Five Minutes With Artist/Illustrator Emily Wendland

I discovered Emily Wendland last weekend at the Ochre Ghost Gallery here in Duluth. Her show was called Transcendental Terrain and her work filled the room with an interesting vibe, aided in part by the music of Marc Gartmann’s Fever Dream. The show featured work in a variety of styles and gave visitors to see her range of interests. When I learned about her early support from family I saw a bit of myself. It will be interesting to see where her talents take her.

EN: How did you first become interested in making art? 
Emily Wendland: I've been making art ever since I can remember. My first published piece was a drawing I did of my dog sleeping on my grandmother's recliner when I was 5. It was published in the 'Grandma's Attic' section of the Duluth News Tribune.

EN: That had to be exciting. Describe your life path from there to where you are now?
EW: Since then, my love for drawing was noticed and highly encouraged and supported by my family. I attended various art camps and took all of the art classes available in school. It's been a process, seeking out artistic training and mentorship wherever I can find it, and self-discovery for myself as an artist.

EN: The mixed media pieces are quite interesting. Is this a more recent development and how did it come about?
EW: My passion is for drawing and illustration, but I've always dabbled in mixed media. I think many artists cross medium barriers... we're always looking to explore our ideas and concepts in different ways, and well, I think we just like working with our hands. For my art specifically, there are some things that can be better portrayed in one medium over the other. I decide which medium will best suite the idea that I am working on.

Spores (detail)

EN: Why the interest in spores?
EW: Over the past 2 years, my work has intensified its theming on nature. I love being surrounded by the work of the Lord, and the growing process of fungi has just fascinated me.

EN: Do you use your artistic gifts/talents in your career or is it something you do when you get home and on weekends?
EW: I have been actively pursuing a career with my artistic blessings. I recently received my BA from Bemidji State University, where I studied art and graphic design. I hope to use my training towards a career in illustration, but I plan to continue doing exhibits in the fine arts as well.

EN: What are you currently working on?
EW: Right now I am working on my own illustration pieces. I sell art prints and greeting cards under the business name 'Eew Cute' or 'Emily Wendland Illustration', where I sell them at various gift shops around the country and online.

EN: Where can people see more of your work?
EW: My art prints can be found on Etsy or at shops such as Double Dutch (Duluth), Yellow Umbrella (Bemidji), Unglued (Fargo), Sparrow Collective (Milwaukee). My online portfolio is at the Cargo Collective.

Making Books for Fun and Profit

"Never mind critics, what do you yourself think is wrong with your writing? How did you dream of your book before it was created? What were your best hopes? How have you let yourself down?"~Zadie Smith

Intergalactica

From time to time I run into someone who says they are planning to write a book. Many are simply too naive about the undertaking to know what they are saying. Some believe they will do it, but since they have no real writing experience or daily writing discipline it is not something that I expect will amount to much. I don't mind being proven wrong, but producing a book is... well, it's a lot like work.

Then there's the problem of taking a good idea and transforming it into something stellar that others might want to read. Putting a bunch of pages together and calling it a book is not an insurmountable task. It just takes persistence. But making a great book is another story.

Then again, who says it has to be a great book? What is great anyways? Great by whose standards? By critical acclaim? By runaway sales? By moral significance?

My opinion is that if you feel compelled to write a book, or a story or assemble a collection of poems, do it. Have fun with it. Express yourself. Pour yourself out. If you're motivated to write book-length manuscripts I commend you for that. It's audacious. It's ambitious. But to make it happen only requires a little daily discipline. Personally, everyone has a story to tell and books are a great way to share it.

I have a co-worker whose mother wrote and assembled memoirs of her experiences living in Germany during Hitler's rule. She did it for her family's sake, and the family has been enriched by this effort. It doesn't matter that the book has not been published by Random House or Scribners. It has been assembled and share.

Digital books have certainly lowered the bar as regards getting your work to the wider public. When you go digital there are no printing costs, and Amazon.com will display your titles all over the world. I don't even think an ISBN number is required for that any more. (Fact Checker: Please confirm.)

