Marginal Arts Parade & Carnival

by Emily Sibitzky

There was much to see on Saturday during the Marginal Arts Parade and Carnival! From giant clown shoes to Dr. Brown's Delorean, the costumes and floats presented covered a wide variety of themes. Here are a few photos from the event. Hop over to our Facebook page to see more! (And we may even add more to that album in the coming days.)

Getting started at the Marginal Arts Festival

by Emily Sibitzky

Today marked the first official day of the Marginal Arts Festival, although Lycee events (workshops, debates, etc,) have been going on all week. Chelsea and I ventured downtown and were happy to run into Brian Counihan, who was garnering attention for the festival by parading through Market Square wearing a huge papier-mâché sugar skull.

Our first official MAF event was Circus Pony, a circus-inspired collection of works curated by local artist Susan Jamison for the Star City Creator's Society. This colorful and whimsical show, held at Liminal Alternative Artspace (302 Campbell Ave SE) includes works by local and national artists with a special opening night performance by Tif Robinette. The show will hang until April 12, so be sure to stop by and see it while you can!

Unfortunately I attended with no memory card in my camera, but I was able to snap a couple of shots with my phone!

 Tif Robinette performing as the "Circus Pony."

Artist Ben Osmann and artist/curator Susan Jamison dressed up for the circus-themed occasion.

PS, Follow us on Instagram @vianoke to keep up with the rest of our MAF adventures.

Echo Sounding

by Emily Sibitzky

On Thursday January 10th Chelsea and I visited the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University for the opening of their newest exhibit, Echo Sounding. The artist in the largest space is Minnesota-based installation artist Liz Miller. Her works are created by cutting shapes and patterns out of large rolls of stiff felt, connecting them in various ways, and then installing them within a space in a way that viewers can move around the piece. All of her works have a story to tell. She explained in her opening lecture that she is drawn to the "beautiful yet sinister," using ornate and decorated antique guns as one of her primary shapes for most pieces and the order and chaos of militant subjects in how she arranges things within a space.

Staying true to her "beautiful yet sinister" stance, she created her ocean-themed piece for the museum based upon the unnecessary slaughter of thousands of dolphins in the waters near Japan. (She says to watch the movie "The Cove" to learn more.) She showed slides of the blue ocean with swirls of bright red, which look strangely beautiful until you recognize that this is the blood of these innocent animals.

Liz's huge piece in the museum space was of a large red wave making its way across the room, all of the pieces made of different types of marine animals and harpoons.

It really was wonderful to walk around and see the work after hearing about it from the artist herself. It was truly amazing. (Can you imagine cutting out all of those shapes!?)

Photo by Emily S

Local Artist: Steve Mitchell Pottery

by Emily Sibitzky

I consider myself fortunate to have recently spent an afternoon at the home and studio of local artist Steve Mitchell. After meeting Steve and discovering his unique style, I was excited to see where and how he worked to create his pottery. I excitedly followed him from his outside studio to his glazing workshop then to his homemade wood-firing kiln, leaving with a further understanding of the pottery-making process and a greater appreciation for the hard work ceramicists put into each piece.

E: Tell me about yourself and how you began working with pottery. Did you have any formal education in ceramics?

S: I went to East Tennessee State because they had a degree in transportation and I wanted to work for the railroad. But about the time I was graduating Norfolk Southern was laying people off left and right so I stayed another year and got a degree in marketing. When I came out I found a job in insurance. I was a manager of claims for Nationwide Insurance; it was a pretty stressful job. Nobody is ever having a good day when they call the claims department, so you’re not talking to them unless they’ve broken a leg or wrecked their car. So I decided to try pottery to unwind... or I should say again. I dated a potter a long time ago; I taught her how to do stained glass and she taught me pottery. I always thought, “I could do better than this.” And so about 25 years later I tried again over at the Brambleton Center, and this time I seemed to have more of a knack for it. So I got a wheel and the hobby started to kind of run wild. I would take my vacation time to go learn and take workshops from famous potters a couple of weeks a year. I did that for about ten years. Then I finally had a glaze formulation class where I learned to actually make my own glazes and the dynamics of glaze-making. About eight years later I decided, “I can do this,” so I decided to leave the company. Of course, now I’m always trying to do something that sells. For most potters, even though they don’t want to do production work, that’s what it’s all about. If you want to try to make a living doing this you have to produce a lot of work. There’s no way around it.

E: So you make all of your own glazes?

S: I do. I was rotten at chemistry in school so this is my punishment, because this is “chemistry world.” That’s what all of this is about; how materials react with other materials.

