A u t u m n A r t A u c t i o nV o l u m e 1 3 , 2 0 1 1

N o r t h D a k o t a M u s e u m o f A r t

The 2011 Autumn Art Auction is underwritten by

Valley News Live

The North Dakota Museum of Art

is grateful to our sponsors who have

given generously to guarantee

that the arts flourish.

Front Cover: Walter Piehl, Khoas Kat: American Minotaur, 2006. Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 inches. Back Cover: Guillermo Guardia, Mama Cora, 2011. Ceramic, 23 x 15 x 10 inches.

Auction PreviewOctober 13 until auction time in the Museum galleries

Monday – Friday, 9 to 5 pm, Saturday – Sunday, 1 to 5 pm

All works to be auctioned will be on display

Auction Walk-aboutLaurel Reuter, Auction Curator, will lead an informal

discussion about works in the Auction

Thursday, November 3, 7 pm, in the galleries

patronsAll Seasons Garden Center, 48

Clear Channel Radio, 71

Grand Forks Herald, 65

Guesthouse International, 47

Hugo’s, 72

Leighton Broadcasting, 67

Minnesota Public Radio, 55

Office of Academic Affairs, UND, 68

River City Jewelers, 49

Salon Seva, 50

WDAZ TV, 73

William F. Wosick, MD, 45

Independent Radiology Services, Ltd.SCRIPTA, LLC

HermesVelox, LLCIn2shapefitnessfargo, LLC

SponsorsBremer Bank, 64

Dakota Harvest Bakers, 60

SupportersAmazing Grains Natural Foods Market, 76

Avant Hair & Skin Care Studio, 78

Badman Design, 74

Blue Moose Bar & Grill, 58

Chad Caya Professional Painting & Historical Restoration, 52

Chester Fritz Auditorium, 58

Frandsen Bank & Trust, 63

Grand Forks Country Club, 56

Greater Grand Forks Community Theatre, 48

HB Sound & Light, 56

Ellen McKinnon, 69

Midcontinent Communications, 54

Museum Café, 70

Auction Supporters continued next page

North Dakota Museum of Art

A U T U M N A r t A u c t i o nS a t u r d a y , N o v e m b e r 1 2 , 2 0 1 1

Wine and hors d’oeuvres 6:30 pm

Auction begins at 8 pm

Autumn Art Auction isUnderwritten by

Valley News Live

Page 59

2

SupportersNorth Dakota Quarterly, 66

Rhombus Guys, 54

Sanders 1907, 46

Special Olympics North Dakota, 70

Summit Brewing Company, 57

Curtis Tanabe, DDS, 76

Duc Tran, DDS, 51

Wall’s Medicine Center & Health Mart Pharmacy, 75

Waterfront Gallery, Northern Plumbing Supply, 75

ContributorsAcme Tools/Rents, 79

Alerus Financial, 77

Altru Health System, 79

Ameriprise Financial, Debbie R. Albert, 69

Archives Coffee House, 78

Camrud, Maddock, Olson, & Larson, Ltd., 78

Capital Resource Management, 51

Demers Dental, 47

Chelsea R. Erickson, DDSPaul Stadem, DDS

Greater Grand Forks Symphony Orchestra, 77

Happy Harry’s Bottle Shops, 74

Mayport Insurance & Realty, 46

Norby’s Work Perks, 53

Gregory J. Norman Funeral Chapel, 70

Opp Construction, 77

Praxis Strategy Group, 66

Rhapsody Spa & Salon, 53

Simonson Station Stores, 52

Sterling Carpet One, 74

Swanson & Warcup, Ltd., 47

Kelly Thompson, Greenberg Realty, 79

Trojan Promotions, 46

Valley Oral & Facial Surgery, 63

Xcel Energy, 57

You Are Here Gallery, 51, 77, 79

Zimney Foster, PC, 63

AdvertisersArtwise, 52

Brady Martz & Associates, PC, 53

Browning Arts, 53

EAPC, 69

Edward Jones, Mark A. Larsen, AAMS, 64

Forks Chem-Dry, 52

Gate City Bank, 51

GoodInsurance, 57

Skip Greenberg, Greenberg Realty, 69

Meland Architecture, 53

Monarch Travel & Tours, 64

Reichert Armstrong Law Office, 66

Rite Spot Liquor Store, 60

Robert Vogel Law Office, PC, 60

Shaft, Reis & Shaft, Ltd., 57

David C. Thompson, PC, 53

Valley Car Wash, 66

Vilandre, 79

Buy local. Read the sponsor pages

to learn about those who

invest in the Museum.

Almost all are locally owned

and operated.

— David Blehm, ChairmanMuseum Board of Trustees

3

Ross Rolshoven is a many-sided man. Foremost, he is

an artist who works in assemblage, hand-colored photography,

and painting. Among his exhibitions was a solo show of

assemblages at the North Dakota Museum of Art in 2002. The

work was based in the iconography of the West, in historical

myths and representations of cowboys and Indians. These themes

overlap with family and relationships and contemporary life.

Rolshoven is a collector of early Western settlement and

American Indian art and artifacts. He is completing his fifth year

on Medora’s North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame Board of

Directors. He has been a volunteer for numerous civic events and

charities over the past thirty years, including the North Dakota

Museum of Art.

In addition to making and collecting art, Rolshoven collects and

restores vintage boats. He is North Dakota’s only professional

boat racer, having finished as high as fourth place in the National

APBA tournament in Kankakee, Illinois—and totaled a boat or

two along the way.

In everyday life, however, he is a legal investigator who handles

high profile cases involving corporate, civil, and criminal

matters. He owns and operates Great Plains Claims, Inc., along

with his brother Reid, in Grand Forks, North Dakota. His work

routinely takes him across the Upper Midwest—a boon to his

collecting and his need to acquire endless numbers of objects for

making assemblages.

Rolshoven is a Summa Cum Laude graduate of the University of

North Dakota with a degree in Business Administration. He has

three children; his oldest daughter, Ashley, is a professional barrel

racer living in Texas. Daughter Jensen and son Carsen attend

school in Grand Forks.

Ross Rolshoven, Auctioneer Auction Chairs

COURTNEY “DOC” DOCKEN (above left) is an Advertising

Executive with Midcontinent Business Solutions. His passion for

art started when he began to meet local artists. “I was totally

amazed how my first purchase energized my surroundings and

added another dimension to my life.” This inspired Doc to

become involved with the North Dakota Museum of Art and the

Empire Arts Center to help them receive various grant

opportunities. Doc enjoys sharing his experience and interest in

art with others and how it has influenced personal design in his

living space.

MOJDEH MARDANI (following page) teaches Electrical

Engineering at the Univesity of North Dakota School of

Engineering and Mines. She is also the faculty advisor for the

Society of Women Engineers at UND. Mardani is originally from

Iran. Her family is spread over three different continents. She has

traveled near and far but still has a long list of places to visit and

experience. Mojdeh treasures her two kids and wonderful family.

She enjoys working out at the local YMCA where she teaches

belly dancing. Mardani has performed annually at the UND

Feast of Nations.

KELLY THOMPSON (above right) is a realtor with Greenberg

Realty in Grand Forks as well as a co-owner of Ink, Inc.

Screenprinting and Urban Stampede Coffeehouse. He’s the father

of three active teenage children, Navy, Fiona and Beck. Kelly is

also an artist and one of his recent paintings is featured in this

auction.

4

Rules of Auction

• Each registered guest will receive a bidding card as part of

the price of a ticket. Upon receiving the bidding card, each

guest will be asked to sign a statement vowing to abide by

the Rules of the Auction listed in this catalog.

• Absentee bidders will either leave their bids on an Absentee

Bid Form with Museum personnel in person or by phone, or

bid by phone the night of the auction. Absentee bidders, by

filling out the form, agree to abide by the Rules of the

Auction.

• Each bidder will use his or her own bidding number during

the Auction.

• All sales are final.

• In September 2002, the Office of the North Dakota State

Tax Commissioner determined that the gross receipts from

the sales made at the Auction are subject to sales tax at

6.75 %. This does not apply to out-of-state buyers who have

works shipped to them.

• In the event of a dispute between bidders, the auctioneer

shall either determine the successful bidder or re-auction

the item in dispute.

• Purchasers may pay for items at any point following the

sale of a work but must pay for all art work before the

conclusion of the evening—unless other arrangements are

in place. Absentee bidders will be charged on the evening of

the Auction or an invoice will be sent the next business day.

• Works of art in the Auction have minimum bids placed on

them by the artist. This confidential “reserve” is a price

agreed upon between the artist and the North Dakota

Museum of Art below which a work of art will not be sold.

Auction Chairs

Auction Committee

Jan Heitmann

Adam Kemp

Tara Johnson

Bryan Hoime

Sally Opp

The Autumn Art Auction serves many purposes, not the least of

which it allows me to visit artist studios as I personally select all

of the work that is included. As I began the process this year, I

looked back at last year’s results. Finally, we are truly developing

a buying audience for art and artists. I am grateful to all of you

who came on board with your support and your money. As you

know, this auction set the precedent for paying artists before

paying ourselves.

The Museum has never asked artists to donate work—although

some do. Instead, we allow them to establish their minimum

prices, an amount the Museum guarantees. The rules of the

game: The artists first set a minimum price, which they are

guaranteed to receive. If work does not reach minimum, it will be

brought in by the Museum and returned to artist. Any amount

over the reserve bid and the Museum’s equal match is split 50/50

between the artist and the Museum. For example: If a reserve bid

is $200, and the work sells for $395, the artist receives $200 and

the Museum receives $195. If the same work sells for $500, the

artist and the Museum each receive $250.

I have been pleased to see other auctions in the region have

adopted our policy. Therefore, instead of always asking artists to

donate, they now can count on actual income from auctions.

And, bless you; you have not forgotten that this is also a benefit

for the Museum so are generous in your bidding.

Each year we widen our pool of artists with ties to our region and

Museum, thus creating a richer environment for art to flourish.

Not all of the artists live locally but they all have some

relationship with either the Museum of Art or the region.

Each summer I receive a stream of visiting artists who are passing

through North Dakota. Many long-term relationships begin this

way. This summer Jon Goodman came by. Who is he?

Photogravure’s unquestioned contemporary master, the man who

taught himself the photographic process that had been lost by the

early years of the twentieth century. He was sent my way by

Bernice Ficek-Swenson, a former Museum employee and now a

noted photogravure artist in her own right. I decided to introduce

you to this marvelous art form through Bernie and Jon’s work.

(See page 61 for more about Jon Goodman and photogravure.)

Also, if you turn to page 80 in the catalog, you will find my

interview with John Colle Rogers, another introduction this year.

John grew up in Grand Forks, where his father was the first Dean

of the College of Fine Arts. He returned this summer as the first

Visiting Artist at McCanna House, our new Artist-in-Residence

compound left to us by Margery McCanna.

We could not publish this catalog without the underwriting of

our sponsors. Please take your business to these companies and

individuals; thank them for their significant contribution; and

note how many are locally owned and operated. Sometimes they

say, “I don’t care if I get an ad, I just want to give to you guys.”

Supporting cultural life is not in the interest of most chains but

rather has become the business of the butcher, the baker and the

keeper of bees—and of Ellen McKinnon who buys her own ad

because it pleases her.

Remember, when you buy through the Auction, the price

includes framing or presentation. Frames are often custom made

by the artists or the Museum staff who use archival materials. This

alone adds significant value to most of the Auction sales.

—Laurel Reuter, Director

From the Museum Director

If we don’t support them,

who will?

5

Lot #1

James O’Rourke(1934 - 2011)

Visby (Red Cathedral), 1966

Oil on Masonite

38 x 62 inches (image)

Range: $1,500 - 3,000 framed

James O’Rourke was born 1934 in Langdon, North

Dakota. Always interested in art, he studied under Cy Running at

Concordia College in Moorhead before moving to the University

of Idaho to pursue French and architecture. Five years in the U.S.

Army, Second Cavalry Division, followed. That took him to

Nuremberg for three years where he could look at art in all of his

off-hours. And he painted. Finally, in 1960 he stumbled into his

life work. He and his late brother Orland Rourke founded the

Rourke Art Gallery on June 18, 1960. (In the 1950s, James

reclaimed the full family name after the “O” was dropped during

immigration to the United States.) In 1975, O’Rourke partnered

with the Red River Art Center and formed the Plains Art Museum.

O’Rourke served as the director until resigning in 1987. The

Rourke Art Gallery on South Fourth Street in Moorhead was later

joined by the Rourke Museum in the old Post Office building on

Main Street when it was vacated by the Plains Art Museum,

which moved across the River to Fargo.

And he painted. The work in the auction was based upon his

travels around Sweden. Visby is the capital of Gotland, the

country’s largest island, which has been inhabited for more than

7,000 years. Visby was invaded by thirteenth century Germans

who left behind spectacular medieval churches, including the

cathedral painted here by Jim O’Rourke. Today Visby is a

UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of Sweden’s best-

preserved medieval cities.

And he nurtured artists. When Jim O’Rourke died, the High

Plains Reader printed responses, including Jonathan Twingley:

I’ve often thought that making paintings and drawings for a living

is a ridiculous notion, and most of the time I’m right. But then I

think about James O’Rourke and suddenly it doesn’t sound like

such a crazy proposition after all: Poetry, Music, Art — yes! —

YES! — these things matter, these things matter more than matter,

these things add up to more than a life, each and every one of

them are once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. Like James O’Rourke.

Twingley concluded, James O’Rourke always called me “Mr.

Twingley.” I always called him “James.”

All proceeds from this sale go to theNorth Dakota Museum of Art forenhancement of its collection.

7

Lot #3, #4, #5

John Colle RogersOakland, California

Glow Sculptures, 2010

Welded steel coated with

Glow-In-The-Dark powder

Each 3 x 3 x 3 inches

Range: $75 - 125 each

Lot #2

John Colle RogersOakland, California

There Goes the Neighborhood (Giant

Egret, Never Get Out of the Limo), 2009

Giclee reproduction of watercolor

13.25 x 11.2 inches

Range: $50 - 100

John Colle Rogers grew up in Grand Forks, but

currently resides in Oakland, California. After years of creating

multi-media installations, he has recently decided to make

smaller, more intimate works. The tiny whimsical sculptures are

inspired by modernist sensibilities, and their humor is

accentuated by the glow-in-the-dark powder coating covering

them. “Yup, they seriously glow in the dark!” maintains the artist.

