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Xanadu’s End-of-Recession Celebration!

We don’t know about the rest of the country, but at Xanadu we’re seeing that the recession is over… at least for our collectors. Our clients seem to have come through it stronger, leaner, and meaner. You saw it all coming, and made the necessary adjustments to prosper while everybody else was whining. You’ve made smart moves that grew your business and filled niches nobody even knew existed a couple of years ago.

All along the way, you’ve kept fine art high on your list of priorities; and for that, we at Xanadu thank you!

You deserve something special and creative to celebrate.

Restoration Window 3 by John & Elli Milan

How about a new painting by husband & wife artists/collaborators, John and Elli Milan? The Milan’s have just brought colorful, dynamic new works in to the gallery, causing quite a stir with our autumn visitors. They will definitely not last long. Snatch one up today!

Or, how about a new wildflower painting by John Horejs to brighten your home for the coming winter months? John’s travels to Idaho and Seattle this past summer yielded great new subject ideas that he’s now capturing on canvas. Wouldn’t this one look great above your headboard, or in the dining area?

Flight Time by Gary Price

If you’ve been thinking about a Gary Price bronze for your garden or foyer, this would be the perfect time to order. Gary is releasing “Flight Time” this month, his first new sculpture in a couple of years. Call us by October 31, and you can add “Flight Time” to your collection for 25% off the regular price. Our toll-free number is 866-483-1306.

Have you visited our website lately? We are adding talented new artists and exciting new artwork on a daily basis. You should bookmark our “Artists” page and check it out often to see all the great new offerings. (Don’tcha just love shopping for art in the middle of the night in your jammies?) Also, be sure to go to our home page regularly for a listing of our upcoming events and exhibits.

Warmest regards,

Elaine
Director
Elaine, Director | Xanadu Gallery

Illusion I by Anke Korioth

Learning to Fly by Lorri Acott-Fowler
Private Collectors - Texas

Stained Glass by Tom Holdman
Resaraunt, Phoenix, AZ

Truth Belt by John & Elli Milan
Mr. & Mrs. Todd E. | Memphis, TN

Red, White and Blue - SOLD by Cristall Harper

Red, White and Blue by Crystal Harper
Ms. Susan L | Montana

Upcoming Events

New Arrivals

Wearable Art Walk

November 5

Artistic Jewelry

6:00 p.m.

Fashion Show at South Bridge will feature the stunning jewelry of Xanadu Artist Helen Serras-Herman

7-9 p.m.

After the fashion show, Helen will display her latest creations at Xanadu, along with Xanadu jewelry designers Sandy Schenkat and Mary Mauritzen. All three artists will be in the gallery to help you select original hand-made art wear for your own adornment and for holiday gift giving.

Green Street Art Walk

November 12

7-10 p.m.

Conservation themed and Recycled Objecs d/Art of Andrew Smith, John & Elli Milan, and Dave Newman

Part celebration, part art exhibit, part music festival, and all environmentally friendly, Green Street Scottsdale is a night on the town you won’t want to miss! Held in honor of the 2009 Greenbuild International Conference & Expo, where "green" designers, architects, and builders will converge in Phoenix, this exciting event at Xanadu in the downtown Scottsdale Arts District will showcase innovative, sustainable art.

Xanadu will feature the ever-popular and totally "green" sculptor Andrew Smith. Andrew will be at Xanadu demonstrating his kinetic sculpture made almost entirely of recycled materials and "found" objects such as old satellite dishes. John and Elli Milan just finished their "Conservation" series of paintings that you can preview on our website. The Milans will also be present that evening.

Xanadu's Green Street event will also feature new "recycled" sculptures by Dave Newman.

Fourteen-year-old Phoenix classical guitarist Guy Soper will perform at the gallery during the evening festivities! Be sure to save the date and join us for an artful evening!

Dave Newman, Abstract Sculpture

Florentina

by Marek

Aspen Way

by John Horejs

Village in Red

by Robert Burt

Fall Road Trip

by Emmy White

PUSSY WILLOW RAKU BOWL

by Elena Miller

Featured Artist: Wess Smith


Marsh With Flotsam 22" x 33" Mixed Media on Arches Paper

This month we sat down with artist Wess Smith to discuss his digital work. Digital art is one of the brave new frontiers in contemporary art. With a growing number of artists leaving the traditional paintbrush behind for the virtual studio, the inevitable question arises: "'Is it art?" Studying Smith's art, the answer seems self evident.

