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Visual Arts
From Pretender Kings to
Temples in Glass: James Aday is a one-man show.
Wine
Inky Fruit: Honest wines of the
Languedoc.
Fasion
Skirting the Issue: Style guy discusses
sarongs.
Performance
Summer Traditions: Late-night and
daylight theater.
From
Pretender Kings to Temples in Glass
James
Aday is a one-man show
BY
LOIS WADSWORTH
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UBU
ROI CARNIVAL, ACRYLIC ON PAPER, BY JAMES ADAY.
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Multi-media artist and painter
James Aday said that he and
his wife, Linda, joked for years that his first solo art exhibit should
be billed "a one-man group show," or, as the Balinese would put it,
"Gado Gado," (all mixed-up). Instead, Aday's one-man show at Provenance,
Aug. 2-31, is called "Paintings in Fused Glass and Other Media by
James Aday." His artistic interest encompasses many styles of painting
— fauvism, abstraction, abstract expressionism, pop art. He
creates works in glass, paintings on paper or canvas and installations
of wood, clay and found objects.
The most consistent influence on the content of Aday's
work is his long involvement in theater and performance arts. The
title of one of the most provocative pieces in the show is Ubu
Roi Carnival, a mask-like, leering face in acrylic on paper in
bold black, white, blue, yellow and red, pictured far right. French
poet and playwright Alfred Jarry named his 1896 play, Ubu Roi.
It's about an "absurd, brutal bourgeois merchant who murders the Polish
king and his family to gain the throne," Aday said. "The surrealists
picked up the idea 20 years later as their anthem, and [Joan] Miró
did a series of about 60 pieces." The name now refers a pretender,
a clown, a buffoon who pretends to greatness.
"I see it all right now," Aday said in a recent interview
at his studio on the McKenzie River. "All over America pretender czars
are running things."
You can also recognize the performance art qualities
of a mixed-media installation/ sculpture titled Ubu Roi in America,
2001. Here the pretender's face is rendered in green glass set
on a painted wood platform, complete with kowtowing figures and a
dollar-sign flag flying from a striped pole. As political art, it
resembles a miniature billboard glorifying the obscene face of a killer.
Two other Rois, each different from the others, are depicted in red
glass and orange glass.
Other political pieces in the show include the acrylic
Sins of the Fathers, a large, red, white and blue flag; and
Baghdad 1991, pastel and acrylic on plywood, features a stylized
figure in red on a black background.
Aday's figurative works in the show include The
Bather, acrylic and pastel on paper. Seated on a stool facing
the ocean and away from the viewer, a nude figure breaks the strong
horizontal lines of beach, surf and sky. The bright red and white
striped towel around the bather adds a dynamic element to the otherwise
stationary, contemplative scene. He Who Gets Slapped is a clearly
theatrical male figure in white face, who wears a pale yellow clown
ruff atop a black-and-white diamond-patterned garment with a stylized
red heart on it. His gaze is intense, but his mouth suggests a sensuality
absent from the eyes.
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UBU
ROI IN AMERICA, MIXED MEDIA INSTALLATION, BY JAMES ADAY.
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Aday speaks about moving from figurative work toward
a more abstract "gesturing" in his work. Both the surrealist painter
Miró and the Russian abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky "exploded"
the figure in their later work, Aday said. Three large acrylic abstract
paintings explore the artist working with just the gesture: Central
Sun, the Acrobat and Far Valley. "I'm trying to
learn paint now," Aday said, after working most of this year
in glass.
For functional glass works, Aday uses mostly bold,
primary colors and cuts or breaks glass into shards, then lets them
"talk" to him. Larger pieces include functional platters with a built-in
slump, an edge that supports them. Others fit stands that allow them
to be placed in windows with light behind them. A large black platter
with turquoise, violet and yellow-green shards embedded in a spare,
abstract pattern is a particularly pleasing composition.
My favorite glass is a Balinese-influenced work, Temple
By the Sea. The background is white, with bold brown stripes on
one side, cobalt blue stripes on the other. At one end a yellow and
orange color block with narrow black lines suggests a temple, while
on the opposite end a red color block holds a black abstract design
that suggests a dancer in motion. Wonderful!
"I'm exploring ways to get that sculptural effect,"
Aday said. "I love accidents. They don't ruin the piece for me. I
just want to know how I did it so I can go there again." And then
he confided, conspiratorially: "Glass wants to be 6 mm thick"
Glass comes in 3 mm sheets, Aday explained. He experimented
with various combinations of sheets at a range of kiln temperatures
for differing lengths of time. "It depends on how long you cook it,"
he said. "If you cook it long enough to spread out to 6 mm, it will
not get any larger. And if you start with a 3 mm sheet, it will be
inclined to shrink to 6 mm." Fused glass pieces in the Gate Series
give a liquid, multi-layered effect. See The Eastern Gate,
pictured on the left.