An architectural blacksmith by trade, Rogers is left with many

“drop” pieces of tubing and angle iron. The works are created

with these leftovers, minimally manipulated and combined

spontaneously.

Lot #3

Lot #4

Lot #5

There Goes the Neighborhood (Giant Egret, Never Get Out of

the Limo) above is a giclee print from a watercolor series in

which unicorns populate empty freeways bearing witness to the

odd goings-on around them. The title is a spoof on a scene from

Apocalypse Now where the character of Chef, after being

frightened by a tiger, repeatedly screams, “Never get out of the

boat!” The giant avenging egret is a nod to the waterfowl who

grace Oakland’s industrial waterways, wading amongst the

broken concrete and submerged shopping carts. And the

unicorns look on . . . .

See page 80 for an interview with

John Rogers by Laurel Reuter

8

Lot #6

Andrew StarkFargo, North Dakota

Winter Light, 2005

Oil on canvas

24 x 48 inches

Range: $400 - 500

Andrew Stark says of his paintings, The surface texture,

color, line and content of this painting is intended to visually

express my reaction to the northern landscape. I am interested in

reinterpreting the traditional Modernist portrayal of the sublime

while directly confronting the optical nature of the painting

experience.

Born in Two Harbors, Minnesota, Andrew David Stark grew up

in Fargo, North Dakota, and has pursued numerous artforms

since childhood, including theater, music, drawing, painting and

sculpture. He attended Minnesota State University in Moorhead,

Minnesota, where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts. In the

spring of 2009, Andrew completed a Master of Fine Arts with a

concentration in painting at the University of North Dakota in

Grand Forks. He is currently an instructor at Minnesota State

University Moorhead and lives and works in Fargo.

Lot #7

Don KnudsonBemidji, Minnesota

Bed Head, 2011

Poplar and pine

48 x 60 x 3 inches

Range: $400 - 600

Lot #8

Marlon Davidson &Don Knudson

Bemidji, Minnesota

Barn Board Quartet, 2011

Mixed media

64 x 1 x 3 inches

Range: $700 - 800

Marlon Davidson & Don Knudson have

devoted their lives to art, first individually and ultimately as

collaborators. The work in this Auction results from over a dozen

years of working together in wood and collage to make relief art

of varying sizes and shifting configurations. Their collaborative

art works are in private and public collections throughout the

United States and Europe.

Both artists also work separately. For example, Don Knudson

incorporates his familiar stick constructions into functional

furniture, such as the bed headboard in this Auction.

Davidson and Knudson were both born in northern Minnesota

and attended Bemidji State College and the Minneapolis School

of Art (now the Minneapolis College of Art and Design).

Davidson combined his art with teaching, first in public schools

and later at Bemidji State University in the Visual Arts

Department. Knudson has worked since the late 50s as a

sculptor and furniture maker.

We are lifetime artists. We have worked for more than four

decades, both in the Twin Cities and later in Bemidji where we

have lived for nineteen years. We think of our lives as an artistic

statement. The great art historian Bernard Berenson wrote

repeatedly about “life as a work of art.” Whereas one never

arrives at that state, we find it a worthwhile journey. Making art

objects is an everyday part of our lives. We think of our art as a

way of explaining ourselves to ourselves. Through it, we try to

understand our culture, and to live actively within it. We also

explore the past through our art—especially the history of art.

While we use a variety of materials, our main source of

inspiration is nature and historical art.

We worked and lived for twenty years in the Twin Cities and are

aware that our work is informed by the art and artists we knew

while living there.

9

Pirjo Berg suggests that color, texture, and shape are at the

core of her paintings, which are inspired by the lines, repetition,

texture, and geometric forms she sees in the familiar and mostly

Finnish textiles she lives with in her home. The rhythms,

contrasts, and lines of Yellow Wind reinforce the idea of textile

just as her thick application of paint is tactile, beckoning the

viewer to touch.

This Finnish artist was born in Helsinki and grew up there. She

moved to Seattle in 1991 with her geologist husband, returned to

art school in Finland from 1996-2000, and rejoined her

husband in Seattle in 2000 after graduating with a BFA in

painting from the School of Art and Media, Tampere, Finland.

She also studied with the EDGE Program, Artist Trust, Seattle,

Washington, in 2005.

Lot #9

Pirjo BergGrand Forks, North Dakota

Yellow Wind, 2011

Oil on canvas

56 x 40 inches

Range: $800 - 1,100

Career highlights include the six-person exhibition “Paint Local”

at North Dakota Museum of Art (2009); a solo show in Seattle’s

Gallery 63Eleven, which was reviewed on NPR’s Washington

affiliate by critic Gary Faigin (2008); and a three-person exhibit

at Seattle’s Nordic Heritage Museum (2007). Commissions

include one by the NBBJ (architecture firm) for Valley Medical

Center in Renton, Washington, and another by the Max-Hotel.

(Seattle artists each created work for one guest room. Catalog

produced.) She was invited on the curatorial team for “Nordic

Artists Northwest,” an invitational exhibit at the Nordic Heritage

Museum, and Convergence–Ballard Building C Artists (where she

maintained a studio and helped develop the Ballard ArtWalk). In

August 2010, Berg opened a two-person exhibition at the Vanhan

Suurtorin Galleria, Turku, Finland.

Sponsored by

Leighton Broadcasting

Lot #10

John SnyderDecorah, Iowa

Choir Studies, 2007

Diptych

Woodcut

17 x 13 inches each

Range: $600 - 800

John Snyder for decades has wanted to find a “golden plot

of land” upon which to build a chapel or grotto. In 2008 he

moved back home to northeastern Iowa from North Carolina. A

year later he took a step closer to fulfilling that longing by

purchasing a home in the country which he hopes will be his

golden plot of land. In “No Lo Se,” his 2010 exhibition at the

North Dakota Museum of Art, he explored the themes, signs, and

symbols of that life-long quest.

In the artist’s dream chapel one thing remains constant. There will

be a choir; maybe a whole section of the chapel will be filled by

a choir. The singers might be painted or sculpted, he isn’t sure.

Back in 1994, he spent six months as an artist-in-residence in the

foundries of the Kohler Company. I tried to cast the choir

members in porcelain but only two remain of that early

experiment and I never had another opportunity to work on that

scale. I did think about concrete. Somewhere along the way, he

decided to make woodcuts of singers—maybe six, maybe

10,000; maybe as a group, maybe individually. The two works in

the Auction are his beginning. The artist imagines that they could

be hung in the chapel if it ever “goes on the road” as an

exhibition. And come winter, he will begin to carve members of

the choir from his accumulated pile of basswood logs.

Snyder says his personal struggle has been to come to terms with

his upbringing within a middle-of-the-road Protestant church

(Presbyterian), and his journey from a Western attitude toward

spirituality toward the mysticism of the East.

The artist’s current body of work, including these two woodcuts,

grows out of his passion for Oceanic and African art, Buddhist

cave temples (in particular the Grottoes of Mogao, a World

Heritage Site on the Silk Road located near the ancient town of

Dunhuang in northwestern China) and from the Northwest

Coast, a Nootka Whalers’ Washing Shrine, now in the collection

of the American Museum of Natural History. Snyder came across

linocuts in the Hirshhorn Museum by Nigerian artists Rufus

Ogundele and Adebisi Fabunmi and realized that he could have

made them. Those early prints made in the early 1970s are

echoed in Choir Studies.

John Snyder was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1956. He

received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

in 1980, having first completed two years at Colorado State

University, Fort Collins. His first major exhibition was at the

Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1992. The catalog essay

begins, John Snyder recently referred to himself, jokingly, as an

‘Iowa corn-bred mystic,’ a perception confirmed more than ever

by the direction of his current work.

In 2003, Snyder showed at the Weinstein Gallery in

Minneapolis. One of the three major paintings in that show, The

Communion, was purchased for the North Dakota Museum of

Art by an anonymous Museum donor from Minneapolis. After a

seven-year break, Snyder opened “No Lo Se” at the North

Dakota Museum of Art in August 2010. Two exhibitions followed

at Art Haus in Decorah, Iowa (2010) and the Bockley Gallery in

Minneapolis (2011). The artist gave four woodcuts and a large

painting on paper to the North Dakota Museum of Art during his

2010 exhibition at the Museum. 11

Lot #11

Zhimin GuanMoorhead, Minnesota

Memory of Home, 2011

Oil on canvas

32 x 32 inches

Range: $1,800 - 2,200

Zhimin Guan: For the last few years, I have been

experimenting with creating landscape paintings on various

surfaces and scales. My intention has been to blend traditional

landscape painting with expressionism, conceptualism and the

aesthetics of Oriental philosophy. Each summer I return to China,

where a couple of years ago I began to paint the streets and

traditional houses of my childhood home in Anhui.

The houses depicted in the auction painting were built during the

Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) in what has become known as the

Anhui style, reflecting a combination of scholarly impulse and

business. Six hundred years ago, Anhui was a wealthy center of

shipping. Still today, the narrow walking street is paved with

maroon flagstones. Two- or three-story buildings flank the street

built in the local Anhui style of stone base, brick construction,

and black tile roof. The thick walls are made of durable brick

shingles coated with an earthen paste, not unlike adobe, but

painted white. The layout of these buildings commonly is

configured with shops in front, while residences and workshops

are to the rear. According to Museum Director Laurel Reuter,

“this is a most successful painting for the artist in that he has

married his loose, abstract handling of paint with the depiction

of a classic architectural subject dear to him.”

Zhimin Guan was born in China in 1962. He started to paint

when he was nine years old, influenced by his father, Chintian

Guan, a traditional Chinese calligrapher and ink painter. Guan

received rigorous training in calligraphy and traditional ink

painting before he was fifteen years old. At the same time, he

developed a strong interest in the Chinese philosophy of Taoism

and in ancient Chinese poetry. During his BFA studies at Fuyang

Teachers College in China, he concentrated on oil painting and

again received intensive training in drawing and painting in the

Western classical style. From 1985 to 1994, he taught painting,

drawing, and design at Dalian Institute of Industrial Design in

Dalian, China. Besides teaching, Guan devoted himself to his art

practice. Then in the spring of 1995, Guan moved to the United

States. Since 1998, he has been a professor of art and design at

Minnesota State University Moorhead and visiting professor at

China Dalian University of Technology, School of Art and

Architecture; Anhui Normal University; School of Art, in Wuhu,

Anhui Province; and the Dalian International Institute of Art and

Design, among others.

Sponsored by

River City Jewelers

Lot #12

Samuel JohnsonSt. Joseph, Minnesota

Wood-fired Coil Jar, 2005

Wood-fired stoneware

21.5 inches high, 21-inch diameter

Range: $800 - 1,200

Samuel Johnson: I used a method of coiling and

paddling to make this jar, that is, I construct the form with snake-

like coils and beat the surface with a textured paddle. The

paddling compresses the walls, defines the form, and leaves

behind textured marks on the surface. Because I’ve used multiple

paddles, each carved by hand to leave distinct marks in the clay,

there is a variety of patterns on the exterior. There is a second

pattern on the interior of the jar. Here, I’ve used an anvil made

from the cross section of a pine branch. The pattern of concentric

rings comes from the growth rings of the branch. The anvil is

pressed against the interior of the jar while the exterior is

walloped with the paddle during the final stages of forming.

After forming, this jar was placed in a wood-burning kiln without

additional glaze or surface decoration. The colors and patterns

you see are either a direct result of the forming method, clay, or

the firing itself. Marked by ashes and charcoal, the jar takes on a

patina of somber hues. The shiny glass-like areas are from ashes

melting on the surface of the jar. During its three-day firing, ashes

lift and float through the kiln like snow, gently landing on the

shoulder of the jar where they eventually melt and form a

primitive glaze. There are also dark pitted markings on the lower

portion of the “face” of the jar. This is the side that was pointed

toward the fire in the kiln. The dark areas are where burning

embers came in contact with the clay jar and dripping, melting

ash. The clay has started to bloat a bit – a testament to the heat

and violent conditions of the firing.

This jar has a feeling I much admire in pottery. It possesses a

tension that exists between strength and vulnerability. Like our

bodies, its scars tell the story of its nobility and long endurance.

My family and I are moving to Beibei, China, this fall. I’m

teaching at Southwest University. Later in 2012, I will build a

wood-fire kiln and develop new glazes from straw and wood

ashes using sunflower ashes from the Red River Valley and wheat

ashes from my home towns of Breckenridge, Minnesota and

Wahpeton, North Dakoa. Both yield interesting high silica glazes,

which produce creame-colored surfaces.

Samuel Johnson was born on the eastern prairie of the Red River

Valley in 1973. He graduated from the University of Minnesota

Morris in painting and ceramics before undertaking almost four

years of apprenticeship in Richard Bresnahan’s pottery studio. In

2000, he was invited as a guest of Denmark’s Design School

while also working at the International Ceramic Center in

Skaelskor and as an assistant in private porcelain studios. He

lived in New York before leaving for Japan as a studio guest of

Koie Ryoji. In 2005, Johnson earned his MFA from the University

of Iowa. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at the

College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University.

Sponsored by

WDAZ

13

14

Lot #13

Adam KempGrand Forks, North Dakota

Wood Duck and the Weeds, 2006 -11

Acrylic on board with artist’s frame

48.5 x 61 inches (framed)

Range: $1,800 - 2,200

Adam Kemp: I sketched out the painting in 2006 but didn’t

finish it until this summer (2011). It was the most successful of

three I made of this man-made landscape. The painting looks

eastward on the Greenway along the Red River. I have

incorporated the foot bridge at the Lincoln Park Golf Course. It is

part of a larger series “Where would we be if we didn’t have

bridges?” After the Greenway was landscaped, wild flowers crept

in to mingle in the plantings. The City still sends a tractor in to

spray the dandelions, which makes me laugh. I think the

meadow of dandelions in full bloom is stunning. This is the first

year I saw a wood duck on the Greenway in a big cottonwood so

I painted it in the upper right.

