2 UPCOMING WORKSHOPS

NEW FALL WORKSHOPS

Mixed Media Workshop with National Artist Nancy Azara at the Duluth Art Institute

Call 218-723-1310 or 218-733-7560 to register! 

Visual Diaries: Surrounded by Possibilities

Nancy Azara

Saturday & Sunday, October 22 & 23

9am-4pm

$200 ($240 non-members)

Nancy is back with all NEW meditations and techniques to help you embrace your creative mind; still plenty to learn for even those who experienced her workshop last year.  Use meditation, discussion, painting, and collage to develop a visual diary from ideas, new visions, shadows from the past and hopes for the future.  For visual artists of all media, these methods of engaging your creative self will surely help to inspire your work in a new direction.  Nancy Azara is an artist who has exhibited her sculpture and collages in New York City, where she currently lives, and throughout the U.S. and abroad.  Her work is carved, assembled, and painted wood along with mixed media collages that reflect subjects about time in relation to memory and personal history.  She has written a book, “Spirit Taking Form: Making a Spiritual Practice of Making Art.”  As much about the process as it is the final product of the visual diary, this workshop will help you realize that full artistic potential you have waiting inside.

Concerns of the Heart, Expanding your Heart Center

Dialogue about love and compassion; combining meditation with artmaking

Nancy Azara

Thursday, November 10th, 6-9pm

Nancy's Studio, Franklin St., Tribeca

$30 

For more information or to RSVP, contact Nancy Azara at nancy@nancyazara.com

Limited space available.

Nancy Azara is a sculptor whose work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art In America, Art Forum, and Sculpture Magazine, and has exhibited in the U.S. and internationally. She is the author of Spirit Taking Form: Making a Spiritual Practice of Making Art, (Red Wheel Weiser).

Essay by Lilly Wei about my recent sculpture "Third Moon"

Nancy Azara’s poetic Third Moon is the most recent edition to what might be called a trilogy, at least so far, more might be coming.  It is visually and conceptually related to two earlier works, Dawn/Light and Leaf Altar for Nunzia (1913-2004).  The latter two are memorials, as is this one, although each in its own way. When Azara made Third Moon, she was thinking of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, an interrogation of the nature of illusion and reality, of shadows mistaken for substance. 

Enveloped by a soft nocturnal radiance created by applying white paint over aluminum leaf in combination with encaustic and a touch of color, the nearly monochromatic silver and rose of Third Moon—the same as Dawn/Light and Leaf Altar—is a further instance of what has lately become her palette of choice.  The support, a seven-foot square panel, is of wood and slightly larger than life but not intimidatingly so, the surface delicately carved with images of leaves, branches and pods to create an all-over pattern. 

Parts of it are more deeply incised than others, resulting in a flickered effect as light plays across the surface. To this low relief, lopped sections of different kinds of tree branches, arranged vertically, are attached for contrast. Together they present a dialectical meditation in which negative contends with positive form, fragments with the whole, reality with ghost images, reflections, memories, and dreams, and the past intersects the present.

Lilly Wei

August, 2011

Castle Series

These collages on my mylar were begun last May and June during a residency at the castle in Umbertide, Italy at Civitella Ranieri. They were made during a time when it was cold and rainy everyday and eyen though it was beautiful, it was uncomfortable, damp, chilly, very unpleasant.

They represent a mood, an assault on my body by nature with its relentless late spring rain and chill. Something about Italy with its tradition and history and its beauty juxtaposed by its cruel weather during this time spurred on this work.

The Castle Series is made by rubbing with both water soluble and non-soluble caran dáche oil pastels, on mylar over carverd luan (wood) plates. Taken from the foliage around my studio, I traced the leaves and collaged them on the surface. The wood plates themselves are carved in such a way that their surface resembles tree limbs, trucks and bark as well as leaves. They span from 4 feet, some vertical and some horizontal.

Leonie Bradbury, (Director of the Montserrat College of Art Gallery, Beverly, MA) has described my collages as: "mixed media collages drawings seamlessly combining a contemporary printmaker´s aesthetic with organic mark making".

La serie del Castillo

Estos collages se iniciaron el pasado mayo y junio (2010) durante una residencia en el castillo en Umbertide, Italia en Civitella Ranieri. Se hicieron durante una temporada en que hacía frío y llovía todos los días. A pesar de que era hermoso, era incómodo, húmedo, frío y muy desagradable.

Representan un estado de ánimo, el asalto a mi cuerpo por la naturaleza con su lluvia incesante y  frío a finales de la primavera. Algo en Italia, que con su tradición e historia y su belleza se yuxtapone por su clima cruel durante este tiempo estimulando así este trabajo.

La Serie del Castillo se hace con la fricción usando dos tipos de pasteles: de óleo soluble en agua y no soluble caran d´ache, se marcan sobre la madera cincelada en las placas. Tomando muestras de la vegetación alrededor de mi estudio, tracé las hojas y los collage en la superficie. Las placas de madera están tallada de tal manera que su superficie se asemeja a las texturas de un árbol, troncos y corteza, así como las hojas. Que van desde 4 a 8 pies, vertical y horizontal de algunos casos.

Leonie Bradbury, (Director del Colegio Montserrat de la Galería de Arte, Beverly, MA) ha descrito La Serie del Castillo como: " collages mixtos, dibujos a la perfección la combinación de la estética contemporánea de un grabador con la hechura de la marca orgánica.

Talk with Nancy Azara

Video by Candy Mar