April Artist: Colorful World

For many of us, the natural world refreshes, comforts, inspires and excites. Joel Wish finds all this and more in the out of doors, and uses nature as a springboard for vibrant impressionistic pastel works.

The Waunakee artist and psychologist—whose work is showcased March 27 through May 10 at Artisan Gallery in Paoli—took a moment to share insights into his inspirations and process.

How did you become an artist?

I have done art since I was a kid. From when I was just in elementary school my mom took me way across town to the Corcoran museum for art lessons. My parents were very supportive of my having private art lessons on and off through my elementary, junior and high school years. In college, I tried to double major but I was told it would have to be either art or psychology. I obviously went with the safe choice.

I am a psychologist in a hospital (UWHC), working primarily with kids. Working with medically ill people makes you appreciate the fragility of things. In short, it makes me grateful for what I have. The tough parts of working with medically ill people get absorbed in me somewhere deep below the surface and doing art just helps bring what’s stored in there out into the light with new meaning/perspective and appreciation—kind of like a cleansing.

How would you describe the style of your art?

My art is one percent knowing what I’m doing and ninety-nine percent struggling to create something that feels/looks right. For me, creative “flow” is the constant push/pull of trying to make something that looks or feels okay despite not knowing how I’m going to get there.

Why do you focus on the natural world?

I find drawing from nature easier than drawing the human figure. The incredible variety of color and form in nature allows one to be very creative while still “landing” a product that is “believable.” Whenever I try to capture a human image, I find I’m locked into getting the details “right.” There’s a narrower window in capturing what’s believable and acceptable in the human form. Getting details right for me is what I try to do at work but not for relaxation!

How did you come to your incredible use of color? And did your chosen medium play a role in this?

I work a lot of hours and I need a medium that is forgiving and quick—little setup time, able to come and go into it with ease, etc. Pastels are perfect, kind of like crayons are for kids. Just like kids can pull crayons out and whip up a painting almost anywhere, pastels allow me to walk into my studio, “paint” for five minutes or five hours and then go back to working at my desk. It’s a back-and-forth volley between work and art. As for the color, pastels are an easy medium for colorists; I really enjoy maximizing the color by making use of different colored surfaces. What lies under the surface of the painting often creates the vibrancy of the painting itself. There’s nothing like painting on dark surfaces to maximize the intense colors inherent in pastels.

What inspires you?

Nature—its forms, colors, contrasts. I love finding these things in the everyday world. Sometimes they’re right there in front of us, but so often overlooked.

What are the greatest challenges in making your art?

What to do with all the paintings I create! I must have about two hundred pieces lying around the house. I’m sure my wife would say the greatest challenge is finding a place to sit in our living room. The house is overrun with paintings. I believe in a few years I’ll probably paint only postcard-size artwork because I simply will have run out of space! I guess the other challenge is working in the very fragile medium of pastel. It creates dust, which is neither good for the lungs nor for trying to have it stay put on painted surface. The dust has some inherent need or tendency to shift. One of the greatest absurdities in my art life is taking a pastel painting and trying to surround it with a white matboard. Life seems awfully short to be grappling with keeping the matboard pure. I wish I could have fallen in love with some more stable art form!

When do you consider a work successful and how do you define that?

What I’ve created has to stand up against the internal critic and it has to stand up against that critic over time. Sometimes the internal critic doesn’t arrive on the scene until days, weeks or months after I thought the painting was complete. I might feel great about something I’ve painted one day, only to wake up the next morning or even weeks later and discover the piece isn’t okay. Maybe only fifty percent of the time does something feel successful from day one to the next day and over time.

What do you hope to share with viewers through your art?

Good question. I guess, however, I have chosen to depict nature, and if viewers can appreciate that through their own eyes, then we’ve made a connection that goes beyond words. Sharing that connection with others is what art is all about for me.

Images are by Joel Wish and courtesy of Artisan Gallery.

IN THE MAGAZINE: The April issue of Madison Magazine comes out tomorrow. Here’s some of the arts content you’ll find within the pages:
• An interview with acclaimed filmmaker Mary Sweeney, plus information on the upcoming Wisconsin Film Festival.
• A poem by Michael A. Walker.
• Our monthly Overtones section with picks on the can’t-miss performances, concerts and exhibits taking place in April.
• An extensive look at the expansion of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Unitarian Meeting House.
• A look at a special ceramics exhibition at the Dane County Airport in Neil Heinen and Nancy Christy’s Genuine Articles column.

Girl Power

What is feminist art? Who is a feminist artist? Must the artist knowingly make feminist art? Must the artist be a woman?

These are just a few of the questions raised in the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art’s latest exhibition, Girls 

and Company: Feminist Works from MMoCA’s Permanent Collection.

The show, which opened in May and runs through July 20, explores the legacy of feminism in art through a collection of roughly twenty paintings, photographs and prints from the 1960s through ’90s.

Artists represented in Girls and Company include Diane Arbus, Joan Brown, Ilona Granet, Jenny Holzer, Mary Laird, Jin Lee, Marisol, Lev T. Mills, Nancy Mladenoff, Frances Myers, Christina Ramberg, Miriam Schapiro and Hollis Sigler.

Photography in the exhibition is particularly striking, from Cindy Sherman’s untitled image of a woman—herself posing as an abused wife—with a bruised face and a look of shock to Anne Noggle’s scenes of an elderly woman in her small Santa Fe kitchen and two nude women sitting at desks in a small office smoking cigarettes.

