March 23, 2016

Table of Contents

Indio Hopes New Store Helps Spur Art Colony Downtown ...... 2 The Human Body Has Always Inspired Art ...... 3 Entrepreneurial Osage Couple Grows Online Art Education Business ...... 5 Friends of Art Offers Amnesty for Missing Artworks ...... 6 The Big Business Behind the Adult Coloring Book Craze ...... 8 These Watercolor Paintings Actually Include Climate Change Data ...... 10 Lopez Artist Shares His Story From Cuban Art Trip ...... 12 Scientists Reveal Cause Of Red Spots Ruining Leonardo Da Vinci's Self‐Portrait ...... 14 Mormon ‘Gospel Art’: Kitsch or Classic? ...... 15 Museum Insider, Moldovans Arrested Over 17 Artworks Stolen in November ...... 18 Staunton Art Supply Shop for Sale ...... 19

2 ______

Indio Hopes New Store Helps Spur Art Colony Downtown The independent "Pa and Pa" art store just opened its 4th location.

INDIO, CA: When James Mancini and Michael Heath looked down Miles Avenue in Old Town Indio, they didn't see empty storefronts. They saw opportunity.

The co‐owners of Jack Farley's Art Supplies, which already had locations in Palm Springs, Yucca Valley and Idyllwild, just opened its fourth store at 82‐769 Miles Ave. in Indio at the end of February.

Selling art supplies at a more specialized and personal level than the big box stores since 2012, Heath and Mancini had long seen artists from Indio drive all the way to Palm Springs for the paints and canvasses they needed.

They had found themselves in the same position before they opened Jack Farley's — traveling hours to find the right supplies they needed or risk paying exorbitant shipping fees. Opening Jack Farley's seemed like the best way to make sure artists like themselves were able to keep their business local.

So when the city of Indio approached them with an offer to open a shop in the downtown area, they knew it would be a chance to make waves.

"The simple answer is there's a huge artist community (in Indio) and it's underserved," Heath said.

Indio is home to many renowned artists such as sculptor Joy Taylor as well as art coalitions like the Coachella Valley Art Center and S.C.R.A.P. Gallery, but the city's goal of creating a true artist colony in Old Town had yet to gain traction for years.

At last week's Indio town hall meeting, Mayor Pro Tem Elaine Holmes told the crowd that Jack Farley's opening signaled the start of something new for downtown.

"My hope and my dream, frankly, is that (downtown) fills in and we have other art stores," she said. "We're not the city of galleries, but we’re where things are made."

Mancini and Heath ultimately picked a storefront on Miles Avenue that needed little renovation and will allow for them to use the back room as an area where art instructors can teach their classes at no cost.

They hope to have an "old town" feeling where people can browse for hours finding things they need and things they hadn't realized they want all in the same place.

"It's a lot of potential," Mancini said.

"It's a risk like anything," Heath added. "But it just takes one person for something to get going."

In an age of online shopping, having a brick‐and‐mortar location with knowledgeable employees and physical product is important to Jack Farley's owners. 3 ______

The new shop contains the same products as all the other locations so artists can stock up no matter where they are, and the special ordering system that employees can utilize for those with more particular tastes is still in place, they said.

"Don't be afraid of the 'Ma and Pa' or the 'Pa and Pa' store," Heath said. "We're extremely competitive. We'll likely beat the price of any box store."

At their official opening, the duo got overwhelming support from city and state officials. Several city council members showed up to celebrate with the owners and Mayor Glenn Miller even got a friendly greeting from the five‐year‐old terrier mix whose spunky personality inspired the store's name.

Sen. Jeff Stone sent a placard of support to the new store and Mancini said their new neighbors have offered nothing but good vibes.

"The energy is terrific," Mancini said. "Being a part of the community and the neighborhood and growing with them — what a privilege."

All Jack Farley's locations are open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday. For more information, visit jackfarleysartsupplies.com or call (760) 424‐8438. The Desert Sun: http://desert.sn/1MjRPtM

The Human Body Has Always Inspired Art Numerous venues to draw in northwest Ohio

TOLEDO, OH: For as long as men and women have roamed the Earth, the human body has been seen as a work of art.

In prehistoric times, the first figure drawers etched scraggy stick figures into cave rock to communicate.

Ancient Greek and Roman drawings and sculptures told mythological tales.

During the Renaissance period in the 1400s, drawings depicting the human form became more realistic, sparked by the discovery of perspective. Artists of the Impressionism and Realism periods moved away from studying only the privileged, and engaged in drawing the common man.

Proportion. Romanticism. Realism. Impressionism. Expressionism. Modernism.

Emotion. Study of form and movement. Communication.

No matter the era or the goal, figure drawing tells a story. And ask an artist about its importance, and he or she will tell you it’s a foundation for everything.

“If you can draw the human figure, you can draw anything,” says artist Mary Dunkin, 28, of Bowling Green, a painter and a nude figure drawing model. 4 ______

In northwest Ohio, both the experienced artist and novice can find numerous venues to draw the human figure, including the Art Supply Depo and the Toledo Museum of Art.

Throughout time, artists have written about improving their craft through study of the human form on paper. Universities also teach figure drawing classes as a fundamental course for not just art majors, but medical students, prospective fashion designers, anyone who wants to understand how the brain interprets physical space and depth perspective, said Roy Schneider, 60, manager of medical and biological illustration and the Virtual Immersive Center at the University of Toledo.

He wants students to first understand the human form as a solid foundation to even everyday life.

“I want them to understand proportion, shape. Why do we have creases, bulges, bumps? We talk about the shapes of the muscles,” Schneider said. “If they understand the skeletal components they can put together the rest of it, and that’s extremely important.

“The body is so complex, just turning it a little and it changes.”