A unique piece, Isabella, is the face of a
beautiful woman, in-spired by French actress Isabelle Huppert. Three
plates of glass that are not fused together but stacked in a wooden
stand create a 3-D effect. Similar to the pro- cess of color separation
for the printing of a four-color photograph, each glass sheet contains
some colors (or lines) not found on the other sheets. The order of
the three plates can be rearranged to create six patterns that catch
the light in differing ways.
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EASTERN
GATE, FUSED GLASS, BY JAMES ADAY.
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Four glass tiles, abstract masks unlike one another,
and several paper masks on beaver sticks will also be in the show.
(Aday collects sticks from the river that show the chew marks left
by the beaver.) I also like a very small oil on canvas in which a
central egg-shaped object with a burning red center gives off a golden
glow against a rich blue background that's etched with lines and symbols
the artist scratched there.
Larger works include Rodeo, a dramatic abstract
acrylic, bright yellow with black lines suggesting a corral, a horse.
In an oil pastel seascape on paper in the Red Line Series, the red
line defines the horizon, with beach grass in the foreground, blue
water and sky in the background. While the strong horizontal lines
are relaxed, the scratched surface of the grass adds texture and implies
wind. Yellow Bird is another more realistic piece on red with
cobalt blue lines and a central, yellow-bodied bird.
Provenance holds an artist reception from James Aday
on Friday, Aug. 2, from 5:30 - 9: pm. The artist will be present.
Join the crowd and celebrate the fine work of this accomplished painter.
Back to Top
Inky
Fruit
Honest
wines of the Languedoc.
BY LANCE SPARKS
Just outside a local wine retailer's
joint, a guy rolled up on me, quiet-like,
silky dude, maybe early 40s, black hair slicked back, black beard,
a little salt in the pepper, dark eyes that slid off my face. He wore
sharp-creased expensive pants, tassled loafers, white golf shirt.
He fiddled with his fingers, clean, buffed nails, some heavy gold.
"I read your column?" he opened, a statement that sounded like a question.
I nodded. Sometimes people keep talking if I just nod. "But I don't
read it much for the wines," he continued. I nodded, sensed his drift.
"Yeah, I wonder why you don't write about really good wines?"
Uh-huh. The rest ran out in long strings. He's looking for what I
call CEO or trophy wines, won't buy a bottle tagged under a C-note,
has a cellar racked with first-growth Bordeaux and grand cru
Burgundy, monster Barolo and Amarone, boutique California Cabs. A
selected case or two would make a good year's wages for a lot of working
people.
And those are the people I'm working for, not CEOs.
For budget-busters and stock scammers with golden parachutes, the
world wine press already pimps top-shelf trophy vinos, hustles the
market and feeds the ego-driven mystique that "good" wines can only
be reached by swells with deep pockets and off-shore bank accounts.
Not my business. I tried to explain to the guy that I'm trying to
help working people find wines that they can afford but that will
tease their palates a little and put some tingle in their nightly
grub. For these folks, I'm looking for what my friend Ray Walsh, winemaker
at King Estate, calls "honest wines," the kind that real people drink,
and have been drinking for millennia.
My snitches — Mole, Treetop, Mouse, many others
— help me scour the books, shelves and Net to find tasty vins
and vinos that are affordable, often overlooked pleasures in the ancient
tradition. Take, for example, Languedoc (pronounced long-g-dock).
Wine has been around for maybe 8,000 years, originating,
some say, in Persia; others argue for a birthplace in the Caucasus
Mountains between the Caspian and Black seas. As tribal peoples migrated,
moving west and south into the Mediterranean area, they brought with
them their vines and made their wines. Some 500 years or so before
Christ, the Greeks brought wines to the south of what is now France
and was then a region along the southern coast reaching from about
the Rhone River to the Pyrenees Mountains, a critically important
trade route occupied by a particularly hardy people with a unique
language and culture. Languedoc translates as "language of Oc"; interestingly,
"oc" was the equivalent of the French "oui," the English "yes." Kinda
cool, huh, the people of the Language of Yes. When the Roman war machine
marched through (naming the area Septimania), they brought more grapes,
more wine. In time, the region of Languedoc and Rousillon became one
of the world's largest producers of wine.