Xanadu: Your digital work has a very painterly quality. What effect are you striving to achieve in your work?

Smith: I try not to think too much about achieving any specific effect but do admit to liking a painterly look and feel. One of the attributes of working in the digital realm is that you have the freedom to easily make changes at anytime. This opens the door to image experimentation which often leads to unintended things happening which I try to exploit. I don’t believe in luck so much as serendipity and then seezing that image opportunity that didn’t occur to me initially. Another great thing about digital painting is that just about every action is captured as a layer. So as you build up the painting in layers you can erase part of a layer revealing part of the layer below, sort of like painting backwards and this tends to give the work a “painterly” appearance. It’s at this point I start digitally painting back into the image using Coral Painter software and Photoshop. Digital allows you to create any kind of brush you want. You can make a virtual brush out of parts of a photograph or you can make one from a drawn texture and then you can add all kinds of shape dynamics like noise or scattering to build a “brush” that doesn’t exist in reality. Another wonderful tool is the clone stamp that I use frequently to capture a small texture or shape from the image I’m working on and replicate that texture or shape elsewhere in the image. All of these tools when used in combination result in a painterly appearance. In the end I’m looking for a finished piece that looks a little like a photograph and a lot like a painting.

X: You have an extensive academic background in printmaking, painting and video. What lead you to digital media?

Smith: I was first introduced to film based photography while studying at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in the mid 60’s and became hooked. At first I simply used photography as source material for my paintings as have many painters since the Impressionists. In fact some are convinised that 17th century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer even used a filmless “pinhole” camera called a “Camera Obscura” to create his paintings, so the medium of photography has been around for a long time.

But soon I wanted to skip the copying process and figure out how to incorporate photography directly into my paintings. I did this via photo-silk-screens following a similar print technique developed by billboard and magazine printing companies where the photographic image is converted into dots at non overlapping angles in the three primary colors of red, yellow and blue. Even today when you look closely at a printed photograph in a magazine you can see that dots of primary colors that make up the actual picture. So I would create the necessary photo silk screens and using oil paint apply them directly onto my canvas then paint back into and around those photo images. Pop artists like Robert Rauschenberg and others popularized this technique. The effort yielded great results but was tedious and difficult to alter during the painting process. For a while I even experimented with photo-sensitizing three dimensional objects and exposing them to photographic images.

In mid career I went back to school and got a second Masters degree in video as an art form. Video is heavily driven by technology and later as a manager of a large video production facility (it paid the bills to feed my art and family) where it was critical in order to remain competitive to have the latest technology available, which eventually led to my introduction to the digital world. Video evolved into the digital realm early and digital still cameras came a little later and when it did I jumped in with both feet. About the same time Photoshop software came along and the ability to manipulate images digitally was a clear path for me as an artist. Now I skip the actual painting with oils in favor of painting digitally which offers far more latitude and flexibility and easily accommodates my interest in the photographic image.

X: Do you find a growing acceptance for the digital prints?

Smith: Yes, but slowly. I think initially collectors were suspicious of digital printing thinking it couldn’t be any better than the results of the $100 inkjet printer that was hooked to their desktop computer. Today’s digital printing is a big departure from the days of running an etched or engraved inked copper or steel plate through a press, the way it’s been done since the days of Albrecht Durer 1471-1528. The quality and choices of printing papers now available for digital printing are excellent, manufacturers are now making inks guaranteed to last at least a hundred years and in reality will probably last much longer and the large twelve color inkjet printers currently available are superior to just about any printing technology.

My former teacher and world-class printmaker friend Peter Milton, www.petermilton.com is now printing both intaglio and digital with barely discernable differences. I also see more and more traditional painters having their work converted to a digital format and then selling the original as a print.

X: What is the reaction you most frequently receive to your work?