Kemp was born in Ugley, Essex, England. He recieved a BFA

from Newcastle upon Tyne in 1986 and earned a MFA from the

University of North Dakota in 1989. Kemp considers himself

“mostly” North Dakotan and certainly American. He wants to

extend a special thank you this year to his wife, Farmers Union

Insurance, Rotary Noon Club, Ruth Meiers Adolescent Treatment

Center, Turtle River State Park, Nelson County Art Council, the

North Dakota Museum of Art, and NOVAC. This last year Kemp

had solo shows in Grand Forks at the Third Street Gallery and at

Frank and Lucy Matejcek’s barn north of Grand Forks.

Below: Lot #14

Suzanne FinkGrand Forks, North Dakota

Snow Too Soon, 2011

Oil on canvas

27.5 x 34.5 inches (image)

Range: $400 - 600

SuZanne Fink describes her painting process: I try to

simplify landscapes to the experience of being in it. I often

choose the outdoors as subject matter because it is always

accessible, be it wilderness, farmlands or cities, broad vistas or

intimate spaces. I prefer to paint on site; however, with our

winters, I sometimes substitute drawing and photography as my

reference. I paint with oils because I paint slowly and want the

long drying time to solidify the surface, layering and mixing

while I paint. To achieve my most essential statement, I abstract

15

Lot #15

Dan JonesFargo, North Dakota

Meyers Pond, 2010

Oil on canvas

24 x 24 inches

Range: $1,400 - 1,600

Dan Jones, who lives and works in Fargo, is among North

Dakota’s few artists able to make a living from their art. He has

long practiced plein aire painting, gathering with a group of

fellow artists and going to the countryside to sketch and paint.

The landscape of the Red River basin provides him with endless

subjects. In the summer of 2007 Jones joined fellow plein aire

painters Carl Oltvedt and Robert Crow at the Plains Art Museum

in the exhibition “Personal Journeys on Common Ground.”

On April 7, 2009, Dan suffered an aneurysm. He was airlifted to

the University of Minnesota hospital where he stayed until May

1st. After a month at MeritCare, Fargo, he was admitted to a

skilled nursing facility specializing in brain trauma rehabilitation

located in Mandan, North Dakota. Due to the severity of his

injury, Dan was unable to pick up a paint brush or a pencil for a

long time. Finally, however, he has fully recovered. According to

Reuter, “Dan has returned to painting with renewed vigor and

deeply-felt gratefulness for another chance at life. I have always

been a big fan of his drawing, considering him the best in the

entire region, especially with charcoal. Recently I challenged

him, ‘Dan, I will give you a solo drawing exhibition,’ to which he

replied, ‘Okay.’” The show will open within the next eighteen

months.

The artist’s paintings are included in many museum, corporate

and private collections including the National Endowment for the

Arts, the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, North Dakota, and the

Rourke Art Museum, Moorhead, Minnesota. His work is handled

by Ecce Gallery in Fargo.

the original drawing, which is often quite realistic. I turn the

canvas, scrape it, experiment with color and try to challenge the

way I organize and frame a scene, coming close to and

sometimes creating an entirely new landscape painting.

This piece was started in 2010 and finished in the spring of 2011.

The title Snow Too Soon was both a lament that the trees had not

even yet lost their leaves before it snowed, and that I wanted to

be outdoors painting, not in my studio.

Suzanne Fink received her BFA from Pacific Northwest College of

Art, Portland, and has studied at Oregon State University

(Corvallis) and University of Minnesota (Minneapolis). As Director

of Education at the North Dakota Museum of Art, Fink develops art

programs for all ages. Specifically, she is instructor and

coordinator of the Summer Arts Day Camps as well as children’s

classes throughout the year. She works on Program Curriculum

Development for the Museum’s Rural Arts Initiative and Director

of ArtSmarts for at-risk teens. Through her efforts the Museum

received President Clinton’s Coming Up Taller award. In 2009, she

won the University of North Dakota Frida Kahlo Phenomenal

Woman Award for her work as an educator and artist.

Fink has always been a working artist, but in 2009 she moved her

studio from her home to a rented space in downtown Grand

Forks. She has shown regionally in venues throughout Oregon

and in North Dakota at such places as Grand Forks’ Empire Art

Center and the Urban Stampede; the Northern Lights Gallery,

Mayville; James Memorial Art Center, Williston; Cando Art

Center; and the University of Mary, Bismarck.

Sponsored by

All Seasons Garden Center

William Charles Harbort, a.k.a. Billy Chuck, is

originally from New York where he worked as a commercial

artist, a package designer for a major cosmetics company, an art

director for a children’s educational software company, and an

automotive magazine illustrator. Harbort is currently a professor

in the art department at Minot State University. Happy with his

life in North Dakota and with teaching, he says, being a college

professor has provided me the opportunity to explore painting;

my commercial art background taught me the importance of

marketing, sales and hustle. Harbort has an active exhibition

record and regularly shows in many “lowbrow” art galleries.

His painting is often inspired by pop culture and bits of

ephemera. Paint-by-numbers, coupons and clip art, are just a few

ingredients often found in our visual culture and in his art. Bill is

fascinated with individual ingredients and the infinite messages

that can be expressed by combining and juxtaposing them

through collage. It is through their relationship that he discovers

meaning and expresses thought. Allusion, suggestion and

investigation become an important part of the viewing

experience. Love, true-love, lust, temptation, luck, loss, life, and

death are recurring subject matters in his work.

Harbort is known for his generosity, his belief that ordinary

people should be able to afford his paintings, his wife family of

wife, boys and greyhounds, and for founding NOTSTOCK, a

rollicking three-day event where students and pros come together

to produce posters, print editions, and experiments in silk

screening. They are joined by some of the hottest modern,

alternative, and local rock bands. At the heart of it all is Billy

Chuck, an associate professor of graphic arts at Minot State, who

knocks out silkscreen posters with the best of them.

Lot #16

William harbortMinot, North Dakota

Head Over Heels, 2011

Mixed media with collage

36 x 28 inches with artist-painted frame

Range: $600 - 800

Lot #17

Brian PaulsenGrand Forks, North Dakota

Street No. 4, 2011

Watercolor

3 x 4.5 inches (image)

Range: $350 - 450 framed

Lot #18

Terry JelsingRugby, North Dakota

Vanishing America, 2005

Oil on paper

17 x 23 inches (image)

Range: $450 - 550 framed

Terry Jelsing, a native North Dakotan, creates art that is

spiritually tied to the prairie landscape. He says, Although my

work often references a common place shared by people who

live in rural environments, I am more concerned about exposing

the internal and private environments of one’s life. I try to make

the viewer aware of common, universal relationships by

depicting this energy in painting, sculpture and drawings.

Born December 10, 1954, in Rugby, North Dakota, Jelsing’s

artistic abilities appeared at an early age. By the time he

graduated from Rugby High School he had several public

commissions to his credit. Before enrolling in the BFA program at

the University of North Dakota, he completed a three-year tour

of duty with the Army in Europe. He later returned to Europe to

study at the Institute of European Studies in Vienna, Austria,

where he was strongly influenced by the German expressionists.

In 1986 he completed his MFA at the University of New Mexico.

During that time he was part of the first American post-modernist

movement, experimenting with time-art studies and conceptual

projects. His graduate exhibition, “Circus for Matthew,” received

national media coverage and was published in Artspace.

After graduate school, Jelsing taught multimedia courses at the

University of North Dakota, served as director of Beall Park Arts

Center in Bozeman, Montana, and became curator and then

Director of the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, North Dakota. Later

named executive director, he guided the museum’s

transformation of an historic International Harvester branch

house into an award-winning arts facility.

In 2000, Jelsing established Eye In the Heart Studio in Fargo and

began teaching art and design at North Dakota State University.

In 2006, he relocated his studio to Rugby and began teaching art

at Rugby High School. In 2011 he left teaching to work full time

as an artist. His studio is a former granary on his family’s original

homestead outside of Rugby, where he lives with his wife Cathy.

Brian Paulsen makes small paintings incorporating

places he calls home. He hails from Seattle, where, as a child and

then a young man, his environs were circumscribed by his

bicycle and later the public bus system. The work in the Auction

springs from this early environment.

According to the artist, I saw a miniature juried show advertised

somewhere. I have been rejected from such exhibitions in the

past because my small works were slightly larger than the rules

allowed. So I made Street No. 4 as a true miniature, 3 x 4.5

inches. Actually I made four paintings, all based in Seattle.

When I am in Seattle I take photographs of various neighbor-

hoods, especially the immigrant neighborhood of my youth with

its blend of Asians and Jews, Italians and American Indians, and

a mix of Northern Europeans. It would be boring to just copy the

photograph in a painting so I add objects that seem to relate but

which fit no narrative.

I was raised with geometry all around me especially in the

materials of carpentry, building, repairing, making, and all those

other useful occupations. My grandfather was a sign painter and

a muralist. My father was an inventor and builder of houses,

cabinets, and boats. My studio was in the same space as his

wood and tools. The realm of Popular Mechanics—a service

magazine founded in 1902 to present clearly written technical

material to the average American man—schooled my

imagination. I came to know illustration as practiced by

professionals, a world given form and order through signs and

symbols and hand lettering. Still today, Paulsen hand letters the

exhibition titles on the walls of the North Dakota Museum of

Art—maybe the last museum in America to be thus graced.

Paulsen, one of North Dakota’s important painters, taught at the

University of North Dakota until 2007. UND named him a

Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor, its highest honor. In 2007,

the North Dakota Museum of Art mounted a solo exhibition

which resulted in a book about Paulsen’s work (2008). He has

been visiting artist at dozens of colleges and universities and

shown in more than 100 juried exhibitions, eighty solo shows,

and 200 invitational exhibitions.

18

In 1928, Barr was appointed Chairman of the Art Department at

the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, a position he

held until his death in 1953. In December 1938, thirty-one of

Barr’s fifty-six Badlands paintings were exhibited in Memorial

Hall of the North Dakota State Capitol Building in Bismarck.

Described by then–Governor William Langer as a “visual record

of one of the state’s greatest scenic assets,” the paintings had such

titles as Breaks of the Little Missouri, East Rim: Painted Canyon,

Teddy Roosevelt’s Horsepasture Road, and Ranchhouse in the

Badlands. When parts of the exhibit toured in the East, viewers

were said to have expressed surprise at the organized pattern of

light, shade, texture, and vivid colors (such as blue skies, purple

rocks, scoria-colored buttes, and green plateaus) that Barr used

as well as disbelief that such scenery existed. The scenes were all

too real, however, to those who were familiar with them.

Barr died in late 1953 at the age of sixty-one, having suffered a

cerebral hemorrhage as a result of a stroke. His work lives on,

though, in private collections all over the country, including that

of the International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation, the

North Dakota Museum of Art, and the North Dakota Governor’s

Office. His book North Dakota Artists, a collection of

biographical sketches on notable visual artists from North

Dakota, was published posthumously in 1954.

In addition to painting, Barr was also a lecturer, teacher,

illustrator, and poet. He served as State Chairman for American

Art Week, has been added to the Honor Roll of the American

Artist Professional League, and co-authored with Eugene Myers

the art textbook Creative Lettering.

Lot #19

Paul E. Barr1892 - 1954

California Hills, 1939

Oil on Masonite

20 x 32 inches

Range: $1,000 - 1,500 framed

Paul E. Barr saw and painted many scenes of North

America and Europe between the time he left the Tipton County,

Indiana farm where he was born (1892) and raised, and the time

he died of a stroke in Grand Forks, where he had served twenty-

five years as Chairman of the Art Department at the University of

North Dakota. During his career, he painted in more than half of

the states in America and in more than ten foreign countries. He

maintained studios in New York City, Paris, Colorado, and

Indiana and attended eight different colleges and universities

including the Art Institute of Chicago, Sorbonne University of

Paris, and the universities of Colorado, Chicago, and Indiana.

Subjects of his paintings included architecture, landscapes, and

other scenery of Holland, Switzerland, and Mexico along with

rivers, woodlands, southwestern landscapes, and national parks

and mountain ranges, such as the Rockies, Grand Tetons,

Catskills, Alps, and Tyrolese Alps. During the summer of 1938,

Barr spent six weeks and traveled 2,000 miles in North Dakota’s

Badlands to produce fifty-six paintings of the area.

Something of a prodigy, at the age of eleven he exhibited in the

Louisiana Purchase Exposition at the World’s Fair in St. Louis, and

in 1916 he became an annual exhibitor at the John Herron

Galleries in Indianapolis. He painted steadily, exhibiting his work

in the Marshall Fields department store and the Hoosier Salon

and Galleries in Chicago; the Indiana Artists Club and Pettis

Galleries in Indianapolis; the Fort Wayne Art Museum; the

Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach, Florida; the William

Rockhill Nelson Gallery in Kansas City, Missouri; and

Rockefeller Center in New York City, among other places.

All proceeds from this salego to the North Dakota

Museum of Art forenhancement of its

collection.

19

Guillermo Guardia (Memo) was born in Lima,

Peru, in 1975. He hails from an ancient pre-Colombian ceramic

tradition. From the time he was little he was steeped in the

images and materials of those early potters. In particular, he

loved the work of the Mochica culture, a pre-Incan civilization

that flourished on the northern coast of Peru from about 200 BC

to AD 600, known especially for its pottery vessels modeled into

naturalistic human and animal figures. The work in the auction,

Mama Cora, is the Incan name of the wife of an Incan Emperor.

I have always admired Renaissance art. When I was a teen I

wanted to be like Michelangelo and sculpt the human body and

all of its beauty. Back in Peru I took numerous anatomy classes

and learned to draw and model the human body, Guardia said.

When I began my MFA degree at University of North Dakota, I

knew I wanted to continue using the human figure as my main

form of art. After building numerous figures in clay, I concluded

I was failing to create the figure I had envisioned. I was not

pleased with any of my new works, unsure of what direction to

take my artwork. My frustration was compounded by the fact that

it was my first time in the United States, and my first time out of

Peru. Everything was new for me. I had problems communicating

with my peers, as it is different to learn English in a Spanish

speaking country than practicing it in the United States. Some

days I went home with painful headaches.

In 2003, I turned my attention to building clay figures that looked

as if they were thinking (The Thinker by Rodin was a big

influence). I quickly finished my first new figure. The new work

looked good, but again, it didn’t match the image I had in mind.