Mike Clink, 31, of Toledo, who teaches figure drawing, sculpture and painting classes at the Toledo Museum of Art and at Northwest Community College in Archbold, tells his students to know the importance of the human form by first getting them to see basic shapes in everyday objects — a bottle, a seashell — and then applying that observation to figure drawing.

“If I put a bottle in front of you, there are geometric shapes — but a body has a lot of organic shapes that come out of that. Most of us have two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, but they don’t look the same,” he said. “You always want to draw what you see, not what you know.

“Everyone has a different perspective, but none of them are invalid.”

20th Century artist Henri Matisse considered his figure drawings to be intimate; playing with contour through gestural lines that suggested form. In the nineteenth‐century, French painter Edgar Degas used nude‐figure drawing to strengthen his portraiture style, sometimes even drawing the nude form first before transforming that knowledge into one of his famous dancers on canvas.

During one of Clink’s first classes as a fine arts student at Bowling Green State University, instructors used nude models to help students learn structure and proportion. But it was really the Renaissance period, he said, when artists discovered perspective through ancient Roman sculptures that they began using human models to draw. Leonardo da Vinci, who lived during that time, was famous for dissecting cadavers and producing anatomical drawings based on what he saw, Clink said.

“Since the beginning of time, it’s what we’ve been doing. We are kind of fascinated with ourselves,” Clink said of drawing the human form.

Dunkin has been striking different poses for local artists for more than four years. At a recent “Drink and Draw” class at Art Supply Depo in downtown Toledo, she stretches her arms to the ceiling. She folds her legs underneath herself to create a foreshortening effect. She turns her head to the right, and her body to the left.

Posing for lengthy periods of time can be taxing; she limbers up before the classes, stretches during breaks, and after. 5 ______

“Human anatomy is a really in‐depth field. Not only are you learning to draw something from life that is three‐ dimensional, you are studying bone structure and muscular structure. And everyone looks a little different, so that’s fascinating,” said Kate Komuniecki, 34, of Toledo, who works at Art Supply Depo. “Figure drawing is something that requires a ton of practice. I think it’s something people are very passionate about because it’s so personal.”

The art supply store started the classes about four years ago as a way to offer a casual forum for local artists — or anyone really — to practice figure drawing. The three‐hour classes are held the first Tuesday of every month, using 10 different models in their rotation.

Rachel Britton, 29, of Toledo, was looking for a class to brush up on figure drawing since she moved here from Columbus about a year ago. A 2009 graduate of the Columbus College of Arts and Design, with an illustration degree, Britton does freelance illustration work online.

She brings multiple media to the class; her pencils, markers — even crayons to catch the quicker gestural drawings — dart across drawing paper.

“When I moved here, it wasn’t available until this, so I come here every month to sharpen my skills,” she said. “You have to know anatomy for every kind of art you do, even if you’re a photographer.”

Not everyone who attends the class is an artist by profession. Scott Sherman, 61 of Findlay, is a semiretired landscape and lawn‐maintenance worker, who attends the classes periodically for the “fun of it. I do this to keep my hands in it. If you can draw a human figure, you can do anything.”

Vincent Van Gogh was sure that taking pencil to paper not only bettered him as an artist, but lifted him out of depression. According to vggallery.com, he created more than 1,000 drawings between 1877 and 1890, telling his brother, Theo, in a September, 1880, letter: “Well, and yet it was in these depths of misery that I felt my energy revive and I said to myself, I shall get over it somehow, I shall set to work again with my pencil, which I had cast aside in my deep dejection, and I shall draw again, and from that moment I have had the feeling that everything has changed for me, and now I am in my stride and my pencil has become slightly more willing and seems to be getting more so by the day.”

Carole Williams, 65, of Toledo, attends the nude figure drawing class at Art Supply Depo almost every month. Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease about six years ago, the retired CAD designer and long‐time drawer and painter, decided the disease wasn’t going to stop her from creating. Her hands shake slightly over the pages as she creates beautiful visual analyses of Dunkin’s frame.

“It’s not going to get me down,” she said. “I love this and I’m going to do this forever in some form.” The Toledo Blade: http://bit.ly/25h5bNN

Entrepreneurial Osage Couple Grows Online Art Education Business

OSAGE, IA: Osage has become a center for online art education due to an entrepreneurial couple.

Jessica (Schwab) and Derek Balsley returned to their hometown of Osage in summer 2012 to begin their home‐based, online company, The Art of Education. 6 ______

The Balsleys moved their company to their Start‐Up Culture office, 518 Main St., in September 2015. The location provides space to accommodate meetings with out‐of‐town team members and expands office space for their growing business.

The online company has grown to have 20,000 Facebook followers and 2,000 graduate students annually taking the 20 courses, which can help art instructors with license renewal and salary advancement. Online students can gain credits toward a master’s degree.

The Art of Education annually produces two live online conferences. During the five‐hour events, over 2,000 art teachers from around the world can interact with instructors during the live feed streamed from the Osage office.

Jessica said teachers in Japan and China are regularly up in the middle of the night to view the conference.

While Jessica was an art teacher and art facilitator in Ankeny, she was not able to locate help for art instructors on the Internet.

The Balsleys’ initial vision was to create an online atmosphere where art teachers could feel at home and exchange ideas around the world.

To fill the void, Jessica began blogging to share with fellow instructors. Soon, her efforts expanded to provide online classes and an online magazine.

Derek stepped up to provide marketing and technological expertise for the business, which became an after‐hours job.

When the couple and their young daughter, Nora, moved back to Osage, Derek assumed his new job as manager of marketing and online sales for Fox River Mills and Jessica continued writing and formulating the online magazine and establishing online art classes. In June 2013, both began fully dedicating their time to The Art of Education.

Today the website provides a daily magazine, art instruction, online conferences and college‐accredited courses for those seeking a master’s degree.