Nicholas Nixon—one of two men in the show—also presents a thought-provoking photograph in St. Petersburg, Florida, in which a group of teen girls directly confront his camera as well as those who encounter the image. It’s a good example of much of the art in this show—in that it raises questions for viewers but doesn’t offer up easy answers.

Noteworthy, too, are prints by the Guerrilla Girls, a collaborative activist group that formed in the 1980s and raised awareness about discrimination in the art world and other realms. In one poster-style screenprint from 1989, the group comments that with the $17.7 million one could spend on a single Jasper Johns painting, he or she could instead purchase at least one work from each of the over sixty-five women artists and artists of color that they list. It’s a powerful statement made in a powerful work.

Jane Simon, curator of exhibitions at MMoCA, recently offered some insight into how the exhibition came together, what feminist art means today and what she hopes viewers take way from the show.

How did Girls and Company come about? Why did you decide to hold this exhibition? 

Exhibitions are sometimes planned years in advance. This one was planned about a year ago. And I think it happened because I was thinking about the changing role of feminism and because I knew we owned these works by the Guerrilla Girls. I’ve wanted to show them since I started working here four years ago. I’ve been intrigued by practices that involve performance and masquerade, two approaches that often revolve around feminism.

What were the challenges for you in putting the show together?

I think I associate with a second or third generation of feminism, and I think that is not always in line with some of the older generations of feminism.

Why does the museum have a large collection of “feminist” art?

How do you define feminist art? I think it all depends on how it is defined. Certainly, when you start looking you can find new ideas.

How has the definition of feminist art changed over the years? What is it today?

I am not even sure feminism occurred to artists like Marisol, but for artists like Joan Brown and Cindy Sherman, it was a constant reminder and a label that came up time and time again. I think they were probably delighted with the label, but their art addressed many issues and concerns.

What piece in the show resonates most with you?

I am very fond of the GG [Guerrilla Girls] pieces as well as the painting by Joan Brown. I’m also very fond of the photographs by Anne Noggle. The museum owns several of her pieces.

What has the reaction to Girls and Company been so far?

Very positive, especially with women viewers.

What is your goal for the exhibition?

To raise awareness and spark discussion.


Images, courtesy of MMoCA, are Untitled Head (#12) by Jin Lee, The Martyrdom by Frances Myers and St. Petersburg, Florida by Nicholas Nixon.


COMING UP: A few events and performances to check out this week.

University Theatre opens its summer production, The Musicals of Musicals: The Musical, on Friday. Also that day, Artisan Gallery in Paoli unveils two shows: ceramics by Rick Hintze and the group show Contemporary Animal Imagery.

The Spring Green Arts Fair, featuring the work of over two hundred artists, runs Saturday and Sunday in downtown Spring Green, while the Madison Early Music Festival offers a Preview Concert Sunday afternoon.

And Tuesday sees the start of Butterfly Encounters, featuring photographs of local butterflies by Ann Thering at the UW–Madison Arboretum Steinhauer Trust Gallery.

Familiar Images

I always find it intriguing when artists take on plants and animals as their subject matter. Such imagery may seem benign initially, but on so many levels they are chock full of history and symbolism.

Do all artists think of the Garden of Eden or fertility when they paint a scene of flowers? Does a depiction a horse or bear always call to mind the countless cultures that have painted them for thousands of years? Probably not. But for me, these histories become part of the subjects’ contexts.

This month, two separate shows in two different galleries take on these themes.

Olbrich Botanical Gardens presents paintings featuring flowers and other botanical imagery in Five Painters in the Gardens. The five local artists—C.K. Chang, Bonnie Johnson, Donna Miller, David Scheifel and Mary Diman—all have a penchant for color and nature, as well as painting in the realist tradition. They met up more than two decades ago and have exhibited together for the past six years. Yet each shares his or her own impression of flowers, through individual uses of color, medium and style.

The show begins June 8 and continues through September 21. It’s open on Sundays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

At Artisan Gallery in Paoli, a group show called Contemporary Animal Imagery tackles animal subject matter in surprising, beautiful, fun and extremely varied ways. It’s an exhibition of paintings, sculpture, photography and ceramics, but all of the fifteen-plus artists involved explore animal imagery as used in contemporary art.

There’s Randy Richmond’s collection of digital prints combining animals and manmade objects: a swan on a seesaw, a cow approaching a piano; both in moody, almost eerie nighttime settings. Or Audrey Christie’s vibrantly hued hand-colored woodcut of a rooster. Both of those are stark contrasts to Laura Zindel’s ceramic bottles, upon which she presents scientifically precise depictions of snakes, insects and spiders. The show offers so many thought-provoking ways of looking at beings we see almost daily.

The exhibition runs June 27 to August 3, and hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday.

Artwork top to bottom is by Mary Diman, Donna Miller, Randy Richmond and Laura Zindel. 

COMING UP: A few events and performances to check out this week.

Sheryl Crow makes a stop in Madison tonight at the Alliant Energy Center as part of her summer Detours tour, while Ingrid Michaelson plays the Barrymore on Saturday. Also that night, The Kissers offer their final show at the High Noon Saloon.

And festival season is in full swing this weekend, starting with the Isthmus Jazz Festival running Thursday through Sunday at the Memorial Union Terrace. There you can enjoy a century’s worth of jazz styles.

Saturday brings the Clean Lakes Festival at Olin Turville Park, as well as Folk on State, the annual folk music concert series held Saturday afternoons on State Street. And Parade of Homes offers its yearly showcase Saturday through June 22 in four Madison-area neighborhoods.

Also on Saturday, American Players Theatre in Spring Green kicks off its outdoor theater season with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which runs through October 5.