I sat in front of it, contemplated for a while, took a carving tool,

and began to draw some lines over the surface. Eventually those

lines crossed each other and became patterns. It made the figure

look as if it was built of individual pieces, becoming the

inspiration for my current puzzle piece series. The first figure in

this series was filled with these puzzle pieces. This puzzle figure

was holding a single piece in his hand as if pondering where it fit

or where it came from. Perhaps the image of the puzzle piece

came from a childhood memory as I remembered my sister

always playing with puzzles, something that was beyond my

abilities and patience.

Most of us have felt the sensation of something missing and not

knowing what it is. We have felt that uncomfortable feeling of

emptiness and are unable to describe it. I don’t believe life is a

walk in the park anymore. It is difficult and complex. The puzzle

pieces represent those little parts of everyone’s life that shape us

as human beings.

Guardia earned a MS and a MFA in ceramics from the University

of North Dakota, followed by a MS in industrial technology, in

the summer of 2008. Currently he works for the North Dakota

Museum of Art as artist-in-residence, teaching ceramics

workshops in schools through the Museum’s Rural Arts Initiative

and continues to exhibit throughout the United States.

Lot # 20

Guillermo GuardiaGrand Forks, North Dakoa

Mama Cora, 2011

Ceramics

20 x 26 inches

Range: $1,800 - 2,300

Lot #21

Bernice Ficek-SwensonMinneapolis, Minnesota

Promise of Water, 2010

Dust-grain copper plate photogravure

Suite of twelve plates printed on

Lanaroyal Paper

8.25 x 10.5 inches (image)

Range: $600 - 800 framed

Bernice Ficek-Swenson has spent the last decade

learning the photogravure process, to much success. She

explains, My photographic explorations are used to create

copper plate photogravure etchings and have resulted in several

suites of related prints: Putting Out Ashes, Vessels and Vestiges,

Pyre and The Promise of Water.

Since 1995 I have been exploring the theme of elemental forces

of nature, photographing still-life materials of stones, ashes,

cremated bones and most recently, water. I’ve become

particularly interested in active aspects of nature, both

regenerative and catastrophic. Elemental materials such as fire

and water portray processes of destruction, as well as

transformation, implying a metaphor of deep geologic time.

Stones are collected by all of us and belong to our “collective

unconscious.” In researching about “stones”, I discovered that it

is the only material that transcends time to convey the same

meaning to all cultures. Use of stone conveys the notion of a

deep spiritual connection to earth. These materials are also used

to suggest an inherent spiritual and/or ritualistic sensibility.

Pyre is a series of 12 related photogravures—two of which are in

the North Dakota Museum of Art Collection. I’m interested in the

duality of life that the fire represents, simultaneously conveying a

sense of catastrophe and of life rejuvenating forces. Change is

inherent with fire, with the process of destruction begins the

cycle of renewal. Each print is intimate in scale and when

grouped together the images create a large presence,

thematically building on each other. The backdrop of stones and

the structure of the flames take on a more naturalistic appearance

and are intended to be ambiguous. The suite ends with a single

flame hovering in a black field. This last fragment of fire invites

the viewer to contemplate whether the fire will perish or persist.

In the series I am currently working on, The Promise of Water,

I’m exploring metaphors of purity/purification, water as

venerated source. Smooth white stones are arranged on

ambiguous clear ground, which is free of specific associations to

land, country, or time. The stones are separated with water

melting or washing over each. Water tears rock, thus becoming

soil, implying an act of weathering, of reducing substance to

their fundamental parts. I think of water as the blood of the earth.

Native North Dakotan, Ficek-Swenson is a Professor of Art,

University of Wisconsin–River Falls where she teaches

printmaking and drawing. She also presides over the University’s

International Traveling Classroom. Other teaching experiences

include conducting a Polymer Photogravure Workshop at the

Athens School of Fine Arts in Greece and sessions in the

exchange “Wisconsin in Scotland” at Edinburgh.

Her education included a BA and MFA from the University of

North Dakota, Grand Forks, and an MA from State University of

New York, Oswego, New York. Before teaching full-time, she

was Co-Director of Land Mark Editions, a fine-art print atelier in

Minneapolis which she founded with her husband, Master

Printer Jon Swenson.

She has exhibited widely, including in solo shows at Camera

Lucida, Galerie Domus, Universite’ Claude-Bernard, sponsored

by Galerie Par-ci Par-la, Lyon, France, and the Gallery of

Technohoros, Athens, Greece.

21

Lot # 23

Jon GoodmanWilliamsburg, Massachusetts

Pictographs, Whitcomb Wash,

Grand Canyon, 1991

Photograph/dust-grain photogravure

10.75 x 13.5 inches

Range: $750 - 1,100 framed

Lot # 22

Jon GoodmanWilliamsburg, Massachusetts

Amaryllis Past Its Prime, 2002

Photograph/dust-grain photogravure

11 x 14 inches

Range: $750 - 1,100 framed

Jon Goodman is a photographer and printmaker. He has

concentrated on reviving the dust-grain photogravure process

(printing the photographic image from an etched copper plate in

ink) for more than thirty-five years. Today he is considered the

Master of Photogravure on several continents. His personal work

can be found in major collections in the United States and

Europe, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art and The

Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Bibliothèque National,

Paris. He operates a small studio in New England specializing in

the production of dust-grain photogravure.

In my personal work, I prefer to work with landscapes and

natural forms. Why is that? I don’t really know. It is an

environment that I am very comfortable with. I find that, in some

way, I am able to project something I sense about the work from

the inside onto the external form. I am most attracted to those

regions where the elemental interfaces occur: light and darkness,

earth and water, water and sky, movement, and stillness. I don’t

generally work from a place of making documents. I subscribe to

the more out-of-fashion idea of “romanticism” where I try to

communicate something through the medium of the subject, an

emotional resonance on some level with the viewer.

Why photogravure? For me, photogravure is very beautiful.

There are some things that I can do, in terms of tone, which I

could not do by any other method. It is not the technical

difficulties that interest me, but the end result. It is not a fast

process, so I cannot be prolific. I rarely have time to do many of

my own images. By modern standards and means, photogravure

is somewhat antiquated. The prints on paper don’t jump out at

the viewer. If the time, however, is taken to further study the

images, the viewer may be touched in an unexpected way.

See pages 61 to follow Jon Goodman’s rediscovery

of the 19th century process of photogravure,

which turned him into the contemporary master.

His work in the Auction joins that of

Bernice Ficek-Swenson,

who worked at the Museum

while an undergraduate at UND.

Above: Lot #24

Gary ThomtonBemidji, Minnesota

Memory Box, 2008

Curly Maple, Cocobolo, and Walnut; felt-lined interior

17.5 x 15 x 3.25 inches, with legs that remove to wall hang

Range: $300 - 400

22

Left: Lot #25

Gary ThomtonBemidji, Minnesota

Harp Leg Table, 2010

Hard Rock Maple, Redheart, Jatoba, and Walnut

32 x 47 x 21 inches deep

Range: $2,200 - 2,500

Gary Thomton makes furniture within the fine art

tradition. He explains, After fifty-two years building and

designing, I have decided to turn my attention to smaller projects.

Furniture and furniture design have long interested me and give

me an opportunity to work with fine woods and finishes while

incorporating my sense of design.

My first experiences included creation, repair and refinishing

while working at a cabinet shop and furniture store. During the

time I was in construction, I began to design and draw plans for

homes and additions, paying special attention to details like

fireplaces and stairways.

A large part of my education took place at a prestigious

architectural firm in Edina, Minnesota. I worked closely with

many architects and designers and learned about their creative

process and sense of design. During this time I attended design

and architecture classes at the Minneapolis College of Art and

Design to further refine my skills.

My work is simple, clean, and functional modern furniture. It is

unique in style and well crafted in fit and finish. I maintain my

studio in Bemidji where I occasionally exhibit work. Often I work

from commission, but I also make work and later sell it.

Lot #26

Duane PerkinsWinnipeg, Manitoba

Untitled, 2011

Porcelain

13.5 x 8 inch diameter

Range: $700 - 900 framed

Duane Perkins has been working as a full-time studio

artist for thirty years. Born in 1947 in Chicago, he lived there

until he moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, to attend Bethel College

where he majored in art and philosophy. During his last year he

needed another credit so enrolled in his first ceramic class. A few

months later he graduated and moved to Winnipeg with his

future wife and immediately set up his ceramic studio.

In the summer of 2007, the Winnipeg Art Gallery celebrated

Perkins’ sixtieth birthday with a large exhibition about which

they wrote: The vessel form is a constant within Perkins’

production. Wheel-thrown and then reduction-fired, the works

are beautifully composed both formally and decoratively. The

firing technique leads to muted and subtle colour variations

within the glazes, skillfully worked into abstracted designs

recalling vegetation such as scattered leaves, twisting vines, and

unopened buds. In other instances. . . . the rich colours and

patterns of oriental fabrics are suggested. Over the last decade,

the dimensions of Perkin’s work have increased as he creates

broad-rimmed platters, flared bowls and vases of soaring heights.

In contrast to their considerable sizes, the vessels’ decoration

mirrors the delicacy of the porcelain body, prompting one writer

to characterize his work as “noble vessel forms decorated with

lush surfaces.” 23

Lot # 27

Duane ShoupBemidji, Manitoba

Untitled Table, 2011

Walnut top, White Oak legs,

Cherry bow tie

28 x 46 x 14 inches

Range: $1,200 - 1,800

Duane Shoup, grandson of a carpenter, grew up in

Maryville, Indiana, south of both Gary and Chicago. By his late

twenties, he felt the urge to break out so he went fishing in

Minnesota. This self-taught furniture maker ended up buying

forty acres near the small town of Shevlin, building a house and

all its furnishings, and embedding himself in Northern Minnesota

deep woods. Here he could find the hardwoods he needed to

establish his studio, Wildwood Rustic Furnishings.

Shoup elaborates, I use only renewable woods—oak, ash, cherry,

walnut, maple, and pine as well as downed and damaged trees

that showcase the color and featured wood grains only nature

can produce.

Inspiration for my work flows from the natural world all around

me and the north woods I call home. Each log, slab, twig,

bentwood, or free-form composition represents materials

purposefully selected on site and processed at my own mill,

giving me complete control of the creative process from forest to

final form. Finished pieces preserve the force of nature in

furnishings and have the potential to become family heirlooms.

He follows in the footsteps of Sam Maloof who also created his

own private world where he made furniture masterpieces known

for their simplicity and practicality. As his own master, Shoup

does what he wishes, challenges his already-formidable skills,

handles beautiful woods, and makes a living in the process.

Sometimes he incorporates the bark into the design, sometimes

he strips the bark away to achieve a more polished work as in the

table in the Auction. Note the bow tie that embellishes the table

top while stabilizing the sizable plank from which it is made.

Advice from Duane Shoup: If you buy the table, take it home andwax the surface. Sam Maloof developed the finish I used on thetable: equal parts of polyurethane varnish, tung oil, and linseedoil. You add the final wax.

Sponsored by

Guesthouse

International

25

Vivienne Morgan’s Typologies were created in the last

year under a 2010 Artists Initiative Grant from the Minnesota

State Arts Board. It allowed her to travel to England to photograph

in the Lake District in Cumbria, an area she hadn’t seen which

shares some of the same characteristics as Bemidji, Minnesota,

where she lives.

According to the artist: I am an English woman who has lived in

Bemidji for longer than I have lived anywhere else, and yet my

sense of identity with a place I call home has not been Bemidji.

My identity has for a long time been tied to the landscape, and

in particular English landscape. Recently I have realized that this

“home” is no particular part of England, just certain landscapes

and certain views which for me have become iconic.

Since 2005, I’ve looked for some sense of home in the local

landscape and found it in the clipped topiary of Bemidji’s

Greenwood Cemetery, and from there I made a body of work

called “Between Two Lands.” I continued looking for the familiar,

a sense of England in my neighborhood, and this time I found it

in the morning light amongst long grasses or in a hilltop view.

This work became an exhibit at the North Dakota Museum of Art

called “A Sense of Place.” These works are matched pairs, often

two views of the same place just feet and minutes apart because

it seems to me that in order to gain a sense of place, one should

look closely, and look more than once.

In the past year I have expanded these pairs in Lakes to Lakes,

and I have traveled back and forth to Cumbria, an area new to me

in England, in search of more connections. This ongoing body of

work is a collection of typological landscapes, pairing similar

environments of lake and wood in Beltrami county, with those in

Lot # 28

Vivienne MorganBemidji, Minnesota

Passages: Nature/Nurture, 2011

Archival digital inkjet on Museo Max

17 x 42 inches framed

Range: $400 - 500

Cumbria, in the North of England. These typologies categorize

the familiar: a dock on a lake in the early morning, a woodland

path, or the expanse of an open field. They are the quiet and

understated places that will be familiar to many Minnesotans,

perhaps to the point of not seeing them anymore. To me these

places have also become iconic, and because I see them both in

Cumbria and Northern Minnesota, I am drawn to them. They

define for me a sense of place, a sense of belonging in two far

apart but similar worlds.

In these typological pairings, England and America meld in

subtle ways: a similar composition, different light, different

weather, different trees. This melding reflects my own slow

journey in becoming an American citizen. This March I became

an American citizen, now I am a part of America’s long history

of immigrants who have sought out similarities to their native

country, looking for familiar climates, similar farmland, to settle,

and while an exact match may not have been found, many found

a permanent echo of their former lives.

Kelly Thompson is a Grand Forks native who left the

area after graduating from UND in the ‘80s, but returned several

years later with a fresh perspective, launching several of his

businesses including Ink, Inc., Urban Stampede, and a real estate

sales practice with Greenberg Realty.  A life-long artist, he mostly

paints at the family dining room table while directing the traffic

of three busy teenage kids.