You do have to ask yourself why you are doing this? Zadie Smith challenges us to not compromise. But it's not easy. Making a good story great requires a lot of work. In my opinion, however, I'm not sure it has to be great initially. Your story simply needs to be told. If it's a good story, there are others who can help you polish it and bring it to the next level.

As for the profitability part of this equation... Don't think about it. It's a tough market and if making money writing books were all that easy, everyone would be doing it. Just tell your story. Tell it well and people will read it.

Meantime, have a very fine weekend. And write on.

Featured eBook of the Day: Unremembered Histories

Is Elegy a Eulogy for the Sexual Revolultion?

In literature, an elegy is a mournful, melancholic or plaintive poem, especially a funeral song or a lament for the dead.~Wikipedia

From the start we know the film’s theme. The opening scene features the acclaimed author and professor of literature David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley) being interviewed on the Charlie Rose Show talking about a colony down the road from the Puritans that relished sensuality but was ultimately wiped out by the hardline Puritans, their “maypole” cut down. Fortunately, according to Kepesh, the Sixties came along and open sexuality re-surfaced, a glorious time to be celebrated.

This is followed by a private monologue that comes across as honest, challenging and vulnerable, an older man thinking about the waning of his years and his sexuality. His public face is boastful and confident, but privately we see an anxious man. In this manner the film’s theme is established:

I think it was Betty Davis who said old age is not for sissies. But it was Tolstoy who said the biggest surprise in a man's life is old age. Old age sneaks up on you, and the next thing you know you're asking yourself, I'm asking myself, why can't an old man act his real age? How is it possible for me to still be involved in the carnal aspects of the human comedy? Because, in my head, nothing has changed.

As the story unfolds we see a man who has spent a lifetime ritually taking advantage of his power as an authority figure to whisk away the hearts of his various college students over the years, sexually possessing them one by one. For decades he has been the beneficiary, for his own ends, of the “liberation” he has written about.

Elegy is the story of David Kepesh, an aging professor who unexpectedly gets emotionally entangled with his latest conquest, Consuela, a young Cuban student played by Penelope Cruz. And what is potentially a story that is both challenging and enlightening film falters and falls. Why? Because Hollywood, just like David Kepesh, has a habit of treating women as sex objects instead of people.

As one imdb.com reviewer put it, “At times funny and heartbreakingly moving, this movie mostly just makes you think how lazy most men are when it comes to relationships. I found it interesting how even a cultural critic, a man who spends his life looking for deeper meaning in everything, can look at a woman and only see a sex toy.”

Here is a professor of literature, influential enough to be a celebrity, and the most meaningful thing he can say to this young woman is that she has “beautiful breasts”… Oh wait, he says "the most beautiful breasts he has ever seen in his life." What does this say about his values? That women are essentially sex objects and this is his best Barbie doll ever? This is a young woman in a Master's degree program and not once do you here dialogue about political issues or the challenges of post-modern philosophy. We only learn how many boy friends she's had sex with and how many he's bedded.

Where is there any candid discussion about the meaning of life? The film shows a man over-analytical and ever-wrestling with self-doubt, hope and despair. But where is the character development in Consuela? She doesn’t want to be like her parents. She likes his piano playing. She wants to travel, but that's about it.

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

There are additional characters in the film worth noting, especially George O'Hairn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning confidant played by Dennis Hopper. Hopper is very good in the role of confidant and sounding board. Later we meet his son who is now wrestling with a rough spot in his own marriage. And then there is Carolyn (Patricia Claskson) , whose strictly sexual relationship with Kepesh has been ongoing for twenty years, following their youthful ideal of sexual freedom unencumbered by emotional ties or responsibilities. Except you can see by Kingsley's behavior that this has begun to bore him. And then later we see that she is extremely jealous when she finds evidence that another woman has been sleeping with him, which he lies about.

For some reason, all of David Kepesh’s decisions put me on edge, and it is very possible this is the director’s intent. Kepesh, whom many young men might aspire to be, is not really a role model at all.

The film flips through time into a fast forward. His relationship with Consuela has extended far beyond his usual trysts and eighteen months into it she continues to invite him to be part of her life, wanting him to meet her family, to be a person. He has already declined at Thanksgiving and Christmas and now there is a large family gathering he finally conceded to go to and he struggles to find an excuse once more. He lies and she sees through and it’s annoying.