Derek says he’s now passionate about inspiring next‐generation entrepreneurs in Mitchell County.

“Online businesses are a great way for small communities like Osage to fight ‘brain drain’ and convince more of our kids they don’t have to move to a big city to have a successful career,” he said. Globe Gazette: http://bit.ly/1RbXamY

Friends of Art Offers Amnesty for Missing Artworks

PITTSBURGH, PA: In 1916, a group of visual art aficionados, now known as the Friends of Art, formed to purchase original artworks for the Pittsburgh Public Schools. Over time some of those works have disappeared, and the Friends and the schools are offering a no‐questions‐asked amnesty for the return of any artwork or information related to a missing work. 7 ______

The amnesty is not about blame or criminal prosecution, said Jody Guy, visual arts coordinator for the Pittsburgh Public Schools. “There’s nothing we want to convey to people other than thank you, thank you, for returning the work.”

Artworks and/or information will be accepted by Alison Oehler, gallery director, Concept Art Gallery, 1031 S. Braddock Ave., Regent Square. She may also be reached at 412‐242‐9200 or [email protected].

“It’s a neutral space,” Ms. Guy said. “We wanted to encourage people [to return the works]. We don’t want them to feel uncomfortable. We want to make it as easy as possible for them.”

The impetus for the amnesty is a centennial exhibition of Friends of Art works that will be held at the Senator John Heinz History Center opening Sept. 16 and continuing through June 2017.

“This is the first time a comprehensive representation of the collection is being shown to the public,” Ms. Guy said. “We want to represent as much of that legacy as we can.”

It is also a milestone year for the Friends of the Art collection which acquired its final piece earlier this year.

“The collection was begun in 1916. It’s 2016 and we’re getting ready to celebrate at the history center. The collection is in a sense complete. We’re done,” Ms. Guy said.

Ms. Guy has been visual arts coordinator since 2010, but the project to catalog all Friends of Art work began earlier, led by local artists Adrienne Heinrich and Patricia A. Sheahan. Early on it became evident that works were missing.

A big change in the approach to the collection came, Ms. Guy said, when one of the paintings was sold at auction in 2013 yielding about $750,000 to the district. Some of that was earmarked to care for the collection.

The decision to de‐accession (or remove from the collection) the painting – “Interior, Light from the Window” by Henri Le Sidaner – was made because it was atypically by a French artist. Other collection art was created by members of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh and purchased from their annual exhibitions.

After the windfall, Concept Art Gallery was hired to appraise the collection and it was then insured. The gallery has also repaired or replaced frames and is installing protective Plexiglas on appropriate works. Conservators Christine Daulton and Wendy Bennett have restored, respectively, paintings and works on paper.

The collection cataloging project located about 325 artworks, Ms. Guy said, and about an equal number are missing. Represented are works in an array of media, including painting, collage, works on paper, photography, sculpture and clay.

The Friends purchased on average five or six works annually depending on how much funding was available. Work from every decade and from almost all of the 100 years is still present, including 1916. “We’e looking for key pieces for each decade,” Ms. Guy said. That would allow the exhibition to illustrate the evolution of expression by Western Pennsylvania artists over a century, she said. 8 ______

Ms. Guy said she has hope for the reunification of at least most of the collection. Some people may have picked up a work without realizing it belonged to the Friends, as when a school closed and property was being discarded. Recently an administrator found a missing work in a school closet. Family members may discover works when clearing a deceased relative’s house. Labels on the backs, if not the frames, often indicate the work was purchased by the Friends.

When looking, people might ask “Did anyone in this family work in the Pittsburgh Public Schools?’ Ms. Guy said. “That’s one clue.”

Occasionally an artwork turns up in an auction catalog. “We do try to retrieve them, but that’s a really slippery slope. Often they can’t trace ownership.”

Images of many of the missing artworks are at https://www.flickr.com/photos/foa‐missing‐artworks. A list of missing works for which no image is available will be added soon. [The link to the Flicker site works only on Google search engines.]

“It would be just a huge gift to the community to get [the collection] back. We don’t need any names. We’d just like to put it back together,” Ms. Guy said. Pittsburgh Post‐Gazette: http://bit.ly/1U2Y5st

The Big Business Behind the Adult Coloring Book Craze

The amateur artists can be found coloring in airport lounges, doctor's office waiting rooms and while they watch TV shows at home. They are forming coloring meet‐up groups at libraries and coffee shops so they can chit‐chat as they doodle.

Coloring books for adults ‐‐ a genre once considered little more than a novelty ‐‐ are suddenly a big business, a bright spot in the financial results of publishers and retailers alike. Nielsen Bookscan estimates that some 12 million were sold in 2015, a dramatic jump from the 1 million sold the previous year.

Whether it is a short‐lived fad remains to be seen. The new generation of books are typically filled with intricate black‐ and‐white illustrations that are art themselves. While many find the act of coloring to be a calming distraction from hours spent tapping, swiping and staring at screens, some early adopters aren't exactly hooked. Several reviewers on Amazon.com found the need to stay in the lines to be anything but soothing.

"Most of the pages are full of pictures that are so small I can hardly see the details to color them, which causes more stress than if I hadn't tried to color in the first place," wrote one reviewer of a popular coloring book on Amazon.

While adult coloring book sales have exploded in the United States in the past year, experts say the catalyst for the craze was the work of Scottish author Johanna Basford, whose 2013 title, "Secret Garden: An Inky Treasure Hunt and Colouring Book," began burning up bestseller lists with its detailed images of topiaries and flowers, and its "Where's Waldo"‐esque challenge to find hidden items in the elaborate illustrations.

