Boston, is originally from Canada. The experience of Canada the wide-open spaces, the scent of pine trees on the shores of northern lakes, snow, the love of art and literature, the concern for social equality, French food and culture, more snow, English culture but not English food, the desire to forge an identity as a peacemaker all of that is at the root of who I am as an artist and writer. I'm an accidental artist. I've always made art as if it were as natural an activity as writing is. Although I considered going to art school, I decided against it because I thought I would have to spend the rest of my life flogging myself as an artist. Instead I went to McGill University, where I studied art history and literature. I have since spent the rest of my life flogging myself as an artist.

The first five years of my career I worked at The National Film Board of Canada in Montreal in the animation department. After moving to Boston, I began to freelance as an illustrator, designer and occasionally an animation filmmaker. My film clients have included CBC-Sesame Street, Nickelodeon-TV (Nick Days), WGBH-TV (Nova). My illustration clients have included Time Magazine, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, Polaroid, John Hancock, Scholastic, Sundance, and many others. My design clients have included: Ginn and Company Publishers, Harvard Graduate School of Design, The Arsenal Center for the Arts, Findhorn Press, and others. I?ve freelanced for more than 25 years.

In time I began to explore writing and wrote 3 novels as well as children's stories and nonfiction. I began to make fine art on a small scale. I've exhibited my art in various venues in Montreal, Boston, New York and Tokyo. My book, The Confident Creative / Inspiration from The Saturday Morning Drawing Club will be published by Findhorn Press in April 2010.

I presently maintain a studio at The Arsenal Center for the Arts in Watertown, MA, just outside Boston, where I also teach drawing as a way to meet the true creative self within.

Alan Hunter

Allan Hunter was born in England, educated at Oxford University (where he gained his doctorate in English literature) and after traveling in India and Africa came to the U.S. in 1986. For more than twenty years he has been a teacher and a counselor and has been at Curry College since 1986. He is the author of two books The Sanity Manual and Life Passages (2000) both of which use his revolutionary techniques of writing for personal exploration. He is also the co-author of his father's wartime memoir From Coastal Command to Captivity, has written a full length study of Joseph Conrad and a novel, How They Met (2001). He is currently completing a book about overcoming writing blocks.

January 25, 2010
Nancy Crasco & Donna Graves

   

Nancy Crasco

As an artist I am particularly interested in Asian textile traditions and their construction techniques and have been influenced by Japanese kesa and Korean pojagi, both of which combine silk scraps into a single piece of cloth. My current use of translucent silk organza allows me to explore new methods of layering. I insert paper, gold leaf, fabric, thread, leaves, seeds and other materials between the layers. Sometimes I use a gelatin plate printing process to create imagery on mulberry tissue, layer it and sew through all the layers. My works often mimic garments from around the world, including stoles, ponchos, tunics and robes. Such pieces are transparent and move with the slightest of breezes. Other bodies of work echo my environmental and political concerns.

I graduated with a degree in Painting and Art Education from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1964. In 1968, with a new baby and limited time and space to continue my oil painting, I decided to make a bed quilt. Enjoying the process, I made several more, and then in 1975 entered an original design of a Bicentennial Star in the Boston 200 quilt competition. I won first prize for a quilt made by an individual, and my art quilt career was born.

I joined the Quilters Connection, a Boston area quilting guild in 1977, and continue to be an active member. I have organized, juried, curated and helped to organize both quilt shows and gallery exhibits of contemporary crafts including venues at the New England Quilt Museum, the Arlington Center for the Arts and the Fuller Craft Museum. I am currently teaching at the Arsenal Center for the Arts.

In 1979 I entered a quilt in the first Quilt National exhibit and my work was accepted. Acceptances to other quilt and art exhibits followed, including Quilt San Diego/Quilt Visions. In 1986, I became part of a crit group which meets every three weeks to share ideas, to critique works in progress, and to support and encourage each other in the creating, promoting and exhibiting of our work with Judy Becker, Linda Behar, Barbara Crane, Sandra Donabed, Sylvia Einstein and Carol Grotrian.

I have continued my education in the crafts by attending the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine.

www.nancycrasco.com

Donna Graves

Donna is a cultural planner and social historian based in Berkeley, California. Her work combines historic preservation, public art, urban design and community engagement to explore local histories and the significance of place. She has nearly twenty years experience developing projects throughout California that document and interpret the state's diverse history.

She developed a range of projects -- from innovative temporary artworks to site-specific public art integrated into ambitious urban design developments. As director for the Rosie the Riveter Memorial in Richmond, California, she directed the first national monument to women's contribution to the WWII home front. Graves was a key collaborator with the National Park Service and City of Richmond in conceiving and developing Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park.

Graves is also currently director of Preserving California's Japantowns, a statewide project documenting pre-WWII Japanese American historic resources in communities across California. Other recent projects include a neighborhood revitalization plan for San Francisco's Japantown, a community history project about civil rights activism in South Berkeley, and directing a competition to design a monument to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade on San Francisco's waterfront. Her publications include articles in the journals, Places, Sculpture and Public Art Review and contributions to the anthologies Public Art by the Book and New Directions in Public Art: Content, Context and Controversy.

November 16, 2009
Ilana Manolson & Allegra Goodman

   

Ilana Manolson

Manolson said her approach to nature-in-miniature "creates a painting with its own dance and rhythm." "If you look closely enough, abstract patterns emerge," she said. "My work reflects different emotional states. It's the world around me seen through these emotional states."

