Travel exhibit kick off at library

Described as a “feast for the eyes,” the 35th annual Ohio Watercolor Society (OWS) travel exhibit is scheduled to kick off its season with a three-week stay at the Piqua Public Library beginning Wednesday, Jan. 16 through Saturday, Feb. 2. The travel show is being coordinated through the combined efforts of the Piqua Public Library, Friends of the Piqua Library and the Piqua Arts Council.

A total of 40 paintings have been selected by a jury representing a wide range of work created by current watercolor artists throughout Ohio. The public is invited to view this unique and prestigious exhibit between the hours of 12-5 p.m. every day – excluding Sundays – through Feb. 2 at the library. There is no admission charge. An exhibit catalog will be available for a nominal fee with partial proceeds earmarked for host organizations. A number of the paintings will also be available for sale, according to OWS President Barbara Rollins. Terms of payment will be available at the exhibit.

This represents the first time the OWS traveling exhibit will be hosted in Piqua. Other sites in 2013 include the Amos Library in Sidney; Wassenberg Art Center in Van Wert, BAYarts in Bay Village, Troy Hayner Cultural Center, Mansfield Library and McConnell Arts Center in Worthington in July.

Rollins, who became president of the OWS in November, notes she is “delighted with the diversity and quality of this year’s show.”

“There are pieces to either awe, amaze or amuse you and always to satisfy you with our members’ abilities to conceive and accomplish all that they do in the ways that they do it with consistent ability,” she said.

The OWS, she explained, was established by a small group of nationally recognized Ohio artists in 1978 and the first annual show took place that year. “We have associate and active/signature members,” she said. “An associate becomes a member by simply joining and paying annual dues. This entitles one to receive our quarterly newsletter, a full color catalogue of the annual show, one free entry into the annual competition and an opportunity to serve on committees.”

Exhibiting artists are chosen by a juror who selects submitted works from digital images. After selected pieces are delivered to the hosting venue, she added, awards are made from the actual works. Jurors are chosen by the OWS board and are all national/internationally known artists from outside Ohio.

“All the award winners and enough pieces to make 40 constitute the travel show,” added Rollins. “Works are for sale and several have been sold already from the Riffe Gallery of Art in Columbus.” She emphasized that sold pieces from the travel show must continue with the show until it closes in July.

“We have professional artists and part timers, including myself, as both active and associate members. Many of our artists also teach and/or hold occasional water media workshops. Our member covers the entire state and is recognized as one of the strongest state watercolor/water media organizations in the country.”

Throughout the OWS exhibit showing in Piqua, several local and area watercolor artists will be demonstrating their skills on Saturdays – Jan. 19 and 26 and Feb. 2 – in the front lobby at the library. The public is invited to meet these accomplished artists beginning at 12 p.m. each Saturday.

His portraits of Heisman Trophy winners are on exhibit loan to the College Football Hall of Fame. His murals hold places of honor in locations across the country. His work has been on gameday programs, on posters, and on display.

While Watts tells his story with pictures, his story will require plenty of ink. It’s a story that started in Miami, Okla., took a turn in Coffeyville, ended up in Oswego, and made its way into frames, posters, programs, walls, athletic facilities and galleries across the country.

“I just want to go in there,” Watts said, pointing to his workspace in the studio, and sit at my drawing table, and draw and paint. I want to do what God told me to do, and that’s draw and paint.”

Watts wasn’t always a painter. In fact, he started off as a sportswriter for the Coffeyville Journal.
“I always happened to be a bit better at drawing things,” he remarked with a smile.

At some point, he began drawing cartoons for the Journal, “then it just mushroomed.”

Universities began seeing his work, and it wasn’t long before he got his first call, setting up a meeting in Manhattan, Kan., with officials from Kansas State University. But K-State wasn’t his only client for very long.

“I took that trip and saw K-State, and I signed a contract to do their press guide cover,” Watts said. “I thought, ‘I have gas in my car.’ So I drove straight to Lawrence. Then, I thought this is going pretty well, so I drove to Tulsa. The University of Tulsa and Oral Roberts [University] became clients. I drove to Stillwater, then on to OU.”

At the University of Oklahoma, he ran into old friend Steve Owens, who also came from Watts’ hometown of Miami, Okla. More on that later. Owens put Watts in touch with the OU officials.

“They all bought in,” Watts said. “But I wasn’t done. I thought, ‘Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas.’ So I drove to Fayetteville, where I sat down with [then-Arkansas head coach] Frank Broyles. I said, ‘I’m Ted Watts, here’s what I can do.’ That’s how it all started.”