But most of the wine was not very good, certainly
no competition for the powerful vins of Bordeaux or the delicate
beauties of Burgundy. But they were honest wines, the kind people
consumed in huge volumes as vin ordinaire, everyday, every-night
wines of the table. The area grew wealthy from the business.
Too wealthy, and too independent: For over a thousand
years, though periodically invaded by Visigoths, Vandals, Gascons,
Suebi, Arabs, and assorted others, the people of the Language of Yes
went about their business, giving the world fine textiles, the poetry
and songs of the troubadours, and a load of drinkable wine. But early
in the 13th century, King Phillip of France needed money, and Pope
Innocent III was irked that the people in Languedoc tolerated some
unorthodox thinking; together these CEOs launched an invasion, with
wholesale slaughter of the Albigensian heretics, yielding one of the
most famous quotes from all the religious wars: One of the king's
soldiers reported to a general that there seemed to be some good Christians
among the people they were killing and asked how he might distinguish
them; the general retorted, "Kill them all. God will know His own."
Pithy generalship, oc?
Sound familiar? Anyway, centuries followed, with more
slaughter, et sickening cetera, up to modern times, and the wine flowed
through it all. Lately, the last few decades or so, the winemakers
of Languedoc have begun to raise their quality, producing some very
quaffable glug, but still at reasonable prices, to wit:
Domaine Grand Maillol 2000 Cuvee Mont-Plaisir Vin
de Pays d'Oc ($6.95), a blend of dark grapes like syrah, mourvedre,
cinsault, whatever else; wine is inky, almost black, with deep flavors
like cassis, pepper, earth; slides right down.
Chateau de Belles Eaux 1996 Coteaux du Languedoc
($7.99), deep purple, fleshy but smoothed out with bottle age, with
the spice of syrah, the black currant flavors of mourvedre, easy drinking.
Domaine Deshenrys 1998 Coteaux du Languedoc
($9.99), another dark beauty from the hillsides, juicy, a bit tannic;
at these prices, you could hide a few bottles for a couple of years
while the tannins smooth out. You'll be happy you did.
Quick final notes: Want a pretty white with summer
chow? Try Vouvray; made from chenin blanc grapes: wines are
fresh, bright, lemony, flowery, delish. Look for Barton & Guestier
2000 ($7.99).
DO NOT MISS: Lorane Valley 1999 Pinot Noir
($10), rich, ripe, super bargain.
It's your wine, people. Honest.
Back to Top
Skirting the Issue
Breezy
fashion at the Country Fair.
BY
STYLE GUY
Well, another Country Fair
has past, and the distinctive aroma of
humanity, humidity and herb has dissipated from the woods of Veneta.
A friend, with sartorial taste alternative to my own, suggested I
attend the Fair to appreciate the unique fashion.
Since Style Guy had a sheltered upbringing in Seymour,
Ind. (also birthplace of John Cougar Mellencamp), I thought this might
be a valuable learning experience. Arriving at the Fair in quest for
unique fashion, I first noticed a throng of nearly naked people. Although
initially surprised, Style Guy agrees no suit will fit you better
than your birthday suit, and encourages such freedoms whenever the
mood strikes.
Beyond the naked folk, I noticed several individuals
wearing beautifully printed long skirts, tied around the hips. After
closer investigation, I observed an array of these fair-goers also
sported beards. "Man-skirts?" I thought, "had I missed a fad?" A major
concern for us scribes of fashion. Then it struck me. The man-skirt
in question had to be a sarong — the perfect choice of
attire on a warm Country Fair day.
The sarong is a piece of fabric, generally about 45"x
75" which is folded and tied around the hips. This traditional Indonesian
wrap, made of cotton, rayon, or silks, has been around for more than
2,000 years. The sarong is quite versatile, and can be tied, tucked,
folded, or wrapped into several different styles, although most wear
as a skirt or beach wrap.
"Sarongs are extremely comfortable, and are worn by
not only women, but many men in the warmer climates of the world",
says Joanie Kleban of Greater Goods. Of course, the question "is underwear
optional for men?" crept into my head, but I resisted.
Sarongs are generally produced using the Batik or
"resist dying" process. The design is first pencilled onto the fabric,
then hand-drawn over the pencil lines with a copper pen containing
hot, melted wax. When dyed, the area covered with wax will "resist"
color. The wax is later removed by soaking the fabric in boiling water,
exposing the design.
"They're huge for us," adds Sharon Halsey of Pineapple
Kiss. "We sell 20-30 sarongs per week." Indeed, sarongs are plentiful
around town, including Urmi's Imports, Sweet Potato Pie, and West
Moon. Yet if the mall is more your scene, then check out the tasteful
selections at Banana Republic. Although their sarongs are not of the
Batik process, BR still offers classy cotton cloths for $38.