There are all kinds of borates, feldspars, nephelite; these are naturally mined clays and they come from particular mines. There’s a clay called “Albany clay,” or Albany slip. It was mined in Albany, New York and was the only true black clay. All of these people built their entire production around that one glaze, but they ran out of it and it’s not available anymore. That was the only place on the planet where that particular clay was found. Fortunately all of the clay that I’ve used for my work has come from the same place. But I had that happen to a frit from Germany. They all have this thumbprint, a profile of their chemical analysis, so I broke it down to its chemical base and I took all of the raw materials and made that frit myself. It took me two years to get it just right.

There’s ilmenite, manganese, tin oxide, vanadium pentoxide, all of these weird – some of them rare – earth metals that are used to make the colors that I have in my glazes. For most people, the first thing they’re attracted to is the color, and hopefully later they fall in love with the form and the details and all of that. So I have most of the spectrum of materials for glaze making. I have at least 5lbs of almost every element on the earth, and 50lbs of most of them.

Some glazes are activated by salt, which is entered into the kiln at about 2300º; it turns into a gas, vaporizes, and swirls around in the kiln and puts a glaze over everything. Back in the old days that’s how they glazed pots, from natural fly ash or salt. I have always fired at cone 10, 2350º, but it’s a very slow process. I met a guy at a workshop who told me, “All of the things you do at cone 10 you can do at cone 6,” which is quite a bit cooler. So I gave it a shot, and sure enough... the ash melts at cone 6, salt turns into a gas at cone 6, but it saves half of the wood. It takes me as long and as much firewood to go from cone 6 to cone 10 as it takes just to get to cone 6, so this cuts my time and wood use in half. I’m reformulating all of my glazes so that they work at cone 6, which just means using different fluxing agents. I’m now using minerals that oddly I had but hadn’t really used before.

E: Do you have a signature style or create any signature pieces? 

S: You have to do something to distinguish yourself or you’re not going to sell anything. The horsehair pots I make are about two to three times larger than a lot of potters will make them. For those I glaze the inside red and the outside snow white. I heat the pot up to about a thousand degrees, 1100ºF actually, and as it cools down there is about a fifty degree window where I can stick a piece of coarse horse hair in and burn a little carbon trail into the white clay. Interior designers really like that black, white, and red.

I have a wood firing kiln as well as an electric kiln so for about six months of the year I do the wood firing work and for the other six months I do my crystalline work in the electric kiln. Chemistry and the temperature cycle create the crystalline. The glaze solution is made up of 25% zinc, which is what they use to create the crystalline pattern on galvanized metal. Zinc wants to go into a crystallized formation, but needs a little bit of a catalyst, which in this case is titanium dioxide. You put a little bit of that in the glaze and coat it on pretty thick. At 2350º the glaze gets real loose and starts flowing off the pot into a tray underneath. I crash cool it down to about 1900º and that solidifies it a bit. At that point the zinc starts flowing towards the titanium dioxide molecules and the crystals will start growing. The longer you let it sit at that temperature the bigger the crystals will get.

It’s a lot of work to get a crystal on any pot. On some the crystals get too big and all run together. I don’t like that but it’s funny, some people really like when the crystals grow together. If I don’t like them they usually end up in the ditch. All potters have a ditch; it’s where the stuff that doesn’t work out very well ends up. If there’s something that I’m not pleased about but someone might like it I’ll throw it in my sale instead. So someone will ask, “What’s wrong with this one?” and I’ll say, “Oh it didn’t do what I wanted it to do.” And they think it’s perfect so they’re excited that they get it for 70% off.

I use Indian wood blocks to create patterns on some pieces. I think the wood is made out of some kind of teak or mahogany, but [the carvers] sit there with little knives and carve these little patterns into the wood blocks; it just seems amazing to me. They use them to print batik fabric, or wallpaper some people say. I stamp the clay and stretch it out to creates texture. You can line them up carefully and never see where the pattern starts and stops. What I like about it is that you get this natural, irregular feel to these pieces.

I’m working on a thing called “terra sigillata.” It’s something that the Greeks kind of came across by accident. You put the clay in a bucket and use a deflocculant – they used vinegars, I use a silicate – and it causes all of the particles to deflect each other so they don’t settle. I mix it up, let it set overnight, and the next morning all of the big particles are at the bottom and the super-fine particles are all in the solution on top. You can dip the pots or spray it on and then polish it on the wheel. The fine particles create an almost enamel-like surface. I’m thinking my next generation of pots will be like that.