Where a Thousand Words Paint a Picture

PERHAPS one place to start when trying to account for the singular, layered power of Peter Sacks’s paintings — the way they suggest a meticulous, almost penitential attention to detail even as they convey a larger visual narrative — is with the walks he took growing up in South Africa during the 1950s and ’60s. It was on these walks around the Drakensberg Mountains that Mr. Sacks, the son of liberal white parents (his father, a renowned doctor, taught in a black medical school), encountered ancient cave paintings made by the original South African bushmen.

“The images seemed to come out of the rock,” he recalled recently, “emerging from what looked like cracks in the wall.” There was something about them — paintings of hunters and animals, real and mythological — that struck him as both “mysterious” and “persistent,” creating lasting traces of “people who had been forced out of the land.”

At some point, around the age of 16, Mr. Sacks began a lifelong habit of keeping notebooks on his walks, wherever they led him, and sketching and writing about what he saw — “to capture,” as he said, “what otherwise might be fugitive in experience.” And during the nearly 45 years since, he has continued to be absorbed by the potential of words and images to not only address the ravages of history but to offer consolation.

In an artistic career that began with a 14-year stint as a poet and then took an unexpected and vigorous turn toward painting, Mr. Sacks has used his finely tuned ear and eye to render the enigmas and horrors of the world as he sees them. His latest works — 21 paintings now on view at the Paul Rodgers/9W gallery in Chelsea — call on both faculties, combining carefully chosen texts with semiabstract imagery to evoke the subjects and themes that have preoccupied him since youth.

Foremost among those, not surprisingly, are the manifold injustices he witnessed all around him in South Africa. In 1970, just shy of 20 and demoralized by the evolving political situation, as well as by the fracturing of the anti-apartheid movement as it distanced itself from white sympathizers, Mr. Sacks left his native Durban. “Being white in South Africa for me at that time,” he told an interviewer in 2006, “meant feeling illegitimate, ashamed.”

He went to Princeton, spent three years in Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, then returned to the States for graduate studies in English at Yale. His doctoral thesis became a book about English elegies, and he taught literature at universities including Johns Hopkins and Harvard, where he is now a tenured professor. He also wrote five well-received collections of image-driven poetry; the second, “Promised Lands” (1990), won praise from his fellow expatriate writer J. M. Coetzee, and the last, “Necessity” (2002), was greeted as “an extraordinary meld of acute perception and formal resource” by the poet Robert Creeley. None of this suggested what would come next, the radical shift in interest and aspiration that would move Mr. Sacks, going into his fifth decade, from the page to the canvas.

“His is the sort of career poet-scholars aspire to and from which one does not change course,” the poet William Corbett wrote in the catalog for Mr. Sacks’s second Paris show, in 2007, “but this is exactly what Sacks has done.”

Although all such transformations are undoubtedly longer in coming than they may appear, Mr. Sacks dates his to the summer of 1999. It occurred during a period of turmoil that culminated in his divorce from the painter Barbara Kassel and eventual remarriage to the poet Jorie Graham. He was in Marfa, Tex., as a Lannan Foundation writer in residence and found himself unable to write. “I went into a place of deep wordlessness,” he said, “into a barren landscape.”

Turning to his tried-and-true pastime, he took walks — often 30 miles long and sometimes through the night. In lieu of writing, he got a disposable camera and started taking snapshots of the countryside. But feeling that the pictures didn’t capture what he was experiencing, he took a bottle of Wite-Out and, in a “reverie of erasure,” started “systematically” whiting them out.

“The tiny brush strokes left little ridges,” he recalled, “like maps of silence.”

Then, deciding the images needed more color, he made vegetable dyes, mixing mustard, pimentos and coffee with Wite-Out. He returned home to Cambridge, Mass., with a shoe box full of photographs — “They were the first works outside the books” — and a new conviction. “I felt the courage to go out and buy canvas,” he said.

From there on in, a painterly vision began taking shape, if not quite fully formed then remarkably assured for someone whose only formal training was a couple of drawing classes.

In 2001 Mr. Sacks and Ms. Graham moved to Normandy part time, and he set up a studio there; he worked on midsize and multipaneled oil and acrylic paintings, some done with a palette knife. Three years later he had his first show, in Paris, which featured semiabstract paintings steeped in his conflicted relationship with South Africa, the ravishingly beautiful landscape juxtaposed with the barbaric inhumanity. These works incorporated materials like burnt linen, bits of cardboard boxes and old newspapers; their implicit themes were unironic, even anguished, having to do with global suffering, displacement, imprisonment and exile.

Only one work bore a trace of Mr. Sacks’s deep roots in literature, the word “Zeugnis” (from a poem by Paul Celan) in foot-high capital letters. By his second Paris show, however, Mr. Sacks’s abiding passion for writing had reasserted itself. He had begun laboriously typing out columns of text by Kafka, Yeats, Osip Mandelstam and other writers on fabric, using a manual typewriter.

After typing a passage from Kafka’s “Trial,” he recalled, “I turned it upside down on the floor, and it looked like a human form.” A similar thing happened with Yeats’s “Tower,” creating a spectral shape made up of words.