Kelly’s current work is heavily influenced by the horizontal,

minimal imagery that surrounds the Red River Valley.  His

fieldscapes, lakescapes, and even tablescapes, all share the

commonality of a strong horizontal division of wide open spaces

that lead the mind’s eye to wonder what is just beyond its ability

to see. One of my favorite travels is between Grand Forks and

Fargo, a route that so many abhor, but I find peace and balance

and awe in that emptiness, which for me is not unlike standing

at the edge of the ocean where farmhouses, like islands, nest

amid the cottonwoods. The recent work is mostly acrylic on

Lot #30

Kelly ThompsonGrand Forks, North Dakota

The Lilac Hedge 2011

Acrylic on wood

12 x 72 inches

Range: $600 - 900

Lot #29

PunchgutFargo, North Dakota

Red Skies, 2011

Acrylic spray paint on canvas

24 x 24 inches

Range: $600 - 900

Punchgut’s  work can be found on everything from a slew

of beautiful but disparate screenprints that mirror a midwestern

gravel road to limited edition gig posters for Americana bad

asses, the “Drive-By Truckers.” Also look for his prolific images

on bookstore shelves in The Art of Modern Rock, Gig Posters Vol

2, The Art of Electric Frankenstein, Rockin’ Down the Highway

and stapled to light posts and record-store bulletin boards near

you, or save yourself the gas money and check

www.punchgut.com. This Fargo artist shows up at various North

Dakota Museum of Art events for which he has created limited

edition posters. He extends his usual greeting, Thanks I always

look forward to being involved in the NDMOA world. Gut Bless.

wood boards. I like the strength that the wood offers, allowing

me to build layer upon layer of paints and textures with

aggressive knife work, and also the serendipitous nature of the

wood’s grain that often leads to unexpected, organic results.

This particular piece is from my Fieldscape Series, showing a

stark panorama of the changing, late-summer crops under a

moody and shifting sky. In contrast, the settled farmhouse

remains steadfast on the horizon.

27

Lot #31

Carl OltvedtMoorhead, Minnesota

Between the Strawstacks, 2003

Oil on canvas

13.75 x 13.24 inches

Range: $800 - 1,200

Carl Oltvedt: The work in the auction, Between the

Strawstacks, began in response to my point of view in relation to

the stacks, the compression of the space between them, and the

one round bale in the distance. My memories of the experiences

I had in visiting Stonehenge, Avebury, and lesser known sites in

England, Scotland, and Ireland immediately surged forward in

my mind. Those are intentioned arrangements, while this was

serendipitous, and only carried that significance based on my

prior experience; in my mind, however, this arrangement now

has a similar monumentality and is reflective of how we relate to

nature in an attempt to understand our place in the cosmos.

The artist continues, I am moved to begin drawing or painting by

the power of form suggested through a subject in a particular

light and formatted to a shape specific to the needs of my

expressive intent. This is an emotive state, where the subject

carries meaning beyond what it is as a person, a dog, a bicycle,

and so on. It is very similar to the experience of an individual

being moved to a particular emotional state by the relationship

of notes/sounds in a piece of music. Embracing this aesthetic

feeling is imperative in creating a work of art which transcends

the material, and sincerely reflects my most intimate feelings

about life.

Carl Oltvedt has been teaching at Minnesota State University at

Moorhead since August of 1983. He is currently a full professor

in the Department of Art and Design. He has worked as a guest

artist in regional schools, and abroad at the Glasgow School of

Art and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Scotland. His

most recent solo exhibition was held in January of 2008 at

Groveland Gallery. He also participated in the annual MSUM

Department of Art and Design Faculty exhibition held in the

Roland Dille Center for the Arts Gallery. Oltvedt’s paintings and

drawings are included in the permanent collections of the Rourke

Art Museum, the Plains Art Museum, the Honolulu Academy of

Arts, the North Dakota Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute

of Art, and the Minnesota State Historical Society. He received a

Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Fellowship in 1991 and a Lake

Region Arts Council/McKnight Fellowship in 2002. Most

recently, his work was included in the Plains Art Museum “Big

Country” exhibition, in which he exhibited Blue Flag Irises; at 40

x 128 inches it is the largest painting he has completed to date.

Carl lives in Moorhead, Minnesota, and maintains a studio in

neighboring Fargo, North Dakota.

Sponsored by

Office of Academic

Affairs, UND

Lot #32

Michael MadzoExcelsior, Minnesota

A Shapely Consolation, 2011

Machine stitched and painted paper

29 x 22 inches

Range: $1,000 -1,100 framed

Michael Madzo: According to Los Angeles dealer,

Darrel Couturier, there is an unmistakable air of mystery to the

collage paintings of Michael Madzo. This enigmatic ambiance

suggests the atmosphere of Marc Chagall and the visual

construction of Picasso. But Madzo’s work is original and unique

in terms of both method and substance. Madzo takes art history

as his literal material and starting point, cutting up reproductions

of classic paintings and reassembling or “suturing” their visual

elements back together in faintly disturbing and dreamlike

configurations which he then paints over with deft matching of

color values and textures. A blatant and poetic device of the artist

is to stitch on a sewing machine the disparate patches of the

original cutout sections. This Frankenstein touch reinforces both

the visual trickery and the meaning behind these tantalizing and

elusive images. There is also something monstrous about this

stitchery. It is a poetic affront to the spectator, an insistence upon

an apparently necessary honesty, and an important reference to

the assembled and man-made nature of this art. Finally, Madzo’s

mutations achieve the sublime by prodding and eluding our

attempts to understand them.

Michael Madzo hails from southwest North Dakota where he

and his artist-brother David Madzo have built a home near

Medora on the family ranch. He graduated from Arizona State

University with a BFA. Since 1987, he has been represented by

galleries in Los Angeles, New York, New Mexico, and Paris.

Lot #33

Nathan MastrudFargo, North Dakota

Liz, 2011

Mixed media on board

35 x 16 inches

Range: $350 - 450

Nathan Mastrud is a North Dakota native located in

the Red River basin of Fargo. Nathan earned a BA in Painting in

2002 and a BS in Art Education in 2006, both from Minnesota

State University Moorhead. His passion for tactile art has led

him on numerous paths from glass blowing to sculpture and

finally finding his rightful place as a tattoo artist at Addictions

Tattoo & Piercing, where he creates lifelong pieces of art.

Mastrud loves to evoke an emotion by his underground

contemporized art. He will put a spin on the image or idea to

change the thoughts of the spectator. This image of Elizabeth

Taylor in this auction painting was sensual and erotic, but after

he painted Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) lines on her she

takes on a new role. Her beauty transcends to a new level so that

one almost doesn’t see Elizabeth in her eyes.

Lot #34

Shaun MorinWinnipeg, Manitoba

Untitled, 2011

Mixed media (collage, pen, ink and

acrylic paint on paper)

19.5 x 15.25 inches

Range: $700 - 900 framed

Shaun Morin was born in 1979. He graduated from the

University of Manitoba with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2004 but

he was already on the way to becoming an artist.

Well entrenched in the practices of young artists is the instinct to

join together in collectives. It began in 1996 when the Royal Art

Lodge came into being and went on to win international success.

They came to the North Dakota Museum of Art in 2000 with

their exhibition Garage Video. (Just as bands are formed in the

family garage with instruments bought at garage sales for $10,

beginning video artists work in borrowed spaces on a

shoestring.) Morin was too young to belong but he followed in

the Art Lodge’s footsteps.

Morin became a founding member of 26, or two-six, Too-Sicks,

etc. Too-Sicks collective is a group of artists that work

individually but together, they share ideas and feed off one

another. Members of the group offer each other someone to talk

to about work and give criticism.

The collective 26 had its first exhibition together in 2002 at the

Graffiti Gallery in Winnipeg, two years before Morin graduated

from the University of Manitoba. Just as he jump-started his

exhibition career, Morin won many scholarships during his

college years beginning in 2001 and 2002 with the National

Aboriginal Achievement Foundation Fine Arts Scholarships.

Morin is also known as The Slomotion, which is his street art

nom de plume. According to the artist, My work ranges from

outdoor illegal installations with custom hand-painted signs to

oil and acrylic paintings on canvas to small hand-made booklets

and also mixed media works on pieces of paper. Each medium in

art that I use has its own way of communicating, which keeps me

exploring new ideas and ways to evolve as an artist. In painting,

my goal is to establish an alternate reality, a place where visual

poetry is conducted. I choose to paint figurative still lifes using

metaphorical iconography to create narratives. My work

sometimes deals with autobiographical content and strange

imaginative ensembles of mundane objects congested together. I

work intuitively throughout most of my art by trusting the

unknown, looking for freedom and searching for my truth.

Painting this way allows me room for experimenting with new

ideas as well as gives me the chance to make discoveries.

Likewise, Morin has been successful in establishing his

individual career with solo exhibitions in Winnipeg, Montreal,

and Toronto where the Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art

Gallery handles his work. He continues to live in Winnipeg.

Sponsored by

Clear Channel Radio

29

Lot #35

Ingrid RestemayerMinneapolis, Minnesota

Spring Fish, 2010

Mixed media print with fiber

50 x 20 inches (image)

Range: $2,500 - 2,800 framed

Ingrid Restemayer is a printmaker and fiber artist

originally from North Dakota but now living and working in

northeast Minneapolis. Influenced by generations of fine crafters,

Restemayer’s work reflects traditional embroidery techniques

while incorporating other process-intensive mediums through

collage. Her latest body of work features recognizable imagery

(koi fish in Circling in Bad Weather) in the form of intricate

etchings on handmade papers, successively collaged with fine

printmaking papers and punctuated by mock-paragraph forms

made from hand-stitched threads. Restemayer’s work has for

years had a hint of storytelling or narration with the use of her

intaglio images as pseudo-illustrations for a kind of story when

paired with code-like paragraph shapes formed from her hand

embroidery.

Restemayer has spent nearly two decades growing and

developing her unique combination of printmaking and fiberart

techniques. She studied overseas in Auckland, New Zealand. In

1996, she earned her BFA in printmaking, fiberarts, and mixed

media visual arts from the University of North Dakota.

Restemayer is heavily involved in the Minneapolis arts

community. She is an active member of the Northeast

Minneapolis Arts Association, and has served as an officer on its

board of directors. She has also spent time on the boards of

prominent Minneapolis galleries, the Northeast Minneapolis

Chamber of Commerce, and as a lead committee member for the

development of the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District.

Sponsored by

Salon Seva

30

31

Lot #36

Guðjón KetilssonReykjavik, Iceland

Engineering (Coffee Drawing), 2009

Drawing with coffee on paper

11.4 x 11.4 inches

Range: $1,500 - 1,800

Guðjón Ketilsson made this coffee drawing during a

long train ride from Venice, Italy, to the shores of Northern

Europe enroute home to Iceland. Instead of ink, he dipped his

pen into strong coffee and let his imagination fill the pages, not

unlike a Leonardo da Vinci drawing centuries earlier.

Ketilsson is not new to North Dakota Museum of Art audiences,

as he was one of seven artists included in the Museum’s 2010

exhibition “Into the Tussock: Contemporary Icelandic Art.” He

was the artist who made an installation of all the hats in Bruegel’s

The Peasant Wedding, which he carved life size. He also built the

installation Shell shown opposite. Guðjón will return to North

Dakota in the spring of 2012 to conduct a week-long workshop

through the Museum’s Rural Arts Initiative.

The artist was born in 1956 in Reykjavik, where he continues to

reside. Between 1974 and 1980, he studied at the Academy of

Icelandic Art, Reykjavik, and at the Nova Scotia College of Art

and Design, Canada. Guðjón primarily works in drawing and

wood sculpture. He has had over thirty solo shows and has

participated in numerous group shows in Iceland, the Nordic

countries, Holland, Spain, the United States, Canada, and

Australia. He was selected as one of two Icelandic artists to

participate in the 4th Beijing Biennale in September 2010.

Guðjón has taken part in various international residencies and

numerous competitions for art in public spaces. Among the

prizes he has received are the DV-Cultural Prize in 2000 and the

Einar Jónsson Art Museum Award in 2001. He has illustrated two

children’s books for which he was awarded the Author’s Library

Grant (2000) and the Children’s Choice Award for book

illustration (2004). In 2010 he showed at the Luise Ross Gallery

in New York City. In October 2010, Guðjón Ketilsson was

published by Crymogea in the illustrious Dungal Art Fund Book

Series on Icelandic Contemporary Artists. It is the third

monograph in the important series.

The next three pages offerrare opportunity

to own a piece of Iceland from artists who participated in the

Museum’s 2010 exhibition“Into the Tussock: ContemporaryIcelandic Art.” After opening in Grand Forks, it toured to three

North Dakota and Minnesota cities.

Helgi Thorgils Fridjonsson is a singular

painter who long ago went his own way. While his art is

anchored in Icelandic nature, it is deeply informed by the history

of European painting. His broad surfaces, rounded monumental

forms, and clear colors harken back to the work of Giotto, the

artist who launched the Italian Renaissance.

Initially, Helgi Thorgils’ paintings can appear naïve.

They are not. Surrealistic? Certainly. Otherworldly? Yes, but it is

the world of Iceland in its pristine, glorious, and

natural state, or the world of the artist’s imagining mind. And

along the way to developing his private vision and individual

voice, Helgi Thorgils became one of Iceland’s most widely-

recognized, contemporary painters.

The artist was born in 1953 and grew up in rural Iceland. He

earned degrees from the Icelandic College of Art and Crafts,

Reykjavik (1976); De Vrije Academie, Haag, Holland (1977); and

Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, Holland (1979). One of the

pioneers of New Painting in Iceland, he held his debut solo

exhibition at Gallery Output in 1975, followed by more than

forty solo shows since. Key exhibitions include “XLIV La biennal

di Venezia,” Icelandic Pavilion (1990); “Outside of a Dog,” Baltic

Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom

(2004); “Frederik Roos Collection,” Moderna Museet, Stockholm

(1995); “Prospect 93,” Frankfurt am Main (1993); “Thick Air,”

Fodor Museum, Amsterdam (1983); and “XI Biennale de Paris,”

Lot #37

Helgi Thorgils FridjonssonReykjavik, Iceland

Man and Giraffe, 2005

Watercolor and ink on paper

19 x 13 inches

Range: $1,000 - 1,800

Lot #38

Helgi Thorgils FridjonssonReykjavik, Iceland

Three Angles, 2001

Oil on canvas

16 x 20 inches

Range: $4,000 - 4,500

(1980). In 1979, he opened The Corridor Gallery in his own

home in order to introduce international artists not otherwise

seen in Iceland. He was one of the founders of the Living Art

Museum and currently serves on the Board of the National

Gallery of Iceland. He has taught at the Icelandic College of Art

and Crafts for many years. His many awards include the DV

newspaper’s annual cultural prize. Helgi Thorgils’s works are

found at all major museums in Iceland, many public collections

in Scandinavia, and private collections throughout Europe. He

resides in Reykjavik. Recently the North Dakota Museum of Art

added Helgi Thorgils Fridjonsson to its permanent collection.

