Art and Style, Artists and Makers, Homepage Callout 2 / 31 May 2018

Tracy Glover: A Love Affair With Glass

For Tracy Glover, it was always about glass. As an artistic child growing up in Alexandria, Virginia, she was taken to art classes and museums, and she spent a lot of her time sketching. But her artistic drive found its focus when

Art and Style, Artists and Makers / 29 May 2018

Unconventional Wisdom: Printmaker Laurie Sloan

Laurie Sloan is gracious and talkative as she offers a visitor a fresh cup of coffee in her cozy kitchen. “There’s no rush,” she says. She’s always more than happy to talk art. Her art, and art in general. Also, politics—and tangentially, the importance of a social conscience. She leans into the island, cradling her cup and talking fast, even as she keeps apologizing for it. Small and unassuming, she looks as if she could be a student herself, but Sloan is an accomplished printmaker and, for the past twenty-seven years, a professor of art and art history at the University of Connecticut. Her work is admittedly unconventional, blurring the lines between painting, cut-paper collage, and digital printing, now her medium of choice. Sloan’s semi-abstract prints are visually complex: a ballet of shapes, lines, dots, spots, dabs, and fragmented forms. They reflect her fascination with the natural world and the “uncertainties of life science research.” Sloan explains that, as humans, we strive to categorize and compartmentalize information all the time. And yet, she says, “We are ultimately faced with a reality that we can never completely grasp.” Uncertainty is reflected in her work, as she is continually moving, cropping, and reconfiguring forms “caught up in incomplete or shifting narratives beyond their control.” There’s passion, meaning, and emotion in every iota of ink. Her latest prints are informed by politics, recent events, and the state of the world. “It has been very hard to make work in the current environment,” she admits. “It’s been hard to get out of bed. . . .” Sloan doesn’t make “activist art” that tells you what to think, preferring instead, she says, to “bring people in to contemplate,” and decide for themselves what to do. She studied zoology as an undergraduate student, but always had…

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Art and Style, Artists and Makers / 29 May 2018

Controlled Burn: Artist Kathleen Kucka

  When I tell Kathleen Kucka that someone once described her artistic process as “painting with fire,” she smiles, pauses, and replies, “That’s not far off. I can see what they mean.” Taking a break from a work in progress—a ten-by-eight-foot canvas—in her expansive mid-nineteenth-century barn/studio near the Litchfield County settlement of Falls Village, Kucka explains how she burns a series of semi-solid concentric circles into the canvas. “It’s really pretty basic,” she says as she shows off an electric fire starter with a loop-shaped heating element. “It’s the same thing people use to start their outdoor charcoal grills. I used to use a hotplate, a butane torch, or an iron, but I found this to be much easier—and safer.” She uses water to help control the size and shape of the burn. After scorching an abstract design into canvas or paper, Kucka often adds paint or colored fabrics, giving her work an extra depth and dimension. Her style has been called “naturalistic,” and she confesses many have compared elements in her intricate designs to amoebas or cells or other forms that appear in nature. “I’ve long been interested in the organic as opposed to the geometric or hard-edged compositions,” she says. Kucka’s designs may be abstract, but they are not random. As one critic noted, “They instead create patterns organizing the experience of the piece, like lyrical footsteps of a dance.” Says Kucka, “I’ve always been intrigued by mark making, and I have experimented with using thread to make my mark or pouring paint onto the canvas. But I kept going back to burning.” Part of the allure of burning is that each mark is unique. “And because each of these marks grows in its own organic way, they feel more alive to me.” Kucka’s work has been featured…

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