Open Studio Hartford, the annual art-and-artists extravaganza, at which 350 local creative talents will show and sell their creations, is Nov. 12 and 13 in 24 locations around the city.
Artists will show work in painting, sculpture, ceramics, jewelry, metalwork, carving, glass work and a variety of other media. They will gather at the Colt Building, the Arbor Arts Center, Union Station, ArtSpace, Connecticut Historical Society and other arts hubs to meet with the public, talk about what they do and offer an alternative to mall and online Christmas shopping.
The Open Studio experience, however, begins on Saturday, Nov. 5, with an event from 2 to 4 p.m. in the art gallery on the ground floor at ArtSpace Hartford, 555 Asylum Ave. “Ekphrasis: Poetry, Music & Dance Inspired by Visual Art” combines poetry and art with music, vocals and dance. Poets, musicians and dancers will perform with the artwork displayed. Admission to Ekphrasis is free but donations will be accepted. Park across the street at Union Station.
For the Open Studio weekend, artists from Hartford will welcome guests in their studios from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and artists from the city and many surrounding towns will set up stands in the big gathering places. Ceramicist Virginia Seeley of Hartford will pitch her tent in Union Station. Encaustic painter Gay Schempp of Winsted will set up shop in the Colt building. Collagist Michael Toti of Avon also will be in Union Station.
Virginia Seeley
Seeley is originally from New Jersey. She has lived there, Indiana, Ellington and West Hartford. But her heart, and her art, belong to the city of Hartford.
“I am so thrilled with the architecture in Hartford,” Seeley says. “I like it, I want to support it, I want to support Hartford.”
Seeley, who has a ceramics studio in the basement of her elegant Charter Oak Place home, creates small reproductions of the most famous constructions in Hartford: the Colt building, Travelers tower, the Soldiers and Sailors Arch, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Science Center, the State Capitol, the Bushnell Park Carousel and lesser-known buildings she is fond of, such as the St. Panteleimon Russian Orthodox Church. Seeley turns the city’s skyline into wall hangings, teapots, mugs, vases, salt and pepper shakers, Christmas ornaments and a marvelous chess set. Travelers is the king. The Colt Dome is the queen.
The Charter Oak home is Seeley’s second in the city. She first moved here many years ago.
“Moving to Hartford was the best thing I’ve ever done,’ she says. “There are lot of people, lots of camaraderie, lots of socializing.” But in the neighborhood she was in, the crime got bad. She moved to West Hartford. A while later, she was lured back to the city by Lynn Ferrari, a Hartford history buff who is now Seeley’s wife.
Seeley has some fun with the city’s image with her Phoenix Building. She paints each one with a different color: blue, aqua, turquoise, pale green. “Nobody can agree on what color they see it as,” she says.
She hopes to someday make replicas of The Comet, Union Station, Charter Oak Cultural Center, City Hall.
Seeley is excited about the city’s future and hopes the opening of the UConn campus brings renewed vigor.
“It’s a very exciting place to live,” she says. “My concern is that it stays as grass-roots as it is. We like the diversity, the feel that the city has now. It’s going to be interesting to see where it ends up.”
Gay Schempp
Gay Schempp’s heart is with the great animal herds of Africa. “I read about how climate change was affecting the migratory patterns of the great herds, and about how poaching is affecting them,” Schempp said. However, she never has had the opportunity to see them in person. So she recreates them in her studio in the Whiting Mills complex. Schempp constructs vistas of elephants, antelope, birds and other animals in flight, sometimes alone, sometimes in multitudes.
Schempp uses encaustic — paint made of tinted, melted beeswax — as the base of her creations, evoking colors of the desert. She scratches a comb or another jagged tool across the surface and fills the grooves with black wax to suggest dynamic movement. The wax surface won’t accept paint, so Schempp inlays animal figures by photocopying small silhouettes of animals, placing the photocopies upside down on the wax and burnishing them until the toner in the copy causes the image to transfer. Sometimes she adds a bit of script in imaginary languages. The result is an artwork that looks both old and new, in the style of cave paintings, with indecipherable text.
“I want them to look like an ancient tablet would look like,” she says.
Schempp will show about 30 pieces from her “Refugee” series, which has grown to encompass human migration, too.
“You hear the news and it’s so heartbreaking, millions of people, nobody wants them, where will they go?”
Schempp says her intense palette — yellows, oranges, reds, blue and green for skies — makes a tragic subject matter more palatable.
“The news is so engaging on a gut-wrenching level, but I want the viewer to be seduced by the color, the flow, the composition,” she says.
Michael Toti
Michael Toti’s inspirations are more light-hearted. Toti’s collages call to mind Terry Gilliam’s animations for “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”: odd juxtapositions of body parts, some body parts replaced by mechanical devices, faces with out-of-place features, vintage images forced into a contemporary context.
Toti’s imagination turns Audrey Hepburn into a bird and Marilyn Monroe’s eyes into targets. Scantily clad women in a Playtex ad become a frolicking circle reminiscent of Matisse’s dancers. A well-dressed man has a beetle’s head and a group of unclothed mannequins have radios, cameras, intercoms in place of heads. A human body is created from a flattened-out box, with formal shoes and skeleton hands.
“I like humor, using weird combinations of images to make a statement,” Toti says. “But I don’t always make a statement. It’s always about letting the art dictate what it’s going to be.”
Toti, who teaches at Manchester Community College, haunts flea markets, antiques shows and used book stores to find old magazines, postage stamps, playing cards, celebrity pictures, floral images and Japanese and Chinese fans to collage. “You’re using other people’s imagery to create your own art,” he says.
Free shuttles, starting at 11 a.m., will stop approximately for 10 minutes at each stop. Shuttle stops, where there is free parking at most venues, are at Oak Hill School, CT Historical Society, Arbor Street and Real Art Ways,
The Dirt Salon, Kempczynski Studio, Colt Gateway, Union Station ($5 parking) and ArtSpace, and The 224 EcoSpace. Return shuttles should be boarded by 5:15 p.m. A complete map of venues and more information can be found at openstudiohartford.com.
Artisan Showcase
In addition to the local artists showing at Open Studio, the Connecticut Convention Center on Columbus Boulevard will host the Hartford Artisan Showcase of artists from outside the area. Admission is $8, half price for those who show “passport stamps” from three Open Studio Venues.
