Sarah Grant

Des Moines’ Art Mama

Sarah Grant is the mother of Des Moines‘ ar scene. More than any person, agency or organization, she gave birth to it, bestowed an identity on it and nurtured its growth. When Grant started Sticks in 1985, as a one person studio, committed artists in Des Moines had to choose whether they wanted to be artists, or to live here. Her company let them do both, by giving full time jobs to some 100 artists at a time. They formed the creative core that snowballed into a legitimate art scene. Sticks makes furniture and art that is now sold in fine galleries and art museums all over the country. Its design work has become as recognizable as an icon, making it easy for tourists from Des Moines to spot it in Los Angeles or New York and feel some local pride.

Grant’s personal art career is also best known in large scale. She constructed, with Michigan architect Stephen Fry, a 30,000 pound kitchen table atop downtown Grand Rapids’ Blue Bridge.

Her giant murals “What I Love About Iowa State,” “We Shall Know Iowa State University by Its Myriad Parts,” and “My World Is So Full of Many Things,” grace Iowa State’s campus. She won an Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects.

Grant has also chronicled her emotional life in abstract paintings. Her annual shows at Olson-Larsen Galleries have been distinguished by moody colors that have made her fans either happy or sad for her. Whether dark or sunny, Grant’s paintings have always been characterized by heavy layering. Even in gay years, they revealed a compulsiveness that almost seemed penitent. One fan called it “the yin to the carefree yang of Sticks.”

Her current exhibition of new work is remarkably restrained. I’m tempted to say it’s better edited. However, painters don’t have an editor’s luxury of going back and subtracting the superfluous. So it’s more as if Grant has attained a new clarity and now simply intuits when less is more. This year’s work is also more narrative and less abstract. She even pushes narratives with playful Sticks-like titles such as “With Bloodhounds, Band-aids Don’t Work,” “Is It Good News?,” “Four Guys in Sports Coats & Ties.”

Most of the new pieces focus through frames within frames, as if the artist is looking reflectively through windows of perspective. “Just an Old Printmaker,” a painting added to the show at the last minute, is autobiographical. (Grant holds an MFA in intaglio printmaking from the University of Iowa.) It is also the most restrained work in the show. All Grant’s work begins as black on white. This painting adds little additional color and yet makes a most dramatic impact.
This exhibition plays through Nov. 26 along with shows of new works by printmaker Paula Schuette Kraemer and painter Thomas Jewell-Vitale. Kraemer exhibits visual prayers, for nurseries and kennels, that have long distinguished her career. Jewell-Vitale reveals a dramatically different palette within his familiar medium of oil and wax. He deserts his trademark cool colors for a sunny excursion to new emotional territory.

Touts

Paintpushers, a group of past and present Sticks artists, are holding their tenth anniversary retrospective at Heritage Gallery through December 1… Jeremiah Elbel, a Des Moines artist who won England’s Saatchi Prize, is exhibiting in Iowa State University’s Memorial Union Pioneer Room through Dec. 5. An artist reception will be held Nov. 30, 5 p.m. - 8 p.m.… Robyn O’Neil, who rocked the Des Moines Art Center two years ago with her black & white visions of Armageddon, is currently exhibiting a single drawing, “Hell,” which took two years to complete and includes 65,000 characters, at New York City’s Susan Inglett Gallery… Des Moines painter Alex Brown has begun work on next year’s return exhibition at Feature Inc., a renowned New York City gallery. He will show drawings as well as paintings this time and a new, retro style.

March 2010

Robyn O’Neil: Origins of the Universe

Wunderkind artist Robyn O’Neil (at the Des Moines Art Center through May 23) stalks both high and low culture for stimulation.

“I read the classics. Except for Cormac McCarthy, that’s about all I read. Walt Whitman, Nabokov, I just finished the complete Proust thing,” she said, before admitting a rather different influence.

“I love bad TV. I have it on all the time while I work,” she revealed, adding that her alter ego is a character from “Roseanne.”

“Darlene Connor is my hero. We’re virtually the same age, grew up together,” O’Neil explained.

The Texan resembles Roseanne‘s younger daughter in many ways. Both grew up in “average Middle American households” and were usually the smartest person in whatever room they occupied. Both depended upon dark humor to muddle through their teenage years with “jerk” boy friends, and both went off to art school in Chicago only to discover they missed their fathers terribly.

"Most people see me and assume the artist is late. They can’t believe these expressions come out of this demeanor. I work at it. I am product of polite Midwestern moral responsibility that demands one be cheerful amongst others. It‘s a good thing I spend most of my time alone, other than with my dog. I couldn’t handle a real social life with a job. I break down and cry when I am alone, for reasons I couldn’t explain to others.