I went to France with a friend of mine who was a wine importer and we went around France tasting all kinds of different wines from different regions. We got down to the Loire Valley to see Marc Ollivier, who is like the rockstar of the Loire Valley in winemaking. So I introduced myself, “Steve Mitchell, potier,” and he responded, “Potier!? My great, great grandpa potier!” And he runs out of this beautiful stone and walnut cellar into this huge mansion and he comes back down with this roughly hand-shaped crachoir, or spittoon. And he goes, “You make?” and I say, “Yeah, I can make!” So I came back home and made like a hundred of them, large and small. I’ve actually sold a bunch. I have a friend who went to Gascony, France and there was one of my crachoirs sitting on the bar; he took a picture of it and sent it to me. So I have them all over. I have a lot of them in Washington and Oregon because there are a lot of winemakers there. It’s a piece that I make that not many people really know much about.

E: Tell me about your wood firing kiln.

S: I was renting a kiln and fired it about ten times, at the average cost of a thousand bucks a pop, and I thought, “You know what? I can go home and build one.” The bricks are 8lbs a piece and there are probably about 6,000 of them. The first chamber is the initial woodburning chamber and the middle one is the first lair chamber. You stack ware all the way up to the ceiling and then brick it up to close it off. The third chamber is the salt chamber. Salt eats into the firebrick and gives them this finite life; that’s why I was paying to use that other kiln, because you’re literally wearing it out as you’re firing. I researched this for two years before I built it; I made hundreds of drawings. There are places where I mortared, but most of it is just dry-stacked.

My kiln will hold about 350 pots, but with the larger sizes I make it will hold about 80 per chamber. I throw pretty fast; I’ll spend 6 weeks throwing and making all of the pots I’m going to make and I’ll spend another month glazing them and getting them ready for the kiln. Then I’ll spend another month splitting wood. In one week I’ll load the kiln, seal up all the doors, get everything cleaned up and ready, and then I have a crew of guys that also fire pots in here come in to help. We’ll fire it all over a two-day period. A lot of wood firings take about three days. We do 8-hour shifts and rotate. You’re up most of that time, but if you get a reliable crew who knows what they’re doing you can go to sleep for a few hours, maybe four or five at a time. It takes a lot of work; some people just don’t know.

E: Where can people find your work or how can they reach you?

S: My website is www.stevemitchellpottery.com and people are welcome to contact me to come by the studio and gallery.


(This article was originally published in the July issue of VIA Noke Magazine.)

PechaKucha: Telling your story in the 20 x 20 format

by Chelsea Brandt & Emily Sibitzky

After David Verde attended his first PechaKucha Night in Charleston, South Carolina last October, he knew he needed to bring the event to Southwest Virginia. “I have several friends down there who are very invalided with the event,” he explained. “It’s like a rock concert for $5. I had to bring one home to our area.” 

Seven years ago architects Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Tokyo, Japan created the first ever PechaKucha Night, a networking event where creatives can come together to talk about their projects and endeavors. PechaKucha, a Japanese term for “chit chat,” serves as a great description of the presentation format, in which you show 20 slides, each for 20 seconds. The official PechaKucha website states, “It’s a format that makes presentations concise, and keeps things moving at a rapid pace. PechaKucha Nights are informal and fun gatherings where creative people get together and share their ideas, works, thoughts, holiday snaps - just about anything really.” Many people have compared PechaKucha Night to TED Talks, but Klein and Dytham disagree. “TED is top down, PechaKucha is bottom up! 

David quickly contacted the global PechaKucha office in Tokyo to request to use the event trademark in Southwest Virginia. Two weeks later he was approved and the planning began to create a regional PechaKucha for the Roanoke and New River Valley region. “For such a small area, there are many groups of people trying to do good things, but it seems they have gotten into a rut of unintentionally exclusivity, making it hard for others to get involved,” he says. “I also think there is far more happening in our area outside of downtown Roanoke and Virginia Tech and people need to become aware of it somehow. Southwest Virginia and especially the Roanoke and New River Valley need to come more openly connected. We’re too close to one another to think our communities don’t effect one another.” 

The event is now happening in over 500 cities worldwide, and PechaKucha Night Southwest Virginia is growing right along with it. The first local event, which took place this past February, was organized and put on almost completely by David. “My wife helped out on the day of the event. If it weren’t for some of my personal friends and the presenters who came out to speak for  the first night, it wouldn’t have been able to happen. It was a group effort, which is the whole idea behind PechaKucha, I think.” Thankfully, David no longer has to run the show alone. “I now have a growing team of incredibly motivated and talented individuals who believe in PechaKucha’s mission.”