Basford and other authors have attracted legions of enthusiasts who are looking to de‐stress, who see scrawling away at an image of a tree or an animal as a low‐key, low‐stakes way to channel imagination or to keep their hands busy while they let their minds wander. 9 ______

"It's nostalgic, and it's a bit old school," said Mary Amicucci, chief merchandising officer at Barnes & Noble. "It reminds people of their childhood."

Indeed, Elizabeth Himeles, 26, said she has taken up coloring as a way to tap into some of the creativity she used when she attended arts camp as a kid.

"I don't have a lot of time in life to do big craft projects, and sometimes I just want to unwind and not do something super active," Himeles said.

Himeles said it's not unusual for her to spend up to two hours a week coloring, and sometimes up to four hours in a week when she gets together with a coloring group she organized in the Boston area.

"A lot of the people who come to my meet‐ups are really interested in the idea of unplugging and being more mindful," Himeles said.

It's not clear whether the rise of adult coloring books has come at the expense of sales in other categories, but the impact of the craze can be seen in various corners of the retail industry: Barnes & Noble has said that strong demand for adult coloring books and artist supplies provided a tail wind to the chain's total sales in the last three quarters. Wal‐ Mart, meanwhile, moved in November to add a dedicated four‐foot section for adult coloring books in 2,000 of its stores. And Target started carrying adult coloring books in 1,300 stores in August and within months rolled them out to the rest of the chain. Initially, the big‐box retailer was carrying only four titles in stores; this month, it'll be up to 40.

If you look at Amazon's bestselling books list, which updates hourly, you're nearly certain to see several adult coloring book titles. (Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon's founder and chief executive, owns The Washington Post.)

"I've been in this business for 20 years, and I've never seen anything like this," said Kathleen Schmidt, vice president at Running Press, which hurried to publish four adult coloring books last year when it saw the category gathering momentum.

The popularity of adult coloring books has pushed retailers to move quickly to cater to fans.

Crafting retailer Michaels has expanded its assortment to more than 150 coloring books and promises more this year. Idalia Farrajota, Michaels's senior vice president of merchandising, said the store has developed exclusive titles to try to keep a leg up on competitors and has sought to expand beyond flora‐and‐fauna‐heavy designs by adding Harry Potter and Star Wars adult coloring books to its lineup.

"It's been hard to keep up with demand," Farrajota said.

That the trend came on relatively fast has underscored how quickly and nimbly retailers and others have to move if they want to ride the wave of a trend in the digital era.

Take, for example, the story of Blue Star Coloring, a nascent publishing start‐up. Gabe Coeli, its chief creative officer, said the team published its first adult coloring book last March, initially believing it would be something of a placeholder business before it pursued other publishing ventures. That month, it sold just seven copies on Amazon of its first creation, titled "Stress Relieving Patterns." By April, it had sold 15,000 copies, and by May, the book had rocketed to the top of Amazon's best‐selling book list.

In 2015, the company sold more than 1 million books, including "Stress Relieving Patterns" and subsequent titles the team hustled to assemble when it realized it had a hit on its hands. 10 ______

"We didn't realize what we were on the cusp of. We didn't realize there was this big movement," Coeli said.

Janine Klein of Washington said she's long dabbled in coloring as a way to blow off steam since, as a nanny, she often has coloring books in arm's reach. But she's been grateful for the new wave of grown‐up titles, including one she's bought for herself and several friends called "Unicorns are Jerks."

"It helps to not have to color princesses or Disney characters," Klein said.

But others are perplexed by grown‐ups taking cues from the kindergarten crowd. Robrt Pela, a writer who also curates a contemporary art gallery in Phoenix, Ariz., is among that group.

"I'm a snob. But I'm also an adult, one who remembers when adults relaxed with bourbon, not Crayolas and an outline of 'My Little Pony,' " he wrote in a February article in the Phoenix New Times.

At Barnes & Noble, Wal‐Mart and Michaels, executives said the growing interest in adult coloring books has also prompted a surge in sales of a host of related art supplies. Indeed, Nielsen reports that total sales of colored pencils shot up 26.3 percent in 2015, a sharp increase compared to the previous three years, when growth ranged from 1.3 to 7.2 percent.

That pattern is likely why Crayola, the Hallmark Cards‐owned giant of kids' art supplies, moved late last year to launch "Color Escapes," a line of chicly packaged coloring books and colored pencils that it is aimed squarely at adults.

It seems likely that the retailing and publishing industries will keep looking for ways to capitalize on the coloring craze in 2016. Amicucci said she believes this marks the beginning of a broader trend toward personal expression, and she said Barnes & Noble will be investing in similar categories such as painting, calligraphy and illustration.

Michaels, meanwhile, moved during the holiday season to put out coloring‐book‐style note cards that Farrajota said you can "personalize and send it to your bestie and wish her a happy birthday. Coloring is not just about the book anymore."

And Farrajota would know: In her office, she has framed and wall‐mounted her own coloring‐book illustration of a horse. Napa Valley Register: http://bit.ly/1Seax5a

These Watercolor Paintings Actually Include Climate Change Data Jill Pelto, an artist and scientist, incorporates graphs of rising sea levels and soaring temperatures in her artwork

Climate change can be seen when a mountainside’s trees turn brown thanks to the burrowing of bark beetles, an insect population that explodes during drought, or when an iconic species is pushed closer to extinction. But some of its effects are obvious only to those who look for them. From decades’ worth of data, scientists build narratives about how the oceans are acidifying, the average temperatures are warming and the precipitation is becoming more extreme.

