BOMBERS, BOOKS, and BUGS: New and Old Work from Robert Spellman

A favorite among websites to visit is Trend Tablet, the site founded by Lidewij Edelkoort, who, as the site claims, is “a trend forecaster, curator, publisher, and educator who constantly lives in the future.”

A circuitous amble across the site links me to the work of the Piecework Collective, and from there to the Mississippi-based quilting workshop, YaloRun Textiles. At the YaloRun site you can find packs of pre-cut quilt scraps curated by Susan Cianciolo.

Using scraps dawned on Robert Spellman, too. Look closely at the surface of his paintings and you’ll see them.

A ladybug’s carapace, the fuselage of a bomber, the elements of a sofa (or davenport if you are from Ohio). Many of his paintings present one thing. It helps us see, as he seems to, the beauty of what we forget to notice. Since I’ve written the word forget, it occurs to me that Spellman’s paintings startle recollection and seem to portray what has happened to these things in the time that elapsed since we last noticed them—they’ve become iconic, wizened, perhaps a little melancholic and ghostly.

Paintings by Robert Spellman.

For the optimists among us, the paintings give us another chance for sweet regard, before old things disappear altogether in the constant renovation of the future.

BOMBERS, BOOKS, and BUGS: New and Old Work from Robert Spellman

January 16—March 2, 2018   

Opening Reception: January 26, 5-8pm

Naropa University, Nalanda Gallery, 63rd & Arapahoe Avenue, Boulder CO

Hay Forks

My grandfather owned a hardware store when I was growing up. Though I was no stranger to tools, it took Jim Dine’s drawings to open my aesthetic eye to hand tools. It happened after I graduated from college and moved to Boston. Dine’s tool drawings* were on exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts. I recollect they were taller than I, raw and poetic. The veil between myself and the ordinary beauty of things was lifted.

Jim Dine, Tool Drawings.

Decades later, I receive an Amish hay fork for my birthday. Need I say they are beautiful? In a tool beauty isn’t all that matters, though, so I took one out to the field with my scythe. It was in December so cutting old grass that’s been nested upon and walked through by deer and elk was laughable. Nevertheless, I cut enough to try out the fork. Miracle. The forks themselves are so light, certainly not weighing even a pound. They are cunningly made from one piece of wood, steamed, bent, split, and shaped, with three small dowels added as spacers. But that is not all. They work, they perfectly lift and balance long grass. Happily, mowing season will be here in a twinkle.

* In looking for a suitable link to Jim Dine’s drawings, I discovered his grandfather also owned a hardware store—his in Cincinnati, OH, mine in Stow, OH.
 

Amish hay forks. Photo by Joan Anderson.