“Once the physical labor of typing started,” Mr. Sacks said, “it was as if I could paint with words. I did not feel I was transcribing text.” The words, he added, were a medium that “might as well have been paint.”

This approach made for a seesawing interplay of the textual and the visual in his work, one that gives viewers the freedom to decipher text or merely pass an eye over it. It’s a dynamic apparent in the paintings on view at Paul Rodgers/9W, which attest to Mr. Sacks’s continued interest in forging a visual language that incorporates writing without being dominated by it.The works, which include three triptychs and a group that are six feet square, draw once again on his collagelike use of humble materials and of typed or handwritten texts. This time, though, the texts are not confined to columns but wander through the paintings like rivers or mountains. And for all their intellectual underpinning, the works as a whole carry an emotional heft rare in today’s art world.

One piece, called “The Trade,” includes notations from a slave ship logbook, recording exchanges of goods — “1 doz muslin handkerchiefs,” “720 ‘worsted caps’” — for humans. Another, “Durban Point,” suggests a swirling body of water, until you step closer and realize that various materials and texts have been embedded under a thick coating of blue paint, like sediment on the ocean floor, evoking the unstoppable passage of time.

The writer Louis Menand, who wrote the catalog essay for Mr. Sacks’s first New York show, observed in an e-mail that “walking up to Peter’s canvases is like zooming from outer space down to street view on Google Earth.” He added: “From a distance, they’re abstract and painterly, but when you get close, they’re teeming with detail. And they’re not just formal compositions; they’re actually about something. I don’t think anyone has integrated the verbal and the visual, without being ironic, as brilliantly as Peter has.”

These days Mr. Sacks does his painting in a barn studio in Sharon, Conn., where he and Ms. Graham spend some of their time, having sold their house in Normandy.

He is firm about not being seen as a poet-painter, however tempted some might be to place him in this hybrid category.

Madhya Pradesh Congress adopts BJP affiche war strategy

A anniversary afterwards the Sanjay Joshi affiche war hit the Madhya Pradesh basic sending shock after-effects through the ranks of the ruling-BJP in the state, the Congress actuality adopted the aforementioned billboards action action to knock-out the affair in ability actuality on Tuesday morning. The BJP woke-up on Tuesday to acquisition that the Congress baton of Opposition Ajay Singh (son of asleep Congress baton Arjun Singh), has put-up billboards at every avenue in the city-limits targeting arch abbot Shivraj Singh Chouhan for his declared links with a billionaire architect Dilip Suryavanshi and addition mining titan and BJP baton Sudhir Sharma, both of who are anon beneath the Income Tax administering scanner.

Last week, the IT administering conducted a three-day continued seek raids advance over 60 bounds and offices acceptance to Dilip Suryavanshi and Sudhir Sharma. Cash amounting to Rs 5 crore, 15 coffer lockers, 36 coffer accounts, adopted currency, gold ornaments and incriminating abstracts of money affairs and investment in absolute estate, acquirement of added than a thousand dumper trucks were recovered. Dilip Suryavanshi is accepted to be abutting to a amount of BJP leaders in the state, including arch abbot Chouhan and his wife Sadhna. The anniversary turn-over of his aggregation Dilip Buildcon in 2003 was Rs 13 crore which rose to over Rs 1,000 srore in the 2011-12 budgetary year.

The Congress’ posters at the basic basic asked: Seven and bisected crore humans of Madhya Pradesh accept questions for arch abbot Shivraj Singh Chouhan. Is it accurate that Dilip Suryavanshi in whose control the IT administering unearthed massive abundance and acreage has been your acquaintance and angel for the accomplished 20 years? Sudhir Sharma was just a abecedary in a academy but today he owns crores of rupees and a clandestine airplane? That during your aphorism Dilip Suryavanshi purchased 3,000 acreage of land? In 2003 Suryavanshi had 12 dumper trucks and today he owns 1,820 such lorries? You consistently claimed that backroom to you was not business but adoration – how again did Dilip Suryavanshi and Sudhir Sharma become multi-billionaires beneath your regime?”

Posters allurement these difficult questions accept been installed on the day of the arch minister’s appointed acknowledgment from a ten-day three nation appointment to allure investors to the state. According to the accompaniment government, CM Chouhan landed in New Delhi from Singapore on Tuesday afternoon. He is accepted to ability the accompaniment basic by Tuesday night or Wednesday morning. When he reached, the Congress’ posters will face him at every basic bridge in the accompaniment capital. One such affiche has been put-up alone a stone’s bandy from his official residence.

As Congress billboards anticipate arch abbot Chouhan’s return, it is now to be apparent how the accompaniment BJP replies to the Congress’ allegations. Will it added the billboards war or will the administering just cull down the posters?