"I need that. I have to pace. When this opening is over, I will not explore Des Moines, I will shut myself in my hotel room and read. That’s how I do it. Patrica Highsmith wrote that imagination functions better when you don’t have to speak to people. I believe that," she said.

Had she been real, Darlene Connor might have created the darkly humorous universe that O’Neil etched

“obsessively” over seven years with the nothing more than the smallest lead pencil and the largest commercial paper. That universe is populated by funny little men in track suits and sneakers, modeled after the death shrouds of the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult. Her men behave badly and not so badly, balancing acts of cruelty and brotherhood.

"These are my melancholy worlds, I don’t use models, it’s all my imagination. I admire the Italian Renaissance painters sense of perspective, how buildings have an unnatural awkward relationship to landscapes. My men float awkwardly like that. Unlike trees, I don’t really let them fit in, they float on the landscape, sometimes without even casting a shadow," she explained.

O’Neil gives cynical titles to her works:

“Everything that stands will be at odds with its neighbor and everything that falls will perish without grace.”

“As Ye the sinister creep and feign, those once held become those now slain.”

“As darkness falls on this heartless land, my brother holds tight my feeble hand.”

“As my heart quiets and my body dies, take me gently through your troubled sky.”

“Oh how the heartless haunt us all”

Such titles were grave enough that Artforum magazine attributed them to the “Book of Revelations.”

“That was flattering. Someone thought something I wrote sounded Biblical,” she said, before revealing that Goya’s “Disasters of War” were an inspiration for her vision.

“Who doesn’t love that?” she asked.

In O’Neil’s drawings, men are always secondary to Mother Nature. Trees, owls, bison, dogs and horses cast shadows in some works in which her soulless men do not. The latter indeed die without grace, while her trees perish in magnificent splendor and her talon-bearing oceans and skies reveal superhuman countenances.

"I am a severe weather watcher, I am obsessed with that too. I mean I am one of those geeky people who calls in weather news to the TV station. It comes from growing up in Omaha and North Texas."

Her series concludes dramatically with the end of mankind.

“That was my intention from the beginning. That’s why I never drew a woman, to remove their hope of procreation,” she explained.

Her final survivor is last seen desperately clinging to a tightrope above a sea of wrath. O’Neil thought his fate was obvious.

"I always knew I would kill all the men off. I just didn’t know when till it was time. I could have ridden off into the sunset with the men too. Could have made a nice living continuing to draw them, that’s what people want. People love these goofy guys but I could care less. They’re too goofy for me now.

"I don’t see the world that way anymore. I have a little more respect from human life now. I see the world in quieter tones, more somber and less anxious than before. I have grown more comfortable with melancholy," she explained.

The more confortable O'Neill takes others unexpected. For all practical purposes, this writer found her to be a rather cheerful young lady. She laughed when I told her that.

“People have trouble with how devastating my work is. One sweet old lady in Dallas told me that she believed he was going to climb right on up to Heaven. I guess I got what I deserved, but hat’s not how I see it,” she said.

She's not so comfortable that she wants her photo taken. After I snapped her she asked that I never publish it anywhere. Preferring to deal with the cheerful persona, I promised.

Two drawings in the Art Center show portend O’Neil’s future. One is a take on Caspar David Friedrich’s depiction of a poem by Goethe, the super ego of Romanticism and the original reconciler of high and low cultures.

"Even a purely romantic scene like that, I was drawn to the idea of a black & white rainbow - not exactly hopeful. I can’t help imposing a down note even in romance. Bird of prey die mating in free fall. That’s romantic, " she confessed.

The other places her doomed tribe within the medieval legend of Magonia - a mysterious place beyond the clouds that has inspired true believers inpredetermination, utopia, and UFO sightings. O’Neil says she’s putting her pencil down to work on an opera about that footnote to France’s Dark Ages. She brought her composer to Des Moines - Chicago singer-songwriter Daniel Knox who shares style with Tom Waits, a view point with Randy Newman and a first name with Darlene Connor’s dad. O’Neil said she’d never even listened to an opera until she was urged to write one about Magonia, by Werner Herzog. But, that’s another story in Robyn O’Neil’s brilliant career.

Touts

From Our Hands won the Niche Award for the nation’s best retail art stores… Chris Vance’s new exhibition opened at Moberg Gallery after the artist’s smash debut in Denver, where 22 of his paintings sold on the opening weekend at 44T Art Space…