The smart sarong is casual, colorful, and confident.
While more elegant than shorts, this natty cloth is easy to wear,
easy to pack, and is perfect for a warm summer day at the pool, park,
or Em's game. You may feel like a young Dorothy Lamour in The Road
to Zanzibar after cinching one up. And as displayed at Country
Fair, sarongs look great regardless if you shave your legs or not.
Back
to Top
Summer Traditions
Late-night
and daylight theater.
BY
ARIA SELIGMANN
Late night experiments and
free outdoor Shakespeare have
become Eugene's most popular summer theater
events, and they're both back this year.
At Lord Leebrick, where the late night invention was
born out of the garage's lack of air conditioning (an A/C unit has
been donated to the theater company, which is raising funds to install
it), the new-play experiential trend continues. It's not a 99 Minutes
of Midnight Madness or even a Bride Of version as in years
past, but a new approach to play development that Artistic Director
Corey Pearlstein hopes will improve the quality of works offered.
Before, the theater would ask for submissions of works
in progress and choose the best of the lot to produce. Now, Pearlstein
is working directly with promising playwrights in developing their
works — giving writers, as well as the actors and directors,
a chance to fully collaborate on their pieces. In fact, the current
production of Tres Pyle's So Many Nights Like This was being
revised right up until opening night.
Pearlstein, who directs the one-act play, says it
is "small, cinematic and explores what's beautiful." Tiny gestures,
intimate glances, the deep emotions between characters as they dance
and interact — all are detailed.
The design of the work is also unique. The audience
enters through the side of the theater into a world of deep red; red
lights and red curtains, with old-timey spiritual music playing in
the background. Against this rich backdrop unfolds a comedy about
the relationship between Maggie, a cat (Susan Tate), Matt, a sailor
(Scott Weddell) and Max, a cowboy (Liam Drumm).
Although the play is under construction and being
workshopped for the first time, Pearlstein has loaded his guns and
cast some of his company's heavier hitters in Tate (Uncle Vanya,
Merry Wives of Windsor), Weddell (Accidental Death of An
Anarchist, Cloud 9) and Drumm (As You Like It).
The play continues Friday, Aug. 2 at 9:30 pm and Saturday,
Aug. 3 at 11 pm and lasts about one hour. Tix are $5.
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THE
TEMPEST
IS PERFORMED EVERY WEEKEND IN AUGUST AT AMAZON PARK
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For the fourth summer, Sharon Mann takes
an eclectic group of actors, turns them
into an ensemble, creates a Shakespeare production and offers it to
the community for free. The founder and director of Free Shakespeare
in the Park this year offers the story of The Tempest.
What's new this year is at 5 pm, preceding each performance,
a "story lady" will synopsize the show in a fairy-tale style so that
kids — and some adults — can follow the story during the
performance.
The concept is fairy-tale-like and Renaissancy, according
to Mann. Props are minimal. A deserted island is represented by a
bench. The wrecked ship is imagined into existence by draping cloths
over picnic tables in the back of the audience area.
"I try to stay true to the roots of Shakespeare's
original intention," says Mann. His shows were originally performed
outdoors in daylight and used simple sets. Those shows "relied on
actors and their creative imagination to make the play come to life
through their words," she says.
The cast includes some Shakespeare veterans to raise
the bar for the younger players. Prospero is played by Jerry Ferraccio,
formerly with the Arizona and New Mexico Shakespeare Companies. And
Caliban, who'll be half-lizard, half-human, is played by one Harry
Stuart, that's local Shakespearean David Stuart-Bull with a new stage
name.
Three different musical Ariels represent the elements
of air (Claire Kouba, flute) fire (Thea Garrett, violin) and water
(Kendra McWilliams, dance).
"This is community theater, with a real range, from
inexperienced to professional actors," says Mann. "It's wonderful
to watch everyone relating to each other. They really work as an ensemble."
One of the biggest bonding experiences the actors
go through involves vocal warmups, because the cast must "speak Shakespeare
to the wind," says Mann. Despite noise distractions, the audience
stays tuned to the performance, and even the littlest kids usually
stay riveted, she says.
The show runs two hours and 10 minutes with one intermission.
Performances are every Saturday and Sunday in August at 6 pm on the
lawn near Amazon Community Center. All shows are free. Bring blankets
or low lawn chairs and a picnic if you want. Donations to offset the
costs of production can be made through Lane Arts Council or to Shakespeare
in the Park.
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