Featured Artist: Roland Orépük

Featured artist: Roland Orépük

Intro

My name is Roland Orépük. I am currently living and working in St. Martin d'Heres near Grenoble in France. I was born to a Polish father and German mother on July 23, 1950 in Briançon, France. Briancon is 63 km away from Les Deux Alpes, and at an altitude of 1350 meters, is the highest city in Europe.

Shortly after primary school, I found work as a metal framer. It was intensively hard physical work in the construction sector. I enrolled in evening courses to become a draftsman. Four years later, I left the building to work as a designer in a engineering, consulting and construction firm. During that period, I had the privilege to study printmaking with Professor François Estebe at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) of Grenoble as a free student for two years. Professor Estebe is a great artist, he etched in a very classic way of Pieter Brueghel. I learned much from him.

I soon became bored with the drafting work, and pursued a new career as a cartoonist. I produced cartoon drawings for various weekly magazines, such as Open City, Hebdo, Ink Free Promotion, and Graphic Arts Liege in the 1970's. Again boredom took over and I found myself without the passion for cartooning. I realized that I needed a new challenge and life goals. I headed to the visual arts. After the shock of discovering artist Malevich, I finally knew what I wanted to do with my creativity. Making art for art sake, as theorized by Ad Reinhardt: “Art is Art. Everything else is everything else.”

From the 1980's, I started to increase the exposure of my creative outputs. I challenged myself to be highly productive artistically while working as a freelance graphic designer to support my family, my wife and two children. Today, I continue to tirelessly make art. The journey was long, but I finally knew what I was truly passionate about, and what I should be doing in life.


My Art

Roland Orépük in his workshop.

I have been using yellow, white and black in a minimal, abstract and geometric fashion in my work since 2000. As the work series began evolving, I use yellow and white exclusively in my work beginning in 2004.

My friend

Mon atelier, my workshop

Mon atelier, my workshop

My influences are Malevich, the French group Supports/Surfaces, the Italian Arte Povera, and of course Minimalism. But my concept of reductive is more European than American.

Roland Orépük, Frame Cut #1, Acrylic on canvas glued
on carved wood frame, 80x 80 cm, 2010

Below are images and translated texts about my work series ‘Monochrome inscrit’ in French, or 'Engraved Monochrome' in English. These texts resonate deeply in me, so I have had them translated into English to share with your English-speaking readers. The original French texts can be found on my website. Here we go:

Roland Orépük, Engraved Monochrome, Acrylic on canvas, 3x(40x80x4cm),2005-2006

Roland Orépük, Engraved Monochrome, Acrylic on canvas, 3x(40x80x4cm),2005-2006

Roland Orépük, Engraved Monochrome, Acrylic on canvas, 3x(40x80x4cm),2005-2006

Roland Orépük, Engraved Monochrome, Acrylic on canvas, 3x(40x80x4cm),2005-2006

Roland Orépük, Engraved Monochrome, Acrylic on canvas, 3x(40x80x4cm),2005-2006

Engraved monochrome:

The set of yellow triptychs presented here shows moments of painting.

Silent dialogue and fusion of the white of the canvas with the white of the wall, foreground of whites and yellow, moments and details which belong to a much larger ensemble.

The forms of the yellow monochrome are no longer under tension as the yellow and black geometric figures were at the exhibition in Portugal.

The yellow monochrome seeks balance and harmony with the white wall, the canvas and the surrounding space. The combination: background, outline, figure, white wall and "yellow paintings" create confusion.

What the artist calls "engraved monochrome" is no longer on the canvas and appears striking in a place where the wall becomes the background and the medium of the painting.

Original text (French): Claude Longo
Translation: Roberto Conte

Roland Orépük, Construction, Acrylic on canvas, frame and
attached greenhouses, 100 x 100 cm, 2006

Roland Orépük, Cut Painting Yellow anger #5, Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 30 x 4 cm, 2010

Roland Orépük, Cross # 3, Acrylic on canvas, 50 x 50 cm, May, 2010

The below are two more translated texts about my work that I would like to share with your readers. Again, the original French texts can be found on my website.

What is to be done?