A variety of topics were presented at the first and second PechaKucha Nights, both of which took place in downtown Roanoke. Presenters ranged from Erica Mason of Hired Guns discussing “20 Steps to Creative Success” to 13-year-old Jacob Wynn excitedly explaining the rules and terrain of Christiansburg’s Wolf’s Ridge Paintball. In fact, the diversity in subject matter is what makes each PKN so great. “Good PechaKucha presentations are the ones that uncover the unexpected, unexpected talent, unexpected ideas,” the website reads. “Some PechaKuchas tell great stories about a project or a trip. Some are incredibly personal, some are incredibly funny, but all are very different making each PechaKucha Night like ‘a box of chocolates’.”

David’s mission for the Southwest Virginia chapter of PK is clear: “I want PechaKucha to become the first thing people think of when it comes to where to find out what incredible things people are doing and things happening in our area. PechaKucha belongs to each town and city in SWVA, each presenter past present or future, every sponsor, every person who attends, and people who don’t know about it yet. If people take ownership for PechaKucha, in turn I hope they will take ownership of the community they live in and its neighboring communities. Ownership is how communities grow and flourish.”

PechaKucha Night #3 is tentatively set for Wednesday, July 18 and will take place in Blacksburg or Christiansburg. Visit pechakucharoanoke.blogspot.com to keep up with the local chapter and to learn details as they become available. PKSWVA can also be found on Facebook. Visit www.pecha-kucha.org/ to learn more about PechaKucha.

(This article was originally published in the June issue of VIA Noke Magazine)

Featured Artist: Toobz

by Chelsea Brandt & Emily Sibitzky

(This article was originally published in the June issue of VIA Noke Magazine.)

Upon returning to the Roanoke area after leaving a skateboarding career behind in California, Toobz Noel was eager to find his niche without succubming to a traditional nine-to-five lifestyle. Influenced by breakdancing and hip hop culture from the West Coast, he easily gravitated towards graffiti and other forms of visual art. As his talents evolved Toobz discovered the fine artist within himself and began honing in on the psychological aspects of his work. We were excited to meet with Toobz and hear his story, learn about his process, and find out what influences his pieces. 

VIA: Tell us how you got started in the arts. What led you to where you are today? 

TOOBZ: I started skateboarding in 1988 and thought it was something I was going to do forever. My family wasn’t too supportive, so I ended up doing a lot of it myself. I decided it wasn’t exactly what I thought it was after I was sponsored and moved out to California. There was no future to it; I was trying to get a grip on where it was going. I didn’t think that art was something I was going to do. About 6-7 years ago was when I started doing it seriously. I understood the process by trial and error, just by watching and deciphering other peoples’ work.

Juggling a family and this lifestyle I’m trying to achieve has been really hard. But all of a sudden I got laid off a few months ago, which has been the best thing. All of a sudden I had a guy contact me who just told me, “I’m going to manage you.” So now I’m working on the Beastie Boys album, I’m working on a Chung King album. Just this year I’ve had around 12 interviews. I’ve even had people from Germany interview me. How do people know me and I don’t know them?

VIA: What is it like working with graffiti as your primary style of painting?

TOOBZ: The street art thing is really huge right now, more so than graffiti, but graffiti has been around since the beginning of man. People have been writing on cave walls for thousands of years but it’s just now getting accepted, which is weird. All of a sudden it’s “really cool,” but that’s a good thing for me. Let’s bring the art out of the galleries and out onto the streets where the people are. It’s not like we want to deface and vandalize. A wall to me is more of a disruption to what we see; it’s such a barrier. How many times do you sit and look at a mural and say, “Gosh, I can’t wait to get around this.” You want to just sit there, stare at it, and absorb it. So instead, when a wall is blank, all you have on your mind is to get around it, to go around the corner. [People] look at vandalism as you writing on something. Well, what about the vandalism of tearing up nature and putting a building there? I mean, what is more detrimental to nature than tearing it up and putting something man-made there? A square building that puts pollution into the air to make profit, that’s vandalism to me. Throwing oil into the ocean, that’s vandalism. Who goes to jail for that? But if you tag something you’ll go to jail. It’s crazy. I don’t get that part.

For right now, art is finding a new wave and evolution, especially with the whole street art thing because people are collaborating more. What’s sad is that it started here [the East Coast], New York, the whole hip hop culture, and then it went out to the West Coast. But now it’s coming back and it’s sort of like we’re late bloomers on it. How can it start and then just diminish? But things change and maybe it had to leave to start fresh and get new influence from them.

VIA: Tell us more about your process. What inspires your work?

