Local Art Seen: Terry Millikan's "Meditations" @ Lizzards

Saturday afternoon Lizzards Art Galler & Framing hosted a reception for a exhibition featuring a new series of Mandalas by Terry Millikan. The images have been produced using a variety of media. What's fascinating is how several of the images appear almost three-dimensional as if embroidered.

The word mandala is a sanskrit word that means, literally, "circle." In Hinduism and Buddhism it is a symbol of the universe.

For Millikan there is a Southwestern influence woven into many of the the patterns reproduced here. Each has its own design.

The pieces vary in size as well as design.

Terry Millikan, right, shares how the pieces came about.

Looks like a circle of beads or peas on this one. It's just a drawing.

Millikan's Meditations series became an opportunity to explore ideas 

she's been thinking about for a long time. It's just one more reason to

stop in at Lizzards this holiday season.

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BONUS TRACKS

Adam Swanson had set up an easel inside Perry Framing yesterday. If you were

downtown doing some Small Business Saturday shopping, you could have 

stepped in off the street and visited with the popular local painter while he worked.

TONIGHT

If you don't have other plans, Beaners Central and Zenith Bookstore are hosting a special event celebrating the publication of The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen. Authors Chef Sean Sherman and Beth Dooley will be on hand for readings, signings and sample recipes, with books available for purchase. Author talks begin at 6 p.m. at Beaner's Central Coffeehouse. Samples of cedar-maple tea will be served throughout.The book, published in October, has been receiving stellar reviews. Some have called it life changing.  

Excerpt from Amazon.com: Here is real food—our indigenous American fruits and vegetables, the wild and foraged ingredients, game and fish. Locally sourced, seasonal, “clean” ingredients and nose-to-tail cooking are nothing new to Sean Sherman, the Oglala Lakota chef and founder of The Sioux Chef. In his breakout book, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, Sherman shares his approach to creating boldly seasoned foods that are vibrant, healthful, at once elegant and easy.

Meantime, art goes on all around you. Get into it.

Flashback Friday: Picasso's Guernica Revisited

Steve Martin, in his autobiography Born Standing Up, describes the impression he received during his first visit to the Museum of Modern Art (affectionately referred to as the MoMA) as he came face to face with Picasso's Guernica. It stuns, and stops you in your tracks. When you see this painting reproduced in books it's difficult to comprehend its massive scale and the powerful effect it produces. Martin then rounds a corner and there finds himself awed by this miniature Dali, equally famous, The Persistence of Memory. It's an experience unforgettable.

Both of these share a prominent positions on many lists of the most significant paintings of the 20th century, Guernica topping the list and Dali's delicately rendered dreamscape third. (Duchamp's earth-shaking Nude Descending A Staircase, second but no second fiddle, hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.)

The MoMA has as many as 300 Picassos, but Guernica's the one that makes your hair stand on end. The painting was brought to mind by an article earlier this week in the ArtDaily about a newly released documents and research about the famous painting.

Those familiar with the story recall that Guernica was painted in response to the bombing of a Basque town on April 26, 1937 by German and Italian air forces under the orders of future Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. The horror was committed not against an army but against a village. Hundreds died, a foreshadowing of the bombings that would later occur in World War II by both the Allied and Axis powers.

That same year Picasso had been commissioned to produce a painting for the 1937 World's Fair in France. Before the bombing he was having the equivalent of writers block. The horror of the bombing ignited Picasso's imagination and this monumental work was the result.

The online exhibit Rethinking Guernica is an extensive exploration of the history of the painting, its influence, its role as a political symbol, its influence, the controversies it generated and Picasso's own perspective on the painting. If you don't have time to check it out today, take a minute to visit the page and bookmark it.


LOCAL ART SCENE 
Small Business Saturday

Mandala with Southwestern Influence, Terry Millikan

Artists and authors are small businesses. Before you spend all your Christmas shopping money on Black Friday, be sure to save a little for small bookstores like Zenith (Central Avenue) across the parking lot from Beaners. There are numerous local art venues clustered here and there, including SiVi's, Art Dock and Northern Waters within walking distance of one another in Canal Park.

In Downtown Duluth, we have Lake Superior Art Glass, Art in the Alley, Zeitgeist, the new Ryan Tischer Gallery and Lizzards within walking distance of one another. If you park nearby and do your walkabout Saturday afternoon, you can catch the Terry Millikan art opening titled Meditations at Lizzards from 1-4 p.m. at 11 Superior Street W.

BONUS TRACKS
All Creative Work Involves Decisions
Guernica in 3-D

Meantime, art goes on all around you. Get into it. 

Local Art Seen: Terry Millikan at Lizzard's

Thursday's opening reception for Terry Millikan's much anticipated new show "Surprised by Joy" put a glow on many faces. It was nice to see the waves of friends and fans who came in to congratulate Millikan and take in her new work.

It was good to see gallery owner Jeffrey Schmidt present, as he had been ill the week leading up to this show and rumored to have been in the hospital. He stood tall and looked in good health as the music and generous warmth of the crowd filled both floors of the gallery.

Millikan's new work is quite different from the pieces I've seen at her former gallery in Superior. The work still remains fluid and laden with color. Here are some photos from the event and the work now being exhibited at Lizzard's. The gallery is open six days a week, and Sunday by appointment only.

Read more about Terry Millikan here.