Art is submerged in a society which is going adrift.
Is it thus condemned to theorizing on the insignificant,
to magnifying some Mickey Mouse or Pokémon desultory icons?
For they are but glib images that generate nothing – no movement, no rebellion, no dream.
To assert that something exists, shall we show its emptiness or give it meaning?

Roland Orépük has made his choice.
Yet has he really made one? Simplicity has imposed itself.
Just a line, a surface. Balance, unbalance. Spatial landmarks.
Facing this, the observer must find himself, must exist.
Yellow, white – colour or light?
The yellow is brighter than the white of the wall; the white of the panel is brighter than the yellow.

The wall has received a trace.
While it was being looked at – for one minute or for a few days.
Then it will recover its silence.
No illusory meanings, no deceptive appearances in this work.
Just the essentials: real sense. A direction.

We are not asked to linger on our wistful past nor to project ourselves into a hypothetical future.
Before us is the essential shape and the vibration of light – or a transient ray of sunlight?
Just the present moment. Just life.

Original text (French): Charles Payan
Translation Monique Tavano

Roland Orépük, Yellow Square, Acrylic on canvas, 50 x 50 cm, 2010

The weather was nice when I contemplated the sky!
But I smelled myself badly at ease with the thought of the clouds.
The weather was nice when I contemplated the large ocean!
But I smelled myself badly at ease with the thought of the waves.

G.C.C.Chang, American poet
“The Hundred Thousand Song of Milarepa”

Roland Orépük, Und, Acrylic on canvas and Armchair, 2 x 40 x 40 cm, 2008

Activities and contact

I am a member of the New Realities in Paris since 1989. I curate exhibitions in the Grenoble area, and I have shown my work at Factory49 in Sydney, Australia; CCNOA in Brussels, Belgium, and ParisCONCRET in Paris, France.

2nd painting from Right: Roland Orépük's Yellow Painting shows in Realités Nouvelles 201O - Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris, 3-11April, 2010.

Roland Orépük's installation Outside Wall Work, at Factory49 in Sydney, Australia, 2008

Your readers are welcome to email me at orepuk@wanadoo.fr or call +33 (0)6 61 70 11 54

Roland Orépük
1, allée Pablo Picasso
38400 Saint Martin d'Hères
France

Roland Orépük, Frame Cut #3, Acrylic on wood, 80 x 68 cm, June 2010

My websites:

• Orepuk.odexpo.com
• Orepuk.blogg.org

Roland installing Tatlin's Tower at Non Objectif Sud in Tulette, France.

Roland Orépük, Tatlin's Tower, wood pallets, acrylic cartons, aluminum plates, screws and attached greenhouses, 240 x 240 cm, July 2010.

I also have videos made of my artwork posted on YouTube.

......................................................................................................
Image Credit: All images courtesy of Roland Orépük

Featured Artist: Dozier Bell

...............................................................................................

Would you please introduce yourself to our readers that might not be familiar with you and your work?

Featured artist, Dozier Bell

My name is Dozier Bell. I'm from Maine - my family has been here for seven generations, and though I've lived elsewhere, I've always ended up back here. The basis of a lot of my imagery comes, I think, from having grown up in sparsely inhabited spaces that seemed vast to a small child, and alive with non-human actors.

I majored in art at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, got my MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1986, and spent the summer of 1985 at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. I was a philosophy major at Smith until I realized that visual representation of some of the concepts I was studying could make them more accessible and interesting. The idea of illustrating philosophy went by the board pretty early on when I saw that the great advantage of visual art is its ability to circumvent linear thought and bring up material from other levels.

I've been fortunate in having my work support me for most of my career. I've done a little teaching and have painted majolica pottery for another artist's business, which was fun, but anything that's not painting takes me off course - it's hard to manage, because my ego is always happy to have an excuse not to have to do my own work.



Please tell us a bit about your work in general. What media do you work in? What are the inspirations behind the creation of your work series? What is the specific message you strive to convey to your viewers? Could you discuss a bit your creative process?


I work mainly in acrylics and charcoal, though I've done quite a bit of photography in the past and am planning to do more in the near future. At one point I did a series of photomontages to help me understand the source of my imagery, and I'm at a point now where I feel the need to revisit that.