Smith: Because much of my work utilizes actual photographic elements many viewers initially assume that the entire image is a single photograph and often ask how I able to take such a picture. But then after taking a second look they quickly realize that what they’re looking at could not possibly be a single photograph. It’s then that they become engaged with the image exploring the relationships of the various elements, moving in to examine details then backing off to see more globally. A little knowing smile usually happens next...you can actually watch their imagination churning away.

X: Describe the process involved in creating a piece?

Smith: Over the past eight years I have slowly built a digital photo database of well over thirty thousand images, these images become my palette. I sort these images into categories so that I can quickly find specific elements, i.e., animals, people, tree roots, skies, etc. that I can utilize. I copy pieces of these images to paint with but never destroy the original as I may need another piece of it later for another painting. When I start a painting I typically start with nothing more than a very general idea, maybe landscape, maybe a version of a work by another painter I admire or maybe even something based on a recent travel experience. I am a great believer in serendipity, in letting things happen, in keeping myself open to happenstance. The digital medium allows you to easily move image elements in relation to others, to change their size, intensity, color or any other attribute and in so doing choices reveal themselves like no other medium, some you take advantage of, and others you discard or repurpose.

X: How do you know when a piece is finished?

Smith: Very good question. I admit to being guilty of over working pieces sometimes, not knowing when to quit tinkering with them. Fortunately with the digital medium you can undo things you’ve done quite easily by turning off layers to get back to where you should have stopped. Also you have to let work sit for a while to see if it holds up as well as you thought it should. I often turn my work upside down or make it very small to see if it holds up from a different perspective. If I think its “cooked” I collapse all of the layers into a single layer and have it printed to a predetermined size. I could always go back into the painting and make more changes but I rarely do this.

X: Who are your influences?

Smith: In mid career I stopped painting for a while because I felt I was being overly influenced by others and was convinced that “my” work always seemed to look like the work of someone else, it wasn’t as “original” as I wanted it to be, therefore, I decided to rid myself of all influences. I cancelled my subscriptions to the popular art magazines, stopped going to galleries and museums, even put some friendships with fellow artists on hold. But over time I came to realize that unless you live in a cave and had never been exposed to the ideas of others it was simply impossible to not be influenced by others so I decided to embrace those influences, draw on those influences and bend them to my own interpretations. I’m a big fan of French Realists landscape painters like Corot, Courbet and of course Manet. I’m also influenced by the English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painters especially John Everett Millais and the American Realists Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer but perhaps my all time favorite is Theodore Gericault and his “Raft of the Medusa.” But these influences don’t rule out the thousands of others from Spanish painter Francisco de Goya to Abstract Expressionists like Wilam De Kooning.

X: For those who are interested in the technical side of your art form, can you talk a little bit about the equipment you employ?

Smith: Tools for any art medium are important and they need to become second nature to you. I never want to have to think should I use this tool or another, I want the use of tools to be intuitive. To gather content for my library of images I use a Nikon D300 12.1 megapixel camera and an assortment of wide angle to telephoto lenses. Next I transfer those collected images to my Dell 370 workstation, edit out the images I don’t want and then move them to Photoshop Bridge files where I can find them later. I started with computers on a PC and have sort of stayed with this platform. Everyone tells me to move to Mac which I may do some day but quite frankly I don’t want to invest in a new learning curve when what I doing seems to be working just fine. I bought a 26 inch high rez (1920 by 1200 32 bit) monitor several years ago and would move to a 30 inch if my computer would support it. I use a second 24 inch monitor to display the Photoshop tools and the library of my images displayed via Bridge. My computer is rigged with a RAID dual hard drive system where the hard drives mirror each other in case one should fail. Keep in mind it’s not if the hard drive will fail but when! Because I believe that and have had it happen three or four times I have three 1 Tb outboard hard drives that all have copies of my photo content files and of course copies of all of my finished images. In the digital world back-up is extremely important. The key to digital art is a large digital drawing tablet and a pressure sensitive digital pen/brush. I use a WACOM 13 X: 18 inch tablet. Speed is also important so I just upgraded to two new 640 GB internal hard drives and 8 Mb of RAM. Last I have a Epson 13 X: 19 inch printer that I use to see how my work will look in print form. When I’m ready to print I work with a local art printer that uses a Cannon 9000 series 12 color printer. WOW, I love the output from that printer.