Meantime, art goes on all around you. Especially at Lizzard's.

Local Art Happenings for the End of September

If you have never been to Lizzard's Gallery and Framing in downtown Duluth, Terry Millikan's opening reception for her new show "Surprised By Joy" would be a good time to check it out. Lizzard's is just a half block west of Pizza Luce and the Tech Village on Superior Street, so it's easy to find.

Terry Milikan's new solo show features paintings that emerged from the incalculable joy she felt in moving to her new rural setting up near Knife River. The opening reception is tonight from 5-8pm. with live music to be performed by Terry's son, Sean Murphy.

Lizzard's represents quite a number of local artists and would make a worthy destination for anyone who happens to be downtown during the day.

This Saturday September 26 from 10-5 is the Lester River Rendezvous at Lester Park, Lakeside. It's a family event with food, music, crafts and from what I hear a "whole lot of family fun."

For a recap of other places to see art in public spaces check out my summary of September art events here.

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AND Next Monday, one more Group Show of works inspired by Lake Superior. Check it out.

Meantime, art goes on all around you. Be part of it.

Terry Millikan's "Surprised By Joy" Opening at Lizzards

Kinetic Sculpture Park

I've been a fan of Lizzard's Gallery as long as I can remember. For years it claimed our attention on the lake side of Superior Street before moving to mid-block between Lake Avenue and First Avenue West. The gallery features quite a number of high caliber local artists and first rate shows such as the upcoming opening for Terry Millikan's "Surprised By Joy."

For a number of years Millikan has maintained studio in the 1890's Trade and Commerce Building (a.k. Old City Hall) in Superior, but sometimes she prefers to move off the grid to a getaway in the vicinity of Knife River. Perhaps this latter is what triggered the look of her new work, which while still featuring vibrant colors re-shapes them into more distinct forms.

Terry Millikan grew up in Rochester Minnesota in a creative family. An accomplished colorist with a snazzy sense of design, she captures vitality with color and pattern. Magically she creates rhythm and movement. Much like Millikan’s fresh sense of existence, her work is never static, but lively, energetic and engaging. Influences have included living in Oaxaca, Mexico; her time spent at Joshua Tree, California, and life along the northshore in Northern Minnesota. Her connection to nature is evident in her use of rich ochres, warm reds, deep purples, quinacridone golds, and the colors of the earth, sky, and water.

She's been affiliated with Lizzard's for many years and it's nice to see her featured in this upcoming show a week from Thursday.

EN: When did you first become serious about being an artist and how did that come about?

TM: My mother provided me with a creative environment because she was a painter. When I was a kid she showed me things that sparked my interest in art. I recall receiving positive reinforcement for my drawings all through school and determined to go for a BFA at University of Minnesota, which actually prepared me for nothing, though it did strengthen my resolve to continue painting no matter what the circumstances.

EN: How long were you in Mexico and what were your takeaways from that experience?

TM: In the nineties, I moved with a French Algerian painter to Oaxaca, Mexico for the purpose of making art. There, under the influence sun drenched plazas, the lush gardens of the Xochimilco studio, the notable Oaxaca painters, Toledo, Tamayo, and Morales, colorful weavings from Atitlan and wildly inventive Mexican folk art in general. Eventually, I abandoned my use of local color in favor of more vibrant saturated colors, while making the leap from representational subject matter into abstraction. The four years I spent in Oaxaca profoundly changed my artistic direction.

EN: I saw that you had many wonderful art volumes in your studio. Who have been your biggest influences?

Mood Indigo

TM: Oh. Yes. The art books. I’ve always read voraciously about art and artist. Over my long career I’ve deliberately copied paintings by disparate masters from Giotto and Duccio to Van Gogh, Bonnard, Matisse, and Cezanne in order to better grasp their technique; their compositions, and more deeply appreciate their unique vision. Looking through art books has always fed me. For many years I was chiefly inspired by abstract expressionism, especially the more gestural work by Gorky, early visceral Pollacks, and Frankenthaler’s stains on canvas. As I’ve gotten older my interests are gravitated towards the early modernists, which I see as a group emanating, more or less, from the obdurate old curmudgeon Cezanne. I am revisiting the “isms” under the rubric of Modernism and I am drawn to Braque’s cubism. Malevich’s constructivism, Leger’s “Synthesism”. My approach to painting seems to have a taken a more intellectual bent in my 70’s. Perhaps my physical energy for spontaneous, gestural, and explosive painting is on the wane. I arrive at my painterly decisions through cognition and deliberation.

EN: Cool. Your work has always had such a kinetic feel. Where did this energy come from?

TM: It comes from my background. There was a push and pull between one atheistic parent and one staunch fundamentalist Christian parent. Confused and lonely I turned to nature as my solace. I would say I am a pantheist, rejuvinated and inspired by the vitality of growth and change. I try to tap into the essence of living things, which is the source of the energy in my work.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower…. Dylan Thomas

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Thursday September 24 has two openings to keep mark on your calendar. If you're in the Twin Cities, try to catch Mark Zapchenk's Mediterranean Melodies 4:30 - 7:00 p.m. at Luther College. And if you're in the Twin Ports, Terry Millikan's "Surprised By Joy" is opening at Lizzard's Art Gallery & Framing in Downtown Duluth.

Meantime, art goes on all around you. Check it out.