Jill Pelto, a recent graduate from the University of Maine, has made it her mission to communicate these changes. The 22‐ year‐old artist paints vivid watercolors of mountains, glaciers, waves and animals, that on closer inspection, reveal jagged line graphs more commonly seen in the pages of a scientific journal than on a gallery’s walls. Pelto incorporates 11 ______real scientific data into her art. In one piece, the silver bodies of Coho salmon dance over blue, rippled water filling a space under a falling graph line. The line connects data points that document the decline of snow and glacier melt that feed the rivers the fish inhabit. Another combines data that describe the rising of sea levels, the climbing demand for fossil fuels, the decline of glaciers and the soaring average temperatures. All of those line graphs lay one over another to create a landscape telling the story of climate change.

Mauri Pelto, Jill’s father, is a glaciologist and professor at Nichols College in Dudley, Massachusetts. When she was 16, Jill joined him in the mountains of Washington for a field season, measuring the depths of crevasses in the glaciers they tracked, recording the extent of snow and ice, and looking for other changes. The experience was life changing. She hiked up the North Cascades for six more field seasons and, in that time, witnessed the slow deaths of the mountains’ glaciers. Around the world, once intimidating bodies of ice and snow are ceasing their centuries‐old movement and becoming static remnants of their former selves, pocked with melt‐water pools and riddled with caves in the summer.

Now that she has earned her undergraduate degree in studio art and earth science, Pelto has plans to pursue a Master’s degree in climate science at the University of Maine next fall.

“I think the science evolved more from my love of the outdoors and caring about the environment, but the art was always supposed to be a part of my life,” she says. “I’ve always considered myself an artist first.”

I spoke with Pelto about her inspiration, her process and her desire to communicate the threats of climate change in a way that emotionally resonates with people.

Can you describe one of the most memorable experiences you had out in the field?

Everything about this past field season [late summer 2015] was striking. It was nothing like any of the others in many ways, due to climate change, due to the drought out West. Everything was different. There was virtually no snow left on the glacier, which was really odd to see. It was just all ice, which melts a lot faster. All the little ponds up there were really small, the reservoirs were depleted, but there were also more forming under the glaciers. I saw a huge lake forming there for the first time and that was really bizarre. It's weird, and sad.

Do you carry your art materials with you to the glaciers?

I take small stuff. I usually take a little watercolor sketchbook, a set of watercolors, some pencils. Fieldwork is usually in the morning, so in the late afternoon or early evening, I'll have time to do a watercolor and capture the different aspects of the landscape. During the summer, the sun doesn't set until pretty late.

When did you start including the graphs of climate data in your work?

I started doing that after this last trip to Washington, this past September. I've been struggling for a long time how to have an environmental message in my artwork. I've done sketches, but those are more just landscapes and memories for me. So they don't really tell a story.

I realized that people who are interested in science pay attention to graphs. I think they are a really good visual, but other people don't really pay attention to them. That was my first thought when I looked at a graph that my dad made of the decline in glaciers—it is a really good visual of how rapidly the volume of these glaciers has declined. I saw how I could use that as a profile of a glacier, incorporating a graph but giving an artistic quality to it. People can learn from the image because you are seeing actual information, but hopefully they are also emotionally affected by it.

Where do you find the data? 12 ______

Sometimes I'll be reading something and I'll see a graph that I think will be good for a piece. Often, I'll have a particular topic and I'll want to create something about it, so I'll look for visuals. I'll research different scientific papers, but also different sites like NOAA or NASA, or sites that have climate news—reliable sites where I can find different graphs and decide which one I think represents and best communicates what's going on.

Do you have a favorite piece?

I like the piece on glacier mass balance, which was one of the three in the series I created after this most recent trip to Washington. It's my favorite just because I feel a very personal connection to those glaciers after working on them seven years.

Why is it important to you to use art to help communicate science?

I think that art is something that people universally enjoy and feel an emotional response to. People across so many disciplines and backgrounds look at and appreciate it, and so in that sense art is a good universal language. My target audience is in many ways people who aren't going to be informed about important topics, especially scientific ones.

What do you hope viewers take away from your work?

I hope to have both intellectual and emotional content in my artwork. I also hope to inspire people to make a difference about these topics. I haven't quite figured out how to do that yet. People have been responding to [these pieces], but I think they are more likely people who already think these topics are important. So I want to find some way to challenge people to do something with my art and make it more of an activist endeavor.

What’s next?

I have a lot of plans. Right now, I have a piece in progress about caribou populations. Another thing I'm trying to do is collaborate with other scientists. They can tell me what they are working on, what the data is and what it might mean for the future. Smithsonian: http://bit.ly/1WE76G3

Lopez Artist Shares His Story From Cuban Art Trip

LOPEZ, WA: Lopez Island resident Steve Hill was one of 79 U.S. artists who went to Havana, Cuba as part of a special invitational plein air (on‐site) painting tour organized by B. Eric Rhoads, publisher of Plein Air Magazine, Feb. 6‐13. It was the largest group of artists to ever visit Cuba and with the specific purpose to paint from live subjects for more than a week. There were 25 spouses, art collectors and patrons along, as well.

"We all felt a sense of immediacy to record our impressions of a country that has been in a time warp for over a half century, before everything changes with the new open door policy now embraced by Cuba and the U.S.," Hill said.

President Barack Obama, Raul Castro and Pope Francis have begun to establish more normalized relations and started talks to lift embargoes that have been in place since 1962. While there is still a long way to go, both countries have re‐ opened embassies (August 2015 – Havana and Washington D.C.) and U.S. citizens are now allowed to travel in Cuba, under government controlled 13 ______classifications that include limited tourism and some educational/religious venues.

Here is Hill's take on the trip:

We all stayed at one hotel about a 20 minute bus ride from the old city of Havana, where we painted four of the seven days during the organized tour. My wife, Judy and I stayed an extra three days just to paint and take hundreds of painting reference photos in the Vedado neighborhood and around the old city.

We rented a very nice apt, right across the street from the U.S. Embassy and just 500 feet from the famed Malecon Sea Wall that protects 4½ miles of the city from the ocean.