The artist co-curated with Museum Director Laurel Reuter the

2010 exhibition “Into the Tussock: Contemporary Icelandic Art.”

33

Lot # 39

Birgir Snaebjorn BirgissonReykjavik, Iceland

From the Series: Blond Heads Nordic Race

2007

37.5 x 27.5 inches

Acrylic on canvas

Range: $2,000 - 2,500

Birgir Snaebjorn Birgisson began

paint ing blonds over a decade ago. He expla ins , I

can’t remember clearly how it all started. I think I was in my

studio in East London, where I was living at the time. It must have

been the year 1996 or 1997. I heard on the radio some talk about

a comment made by Diane Abbott, the British MP (Member of

Parliament), about too many blond nurses working in the British

hospitals—mainly from Finland and Poland. I found this

discussion a bit strange, but didn’t think more about it (or so I

thought). That day BBC changed my life . . . . A year later, I

decided to make a painting of a group of blonde nurses. It was

only meant to be one piece of work, but the subject and the

content completely overpowered me and I haven’t been the same

since. It’s a big series now.

First he painted nurses, then all of the Miss World Contest

winners since 1951, then blond Nordics of all kinds, including

the young boy in the Auction. The figures are hardly there. Birgir

continues, You can’t see if they’re blonde or not. Of course

they’re blonde. They will always be blonde. The focus is on the

uniform—or the head—and the aura around it. Caring, warmth,

power, and love.

Birgir Snaebjorn Birgisson was born in 1966 and lives in

Reykjavik. He studied multimedia at École des Arts Décoratifs,

Strasbourg, France (1991-93); graphic art at the Icelandic College

of Art and Craft (1986-89); and general art at Akureyri College of

Art, Iceland (1985-86). His recent exhibitions include “Humility”

at Turpentine Gallery in Reykjavik (2008); “Blonde Miss World

1951–” at the Reykjavik Art Museum (2007); “Portraits on the

Edge” at Gallery Boreas in Pittsfield, Massachusetts (2006);

“Blonde Professions” at St John´s Church in London in (2006);

“Touching” at Iceland’s Kópavogur Art Museum (2005); and

“Blonde Nurses,” also at the Kópavogur Art Museum (2001).

Recent group shows include “Wistful Memory” at the National

Gallery in Reykjavik (2010); “Stripped Away” at Tintype Gallery

in London (2010); “Rhyme” at the Reykjavik Art Museum (2009);

“Happy Together,” Estonia’s Tallinn Art Hall (2009); “Painting

Space and Society” at Göteborg’s Konsthall, Göteborg, Sweden

(2007); “Tiere auf Grasshockern” at Kunsthalle, Kunstverein in

Bremerhaven, Germany (2006); “Black Bile” at London’s 3 Colts

Gallery (2005); “Cold Climates” at APT Gallery, London (2004);

and “Stop for a moment — painting as narrative,” Proje4L,

Istanbul, 2002.

Sponsored by

William Wossick, M.D.

Lot # 40

Mike LynchMinneapolis, Minnesota

Moose Junction, The Iron Range

in Northern Minnesota, 1987

Lithograph, folio edition of five

9.75 x 15 inches image

Range: $700 - 900 framed

Mike Lynch’s realist style is rooted in American

Regionalism of the 1920s and 30s. His poetically rendered

Minnesota subjects include urban landscapes such as grain

elevators, taverns by the side of the road, industrial loading

docks, ships in the Duluth/Superior harbor, and small town

streets. The moody romance of these scenes is heightened by his

use of nocturnal or early dawn light.

In 1987, Jon Swenson and Bernice Ficek-Swenson (page 20)

invited Lynch to create a portfolio of lithographs in their Land

Mark Editions studio. The artist would spend up to two days

patiently drawing the image onto the lithograph stone before

turning it over to Master Printer Jon Swenson to print the images.

Moose Junction comes from that portfolio.

In 2003, Mike Lynch won the McKnight Distinguished Artists

Award, Minnesota’s most important honor with its $40,000

purse. Noa Staryk, Chair of the McKnight Foundation, wrote in

the accompanying tribute book: As one of his friends points out

. . . the designation “distinguished artist” doesn’t rest comfortably

on Mike Lynch. Lynch’s painterly world of back streets and

industrial monuments—portrayed in darkness or at dusk, often

just before the wrecking ball strikes—is decidedly ordinary. But,

as rendered by Lynch’s pen, paints, and brush, these mundane

landscapes are extraordinary emotional documents. Dimly

illuminated by a corner lamppost, Lynch’s silent streets attest to

the soon-to-beforgotten moments that make up daily life.

Lynch’s mostly realist art is widely collected by individuals and

corporations throughout Minnesota. He has exhibited at virtually

every major Minnesota art museum. He has won prestigious

fellowships and awards from Minnesota organizations, including

the Bush and McKnight foundations. He has illustrated books for

notable Minnesota writers Garrison Keillor and Jon Hassler. Yet

his name is hardly a household word. Why? Perhaps because he

is so profoundly Minnesotan, in the way we like to think of

ourselves.

He is modestly dedicated to creating his art rather than

promoting it. Fame tends to follow those who are quotable and

flamboyant, who stand out from the crowd. To Lynch, it is the

work, more than recognition, that counts. It is no secret to

anyone who knows him that he has made many sacrifices to live

as an artist, accepting the frugality and insecurity that

accompany such a choice.

Mike Lynch may not feel “distinguished,” but his dedication to

his craft is clear to anyone who sees his work. It is reflected in

sublime quality, which, along with his humility and work ethic,

has influenced succeeding generations of Minnesota artists. The

McKnight Foundation is privileged to have this opportunity to

recognize Lynch. In these unsettled days, his work reveals the

fleeting beauty of everyday life and reminds us to cherish the

time we have.

The Southwest Minneapolis Patch reported that at the age of 72,

painter Mike Lynch traded his brushes for harmonicas and

keyboards. For almost twenty years, Lynch’s hobby has been

playing harmonica and keyboards with Mercs, a local bar band

that performs monthly at Merlin’s Rest on Lake Street in

Minneapolis. Lynch mainly plays harp, a long-time hobby. Later

in life, he took up keyboard noting, I play it like a typewriter; it’s

a good way to figure out tunes. I don’t have the technique in

music that I have in painting; I haven’t worked at it that hard.

Lena McGrath welker’s work in the Auction is a

multi-layered, two-sided, white-on-white, translucent and

transparent print that hangs from a steel frame in a two-sided box

frame. It is from the body of work she named “Navigation

[affinis]” that was in her December 2010 exhibition at the North

Dakota Museum of Art.

The complete “Navigation [affinis]” was composed of thirty large

drawings, fifteen on each side of the corridor between the

Museum’s east and west galleries, suspended from stainless steel

frames hung adjacent to the walls. The installation is made of

small etchings and drawings on thin gampi paper, which are

embedded in handmade sheets of overbeaten abaca. They

contain translucent, very minimal and abstract imagery moving

from references to [flight] into references to [stillness]—the two

bodies of work in the neighboring galleries.

Lot #41

Lena McGrath welkerPortland, Oregon

Sheet from Navigation [affinis] (front and back), 2010

Etching, drawing, with Palladium on gampi paper, suspended

on steel frame, with wood and Plexiglas frame.

31.5 x 39 inches framed

Range: $800 - 1,000 framed In 2004, the artist showed four bodies of work in the Museum

from her on-going Navigation Series. At that time, Museum

Director Laurel Reuter invited her to return with the final

installation of this, her major lifework. Twelve years in the

making, Navigation Series concludes with this exhibition titled

“Navigation [chime]” because chime has poetic and musical

derivation, but it also refers to a system in which all the parts are

in harmony, showing a correspondence of proportion or relation,

according to the artist.

The over-arching theme of Navigation Series, both in the 2004

exhibition and in the 2010 show, addresses ways of thinking

about the accumulation and transmission of knowledge and

wisdom. What gives written language its power? In what ways

does language fail us, and in what ways does it allow

communication to take place?

Lena McGrath Welker continues to reside in Portland, Oregon.

Proceeds from the sale of this work

will be used to publish a book about

the artist’s Navigation Series as shown in the

North Dakota Museum of Art.

35

Lot #42

Robert WilsonWinnipeg, Manitoba

Sliced Antler Vessel, 2010

Deer antler, turned pine form (hollow), resin,

and dark roast coffee

13 x 8 inch diameter

Range: $1,200 - 1,500

Robert Wilson is one of a small handful of Canadian

master wood turners. The prize-winning prototype for the work

in the Auction was included in the touring exhibition Prairie

Excellence, which included work from Manitoba,

Saskatchewan, and Alberta.

According to Helen Delacretaz, Chief Curator and Curator of

Decorative Arts at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Robert Wilson’s

Sliced Antler Vessel is a work defined by its beauty, sensual

finish, and meticulous craftsmanship. The proportions of the

bulbous, high shouldered vessel are unexpectedly balanced by

the delicate, elongated ivory finial. Extremely pleasing to

experience, one is immediately drawn to the stark contrast of

thick slices of organic antler suspended in the dark, ebonized fill

of cast resin and dark roast coffee. The sensuousness of the

medium is at once exotic, opulent, yet polarized. This is a work

that delights in touch, is seamless in its integration, and elegant

in its timelessness.

The artist slices found deer antler to 3/8-inch thickness, which

ends up about a quarter inch as the thin slices are embedded or

secured with a thick paste made of casting resin and dark roast

expresso coffee. The finial is carved from the crown or rosette of

the antler where it is anchored in the deer’s head. Clearly, this is

the work of a Master Craftsman.

Over the years, Robert Wilson has won many Juror’s Awards from

the Manitoba Craft Council. One of his career highlights was

when Princess Anne, visiting Winnipeg for the 1999 Pan Am

Games, chose a piece of his work as a Manitoba memento. Susan

Sarandon also chose a piece of his when she visited Winnipeg for

the movie Shall We Dance. Robert’s work is also in the collection

of Great West Life & Annuity Insurance Company.

Sponsored by

Grand Forks Herald

37

Lot #44

Michael ManzavrakosMinneapolis, Minnesota

Second Revisitation from the Revisitation Suite, 1990

Intaglio, drypoint and linoleum block print

Published and printed by Land Mark Editions

23.75 by 18 inches (paper)

11.8 x 8.8 inches (image)

Range: $500 - 700 framed

Michael Manzavrakos is a Twin Cities artist of

Greek ancestory. In the late 1980s, he visited Greece and was

taken with the symbols carved onto buildings that had been built

by several generations of his family of stone masons. He returned

to create a series of six prints in his Revisitation Suite that was

based upon these symbols.

The artist began drawing the plates in 1988. He created a two-

color intaglio with drypoint on old ochre linoleum he picked up

as scrap—Manzavrakos is known for using an array of cheap

materials. Thus, the prints suggest the worn surface of a much-

used, common work-a-day material. The worn linoleum echoes

the worn stone of ancient buildings. Using traditional drypoint

methods, he “scratched” the lines of the symbols, inking them

with black. Proofing was started in the summer of 1990 at the

Land Mark Editions press in Minneapolis. By October of that

year, Master Printer Bernice Ficek-Swenson completed the

edition.

The artist was born in 1951 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He

studied at the University of Minnesota. Over the years he has had

many exhibitions, starting in 1978 with a solo show at the

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota. In 1989 he was

included in a group exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in New

York. His work is in the collections of the Walker Art Center and

the Minneapolis Institute of Fine Arts. The North Dakota Museum

of Art owns the complete suite, a gift from Jon Swenson and

Bernice Ficek-Swenson, founders of Land Mark Editions.

Lot #43

Michael ManzavrakosMinneapolis, Minnesota

First Revisitation from the Revisitation Suite, 1990

Intaglio, drypoint, and linoleum block print

Published and printed by Land Mark Editions

23.75 x 18 inches (paper)

11.8 x 8.3 inches (image)

Range: $500 - 700 framed

Walter Piehl is a painter who draws and also

incorporates drawing into his acrylic paintings. He does not use

drawing to make studies for paintings but as a primary medium,

either embedded into paintings or as separate works of art. But

ultimately Piehl is most widely known as a painter. His goal is to

make his surfaces dance with subtle variations. Drips, feathered

edges, scumbled paint, and the judicious use of glazes all

contribute to his rich surfaces. His fractured spaces, transparency,

multiple images and their afterimages cause his works to sing

with movement.

Unlike most artists, he was quite young when he decided to

make art from his own life. Born into a family that raised rodeo

stock, Walter rode as a matter of course. Likewise, in a household

without television, he drew constantly. He went on to paint and

Lot #45

Walter PiehlMinot, North Dakota

Khoas Kat: American Minotaur, 2006

Acrylic on canvas

48 x 36 inches

Range: $3,500 - 5,400

draw horses, year after year, never wearying of his subject, never

despairing in his quest to create contemporary Western art. This

master painter, while continuing to live the cowboy life, has

found the means to visually enter the sport. In the process he has

led droves of artists into a new arena called Contemporary

Western Art—but most don’t know that this artist from North

Dakota charted their course.

In 2008, Walter Piehl won the Bush Foundation’s first Enduring

Vision Prize worth $100,000. He earlier received the North

Dakota Governor’s Award for the Arts in 2005.

The artist has twice served on the North Dakota Arts Council,

once on the Board of Trustees of the North Dakota Museum of

Art, and is on the founding governing board of the North Dakota

Cowboy Hall of Fame in Medora.

Sponsored by

Valley News Live

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Lot #46

Marley KaulBemidji, Minnesota

How Does the Moth Know, 2007-08

Egg tempera on panel

27.5 x 19.5 inches framed

Range: $1,600 - 2,400

Marley Kaul’s work in both content and energy

emphasizes his connection with natural forms and poetic

metaphor. Now retired, he was long-time chairman of the Art

Department at Bemidji State University. He continues to paint

daily in his studio near Lake Bemidji, to exhibit generously

throughout the region, and to see his work moving into

significant private and public collections. Kaul’s work has been

collected by almost every major museum in Minnesota and

North Dakota, which speaks to his tireless commitment to his

development as a painter and his desire to explore the world

around him. In 2009, he completed the design for a stained

glass window for the First Lutheran Church in Bemidji, where

in 2001 he had designed another window for the chapel, as

well as creating a painting for the altarpiece. Ultimately,

Marley Kaul is a superb painter with a scholarly bent who has

become widely respected and loved within the region he calls

home.

