Join the Conversation with Phillips' Mill ArtTalk

Baseball bats that branch or crook sideways… tables with legs and “bent knees” that seem to dance… candlesticks apparently made of mismatched wooden discs stacked precariously that risk the security of the flaming torches they’re meant to hold… these are some of the works created by sculptor Mark Sfirri. His wooden turnings have an insouciance that belies the precision that characterizes his work. His pieces are humorous and engaging.

Some of the best art can result from explorations of a very simple concept. Mark Sfirri has fruitfully explored multi-axis wood turning on a lathe. The technique is challenging and requires careful planning and yet Mark’s results appear effortless.

Mark Sfirri has a BFA and an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design. His work is in the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian, the Museum of Arts & Design in NY, Yale University Art Gallery, the LA County Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, Musee de Bugey-Valromey, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, and the Michener Art Museum, among many others. He’s written several articles on Wharton Esherick and lectured and demonstrated on wood turning internationally.

As a kid in California during the 80’s Leon Rainbow saw the impact other kids were having as they created a new art form through graffiti. The colors and the movement were cool. He decided that’s what he wanted to do. Now Leon is a resident of Trenton, where he not only is a graffiti artist but also teaches and sometimes juries art.

Leon says his art is a channel for deeper expression. He applies fine art composition and principles to his work which allows him to react and visually educate on social issues and current events. He uses styles that his young audience can relate to and designs his visual media with a powerful spiritual message. Leon believes that his approach allows him to reach a wide variety of people:

“Anyone who looks at my art sees something beautiful – it might just be color, shape or form – or they can tune into the narrative. My goal is to make art that resonates on several levels.”

Helena van Emmerik-Finn has focused on pastels as her main media for more than forty years, with oil as a second media. She paints light and color and let’s them reveal the landscape or scene in her works. Her emphasis on compositional movement engages the viewer in her subject. She says, “The preliminary drawing process has become very important to me. Once I have established this strong foundation in my work, I intuitively and quickly apply color."

We’ll talk with Helena about her process and why the technical aspects of her art are so important to creating the engaging images in her work. We’ll also explore pastels as a medium, what makes them uniquely challenging and rewarding.

Helena’s family emigrated from Holland a few weeks before she was born and settled in upper Bucks County. She attended the Philadelphia College of Art where she studied graphic design, photography and film-making. Helena is a regular participant in the Phillips’ Mill Juried Art Show. After college, Helena traveled extensively, including back-backing and youth-hostelling through Europe, North Africa and India. She now lives in Doylestown, Bucks County, with her husband, Bob.

James Dupree’s work is filled with intense color, lots of hues. It grows out of his personal sense of color. James’s art treads the line between politics, culture, and fine art. What lies beyond the viewer’s initial aesthetic impression, are poignant messages on race and class. As a master of his craft, the intentionality behind his work is supported by the intersection of his expression of color, form, and unparalleled technique. Paired with Dupree’s ardent activism as a stronghold within the Philadelphia community for the last forty years, this artist and agitator carefully impacts all which he touches.

Dupree holds a BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design, an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, and has attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. He has taught at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, University of Pennsylvania, and Crewe and Alsager College in England.

James Dupree owns and operates two Contemporary Fine Art galleries, in Lambertville and Philadelphia. His work is in the collections of Philadelphia Museum of Art,LA African American Museum, The Schomburg Center in NYC, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, and Patti LaBelle.

Old photographs often have a different quality to them, a personality that pop photographers often try to achieve with filters on their digital devices. Next up on ArtTalk we’ll talk with Jill Enfield about her work as an expert in alternative processes in photography, which is often historical processes of photography.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t be artist or apply alternative processes to your digital photography. For her recent work, titled The Way Home, Jill used her iPhone to take images from the Metro North commuter train that she rides a few times a week, traveling along the Hudson River from the Beacon train station to NYC. Jill made positive transparencies from the iPhone images to contact print on to glass for the final pieces.

In this episode of ArtTalk, improvisational artist Annelies van Dommelen discusses the challenges and rewards of working without a plan.

Early records indicate that all the way back in 1921 locals performed Antons Chekhov’s “The Proposal” on the stage at Phillips’ Mill. It’s believed to have been the first play performed at the quaint location in Bucks County, Pa. That was the start of a long tradition of bringing live, community-driven theater to our community. From original musical comedies to cabarets, short plays and impromptu poetry readings, Phillips’ Mill Drama has presented a variety of entertainment while supporting the aspirations of emerging writers, actors, musicians, and other artists.

More than a century later the Drama Committee is still going strong. How exactly has the Drama Committee continued for 100 years? How has it evolved over the years to what it is today and where will it go tomorrow? Valerie Eastburn, Chair of the Mille drama program, and Fran Young, director of the Mill’s EPC readings, will be our guests on the next ArtTalk where we will pull back the curtain and get a peek at what’s next.

Luiz Vilela’s work is highly skilled and he paints beautiful pictures, whether they’re a landscape or a portrait. But there’s something more there. People stop in their tracks and gaze at his work, like "Under Paris Skies" in last year’s show at Phillips’ Mill. He was voted onto Art Talk’s People’s Choice show as a result. Luiz likes to paint from life because he says photos often lie. Luiz tells a story that evolves from moment to moment as he’s painting.

That close time spent with his subjects and of course a lot of work on his skills gives Luiz’s work that striking presence. He says he found his “right place” as an artist when he made a master copy of one of the revered Daniel Garber’s works. He learned that each of Garber’s brushstrokes was exactly right. Luiz has learned to put down his brushstrokes and leave them there.