Manolson has lived in several widely varied places with their own unique natural character. She was born and raised in Calgary, Canada, and vacationed with her family around the cluster of lakes in the Laurentians region north of Quebec. "I grew up next to a pond. So I developed a sense of looking at life in miniature," she said.

As a teenager, she taught in the Fiji islands in the South Pacific with a Canadian volunteer organization. After returning, she earned a degree in botany and later worked as a naturalist in Elk Island National Park in Edmonton.

Manolson said, "I spent a lot of time looking closely at things. I loved drawing plants."

For Manolson, the seemingly divergent disciplines of botany and painting share her artistic interest in the harmonious balance of opposing forces.

www.manolson.com

Allegra Goodman

Allegra Goodman is an American author based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her most recent novel, Intuition, was published in 2006. Goodman wrote and illustrated her first novel at the age of seven. She has been writing ever since. To date she has five novels, including, The Family Markowitz and Kaaterskill Falls.

www.allegragoodman.com

October 26, 2009
Mako Yoshikawa & Eric Garnick

   

Mako Yoshikawa

Mako Yoshikawa's first novel, One Hundred and One Ways, was published by Bantam in 1999. A national bestseller in the States, it has been translated into six languages, including Swedish and Hebrew. Yoshikawa's second novel, Once Removed, also published by Bantam, came out in 2003. Mako Yoshikawa has studied at Columbia University and Oxford. She has received prestigious writing awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the MacDowell Colony and has been the Vera M. Schuyler Fellow of Creative Writing at the Bunting Institute at Harvard University. Yoshikawa is a doctoral candidate in English literature at the University of Michigan and is currently a professor of creative writing at Emerson College. Yoshikawa, herself the great-granddaughter of a geisha, was born in the United States to Japanese parents. She spent two years of her childhood in Japan and has lived in England, France, New Zealand, and Switzerland but considers New York her home. The Washington Post praised Mako Yoshikawa's extraordinary first novel, One Hundred and One Ways, as "strikingly assured." The Orlando Sentinel called it "an impressive accomplishment."

www.makoyoshikawa.com

Eric Garnick

I majored in both ceramic studio art and biology at Antioch College hundreds of years ago, after which a long stint in marine ecology and mathematical ecology somewhat derailed my career in art. I nevertheless continued to experiment during that time with various media, including ceramics, sculpture, painting, and performance art (which lengthened my graduate studies to near record duration).

Finally realizing my true inclinations 17 years ago, I effected a major career change and took up free-lance computer work in order to concentrate on making art. I have since focused intently on oil painting and would cite as major influences the mid-twentieth century abstract expressionists (to whom I was first drawn at the age of 11), including most notably Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Cleve Gray, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, and Barnett Newman.

I am particularly interested in the visual rhythm created by the juxtaposition of forms, so, although my work is resolutely non-representational, my inspiration often comes from such sources as neolithic standing stones, industrial relics (e.g. fences, old piers and pilings), figures in landscapes, and newspaper photographs.

September 21, 2009
Jay (J.B.) Jones & Tracy Winn

   

Jay (J.B.) Jones

I declared victory on my career of nearly 30 years in architecture one day in 1995, and on the very next day began a new career as a painter. In the process of recapitulating the history of art in order to find my place in it, I discovered a few things that have continued to inform my work. I found, for example, that I am not interested in making things that point to an experience or address issues. This is probably because I came to consciousness of art in the early 1960s, when the idea was to make something which, instead of pointing to an experience, becomes the experience itself.

I was also lucky to find out early that looking for more intensity in my work did not mean using new media or materials, but rather meant reaching a better understanding of the traditional techniques and materials of painting that have been in use for four hundred years: canvas, pigment dispersed in linseed oil, bristle brushes. I suspect that four hundred years from now, if our benighted race contrives to last that long, nobody will remember what television or holography were, but they will still be painting and drawing.

Most of my paintings are large, about four feet by five feet, and use everyday things as subject matter: a key ring, a box of pencils, an open book. These things appear as if viewed in an intense close-up, with images on the canvas that are many times the actual size of the object. These images become ambiguous, pushed to the edge of abstraction. An untraditional palette and high-key contrast are also part of what lifts these quite realistic paintings of ordinary things into evocative pictorial inventions.

My process begins with imagining forms and colors that elicit an emotional response for me, and then finding or making something that looks like what I had imagined. This is the opposite of seeing something beautiful and making a painting of it. I love being part of a tradition that can touch people in this way.

jbjonespainter.com

Tracy Winn

Tracy Winn, who earned her MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, is the recipient of grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Barbara Deming Memorial Trust, and the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Millay Colony. Her short stories have appeared in journals such as the Alaska Quarterly Review, The New Orleans Review, and Hayden's Ferry Review. She lives near Boston, Massachusetts, with her husband and daughter, and works with Gaining Ground, an organic farm for hunger relief. Mrs. Somebody Somebody is her debut collection of stories.

Mrs. Somebody Somebody
By turns funny and sad, the linked stories in Tracy Winn's debut collection, Mrs. Somebody Somebody intersect in surprising ways. Winn draws us into the last sixty years of an old mill town where her unforgettable characters are down on their luck, but making the most of it. The man-crazy young mill worker of the title story forms an unexpected friendship with a lesbian labor organizer; a plucky immigrant child finds faith that her sister will return safely from Iraq; and a secretive old bookie has reason to hide a fragment of bone in his pocket. Connecting them all is the decidedly upper-class Burroughs family whose stately home holds years of unspoken compromise and regret. In clean, sensuous prose, Winn delivers the truths of our experience, unfolding these all-too-human lives, showing how little race, class and age matter when it comes to the grace that connects us all.

www.winnwriter.com