Like Northern European artists of long ago, Kaul paints

domestic life: the world surrounding his home in Northern

Minnesota, his garden, including the daylilies and cabbages in

this painting, the birds who come to the feeders, his

grandmother’s tea pot, and all the other utensils and

accruements of daily existence.

Kaul is probably the only artist in the region who paints

continuously in egg tempera, a slow and ancient process.

Tempera, also known as egg tempera, is one of the oldest

mediums in painting. It consists of dry pigment, water, and egg

yolk. Tempera was used all over the world: for the icons of the

Russian and Greek churches—and still is,—for panels of Italian

painters, for Islamic manuscripts, and even for modern American

paintings. Tempera paintings are long lasting with examples from

the first centuries CE still in existence.

Egg tempera is valued for its crisp, clean colors, its quick-drying

matte finish, and luminosity. Underpainting is an important part

of egg tempera. Each layer that is applied is affected by the

former layer, and it becomes richer as each additional layer is

applied. Marley Kaul is a contemporary tempera master.

Laurel Reuter, NDMOA Director, loves to tell the story of visiting

Marley in his studio on a day he had spent the morning painting.

They decided to drive into Bemidji for lunch. Upon their return,

and much to their amazement, the painting Marley had been

working on just before lunch was gone. The support board was

leaning against the wall as he had left it. The cat had eaten the

painting, savoring the egg yolk that served as the pigment binder.

Sponsored by

Minnesota Public Radio

Lot #48

Herman de VriesWinnipeg, Manitoba

Box Elder Hollow Form, c. 2009

Box Elder wood

7 x 10 inch diameter

Range: $1,000 – 1,200

Doug Pfliger: Doug’s Dogs is the latest body of work in

a series of themes that I have been developing since 1995 when

the series started quite by accident. Originally they were called

“Scrap Pile Dogs.” I used found objects in their construction to

add an intentional folk quality and to give them unexpected

individual personalities.

While their pedigrees may be questionable, their role as faithful

friend and companion is clearly defined. To date one-hundred-

eighty-plus dog forms have been created, but a few cats and

birds are starting to appear as in the work in the auction.

Dog-shaped household objects such as oil lamps and purely

decorative figures of dogs were popular in ancient Roman

homes, and the very Roman tradition of an image of a dog

inscribed with the words cave canem or “beware of the Dog,”

persists today.

I have been working in a number of mediums and themes since

1995. My art tends to be of a humorous, narrative vein that I

want viewers to respond to on a physical level first, and then

contemplate the deeper underlying message—if indeed there is

one. Most of Doug’s Dogs have been adopted by good homes,

for they do not bark or bite, require only an occasional dusting,

and will not chew up your favorite pair of shoes.

Born and raised in North Dakota, Pfliger lived in Minot, North

Dakota for years while teaching art at Minot State University. He

graduated from Minot State University with a BS in Art Education

and taught art in public schools for thirteen years before

completing his MF at the University of North Dakota in 1997. He

taught at Northern State University Aberdeen, South Dakota,

before moving to Minot in 2001. At the end of May, 2011, he

moved to Durango, Colorado, just in time to miss Minot’s

historic flood.

Lot #47

Doug PfligerDurango, Colorado

They Fight Like Cats and Dogs, 2009

From the Sad Circus Series, #156/156A of Doug’s Dogs

Wood, metal and paint

Dog: 11.25 x 8.5 x 5 inches. Cat: 11.25 x 9.75 x 5 inches

Range: $350 - 575

All proceeds from the Pfliger salego to the North Dakota Museum

of Art as a gift from the artist.

Herman de Vries was born at Ochre River, Manitoba.

He received an MA in Music Education from the University of

Sioux Falls and South Dakota State in the 1960s. Today he is a

retired business executive and a former professional singer and

music teacher. A self-taught wood turner, he began in 1997 and

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Lot #49

Jessica Matson-FlutoHorace, North Dakota

Dissolve Diptych, 2008

Oil on canvas

13 x 10 inches each

Range: $400 - 600

Jessica Matson-Fluto was born in 1980 in Spokane,

Washington. She earned her BFA from Minnesota State

University Moorhead in 2006. Two years later she graduated with

an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She is

employed as an adjunct art professor at Minnesota State

University Moorhead and instructs workshops at the Plains Art

Museum of Fargo. She and her husband currently live near Fargo,

North Dakota.

According to the artist, many of the figures in my work are based

upon imagined interpretations of myself and those familiar to me.

I often portray these “beings” as suspended, drifting, or trapped

in space. Such dreamlike images construe my own journey of

self-discovery and represent an ongoing investigation after a life-

altering, physical assault that changed my own perceptions and

ways of seeing the world. That haunting experience prompted an

ongoing series of self-portraits that continue to weave through my

body of work. My images tend to either be strongly pre-

meditated, or come to the canvas involuntarily, guided by my

painting medium.

was teaching classes a year later. Today he makes some of the

most beautiful wood-turned vessels and plates in the region.

The Box Elder Hollow Form in the Auction came from a tree in

North Winnipeg. One day he got a call from someone who saw

the tree being removed. Once de Vries arrived at the site, he saw

the red in the wood and thought, I might be interested. But

already, most of the wood was gone and I only got a few pieces.

It was a very old neighborhood, so the tree was probably planted

100 years ago.

He continues, I never considered wood turning as art. For me it

is a labour of love. For many years I worked with wood as an

amateur furniture maker, developing pieces in our home. It

wasn’t until 1995 that I acquired my first lathe. Immediately, I

was hooked.

A few years later I went to a lonely spot on my parents

homestead where I was born. I saw the old maple trees that my

father and mother had planted in the early 1920s. Some were

dying. Taking the wood from those dying trees and turning it into

a piece of turned art became a way of preserving something that

represented the future to my youthful father and mother. I am

their future, and the tree was their future. If I am able to leave

behind a legacy, it seemed only fair that the tree should be able

to do the same. I only helped a little.

Lot #50

Robert CroweMoorhead, Minnesota

Abstraction #17, 2006

Pastel and charcoal on paper

20 x 27 inches

Range: $600 - 850 framed

Robert Crowe: Plein aire artist, Robert Crowe creates

landscapes that convey the peace, beauty and tranquility of place

and time. His pastel work evokes the rhythmic pattern and

impressionistic atmosphere of the Red River Valley and Lakes

Country. This is echoed in his abstract work, represented by the

work in the Auction.

According to the artist, Having been born into the family who

owned the Bergstrom and Crowe Furniture store in Fargo for

ninety years, I spent most of my early life in retail and interior

design. During this time I was making my own paintings and

doing faux finishes in my spare time. Finally, I became frustrated

with retail and decided to return from Dallas to Fargo to finish a

long overdue art degree at the University of Minnesota [MSUM],

Moorhead. While finishing my BFA, I began teaching at Creative

Arts Studio in Fargo. There I became friends with Robert

Kurkowski, the Studio’s Director, and through Bob I fell in love

with teaching kids. After getting my BA, I decided to pursue a BS

in education, also at Moorhead. Here I became friends with

painting instructor Carl Oltvedt and fellow painter Dan Jones.

Dan and Carl introduced me to plein aire painting—plein aire

painters work on location to quickly capture the fleeting light

effects that occur in nature. But all the time, I continued to make

abstract paintings, I was exploring the same simple shapes and

forms, but without narrative or content.

Robert Crowe lives on the family farm near Comstock,

Minnesota. In the summer of 2007, he showed at the Plains Art

Museum in Fargo in the exhibition “Personal Journeys on

Common Ground: Robert Crawford Crowe, Dan Jones, Carl

Oltvedt.” He is represented by the Ecce Gallery in Fargo.

Madelyn Camrud & Adam Kemp: Native North

Dakota artist Madelyn Camrud—who is also a poet—writes,

Kellys Slough is about thirty minutes west of Grand Forks. A

national wildlife refuge, it supports waterfowl by the thousands.

Ducks and shorebirds abound. It’s a fantastic place to visit,

especially during the migration season. Having grown up on a

farm with a coulee running through, I am particularly fond of

waterfowl. It pleases me a great deal to have wood duck and

mallard nesting and swimming along a tributary of the English

Coulee that flows through my backyard.

This particular scene is from a photograph of Kellys Slough in late

autumn, the clouds heavy, the landscape golden. Just before

setting, the sun breaks through and casts light on the clouds in

the east. A gray, cold time of year, the clouds take on intensity,

warming to a rich Prussian blue.

While a visual arts student in the mid-1980s, I focused on

sculpture, which is probably why, in my paintings, I tend to work

the surfaces I paint on, whether board, wood, or canvas, making

them more palpable with spackling compound, putty, and any

collage elements I can find. I use generous amounts of paint in

a loose manner, glazing and reglazing, and allowing the medium

Lot #51

Madelyn Camrud & Adam KempKellys Slough, 2011

Oil and collage on wood with wood collage

27.5 x 50.25 x 2.5 inches

Range: $1,200 - 1,500

to offer me surprises. I transfer texture to landscapes I know and

care about, most of them on or near farmland where I was

raised, twenty-five miles southwest of Grand Forks. With its long,

lovely horizon line and broad sky, this land I first saw is of special

importance to me.

Weather interests me as much as the land, and in the paintings I

work to recreate the atmosphere or mood of a day in my

paintings, transferring what I recall of the light, clouds, time of

day, and season when I first sensed the scene.

Upon a suggestion by Justin Dalzell, it was my pleasure to

collaborate with Adam Kemp on this piece. It is a joy to work

with Adam on almost anything. He brings to mind poet Thomas

McGrath’s famous line: “North Dakota is everywhere.” It seems

to me, for Grand Forks, Adam Kemp is everywhere. He is at the

hub of the fantastic network of artists in this town. He is a great

teacher for our young people. He is entertaining, ambitious, and

operates mostly on instinct, which, it turns out, is highly accurate

when it comes to making art. He knows what will make or break

a painting. In a relatively short time he made the wood

construction for this piece, choosing shapes, sizes and colors

that are just right. Most importantly, he has attached a catalog of

his wood sources to the back of the work for historical purposes.

Collaborator Adam Kemp declares, I first met Madelyn in 1987

and finally we are collaborating. She made the painting; I made

the wood collage from scraps I have collected over the years

from the old Sanders restaurant lost in the flood, from Alex and

Stephanie Reichert’s Reeves Drive home, and from the old

Norby’s store. (See page 14 for more information about artist

Adam Kemp.) 43

Emily Lunde (1914 - 2003). Lunde’s father died when she

was five years old, and she and her two sisters were raised by her

immigrant grandparents on a farm near Oslo, Minnesota.

Memories of those days are the inspiration for much of her work.

Emily left home at the age of eighteen and went to work as a

maid in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Although always interested

in art, Emily married and raised four children before beginning to

paint seriously in 1974.

Emily Lunde is one of the state’s eminent folk artists and

unofficial cultural historians. She has recorded the life of the

Scandinavian immigrants who settled the prairies and small

towns of the Red River Valley during the early years of the

twentieth century. She collectively categorized her work as a

“satire of human nature as I alternately toast and roast those I

love.”

There was a time when I would paint on anything I could get a

hold of. Any piece of board or paper. It was fun to see what things

looked like. Then I’d take a painting somewhere and I’d be too

bashful to go and pick it up. My first art exhibit was at the

University; I never did find out what happened to the painting.

One of my first endeavors was to paint the farm home. I gave it

to my mother and she hid it in the attic. So I guess it wasn’t too

good, at least she didn’t think so. My husband didn’t like my

work in the beginning either. We got back from Fargo one time

and he said, “Nobody is going to buy that stuff.” So I stuck them

in the attic. I thought I was never going to paint again. But then I

got some calls for the paintings and from then on he would help

me frame them. One time I painted a threshing machine and after

I got my horses all harnessed and everything my husband looked

at it, and he said, “The horses are going the wrong way.” He

could have told me that before.

I paint things I’d seen at grandma’s or in my own home, things I

have attended –– weddings, carnivals, threshing gangs, things

like that. It’s sort of a satire of the old days, some of it’s

affectionate but some of it’s also a put-down. So there’s some

kind of bite in The Gossips and there’s a little bit of hypocrisy in

the one where the preacher comes unexpected. The people

weren’t supposed to do any of the things they do in the painting,

but they did them when nobody was looking. I don’t know if that

is the thin line between comedy and tragedy.

When I sit down and paint I laugh at my characters. They were

like company. It was quiet here, my husband didn’t talk much

and we didn’t go anywhere, so I painted. I don’t know what I

would have done if I hadn’t painted. That and the library.

Painting’s getting to be work now. But then there are times when

there is something I’d like to do. I’d like to do something entirely

different once. But when I do that it isn’t what people want

because they have an idea in their mind about what I do. So then

you go back and make it. I don’t care if I never make a country

store again. I have hundreds of them out, all to different persons.

But they’re so tedious. I wouldn’t sell one for under $100 now.

Emily Lunde, “Amazing Emily: Reminiscences of A Folk Painter” Border

Crossings, September 1985.

Lot #52

Emily Lunde Harvest in the Field, 1989

Acrylic on canvas

20 x 24 inches

Range: $750 - 1,000

All proceeds from this sale go to the

North Dakota Museum of Art for

enhancement of its collection.

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JON GOODMAN

By Andrew Wilkes

No other method of printing multiple copies of black-and-white

photographs compares in subtlety and richness with

photogravure. A continuous-tone process so painstakingly exact

and complex as to be arcane, it produces prints unequalled in

luminosity and dimensional definition. To Jon Goodman—

contemporary photogravure’s unquestioned master—what its

creators were searching for, “the light-drawn image in ink on

paper,” is “a mystery of the highest order.”

First devised in 1878 by the Czech printer Karl Klic—although

the technique also derived from William Henry Fox Talbot’s

photoglyphic engraving—the process reigned supreme until

1918, after which it precipitously lost ground to quicker, cheaper,

mechanical printing methods. By the late forties, despite the fact

that such photographic pioneers as Edward Steichen, Alfred

Stieglitz, and Paul Strand considered photogravure the apotheosis

of the philosophical and aesthetic gesture of making a picture,

the method had become largely a glorious memory—accorded

the same awe as the illumination of manuscripts perhaps, but a

memory nonetheless.