TOOBZ: My father had a calcium deficiency when he was born; he had a lack of calcium in his face. They took several of his ribs out and they reconstructed his face. So I’ve grown up looking at distortion my whole life and it’s something I incorporate into my paintings constantly. I guess it’s something I feel comfortable with and has to do with him being my father, with feeling safe. Slanting, obscuring, and distorting images are one of my favorite things to do. I love to stretch and pull and I do this without Photoshop; I just look at a face and I can pull it down and stretch it in my mind.

I take what we see as “perfect people” and do that to them because it is still beautiful in a sense, to me; a “beautiful decay” type of thing. I just find beauty in the grotesque sometimes, or what people see as grotesque, but I don’t see it that way. I have a somewhat photographic memory. I’ll look at something and study it and imagine how I could distort it. Then I’ll take this ear that I’ve been studying and incorporate it into something else and it just works. I don’t know why. I guess because we’re all pretty much connected. And I just realized that I do this, in relation to my father, about four months ago. Everything I do is very psychological because I don’t know any other way to do it. I just find that I can convey my messages like that. I’m a perfectionist, but I’m a sloppy perfectionist. I think that’s one reason I do the distortions because there’s no one true way of doing it; as long as everything looks clean it doesn’t have to be in proportion. 

VIA: How has your work evolved since you first started painting?

TOOBZ: I’m just a graffiti artist who has turned into more of a fine artist with a spray can, and I find that it is more appealing to the route that I’m trying to go. I used to do letters and silly characters but when I started getting more into realism I really enjoyed doing that kind of work, especially with the distortion and seeing that come alive. I like to let my work evolve when I’m creating it. I’m doing some pieces right now with charcoal and I’ve invented certain tools, like makeshift brushes, that give a certain effect. Happy accidents happen and the work starts to just grow out of that wrinkle and I decide it’s just going to be more organic. Even if I have a reference my work grows into something. I mean, think about life, what’s exact about that? I don’t find things exciting that already exist. I don’t like it when people do portraits of a photograph that look just like the photograph. That’s very skilled, yes, but where is that one percent of you?

VIA: Do you always work with spray paint or do you incorporate other mediums into your work?

TOOBZ: There are certain mediums that take the physical effort of doing things instead of taking a picture of something, blowing it up big and pasting it on a wall. That is a form of communication, which is just fine, but say somebody grows up learning all of these different instruments, becomes a really good musician and then someone just sits down in front of a computer, with a machine, composes a bunch of music, and makes millions out of it. You know, there’s a difference to that. It’s the blood, sweat, and tears versus the overnight success.

I have been experimenting with different mediums. Right now I’m working with charcoal. I used to not like getting messy but now I don’t mind my fingers getting involved and making it organic. Being a part of the paper, feeling and touching it, the face feels much more real and I feel like I’m even more of a part of it with my oils and my fingers as a part of it. It’s really cool.

There are different types of paints that I use. There are a ton of different graffiti companies right now making different spray paints. I buy it from Barcelona, Italy, Germany, and Canada. They all make top-quality paints for graffiti artists. People think, “oh, just go to Wal-Mart, buy some [spray paint],” but it’s like every other artist; they like their Winsor and Newton or Grumbacher types of paints, and now graffiti has its own line of paints with an array of colors. It’s incredible, you just get to go nuts over it.

VIA: How do you choose your color palette?

TOOBZ: I’m colorblind; I have a problem with secondary and tertiary colors. Primary colors I can see, like a true blue or yellow, but if it’s mauve, grey, tan, or lime... in-between colors like that are hard to see. So I’ll pull a picture into Photoshop, put it in black and white, and then look at the shades because it’s so much easier for me to identify with the shades when I can see the contrasts. I can’t see hard contrasts unless it’s in black and white. So then I just use colors that are the same tone as the dark parts of the face and I use the same colors of the same tone as the lightest part. I’m using multiple colors but I don’t even know what they are; as long as I see that they’re close to that scale that’s how I come up with my variations of colors.

VIA: Do you usually have any specific goals in mind when you start a new piece?

TOOBZ: My main goal is just to paint. There are so many different people with different tastes in all walks of life. Why narrow it down and make them think one way? It’s so much more about me and the subject matter that I’ve chose. I have much more of a connection with the subject matter; it really is exciting. It’s like meeting a new person, especially when you create it. And you really get to know this person, because you created them, and for that one little moment you’re almost like God, because you created this for people to see. There is that one percent of me that is put into the process, the heart, and the image itself. The color choice, perspective, and the balance of everything… that is me.