I was able to get one painting done along the Malecon at daybreak and during low tide, which is pictured here. At high tide those same waves hit the wall with enough force to send 40 foot waves over the top. Auto traffic is re‐routed two blocks into the city when that happens.

Havana has a population of two million people, nearly 20 percent of the 11 million total people in Cuba. We explored as many nooks and crannies as possible there and never once encountered any bad city vibes. People went out of their way to be friendly and help us.

Our tour included a visit to Cojimar, the fishing village immortalized by famed author, Ernest Hemmingway (1898‐1961), whose home there has become a museum and where his boat "Pilar" is also preserved under cover.

In fact, wherever we went in the Havana area, we ran into busts and sculptures of Hemmingway, little museums at hotels where he stayed, roped‐off corners of bars and restaurants he frequented.

My first day painting in Havana was just across the street from "La Floridita" one of his favorites, although that bar does not appear in my painting, as I was far more interested in the warm light bouncing off the beautiful old buildings just down the street and "old cars" that have made Cuba famous.

Our Cuban guide explained that it's forbidden for Cubans to sell those old cars, as the government has declared them a national treasure. As visiting artists, we were absolutely thrilled to see tens of thousands of these relics from the 1930s‐ 1950s still driving the streets, wave after wave, like the clock had stopped a half‐century ago!

Newer cars are totally the exception and the whole "car thing" speaks to the resiliency of the Cuban people to survive with little or no resources. They are expert mechanics and have learned to re‐manufacture critical car parts, just to keep them running.

While Cubans still struggle with their economy (average wage is $90 per month and doesn't matter if you are a doctor or street sweeper) "the times they are a changin'," to paraphrase Bob Dylan. Street artists can and do make well over $1000‐$2000 per month, a total reversal of the professional strata that exist among "visual artists verses doctors or lawyers" in the U.S.

But art materials and supplies are so scarce in Cuba that they are virtually unattainable. Most of their paint brushes looked like hardware store rejects after a bad year in the Mojave Desert.

Our group donated several thousand dollars' worth of oil paints, brushes and pastel sticks to artists we found working around Havana. They have had to use gasoline as paint thinner and brush cleaner for 50 years – not good in any way, for either the artist or the painting. 14 ______

Nonetheless, the quality level of their art is nothing short of outstanding and we all took note that they could execute some of the best "plein air" paintings we had ever seen. So much for superior art supplies!

That whole coping ethic flows throughout their culture like an electric undercurrent, from music (it's everywhere!) to poetry, dance and a very high literacy/education standard. Our guide, a young woman in her late 20s was going for her PhD in writing and had a masters in economics. But like so many Cubans, she makes her extra income through tourism (the large tips we left for her) in order to have a better standard of living at present.

"Money can't buy happiness" could easily be the mantra for modern Cuba, as they have learned to make do, just with what they have and embrace life to the fullest.

We had several serenades from incredible musicians on the streets wherever we painted, as if to say "Hey we're really glad you're here painting!" They would also engage us in conversations and clearly, were very glad we were there.

We must have heard "Guantanamera" the best known Cuban and patriotic song one hundred times– and just like the dozens of world famous musicians who have recorded the same, each rendition was given hauntingly and soulfully, as if it were the first time they had ever sung that piece. Chills, it brought chills down my spine.

One memorable day was spent at an old sugar plantation about an hour outside of Havana "Taoro" where I was able to get a small painting done and made a larger from my studio this week. The mode of transportation in the farmlands is mainly horse and wagon or buggy, rather like the Amish Country in Pennsylvania, but with very worn and tread bare vehicles; think lots of bailing wire. They do know how to make something out of nothing in Cuba!

As space does not allow a lot of paintings, I have photographed six of the eleven pieces I did while in Cuba, as a composite collage. Some of us are exhibiting our work back east (Annapolis, Md. and Florida) for two special invitational exhibits at major galleries for this Cuba trip, coming in May. These smaller paintings are all part of the "plein air process" and will allow me the best reference I can have in my Lopez studio, to the special Cuba light qualities and imagery, to create larger versions. The Islands’ Weekly: http://bit.ly/1WE7jt4

Scientists Reveal Cause Of Red Spots Ruining Leonardo Da Vinci's Self‐Portrait And it really, really wasn't easy to find out.

Back in 2012, a team of experts determined that Leonardo da Vinci's only universally recognized self‐portrait was damaged beyond repair, breaking the nerdy little hearts of art history buffs around the world.

The delicate red chalk drawing, created in 1512, was accidentally exposed to sunlight while being framed for an exhibition in 1929, which is believed to have led to what scientists call "foxing" ‐‐ simply, unwanted marks manifested on the work's surface.

For years, however, the details of those teeming marks went unknown. Were they the result of oxidized pigment or a developing fungus? Such specifics are not only helpful but crucial for scientists working to prevent the burgeoning mass of little reddish brown spots from completely consuming poor Leonardo's face. 15 ______

Well, thanks to a research team led by Guadalupe Pinar at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, we now know that the spots resulted from several species of fungus, as published in Environmental Microbiology Reports. (Yes, these findings are the result of the new "non‐ destructive and non‐invasive diagnostic method" we've been waiting for.)

First, scientists extracted DNA from the drawing, then magnified the fungal internal transcribed spacer regions, cloned the recovered fragments and compared the results with the microbial community. While the "non‐ culturability of the microorganisms inhabiting the portrait" prevented researchers from identifying the exact fungus responsible, they could tell the fungal community was dominated by fungus of the Ascomycota phylum, and particularly a previously uncharacterized Acremonium species.

As described in Discover Magazine: "Their electron microscopy efforts revealed a zoo of fungal forms: smooth spheres wrapped in filaments, spiky cells congregating on a mysterious particle, and flattened disks with cross‐ hatched scars."

