THE BRUSH, THE LENS AND THE LIGHT

Saturday, March 19, 2011

At the Opening

Here is a very short (1 minute) video from the opening. Arguably too short and I keep being reminded of how poorly I use video cameras, to my great dismay.

Luckily, the quality of this video is unrelated to how terrific the show itself was.

It Is Official! Join us March 25th, 4 pm!

After what has been months of chatting loosely, we finally "got down to business" as the show was bearing down upon us! Mary, Cynthia and Abe Pachikara. It has been a precious, eye opening and all too ephemeral collaboration within one family, spanning 3 genres of art.

Shuttle astronaut Mae Jemison, one of those rare birds that is both a scientist and accomplished dancer, called art the "one's personal expression of the universal." And this one presents three views - 70 watercolors, 28 images, and one installation piece. Less apparent are the others in the family who similarly express themselves in artistic manner: my sister Susan thru her chocolatiering, my dad who introduced me to photography back in the 4th grade, and my wife Molly who is an avid and accomplished creator of a variety of cuisines.

Perhaps someday, I will get to collaborate with my own sons in a similar fashion. One observation, don't wait as many decades as we have to undertake these endeavors. One can never start too soon!

Friday, March 18, 2011

The Core Team

Here is a shot of the folks who made the possible – L-R, Abe Pachikara, Cynthia Pachikara, then Dona Bachman and Nate Steinbrink who run the gallery in a very mindful, thoughtful manner, and Mary Pachikara.

Interview: Mary Pachikara & Her Watercolors

Here’s a chance to hear from the artist regarding a few of her pieces at the show, “The Brush the Lens and the Light” and musings about what keeps her coming back to watercolor as a medium.

Note that the audio is a bit quiet at the beginning.

What was the show like? Some “panos”…

I was lucky to actually attend the show “live” and wanted to insert a few images and videos for those who could not join similarly. So here is the first of a couple of panoramic, stitched images of the space itself.

Getting Ready
Abe Pachikara, Copyright 2011 (click for much larger image)

Getting Ready, 2
Abe Pachikara, Copyright 2011 (click for much larger image)

Getting Ready, 3
Abe Pachikara, Copyright 2011 (click for much larger image)

The View From the Entrance
Abe Pachikara, Copyright 2011 (click for much larger image)

All Cleaned Up and Ready To Go
Abe Pachikara, Copyright 2011 (click for much larger image)

Interview with Abe Pachikara

Here’s a 2 min chit chat with Abe regarding taking photos and why he’s so interested in stitched images.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Dedication

This show is dedicated to…

Our immediate and extended family and the many ways we collaborate on a day to day basis. The interactions make us laugh, make us pout, and concoct creations not otherwise possible.
The collaboration that occurs between families and friends throughout the year, be it Thanksgiving Dinner, or a trip to the zoo.
The remarkable DaVinci’s in all of us. We start into life as proud and emphatic artists, athletes, philosophers, scientists and theologians, all packaged into one neat bundle. With a little luck and support, we continue many pursuits. So even as we juggle our day jobs and responsibilities, we also undertake endeavors that stretch us, at times make us go crazy, and tap the precious treasures and talents simmering inside.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Cynthia Pachikara – Artist’s Statement

The cultural traditions of my extended immigrant family manifest in me like a stubborn Siamese twin. I experience her as a figurative, geographic, social appendage pulling me in different directions. Yet, despite the authority she wields on me psychically, she is virtually invisible to others. Her presence in my external world is as slight as a shadow. As the daughter of immigrants, the personal experience my family’s move to this country and resulting perceptions of “place” have become the foundation of my work. That is not to say that the work manifests as a direct biography. On the contrary, my practice attempts to present ideas about spatially governed identity that are perceptually and aesthetically experienced.

Monday, March 14, 2011

Abraham Pachikara - Artist's Statement

In the 4th grade, my father brought home a used Mamiya Sekor range-finder camera when he returned from a medical conference. Better yet, he took time on the very day of his arrival to share his thoughts on how photos come to be. And by chance, the elementary school of our small Mennonite prairie town had a camera club. Since then, photography has been a persistent part of my journeys, like a slow burning ember that at times will burst into a flame before returning back to a quiet glow.