The movie has a surprise twist at the end which the screenwriter probably meant as a justification for focusing on Consuela's breasts earlier on, but it doesn't work. The overall effect is one more depressing layer of story.

To their credit, the acting is fine throughout and the film itself is first rate. But there is a humorlessness that makes it maudlin, though again, this may well be intentional because times have changed for David Kepesh and his ilk. The university posts a sexual harassment hotline number right down the hall from his classroom and as important as he is he'd experience serious consequences if he bedded the girls in his class the way he used to. In this regard the film has a measure of integrity that is noteworthy.

The movie is based on the The Dying Animal, a novel by award-winning author Philip Roth who has a reputation for making readers uncomfortable with his candor regarding sexual themes like promiscuity and lust. So it is not surprising that this film makes us uncomfortable as well. Was the sexual revolution a good thing? For a season it was very good for David Kepesh and his friend George O'Hairn. Kingsley does an excellent job of showing that even when the stars align, the thrill can be gone.

Yukon Jack

Picture of the Day

Yukon Jack

(He's Back)

Wordless Wednesday: Where Are We?

Intersections and Connections

Am currently watching Last Call, starring Jeremy Irons and Sissy Spacek, about the last days of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Last Tycoon was Fitzgerald’s last novel, incomplete but still made into a film. The Great Gatsby is probably his most famous story that years later resulted in a film starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow as Jay Gatsby and Daisy, told from the point of view of Nick Carraway played by Sam Waterston. Sam Waterston, as it turns out, played the journalist Sydney Schanberg in The Killing Fields which I just finished watching this past week. The Killing Fields is the tragic story about the Khmer Rouge regime that rose to power in Cambodia during the Viet Name War. My daughter bought the book for me as a gift after having spent three weeks in Cambodia, Thailand and Laos last year.

Another film about the Viet Nam War that I’ve found profoundly moving is The Quiet American, based a novel by Graham Greene. Michael Caine plays the role of a journalist in this compelling film. Caine is also a central character in the hilarious comedy Dirty Rotten Scoundrels along with Steve Martin, author of the autobiography Born Standing Up. Born Standing Up shows how Martin’s early life experiences, including doing magic tricks to sell them at Disneyland and playing banjo, later re-appeared later in his career as an entertainer. Now, Martin is performing his own music as a banjo picker and last summer we had the opportunity to see him live, playing tunes from his CD Rare Bird Alert with the Steep Canyon Ranger here in Duluth; it was fantastic.

Doc Watson is another banjo picker whom I once had a chance to see when I was a student at Ohio University. The occasion was a two-day folk festival that included the likes of Mary Travers and the Youngbloods. Peter, Paul and Mary were instrumental in bringing Bob Dylan’s music into the wider culture by performing and recording songs like "Blowing in the Wind." Dylan’s music permeates our culture today, endlessly covered by other groups and used in soundtracks for dozens of films like Henry Poole Was Here which was carried along by the somber "Not Dark Yet."

Shadows are falling and I’ve been here all day
It’s too hot to sleep, time is running away
Feel like my soul has turned into steel
I’ve still got the scars that the sun didn’t heal
There’s not even room enough to be anywhere
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there

Dylan’s "Shelter From The Storm" was picked up in the Tom Cruise film Jerry Maguire. Yesterday I brought home from the library the film Days of Thunder, which stars Cruise as a race car driver. Not sure which film first put Cruise on the map but Rain Man is one of the most memorable. Mrs. Robinson is probably the film that put Dustin Hoffman on the map. Hoffman once considered his Ratso Rizzo role in Midnight Cowboy as one of his two greatest.

Jon Voigt, the other central character in Midnight Cowboy, opened the film Runaway Train with the statement, “What doesn’t kill me only makes me stronger.” Trains are a central feature of countless Hollywood films including Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train and Murder on the Orient Express based on a mystery by Agatha Christie. Graham Greene, who wrote numerous novels that later became films, also wrote a novel called Orient Express.