How strange to think that all of these diverse, alien fungal forms appear, to the naked eye, like annoying brown spots. The results suggest that the foxing began when dust‐borne iron particles landed on the paper, disrupting its structure. This then allowed fungal organisms to burrow into the paper, surviving by shutting down their metabolism, and occasionally spewing out oxalic acid which further damaged the paper.

The recent discovery bodes well for conservators hoping to devise a restoration strategy to save Leonardo from his spotty fate. Although there's still a ways to go in determining the proper plan for restoration, understanding precisely how the spots formed will prevent scientists from further damaging the work.

Thank you Guadalupe Pinar, Hakim Tafer, Katja Sterflinger, and Flavia Pinzari for determining the chemical makeup of those pesky red spots in Leonardo da Vinci's beard. Now it's just a matter of determining the proper technology to remove them. The Huffington Post: http://huff.to/1ReGnhS

Mormon ‘Gospel Art’: Kitsch or Classic?

SALT LAKE CITY, UT: Enter the North Visitors’ Center in Temple Square here, home of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‐day Saints, and you can’t miss them: 10 life‐size oil paintings that march along a curving wall.

The paintings illustrate the life of Jesus. Here is John baptizing Jesus, there is Jesus gathering disciples from simple fishermen. Another shows Jesus entering Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, and in another he is crucified between two thieves.

In all of the paintings there is little room for interpretation about who is being depicted: Jesus glows with an otherworldly light. 16 ______

But if the message is hard to miss, so is something about the medium. Everyone is spit‐spot clean and all of the paintings seem set more in the lush, green valleys near the Great Salt Lake than on the dry, brown shores of Galilee.

There are even American wildflowers — lilies of the valley, bluebells and buttercups — at the feet of Jesus as he preaches.

But to focus on the quality of the art — commissioned by the church in the 1960s from artist Harry Anderson — is to miss the point. This is what Mormons call “gospel art,” and they revere it less for its artistic merits and more for its religious purpose — to convey the message and doctrine of Mormonism, which binds its 15 million members worldwide.

The North Visitors’ Center is full of works that tell the story of the Old and New Testaments with a Cecile B. DeMille feel. The Church History Museum across the street has its share, too — much of it depicting scenes from the life of Joseph Smith, the New York farmer who founded the church in 1830 after an angel handed him the Book of Mormon on plates of gold. The church’s nearby Conference Center houses a collection of paintings of scenes from the Book of Mormon — battles, baptisms and strapping warriors on an epic scale.

These images and many like them have graced church publications for generations. Reproductions, available from the church’s online media library and from the online retailer LDSArt.com, hang in Mormon homes and church buildings around the world. They are something almost every Mormon sees, every day, everywhere — a kind of backdrop of the faith.

Very little, if any of it, would find a home in a non‐Mormon museum, except perhaps for its historical value.

“You don’t have to mince words for me,” said Ashlee Whitaker, curator of religious art at Brigham Young University Museum of Art, when asked about the North Visitors’ Center art. “Sometimes the quality is not the finish I would hope for.”

But, she continued, the art on display here is intended first to teach and then to inspire.

“They give us an opportunity to understand the divinity of Jesus better, to teach ourselves more about Jesus Christ,” she continued. “That is a priority for us, to seek these teaching moments that give us an opportunity to grow spiritually. These images are a springboard for that in a very real way.”

David Morgan, a professor of religion and art at Duke University who has written about Anderson’s works, is blunt: “Yes, it is kitsch, but so what? They are not about artistic expression, but about community, about prayer, about devotional feeling. Theses images are the intimate symbols of the community of feeling to which (Mormons) belong.”

This art, Morgan said, “is the mental furniture” of the Mormon faith.

The development of ‘Mormon art’

“Mormon art” exists in a way other scriptural representations do not. And while all religions use art to further their tenets — picture a Catholic Church altarpiece from the medieval period — no Protestant denomination has quite the same relationship to this kind of illustrative art as the LDS church.

“We are a very visual people and we want paintings of these religious ideas that matter to us,” said Anthony Sweat, a professor of church history and doctrine at Brigham Young University and a trained artist. “Art is another teaching tool for us.” 17 ______

The church’s interest in art goes back to 1847. Artists were among those who made the church’s epic trip from Nauvoo, Ill., to the Great Salt Lake Basin. They drew landscapes of the “new Zion,” as Mormons dubbed Utah, that were used to proselytize for the new faith.

Their “romantic landscapes were linked to their religious faith,” church scholar Richard G. Oman wrote. “They saw the face of the Lord in nature and Zion in the purity of the western wilderness.”

By the 1890s, the church was sending “art missionaries” to Paris to train. With the outbreak of World War I, this crop of Mormon artists brought its talent to New York.

In the 1950s, Arnold Friberg, a Mormon artist who taught at the University of Utah, was commissioned to create a series of paintings from the Book of Mormon. They became so popular outside the faith that DeMille put Friberg to work on scenery for his film “The Ten Commandments.” Friberg won an Oscar, which cemented his idealized, mid‐20th‐century style within the church. Visually, they have a lot in common with the children’s book illustrations of N.C. Wyeth and the pre‐Raphaelite works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Sweat often uses Friberg’s art to conduct an experiment with his students. Close your eyes, he asks, and picture the story of King Noah and Abinadi — a story from the Book of Mormon. How many picture Noah as an overweight man on a throne, he asks, and nearly all hands shoot up. How many see Abinadi as a shirtless, elderly man with an excellent physique? Again, nearly all hands rise. And what kind of pet does King Noah have? The class shouts as one: “Leopards.”

The students have all described one of Friberg’s most famous and most reproduced paintings, “Abinadi Before King Noah.” It has, Sweat said, formed their understanding of the story.