The Eternal Moment: Mary Pachikara’s Watercolors

Essay by Angela M. Reinoehl, Professor, Department of Art and Design, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL, 62901

A young woman with her hair in a loose bun wrapped in a sari gazes at an elaborate lantern. Another looks lovingly into the eyes of a baby cradled in her arms. Yet another stands alone, gazing from a balcony, with her back to the viewer. The women Mary Pachikara paints are caught in quiet, reflective moments. Her subjects are friends and family sometimes holding children, other times by themselves, but always serenely gazing.
The figures are naturalistic, but the backgrounds often give way to the fluidity of the medium of watercolor or sepia ink or a quiet swath of white space. There is a tension between control and chance – order and chaos – that creates a sense of balance in the final work. Pachikara clearly revels in allowing the paint to find it’s own way. Yet, there can be a crispness to a sleeve or a nose in profile. In the figurative works, the palette is often limited to variations on one or two colors. This choice furthers her desire to convey a meditative mood in her artworks.
This sense of capturing a moment is not limited to Pachikara’s figurative works. Her landscapes, inspired by her evening walks in her hometown of Murphysboro, Illinois, stand at the threshold of abstraction. There is always a horizon line or a tree to anchor the scene to the natural world. But, unlike her figures, the landscapes tilt the scales toward the nonrepresentational. The crispness gives way to amorphous clouds of beautiful color that just barely suggests leaves on a tree or wild flowers. A smudge of an electric orange horizon separates what appears to be a swirling expansive sky and sliver of earth.
Pachikara’s interest in the figure and landscape is inspired by Impressionism – particularly Mary Cassatt. She takes up some of the same themes, like the ‘mother and child’ works, for example. But, Pachikara chooses a different medium – ink and watercolor – and the overall mood is more intense and reflective. Much of Cassatt’s work is a painted snapshot of daily bourgeois life in 19th century Paris. Pachikara’s work does invoke the everyday, but also the timeless and sacred. This may be conveyed by the quiet singular colors that refuse to distract the viewer from the form. The distant, faraway gazes also counter Cassatt’s quick glances away that seem to be more motivated by social conventions than introspective thought. Pachikara conveys what is best described as the essence of a given scene or model through the push-pull of naturalistic representation and abstraction.
Mary Pachikara is as immersed in her media as she is in her subjects - whether it is wild grasses on a fall afternoon or a young woman lost in a book she is reading. For her, art is the “ability to capture things as I want others to see them.” Her work is an expressive, emotional response to what she encounters as well as a collaboration with the media that results in a sense of meditative presence for both the viewer and the artist.

Mary Pachikara - Artist’s Statement

It may be the recollections of my home in the rainy coastal region of Southern India that frame my perceptions of the lush effects of water and moisture across surfaces and landscapes. At the same time, much of my early training in meticulous observational drawing came about when I was a young student of botany. My studies demanded the rigorous scrutiny of natural forms at various magnifications and required the illustrated translation of this information. My transition into watercolor painting seems a natural combination of these experiences. I am sure my exposure to two different cultures and climates, my understanding of the various methods of biological illustration, and my art education are all at work, intertwined, when I paint. I tap my botanical acumen by nurturing a large flower garden at home, a place that has provided the source materials for my still life paintings for years. Similarly, figure paintings, comprised largely of immigrant women caught in contemplative poses, have also been a favored subject. But my most recent body of work takes on my adopted home in Southern Illinois as a focus.

In each of these bodies, I use a wet-on-wet technique. It is the element of chance that this process spawns – spontaneous and intuitive – that intrigues me. The resulting aesthetic forces realism and abstraction together in the same picture plane. At places in each painting, the representational details of the subjects – whether flowers, figures, or environmental forms – begin to bleed into pools of color and form. The time frames that this effect suggests, a sort of frozen motion, helps to embody the subjects with suggestive temporal characteristics that go beyond their simple physical selves. Figures in a state of momentary meditation and fresh cut flowers held still in vases are not exactly motionless. The immediacy of watercolor is particularly effective when expressing the landscape as an abstraction that it often is. It allows me to render the transformative conditions of light, color and form that exist especially in the passing magnificence of the Southern Illinois landscape over minutes, days, and seasons.