Dozier Bell, Navigation, 24" x 36", silver prints with oil, 1994. Photo: Melville McLean

Dozier Bell, Tide, 24" x 36", silver prints with oil, 1994. Photo: Melville McLean

The inspiration behind the work has always been the same: the challenge of translating and externalizing an interior mental environment. Starting with abstract shapes and areas of color, and eventually incorporating information from memory and observation as I see things emerge, I'm able to develop a sense of that environment in ways that allow me to discover new things within it. It's a slow process - I spend many months to as much as a few years on a single painting, though I work on many pieces at once.

Dozier Bell, Ring, 88" x 82", acrylic on linen, 2004. Photo: Dozier Bell

Dozier Bell, Starfield 5, 62" x 66", acrylic on linen, 2006. Photo: Melville McLean

I don't strive to convey a particular message to the viewer - I'm looking for the message myself, and don't know what it is until I've had a chance to look at the finished work for a while. Even then it's seldom truly clear...or it may have implications I'd rather not go into. Writing about and/or trying to interpret the work has never been all that helpful to me.

Dozier Bell, Field, 3.75" x 4.5", charcoal on Mylar, 2007. Photo: Tom Arter

That said, many things that interest me undoubtedly have a place somewhere on the continuum between the images in the paintings and the initial, less accessible impetus for making them: the World Wars and the environments they created; the correlates between remote sensing technologies developed for warfare and spiritual/psychological life; concepts of divinity; animal consciousness; the persistence of the past in the present; the links between environment and psyche. None of those things are what the paintings are about, but they do serve at times as armatures for the less accessible parts of the process.

Dozier Bell,Memory series:Morning city, 5x6"acrylic on panel, 2008.Photo:Tom Arter

Dozier Bell, Memory: Burg, 5" x 6", acrylic on panel, 2008. Photo: Tom Arter

Dozier Bell, River, 3.5" x 3.75", charcoal on Mylar, 2008. Photo: Tom Arter

Dozier Bell, Haze, 22" x 28", acrylic on linen, 2008. Photo: Tom Arter

Dozier Bell, Swells, 3.5" x 4.25", charcoal on Mylar, 2008. Photo: Tom Arter

In the past year, I've begun to work with more personal imagery that has to do with the persistence of the past in the present, and with German Romantic literature and its idea of a sentient universe. It seems very relevant to climate change.

Dozier Bell, 16:00, 15" x 16", acrylic on panel, 2009. Photo: Tom Arter

Dozier Bell, Confluence, 24" x 50", acrylic on linen, 2010. Photo: Tom Arter

The castles are a new image that I'm still trying to make sense of. They are obviously connected to the German Romantic influence, but also to the idea, expressed so well in Poe's The Masque of the Red Death, that there is a way to protect oneself from the common fate. It's a tough image to use because it's so iconic, but it's what's coming up right now.

Dozier Bell, Citadel, 3.5" x 3.75", charcoal on Mylar, 2010. Photo: Dozier Bell

Dozier Bell, Harbor city, 3.5" x 4.5", charcoal on Mylar, 2010. Photo: Dozier Bell

Are you currently showing your work? Are you planning any exhibitions of your work in the near future?


The current show is at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport, Maine, through September 25th. It's titled "Momenta" in recognition of the fact that all the images are pieces of a whole, the sense of which can't be conveyed by any single one. Work in this show spans the last decade.

Installation view: Oculus, 5, by Dozier Bell. Photo: Sand T

Dozier Bell, Oculus, 5, 46" x 44", acrylic on linen, 2010. Photo: Tom Arter

Installation view: Dozier Bell's Momenta exhibition at CMCA. Photo: Sand T

Installation view: Dozier Bell's Momenta exhibition at CMCA. Photo: Sand T

Installation view: Dozier Bell's Momenta exhibition at CMCA. Photo: Sand T

After this, I'll be having a solo show at Aucocisco Gallery in Portland, Maine in October which opens on September 30th; that show will be the most recent work from the CMCA show.

Dozier Bell, Burg, hillside, 3.75" x 4.25", charcoal on Mylar, 2010. Photo: Dozier Bell

And in November, Karen Schiff, Hadi Tabatabai and I will each have one of three galleries at Danese in NYC for a drawing show that will open on November 18th and run through December 23rd.

