Showing posts with label Brandon Kuehn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brandon Kuehn. Show all posts

Monday, September 28, 2015

Terri Myers Wentzka - Drawing and Watercolor

Terri Myers Wentzka


Name:  Terri Myers Wentzka
City/State:  Shoreview, MN
Email:  terri@naturalhistoryarts.com
Instagram:  terriwentzka

Bio:  Terri Myers Wentzka is a drawing, watercolor, and collage artist whose work is inspired by mysteries of the natural world and by mundane human detritus. She received her BA in Painting from the University of Minnesota, and has returned to making art after spending many years as an award-winning writer and filmmaker. Her work has been exhibited at numerous local venues, including the Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts, the Bloomington Center for the Arts, and the Minnetonka Center for the Arts.

Tell me about your work? What are you currently working on? How is this different from past projects?
Right now I’m finishing work for a show that opens at TuckUnder’s Leaky Sink Gallery on October 8. This will be my first site-specific installation, so it’s challenging my thinking in some different ways and I’m enjoying that process. I’m also getting ready for Art Attack (at my studio in the Northrup King Building) the first weekend in November, and for a show at the First Unitarian Society at the end of November. While all that’s going on, I’m noodling about ideas for the new series I’ve recently started, which is about protection. Some of the early, small pieces will be at TuckUnder, but I’m also planning to make a number of large drawings next year. They’ll be bigger than anything I’ve done to date, since I’ve always worked relatively small. So I’m doing tests, and research, and figuring out how to proceed.



How did you decide to become an artist?
It wasn’t really a decision. I always knew I was an artist, despite the years I spent attempting to do other things. So the decision wasn’t to become an artist, but rather to allow myself to return to art. I never feel quite right unless I’m making art, even if I’m doing something else creative, so I simply had to.

What was the best advice given to you as an artist?
Draw. Actually, this is good advice for anybody, even non-artists. It’s not possible to draw too much, no matter what medium you work in.



Many artists struggle to find ways to sell their art. How do you sell your work? How do you market yourself? (Include links to your Esty store, finartamerica.com, your website, etc.)
Selling art is hard. Most of my sales have been during studio crawls:  Art-A-Whirl and Art Attack. I’m currently stepping up my efforts online with Facebook and Instagram and learning all I can about art sales and marketing.

Instagram:  terriwentzka

Who are some of the Minnesota artists you enjoy? (Provide links)

Scott Wentzka  http://wentzka.com
Terry Genesen Becker  http://terrygenesenbecker.com
Mary Bergs  http://marybergs.com
Jantje Visscher  http://jantjevisscher.com
Brandon Kuehn  http://brandonkuehn.com
Wing Young Huie  http://www.wingyounghuie.com

For every person I’ve listed, there are probably five more wonderful artists I love, but I have to stop somewhere!



If I were to follow you around to see art in Minnesota, which places would we go? What would we see? (Links)

I don’t know if I’m a good person to follow anywhere (I might hide if I know you’re up to such a thing), but these are some of the places I like to go:
Groveland Gallery  http://grovelandgallery.com
Artistry at Bloomington  http://btacmn.org
Bockley Gallery  http://bockleygallery.com
2001: A Space  http://2001aspace.com



In addition to www.Local-Artist-Interviews.com, where do you go online for good art resources, whether to find a new artist, or to see what is going on in the art world locally and otherwise?

Hyperallergic  http://hyperallergic.com

Those are a few. There’s so much information everywhere these days that random tidbits seem to come from everywhere. Many bread crumbs to follow.



Choose one:
Do you have any exhibits to promote in the near future? What can we expect to see from you in the future?
My solo show, Hideaway, opens October 8 and runs through November 15, in the Leaky Sink Gallery at TuckUnder Projects. It’s all recent work that reflects upon the real and illusory ways humans and other creatures protect themselves from all manner of threats, while also exploring the mysteries of bathroom cabinets and found papers. The show will include drawings and watercolors that allude to scientific studies in their composition, but upon taking a closer look it becomes obvious that each one incorporates the text of someone’s discarded grocery list or other scribbled notes. Hideaway takes advantage of the mysterious nooks and crannies of the Leaky Sink Gallery, with art and collections of objects of uncertain purpose hidden away in cabinets for visitors to find. 