Greene’s The Third Man is another of my favorite novels that has been translated into film, Orson Welles being the central character in that phenomenal story. Welles found his way to Hollywood by means of radio theater, capturing the imagination of a nation through his dramatic and terrifying presentation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. Among other things Wells also wrote a story called The Time Machine. Time travel is another recurring theme in Hollywood, one of my personal favorites being Twelve Monkeys starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt. Pitt gives the appearance of enjoying himself as a film star, playing roles as varied as a Major League Baseball manager, a goofy health club worker and a suave high-class criminal. Yes, crime does pay in Filmland where mucho bucks have been taken in through box office receipts from stories about gangsters like Al Capone. Sean Connery, who was shot down by Capone’s henchmen in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables, established his fame as the original Bond, James Bond.

The Bond franchise has featured more than a half dozen actors if you include Barry Nelson and David Niven. In recent year Daniel Craig has proven himself exceedingly worthy of the Bond name and is a favorite of many. Craig was also the hero of Cowboys & Aliens, a surprisingly entertaining sci-fi Western. Cowboys have always been a staple of Hollywood, even before the days of Hopalong Cassidy and the Lone Ranger.

On my first visit to Hollywood two wheels were stolen off my rental car and I spent three hours in the Hollywood police station waiting for a replacement car from the rental company. The car was parked about a half block from Kinko’s right where Shirley Temple’s star is cemented. Shirley Temple was a talented little girl who no doubt raked in boatloads of money for the studios by dancing, singing and being cute. Shirley Temple’s middle name was Jane. The love of Tarzan’s life was also named Jane. My favorite Tarzan actor was Johnny Weismueller. When I was a kid we used to play baseball after school, but we always came home early when Tarzan movies were on.

Those were the days.

Intersecting Collaborations: May As Arts Month

The Pugilist by Andrew Mathhiassen

Collaboration: working together to achieve a goal.

I've not seen any official announcements, nor have I heard of an official name but the month of May has received an official endorsement from both Mayor Ness and Mayor Hagen as a month to celebrate the arts here in the Twin Ports.

The idea was given birth in the course of the past year through the collaborative efforts of the the Twin Ports Arts Align (TPAA), a network of artists across all disciplines that is serving as a catalyst to incubate and stimulate a vibrant, sustainable arts culture in the Twin Ports. Through their synergy they aim to educate, inspire and support the spirit and economy of our region.

After an initial kickoff event in late April the official time frame for Twin Ports Arts Month will be from April 28 thru June 2. The concept, as I understand it, is to have each week of the month set aside as a time to consciously showcase the various arts activities that are already happening here. Each week will feature a different facet of the cultural jewel that is the Twin Ports Arts Scene.

Kicking off the month will be our already-celebrated Homegrown Music Festival, Apr 28-May.Following this will be Visual Arts Week from May 6-12. May 13 through 26 will be comprised of Dance/Theater/Opera/Literary Arts/Classical Music and Dylan Days. The DuSu Film Festival will bring the month to a close May 29-June 2.

Since this is not just a Duluth Arts Month, I asked Erika Mock to share briefly what is happening on the Superior side of the bridge in May.

Phantom of the Gallery

"The calendar is still growing here in Superior," Mock explained. "So far The Red Mug will feature ‘Blood Oranges’ curated by Jeredt Runions. Phantom Gallleries has a thrilling line-up to include: ‘Shift’ large-scale paintings by Sarah Brokke that address the feeling of the fragile balance we are all making; ‘Gridded Geometry’ paintings, collages and floor sculptures by Adam McCauley; new explorations in the beauty and complexity of grids, arge-scale abstract stained glass by Patricia Davey. There will also be Busking Installation by Rachel Nelson. Superior Night is Wednesday May 8, with multiple receptions in the planning. We’re also thrilled that the City of Superior is completely supportive of Twin Ports Arts Month and is joining the City of Duluth in its marketing."

Anyone who's ever seen the explosive force a whale makes when it emerges from the deep knows the great energy that preceded that moment that took your breath away. So it is that there is a great energy stirring below the surface here that will soon emerge in a manner akin to spectacle. This spring during arts month you're invited to be part of something very special, and maybe even historic.

Working together can make it happen.


Featured eBook of the Day: The Breaking Point and Other Stories
Photo credit: Phantom of the Gallery by A. Perfetti