Then, in the early seventies, Jon Goodman appeared. Himself a

photographer, the Antioch College student found his imagination

caught and held by the mystery and beauty of this all–but

–vanished art. Over the last two decades, he has devoted himself

with almost religious fervor to reviving and perfecting the

method. He is arguably the only photogravurist working today to

realize the dream of making a living solely from it.

THE PROCESS: The French term photogravure traditionally

refers to high-contrast photoetching, which produces a strictly

black-and-white print. A photogravure is an ink print, pressed

onto paper from a copper plate etched from a film positive. The

heliograph, or intaglio photoetching, is a tonal process when

prepared by Talbot-Klic methods as Jon Goodman does.

Of the three main varieties of printing processes, the most

common for five-hundred years was letterpress, which is

typographic; in letterpress printing, a raised surface is inked and

printed, while cutaway areas remain white. Lithographic printing,

the most popular technique today, depends on the mutual

antipathy of oil and water: the image to be printed is ink-

receptive, while the blank areas are ink-repellent. Photogravure

utilizes the intaglio printing process, which obtains tone from

recessed areas on the plate that are etched to varying depths, thus

holding different quantities of ink. The resulting print produces a

continuous range of gray tones, from very light—almost white in

the areas not deeply etched—to rich blacks in the deepest areas,

creating an extraordinary tonal gamut not available in silver

prints. This range seems to become more expansive, its

luminosity more variable, depending upon the ambient light

levels of viewing—from the front, from behind, from a distance.

The varying density of ink creates profound subtleties in the

print; in fact, it is not uncommon for photographers to discover

previously unseen details from their negatives in photogravures.

THE STUDENT: Both as a photographer and gravurist, Jon

Goodman is a self-admitted Romantic in the late-nineteenth-

century tradition of William Morris. He has always resolutely

rejected the current and fashionable in favor of, as he puts it,

“the philosophy of craft—of making something well, of

incorporating an aesthetic and vision which deepens the power

of each picture.” Early on, the young photographer demonstrated

his diametric opposition to prevailing counterculture aesthetics

by selecting the 4 –by–5 view camera over the more popular

35–millimeter model. Struck by the pristine clarity of its

medium-format negative, he set out to master perspective, rise

and fall, shift, tilt, and the swing of the view camera, using back-

country settings as his subjects. But Jon Goodman’s greatest,

most life-altering discovery was still to come.

While in high school, Goodman had been enormously

impressed by Paul Strand’s “Mexican Portfolio”—considered

with Camera Work and the Stieglitz gravures to be the most

important works in photogravure ever done. Then, in 1971, at

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, he was able to view

closely Strand’s original prints. The experience would transform

him: the pursuer of perfection had glimpsed his grail.

Subsequently, Goodman was awarded, through Antioch, the

prestigious Thomas J. Watson Foundation Fellowship, which

funded a year of independent postgraduate study and travel

abroad. His course was clear—he would spend the year learning

photogravure.

Realizing that ambition, however, was far more tortuous than

Goodman could ever have imagined; he wrote countless letters

attempting to locate practicing photogravurists, but was

invariably disappointed. “It was something that was literally

dead,” he recalls, “and such a mystery, that simply trying to find

out where I could go to learn, who knew about it was almost

impossible.” But Goodman was a man with a mission who

would not be denied.

Following his graduation in 1976, he scoured Europe for a place

to study, buoyed by his bible, Herbert Dennison’s A Treatise On

Photogravure (first published in 1865 and reprinted in 1974 by61

Visual Studies Workshop). Eventually, he happened upon the

Centre Genevoise de Gravure Contemporaine in Geneva,

Switzerland, a printmaking establishment that made its presses,

etching room, rudimentary-basement darkroom, and vacuum

table available to him. “The way I learned to do photogravure,”

he remembers, “was to make every mistake possible and find the

solution.” Still, after three frustrating months, Goodman’s vision

quest began to bear fruit: he made a successful gravure plate.

At the end of 1977, Goodman met with the Atelier de Taille-

Douce in Saint Prex, Switzerland. Although the workshop’s

raison d’être was making very fine à la poupée prints—multicolor

engravings made in one pass of a press—the artisans expressed

an interest in collaborating with him on photogravure. They were

engravers and painters, and he a photographer, but working with

them enhanced Goodman’s perspective and versatility in

printing. The aspiring photogravurist was learning his craft.

THE CRAFTSMAN: Intent on making photogravures, Goodman

returned to New York in 1978 and, after talking with galleries,

artists, and publishers, contacted the Aperture Foundation. This

felicitous meeting resulted in an invitation by the Foundation’s

Director, Michael Hoffman, to test the process on a series of Paul

Strand photographs. Goodman felt uneasy about the project,

since up until then he had worked only from his own negatives;

but passion prevailed, and his work commenced.

Goodman’s first Strand gravures, Fisherman, Gaspe and Iris,

Maine, were made in collaboration with Strand’s master printer,

Richard Benson, in Newport, Rhode Island. Strand had died in

1976, but Goodman says, “Benson knew each negative by

heart.” The test, which was to take two weeks, stretched into

three months, at the end of which he had the first plate.

Goodman—with just enough money to feed his dog, if not

always himself—was able to remain in Newport largely due to

the generosity of Benson and his family. Then Hoffman suggested

that gravurist Goodman relocate to Millerton, New York—where

Aperture’s Strand Archive was situated—and talked of

establishing the Photogravure Workshop, to be started up under

the aegis of and with the financial aid of Aperture.

At Millerton, Goodman began resurrecting “The Early Years:

Edward Steichen,” the photographer’s last great project, which

Steichen had asked Hoffman to undertake in 1968. The first plate

had been well crafted and successful, but subsequent ones failed;

ten years later, the portfolio remained unfinished. Goodman

traveled to Germany and Switzerland on a stipend from Aperture

to iron out details, then, back in America, arranged to make the

plates in Benson’s studio. Creating the twelve plates took one full

year. The portfolio was printed at Goodman’s alma mater, the

Atelier de Taille-Douce, where the gravurist stayed for another

year while the work was in process. The production of the

portfolio was an extraordinary feat: twelve plates, six-hundred

prints per plate, totaling 7,200 final prints.

Once the project was completed in 1981, Goodman settled in

Millerton, living in the home of Hazel Strand, Paul Strand’s

widow. Committed to ensuring that the photogravure process so

cherished by her late husband would not be lost, Hazel joined

Aperture as a Goodman patron, helping him purchase equipment

and supplies. It was here that he finally custom-designed and

supervised the construction of a press by a master machinist in

Millerton from old Swiss plans. The Photogravure Workshop had

come to be.

THE MASTER: During the Millerton period (1978-1984),

Goodman produced in collaboration with Aperture the portfolios

“The Formative Years: Paul Strand 1914-1917,” “The Golden Age

of British Photography,” and the aforementioned “The Early Years:

Edward Steichen.” He also produced single gravure prints,

including: The Spinner, by W. Eugene Smith; Migrant Mother, by

Dorothea Lange, and Wire Wheel, by Paul Strand. All the while,

he went on refining his technique, imparting a look and level of

quality unique to his gravures, yet still maintaining fidelity to the

photographer’s vision far beyond what anyone thought possible.

In the fall of 1984, Goodman moved the Photogravure Workshop

to its permanent home in Hadley, Massachusetts, a thriving arts

center affording him both solitude and community. He continues

working with Aperture, having recently produced the Paul Strand

White Fence gravure, made from the original catalog negative

and unpublished to date, and developing the large-format Hill

and Adamson portfolio. At the same time, he pursues such

independent assignments as printing photographs by Robert

Mapplethorpe, Joel-Peter Witkin, Brassai, Walker Evans, William

Clift, and André Kertész, among others. “Somehow or other,

people find me,” he notes. He also perseveres with his own

photography, examples of which appear here.

When asked what has motivated him to struggle so long for

perfection and sacrifice so much to concentrate on photogravure,

Goodman replies, “The pursuit of a mystery: a beauty dreamed

of, the indescribable effect on a man’s soul of the marriage of ink

and paper, born of a technical discipline, but whose magic lies

in its very presence and effect on the viewer. Or,” he adds wryly,

“maybe it’s as simple as stubbornness.”

Text of article printed in Aperture #133, Fall 1993. 62

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Explore . . . Endure . . . Evolve . . .

North Dakota Quarterly, Merrifield Hall Room 110, 276 Centennial Drive Stop 7209, Grand Forks ND 58202-7209, (701) 777-3322 e-mail: und.ndq@email.und.edu www.und.nodak.edu/org/ndq

North Dakota Quarterly is proud to

support the North Dakota Museum

of Art’s Autumn Art Auction—part

of our ongoing support of art and

artists in the upper Midwest. North Dakota Quarterly typically

showcases local or regional artists on our covers, and the

painting (left) by Kim Bromley is on the cover of our latest

issue, available at the Museum shop for $8 each. Now in its

76th year of publication, North Dakota Quarterly is a stimulating

collection of essays, short stories, poems, and reviews.Kim Bromley, Wood Duck, 2001.

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John Colle RogersInterview with Laurel Reuter

John Rogers has spent a couple of months this past summer as the

first visiting artist at the Museum’s new Artist-in-Residence

compound, the McCanna House retreat. This is the first time his

work has been included in an Autumn Art Auction. He does,

however, have a work he made in collaboration with his father,

John Rogers, in the Museum’s permanent collection.

LR: John, what brings you to Grand Forks?

JR: I grew up here, and find all this space very calming, a nice

counterpoint to the frenetic energy of the San Francisco Bay Area.

My father, John H. Rogers, was the Dean of the College of Fine

Arts at the University of North Dakota, and I grew up roaming the

halls of the Hughes Fine Arts Center. My mother Ann was his

sidekick when it came to supporting him and entertaining visiting

artists. With her interests in art and literature, they brought a lot

of creativity into my life as well as into the community. My father

passed away in 2005, and I lost my mother this past February

after looking after her for a few years. So now I have a little more

freedom of movement and have come back to the place that is

good for my heart.

LR: Will you come back?

JR: Absolutely. In the same way that many folks here have a lake

home, I would like to find a prairie home for myself. I have been

looking in the Larimore area and will probably buy something in

the next year or so. I plan to spend a month or so here in the

spring and the same in the fall. Take a break from California

Craziness. . . .

LR: Tell me about your life as an artist.

JR: I support myself as a blacksmith, doing gates and railings in

my shop in Oakland. This allows me the freedom to take time off

when I have a big show or, like now, when I feel like I am turning

the corner with a body of work and need some immersion time

to pull the right heart strings to break stuff loose. I oscillate

between making work that is very cerebral and conceptual, to

working directly and intuitively with materials—just goofing

around. There is a pretty strong community of artists out in

Oakland, and we are constantly having shows and lectures and

stuff. I get tapped for many local things as well as putting my

work out there through various curators and contacts.

LR: Did you ever consider not being an artist?

JR: I did my undergrad in Japanese studies and probably would

have taken a very different, very academic track if I hadn't gotten

sideswiped doing sculpture my senior year of college. I've

always made stuff and had studied Japanese brush painting and

blacksmithing all through college to balance out the heavy

studying. I went to Japan part of my junior year, and when I came

back I had the idea to combine the brush painting and the

blacksmithing to make curvy, pointy sculptures that referenced

calligraphy. I got hooked on making stuff and made a conscious

decision to pursue grad school in art rather than a more

academic line.

LR: Tell me about your art.

JR: Much of my work deals with the use and abuse of power. But

I try to infuse the work with humor. Like a bazooka that shoots

rubber chickens. Or the giant model railroad scale dioramas

where two fantastic armies are clashing while glow in the dark

skateboarding zombies zoom around them. Some pieces are

more sober, like the Shot Boxes, which are 3" hollow steel cubes

I shoot with a .44 Magnum, or the Basilisks, which are forged

two headed dragon-like creatures with gothic wings made of

sheet brass or copper. They all deal with the forces we have

harnessed which sometimes get a little out of control.

LR: How have you found the Grand Forks art community?

JR: I turn left at Fargo and keep driving until I see you.

Having seen the love people here showed for the arts in the

1970s and early '80s, I am not surprised by the great turnout at

the Museum events and gallery openings I have attended. People

here know good stuff and are eager to show their appreciation.

There is a lack of distance between the artists and supporters that

I find refreshing. And of course, the artists themselves have

shown a great amount of mutual support and interest in what

each other is doing. I think that even with the internet there is a

feeling of not being grounded to either coast that gives folks here

a creative freedom that is as wide open as the physical space we

inhabit.

LR: Tell me a favorite memory of your childhood in Grand Forks.

JR: I remember playing outside one time and feeling a storm

come in. Even before the sirens went off, my mother had already

phoned up and ordered me home. The wind was picking up and

I was pedaling away like mad when I looked up and the sky was

that crazy yellow-green color. It still sends chills up my spine.

That day would tie with watching the Northern Lights in the

backyard with my folks and a handful of other neighbors.... yup,

the sky.

North Dakota Museum of ArtBoard of Trustees

North Dakota Museum of ArtFoundation

Board of Directors

Evan Anderson

Ganya Anderson

Kjersti Armstrong

Victoria Beard, Treasurer

David Blehm, Chairman

Julie Blehm

Chad Caya

W. Jeremy Davis

Virginia Lee Dunnigan

Susan Farkas

Bruce Gjovig

Kim Holmes

Mary Matson

Dianne Mondry

Laurel Reuter, President

Alex Reichert

Pat Ryan

Lois Wilde

Joshua Wynne

Wayne Zimmerman, Secretary

Corinne Alphson, Emerita

Barb Lander, Emerita

Darrell Larson, Emeritus

Robert Lewis, Emeritus

Ellen McKinnon, Emerita

Douglas McPhail, Emeritus

Sanny Ryan, Emerita

Gerald Skogley, Emeritus

Anthony Thein, Emeritus

W. Jeremy Davis

Nancy Friese

Bruce Gjovig

David Hasbargen

Laurel Reuter

North Dakota Museum of Art Staff

Justin Dalzell

Suzanne Fink

Becca Grandstrand

Guillermo Guardia

Kathy Kendle

Wayne Kendle

Eric Langenfeld

Brian Lofthus

Laurel Reuter, Director

Gregory Vettel

Matthew Wallace

Justin Welsh

Katie Welsh

A dozen part-time, intern, and student employees

and over fifty volunteers