If you are promoting an event, by what date do you want your interview/profile to be online?
My opening at TuckUnder is October 8 from 6 to 9 p.m. It would be wonderful if you could post this interview sometime between Sept. 30 and October 2.  Thank you very much!!


(Include dimensions and year made if applicable)
Image List: 1. Not Home, 2015, 22 x 14”
2.  Scattered, 2015, 5 x 4”
3.  Bean Guardian, 2015, 11 x 8”
4.  Protected, 2015, 10.75 x 8”
5.  Osprey Eggs with Erased List, 2014, 11 x 9.25”
6.  Curiosity Cabinet #1: Three Eggs & a Cootie Catcher, 2014, 11 x 14”
7. Image of artist
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Friday, April 1, 2011

Brandon Kuehn - Painter

Sighting Outside of Kyoto #2
Brandon Kuehn


Brandon Kuehn
Email: brandonkuehn@yahoo.com
Website: www.brandonkuehn.com
Social Media Pages:
http://facebook.com/brandon.kuehn

Bio:
Brandon Kuehn is a landscape painter who is from Minnesota originally. In 1997 he graduated from the University of Minnesota with his BFA. This year he graduated from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University with his MFA.

Sighting Outside of Kyoto #3

Tell me about your work.
For the past 20 years I have been doing more traditional landscape painting, but right now I am continuing some work that I started last year in my graduate program. My MFA thesis was about Sigmund Freud's essay "Un Heimlich" (The Uncanny) from 1916. Freud described the uncanny as seeing something we thought we knew in a different or unnatural context. It creates an eeriness that suggests the sense or power of something otherworldly. So in this body of work I'm using the innocuousness of landscape painting to set up the uncanny moment for the viewer.

Sighting Outside of Kyoto #1

"What is Art?"
That is a big question, isn't it? Well, for me I think Art needs to be bigger than ourselves. It needs to reach into a fundamental human truth. I just finished reading Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic tradition. In it, author Robert Rosenblum follows a lineage of artists from Caspar David Freidrich down through the Artistic family tree to Mark Rothko, he never really clearly states his thesis or the commonality that follows from each artist but he comes close to it when he describes the work of Vincent Van Gogh: "He, too, was an artist who thought of his painting not primarily as an aesthetic activity but as a means of communicating with those supernatural mysteries which lay concealed somewhere beneath the surfaces of the materialistic nineteenth-century world." I think this pretty much sums up what art is to me.

Otmoor #3

"What was the best advice given to you as an artist?"
I had a wonderful professor in undergrad (and luckily we're still friends) named David Feinberg. I took a lot of classes with him and one of the most important things he taught was what he referred to as, "taming the wild beast." It meant that you didn't just do art for art's sake. You had to pursue subjects you were interested in, things outside of art and incorporate them into your work, otherwise your work was just sort of "pretty" and not really meaningful for you.


"Tell me about your workspace?"
Right now I'm in the process of setting up my new studio in Anoka. I love telling my friends back in Boston that my studio is in "Lake Wobegon!" (Anoka is Garrison Keillor's home town). It's a much larger space than I've ever worked in, so it's going to give me the chance to work bigger and try some things I've always wanted to.

"Who are some of the Minnesota Artists you enjoy?"
Well besides Professor David Feinberg I mentioned earlier, I'm very lucky to know Christine Wilcox who is the head of the Art Department at Macalester.

I've worked with some other great students at the U of M including: Dan Young and Sarah Hiatt. I was lucky enough to work in a gallery with Robyn Beth Priestley and I'm a HUGE fan of Nick Harper's work.

Otmoor #4

"Do you have any exhibits to promote in the near future?"
Yes! Later this month (March 24 – April 15, 2011) I’ll be showing my thesis work from my MFA program at the Paul Whitney Larson Gallery, in the St. Paul Student Center, on the St. Paul Campus at the University of Minnesota. Opening night is 4/1/2011 from 7 to 9 pm.

Location: Larson Art Gallery
Address: 2017 Buford Ave. #25A
St. Paul, 55108 United States
Hours: 10AM-5PM M-F

From May 13- June 4, 2011, I’ll be having a solo exhibition at the Pine Cirty Art Center in Pine City, MN.


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