Dozier Bell, Burg, 3, 9" x 12", acrylic on panel, 2010. Photo: Tom Arter

Would you care to share your experience in approaching galleries about showing your work with our readers?


Painting has been a spiritual discipline first and foremost, one in which I realized early on that I couldn't necessarily "make" any career things happen; all I could do was keep working on a regular schedule and try to get the finished work seen whenever possible. My part was in taking my work and my responsibility to it very seriously; everything else, including contacts with dealers, followed from that, and those contacts never took the same form twice.

Dozier Bell, Circling, 20" x 27", acrylic on linen, 2010. Photo: Tom Arter

I think the most important aspect of dealing with galleries is the understanding that it has to be a cooperative effort - the gallerist needs the artist to understand the exigencies and focus of their particular gallery every bit as much as the artist needs the gallerist to understand her/his situation as an artist. Just finding the "right" gallery is never enough.



Do you offer any art classes? Are you available for commissioned works? Representing gallery if any? Do you have website(s) for interested readers to learn more about your work?

Dozier Bell, Incident, 2" 2.5" x 4.5" charcoal on Mylar, 2010. Photo: Dozier Bell

I don't normally teach and haven't done any commissions, but am always open to ideas. I'm currently represented by Danese Gallery in NYC and Aucocisco Gallery in Portland, Maine. My own website is DozierBell.com



........................................................................................

Featured Artist: Harald Schmitz-Schmelzer

Featured artist, Harald Schmitz-Schmelzer
Photo taken in Cottonwood Pass, Colorado, Summer 2010

Brief intro

My name is Harald Schmitz-Schmelzer. I was born in Duisburg 1953 and now live in Muelheim. Both cities are in Germany, near Duesseldorf and Cologne, two of the most interesting cities concerning arts. I studied at Kunstakademie Duesseldorf, where I received the final degrees called Meisterschüler (Master Student) and Staatsexamen Kunst (Teacher Certificate in Art). I also studied Art History, with a focal point on art of the 20th century.

Looking back on my childhood, I was always painting, drawing, or constructing something. Many of these products looked really chaotic. I started painting “impressionistic” when I was twelve or thirteen years old. By fourteen, I started my “surrealist” phase and so on. When I was twenty or so, I began reflecting on my own way of making art, and stopped to mirror visual reality in my paintings. My first abstract paintings were very large, 2 x 2 meters. This decision was not accompanied by much appreciation by my fellow students at the Kunstakademie, because most of them were influenced by the neo-expressive painters who became famous in Germany and all over the world during that time (1975 – 80). I always stayed true to myself and kept working in a non-figurative, self-referential and sometimes reductive way.

Harald Schmitz-Schmelzer, O.T,
58 x 16 x 21 cm, paint on soft board, 1984

Traveling is very important for me, as I am still living in the same area where I was born. When I was a student I traveled to Asia very often, to countries such as India, Nepal, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Kazachstan and more. Nowadays, I like to travel in the North of America. I appreciate the “wild, wild West”. In the past, I rode many mountain bike trails in the United States, now I prefer fly fishing and rock climbing.



Climbing in France, 2008


Beside my full time job as an artist, I have been teaching art at high school and college for nearly 30 years. The teaching load is very small, that enables me to cope with both professions rather easily. In the 70s and 80s, I co-managed a gallery with a friend. We presented superlative exhibitions that featured Joseph Beuys, Imi Knoebel, Jürgen Partenheimer and others. Unfortunately, we had little economic success in running the gallery and decided to close shop.



On my work

Harald Schmitz-Schmelzer, Hackbrett 31,
48 x 43 x 24 cm, resin on plywood, 2007

Since the time of my studies, I have been interested in exploring the possibilities of color, paint and chromaticity. I experimented with shaped canvas to find a certain “body” for the color and was mesmerized by painting plenty of transparent layers of paint on very large canvasses. This “iteration loop” was a kind of meditation for me.