Luiz Vilela studied architecture at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and illustration at Pratt Institute in New York, as well as with Nelson Shanks at Studio Incamminati. Luiz worked at Golden Books and Random House. He’s an award-winning artist who’s exhibited at Phillips’ Mill for many years.

Alexander Shanks is a classically trained artist in the tradition of his parents, Nelson Shanks and Leona Shanks. He fuses classical methods with contemporary ideas. We’ll talk with him about what that means and how trends in technique affect what we see. Alexander is just back from Italy, where he absorbed inspiration from the classical masters. We’ll find out how he is applying this experience to his work in our modern context.

Art museums are often academic institutions, presenting art from a Euro-American canonical perspective. But we know that art is personal. What you see in a piece of art is influenced by what you’ve already seen, what you’ve experienced.

Art institutions that have traditionally displayed art and authoritative analysis for our edification are now asking curators from different backgrounds to design exhibits. And they’re asking visitors what they think about the works on display. Rather than a lesson in art history, it’s a conversation.

Our own Michener Art Museum has recently mounted such a show called (re)Frame: Community Perspectives on the Michener’s Art Collection. Curators with multiple social and environmental viewpoints have selected familiar works and shared their personal interpretations.

But what does this mean for the role of the museum as educator? And how will it affect our experience as art lovers?

Join our conversation about the exhibit with Dr. Laura Igoe, Chief Curator, and Joshua Lessard, Director of Exhibitions, as well as hear from some of the guest curators.

Phillips’ Mill is synonymous with the Pennsylvania Impressionists. We were their home base, even as they showed nationally. But our 93 year history includes many other artists and artistic styles. One artist who was integral to our arts community was Katharine Steele Renninger. In contrast to the Impressionists who documented the beautiful landscape, Renninger was a realist who focused on the everyday objects of Bucks County life, things like baby carriages… or Windsor chairs… or even the details of a staircase. Katharine’s work is spare and elegant. She saw the patterns of line and light in the quotidian. Her paintings are as much of a paean to Bucks County living as any of our painters’.

Katharine’s work has been compared to important American Modernists, such as Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth and Edward Hopper. She was highly decorated, winning prizes at the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Woodmere Art Museum. In 1975, she  was named Distinguished Pennsylvania Artist. She was also instrumental in founding the Michener Art Museum.

Jane Ramsey’s life and work are steeped in Bucks County. She grew up in Lumberville along the Delaware River, where she carried a sketchbook from an early age. Her family went on Sunday drives to visit her father’s favorite barns. Jane is still visiting farms, but she stops to paint them now.

Jane’s watercolors of our rural landscape are informed by a lifetime of observation and sketching — what she calls “memory banking.” Now she can compose a swirling field of winterized grass or a cloudy expanse of sky from memory. Still, she’s frequently to be found en plein air, lovingly detailing the places where generations of farmers have tended the land. We’ll look at her work and hear about the people and places she’s encountered making it.

Jane Ramsey lives and paints on the Ulrich Farm, in Bedminster Township, Bucks County. She owns Simons Fine Art Framing & Gallery in Dublin, Pa. She also teaches art privately. She earned a BFA in graphic design (emphasis illustration) from Cornish College in Seattle.

Jane is Vice President of the Arts & Cultural Council of Bucks County.

Prominent Gallerist Paul Gratz of Gratz Gallery and Conservation Studio in Doylestown has rediscovered the works of painter Peter Miller, an American Modernist. Miller was a wealthy heiress (born Henrietta Myers) and a spiritualist who painted for the love of art rather than ambition. Even so she had notable success, her colorful works having showed at the prestigious Julien Levy Gallery in New York. Her influences were Joan Miro, whom she knew and collected, and Arthur Carles, with whom she studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. She traveled widely and knew the most prominent artists of her time, including Picasso, Matisse, Calder and Ernst. Miller divided her time between Pennsylvania and New Mexico, where she was influenced by friends on the Tewa Pueblo.

We’ll talk about Miller’s fascinating life and works with Paul Gratz. Miller’s work was mostly forgotten until Gratz had the opportunity to buy the paintings remaining in her estate. The work needed extensive conservation, some of it having been stored in a barn. Gratz is a professional conservator. He was able to do the work during the pandemic. There’s now a book and an exhibition opening at the Gratz Gallery on April 23.

Paul Gratz is the owner and head conservator of Gratz Gallery and Conservation Studio. His formal training began at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Paul continued to hone his ability through apprenticeships with a number of the nation’s most revered conservators, including Gustav Berger, a recognized art conservation pioneer. Gratz is an authority on work by the New Hope Circle of painters. Today, he leads a staff of skilled conservators at the Gratz Conservation Studio, which is housed next to the gallery and is open for private tours.

Chef’s will tell you that technique can only do so much; you need good ingredients to make good food. And materials make a difference in fine art as well. Knowing your tools can help you get the results you intend and it can certainly save you some aggravation. Nationally renowned plein air instructor Joe Gyurcsak takes us to the Utrecht Paint Factory in Brooklyn, New York to see how paint is milled.

Janine Dunn Wade is known for her beautiful still lifes of flowers. One critic described her free brushstrokes as “confident.” They look effortless. But there’s more behind the works than meets the eye. These beauties don’t just happen. Wade puts a lot of thought into the still life composition. She makes color studies and has palettes she’s developed over time. She studies other artists. And of course she’s worked for many years on her art. All of that go into the making of those seemingly improvised floral still lifes that are so joyful.