“It’s an image with such influence and widespread distribution that it has shaped these artistic interpretations into almost certain facts for an entire generation of church members,” Sweat writes of the experiment.

Friberg’s popularity set the stage for Anderson, a Seventh‐day Adventist who created New Testament scenes for a church display at the World Fair of 1964‐65. Millions of people — Mormons and non‐Mormons — saw them at the fair. They have since hung in the North Visitors’ Center, which receives upward of 5 million visitors a year.

But are the works of Friberg, Anderson and a dozen other LDS artists whose works dramatize the faith any good? Do they deserve their reverence and place in the hearts and minds of Mormons around the world?

The ‘Mormon gaze’

Laura Allred Hurtado says they do.

As curator of the Church History Museum, Hurtado studies all kinds of Mormon art, which she describes as a thriving, diverse genre of which gospel art is only a small part. A good sample can be seen in the church’s triennial art contest, which attracted 944 entries from artists in 40 countries last year, and is displayed on the third floor of the museum.

To compare a work by Anderson or Friberg — or any other gospel artist — to a Michelangelo or a Rembrandt is a mistake, Hurtado said. The expectations we bring to them are different.

“It doesn’t have the same aesthetic burden as a Michelangelo because we come to it with a believing gaze, with a Mormon gaze,” she said. “We don’t interrogate them in the same way.”

That Mormon gaze, she said, “becomes part and parcel of the experience” of the art it beholds. 18 ______

Morgan, the Duke professor, studied the effects of that gaze in “The Forge of Vision: A Visual History of Modern Christianity.” Mormons are not the only religious group to bring a specific gaze to religious art, he said, but they bring one that is different from other Protestant groups that have embraced new forms of art and media.

“The images they had 50 years ago still carry a charge of authenticity for them that for many other groups didn’t survive,” he said. “It is their anchor in time they very deliberately do not want to let go of because it maintains their sense of identity.”

That identity includes the belief that Jesus visited America in resurrected form and that the Book of Mormon is “another testimony of Jesus.” Having a common set of images reinforces what Mormons see as their specialness.

To sit in front of the Anderson paintings is to watch that theory at work.

“Oh, look, it’s that picture,” a man, apparently in his 50s, said as he and his female companion approached Anderson’s “Sermon on the Mount” in the North Visitors’ Center recently. Both wore black name tags identifying them as LDS missionaries.

The man then explained the painting as if he were reading a graphic novel or comic book and filling in the missing speech bubbles. His female companion murmured along with him, then moved on to the next picture in the story.

At the Church History Museum, similar scenes were played out between families. Jason and Mysha Denson brought their three daughters to see the newly remodeled museum from their home in Springville, Utah.

Walking before a Gary Earnest Smith rendering of three glowing angels appearing inside the church’s Kirtland, Ohio, temple, Mysha tells the children a story all Mormon children learn — how the women there ground up their china to put it in the temple walls so they would sparkle.

“That’s sad,” said 7‐year‐old Ella.

“It’s not sad,” her mother said. “They were happy to give whatever they had for the church.”

Denson said she and her husband brought the girls to the museum specifically to see the art — much of which she and Jason remembered from similar visits with their parents and church groups. Asked if the quality of the art was important, she dismissed the question.

“It is so hard for kids to grasp these abstract concepts” like sacrifice and the uniqueness of the church’s history, she said. “But here, you can show them a picture and that makes it more real.” Religious News Service: http://bit.ly/1Rw3xDF

Museum Insider, Moldovans Arrested Over 17 Artworks Stolen in November

ROME, ITALY: Italian authorities said Wednesday they have pinned last year's theft of Rubens and Tintoretto masterpieces in Verona on a Moldovan gang they believe was helped by a museum security guard.

But despite ordering 12 arrests in Moldova and Italy they have yet to recover any of the 17 artworks that disappeared in November 19 ______from the northern city's Castelvecchio museum, which values the missing canvases at 15 million euros ($16 million).

"We are on the right track but we have not yet been able to put our hands on the missing paintings," Verona prosecutor Mario Giulio Schinaia was quoted as saying by local media.

At the time of the robbery, police said it appeared the works had been stolen 'to order' for a private collector, given the difficulty anyone would have in selling on works by such well‐known artists.

Three masked men entered the 14th century building at the evening change of guard, slipping in after the museum had been emptied but before its state‐of‐the‐art security system had been put into overnight mode.

A security guard and another member of staff were tied up before the pictures were taken.

The guard is one of the suspects arrested, along with his brother and the brother's Moldovan girlfriend, who is suspected of having alerted the robbers to the potential to pull off the audacious heist.

The thieves' haul included "Portrait of a Lady" by Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens and "Male Portrait" by Venetian artist Tintoretto, as well as works by Pisanello, Jacopo Bellini, Giovanni Francesco Caroto and Hans de Jode.

Another acclaimed work, "The Conversion of Saul", by Italian Renaissance painter Guilio Licinio, was damaged during the robbery but has since been successfully restored. artdaily.org: http://bit.ly/1pwijhc

Staunton Art Supply Shop for Sale

STAUNTON, VA: Leslie Banta, owner of Staunton Art Supply, is hoping to turn her store over to another passionate artist.

Banta has lived in Staunton for 10 years, and owned the shop for nine.

She said throughout the years she has had many repeat customers because of her quality supplies and knowledge of what they are doing.

She told WHSV she hopes the next owner can share their love for art with the community as much as she did.

"I'd like to see the next person who owns the store be able to provide quality supplies to our community and understand what it takes to make that happen," said Banta.

As for the future, Banta hopes to spend more time with her husband and children. She also hopes to sell the store soon and officially move out by the summer. WSHV: http://bit.ly/1LCrZB3