Harald Schmitz-Schmelzer, Lindgrün und Türkis (dunkel),
69 x 67 x 16 cm, Resin on Plywood, 2009

Later I started to paint on bulky canvas and to cast colored cement to three dimensional shapes. In the early 90s, I found a piano maker who coated some of my paintings with a clear resin. These paintings looked a little bit like Asian lacquer paintings. That was the beginning of my work with resin that I continue to use until today. When I found the right resin to cast the lacquer thicker and thicker, I combined it with earlier ideas of the transparent layers and began to hear the “3-D color striped works” comments about my work.

Harald Schmitz-Schmelzer, HB 42 schwarz, Kirschbaumholz,
Resin on Plywood, 48.5 x 46.5 x 21 cm, 2008

Well, actually there are no stripes in my work at all. Each color is a three dimensional corpus with a certain chromaticity, with a certain shine, transparency and sedimentation. That means the weight of the particles of my paint mixtures is different so they affect the presence of each color. All this allows me to show the qualities of color and paint that could not be seen in traditional materials like oil color.

Harald Schmitz-Schmelzer, diskos Red-Orange,
59 x 20cm, Resin on Plywood, 2009

What is the message I would like to convey to my viewers? What is the message of a sublime landscape? What is the message of Bach’s cello suites? A composition of music has some analogy to my pieces. They need a lot of time for production, they need some time for their reception.

Harald Schmitz-Schmelzer, Green on red,
75 x 7 x 26 cm, Resin on Plywood, 1999

They do not have the simultaneous presence of a classic two dimensional painting, the viewer has to move from one side to the other side of the object to see it all successively. In a lot of aspects the pieces are in between: painting and sculpture, color and surface reflection, control and coincidence. They seem yet to have a certain impression of flavor to some people. Several have told me that they have the feeling that they would like to lick my work.

Harald Schmitz-Schmelzer, Kleines Farbsediment 6/08,
resin on plywood, 35 x20 x11 cm, 2008

Encyclopedia of the possibilities of color… beauty of color…iteration…

but, like Sisyphus with his stone: that is what I have to do!

So I can agree with Picasso saying: “I do not seek…” But I disagree with him, when he continues: “… I find.” The above mentioned quality of individual color is not a fruit of the spur of the moment, but a result of long learning by doing! You can see this obvious fact when you look at monochromatic paintings. Only a few artists achieved this special vibrant quality, many others did not and remain dull.

Harald's artworks on display in his studio.

The hybrid character of my pieces, the ambiguity of the visual presence is something I like to achieve. This cannot be transferred into another communication system like language without loss of the essential.



Happenings


Currently I am showing my work in two group shows. One, at Lausberg Contemporary in Toronto, Canada, while the other is at Galerie von Braunbehrens in Munich, Germany.

Harald Schmitz-Schmelzer, 72 Farben,
94 x 88 x 15.5 cm, Resin on Plywood, 2008

This upcoming October, I will have a solo show at Gallery de Bellefeuille in Montreal, Canada. I will be also showing my work with Robert Schad, a sculptor, at Galerie Jean Greset in Besancon, France from October 14 to November 6, 2010. The opening reception has been scheduled for Thursday, October 14, 2010 from 4:00pm. For more information please visit gallery's website.

New works by Harald Schmitz-Schmelzer
69 x 67 x 15 cm each object, Resin on Plywood, 2010

The Museum Muelheim an der Ruhr in Germany is presenting their permanent collections, where my work is part of the exhibition.

In this photo, Harald Schmitz-Schmelzer with his work created in 1996,
is a permanent collection of Museum Muelheim.

I am represented by the below galleries:

• Galerie von Braunbehrens, München
• Galerie Bernd A. Lausberg, Düsseldorf
• Lausberg Contemporary, Toronto
• Galerie de Bellefeuille, Montréal
• nohn-art consulting, Frankfurt
• arte moderna Ammann, Locarno
• Galerie Proarta, Zürich
  

Contact


Harald Schmitz-Schmelzer in his studio, photo taken in July 2010


Your readers are welcome to contact me at Schmitz-Schmelzer@t-online.de. For further information and to see more images of my work, please visit my website www.schmitz-schmelzer.de

...............................................................................................
Image Credit: All images courtesy of Harald Schmitz-Schmelzer