Vignette: Brennen Cabrera

“Who Can Know?” by Brennen Cabrera, Mixed Media; Mixed Media; Oil, Acrylic, Soft Pastel, Charcoal, and Textile on Canvas, 14x11in, 2018, $175

With a vibrant, graphic-novel sensibility, Brennen Cabrera’s paintings spill out towards the viewer with a confrontational force. Yet the imagery is so raw and confessional that it also feels as if we have been invited into an extremely private and privileged world.

“I am not afraid of what I express visually, explains Cabrera. “Art mostly is my voice for things I find difficult to express verbally and sometimes physically. My work mainly focuses on life, emotions, and dreams I experience as an individual with high functioning autism. My goals for many of my brutish, surreal, and provocative paintings are to spread emotional and mental health awareness, especially in people with autism and developmental disabilities. However I do believe anyone can associate with my work. I also want to inspire other artists to be bold and more personal.”

Cabrera is fearless in exposing his inner demons, and the discipline in his draughtsmenship struggles against the spontaneity that energizes the compositions. While there is a sense that the artist has given unfiltered expression to his inner self, there is also a wealth of rationality and logic in the visual relationships.

If anything, Cabrera is even more frank in the way he writes about his work. He wears his heart unabashedly on his sleeve: “Disquietude” is the breakthrough piece of my “Psychology Series.” This one sparked the inspiration to continue my emotional journey. During a strong anxiety attack, I tore a sheet of canvas off my roll, stuck it to the wall and violently smeared acrylic paint all over the raw surface. As I stood back to look at the piece I could see the shape of a face so I decided to paint a face. Then next thing I think of adding, a nude man from behind, pants around the ankles and shirt taken off. I at the time of this attack I was unhappy with my body and I was dealing a lot with sexuality and desperation.”

There is also a common use of literary references happening. “Who Can Know?” is inspired by the choral piece written by Ēriks Ešenvalds and based off the poem “Only In Sleep” by Sarah Teasdale, and
”Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” is, of course, conjures the famous poem written by poet and Cabrera’s great cousin Dylan Thomas.

Currently, Cabrera’s work is exhibited alongside Herb Bradshaw, Lynn Dunbar, Claudia Hammer, Gibbs Rounsavall, and Frank Weisberg in Art in City Hall, a yearlong group exhibition that runs till August 2019.

2017 - StudioWorks, “BAFOL Arts Showcase” Louisville, KY. USA.

2017 - StudioWorks “Connecting Community Through Creativity” Louisville, KY. USA.

Hometown: Louisville, Kentucky
Education: High School Diploma from Waggener Traditional High School (Class of 2015)
Instagram: brennencabreraart

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”Disquietitude” by Brennen Cabrera, Mixed Media; Oil, Acrylic, Charcoal, and Textile on Raw Canvas, 56x36in, 2018, $1000

“Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” by Brennen Cabrera, Acrylic on Canvas, 20x16in, 2019, $250

“As the Ball Drops” by Brennen Cabrera, Mixed Media; Oil, Acrylic, and Soft Pastel on Canvas, 60x75in, 2019, $2000

“Nightlife” by Brennen Cabrera, Mixed Media; Oil, Acrylic, Soft Pastel, Wrapper, and Shirt Scraps on Canvas, 14x11in, 2018, $175

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Written by Keith Waits. Entire contents copyright © 2018 Louisville Visual Art. All rights reserved. In addition to his work at the LVA, Keith is also the Managing Editor of a website, Arts-Louisville.com, which covers local visual arts, theatre, and music in Louisville.

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Feature: John Brooks

“An Abyss Of Thighs” by John Brooks, 37.5x33.5in, Oil on canvas, 2019, $3800

John Brooks has work all over Louisville right now. He is a part of the Imagined Monuments exhibit at Metro Hall, he is showing with Letitia Quesenberry at O Gallery, and some of his paintings from a just closed show at Moremen Gallery will remain on view in a space adjacent to the main gallery (he’ll be showing there again this summer). On top of all of that, his Quappi Projects exhibition initiative, in which he shows other artist’s work in his studio in the Portland neighborhood, is going strong in its second year. He is especially articulate about the foundations of his practice and the imagery he creates, so we will let his most recent Artist’s Statements speak for themselves:

“I consider myself foremost an oil painter. This new and developing body of work represents the first time I have integrated two other areas of my creative practice - collage making and poetry - with my painting practice. This solution evolved out of what was primarily a crisis of composition: after nearly a decade of almost exclusively creating expressive faces, my painting practice had reached a standstill. I did not see a way forward until it occurred to me to utilize my collages - during the making of which I do not suffer from compositional frustrations - to help facilitate composition in my painting. Through this change in method and approach, I feel unbounded. The addition of poetic text into my painting has also made my work more expansive and allows for a more comprehensive representation of my artistic conceptions. In the past, I have mostly resisted incorporating text into my visual work out of a fear that it could be too leading, but as a person who writes constantly in my head as I move throughout the day, the appeal of joining my poetry practice and my painting practice was undeniable. The way in which I have incorporated text into these paintings provides a narrow window into an idea or feeling but bewilders more than illuminates.”

“Fizz Of Hornets (Betty)” by John Brooks, 42x56in, Oil on canvas, 2018, $3800

“For the last decade, my work has explored themes of identity, memory, death, and place, and has been centered around questions of contemplation, the expression of emotion, the transformative power and the emotional resonance of particular experiences and what Max Beckmann described as “the deepest feeling about the mystery of being.” These paintings are a continuation of those notions. Something seems amiss in the zeitgeist; a mood of uncertainty and disquiet has seemingly overtaken the world. We find these moments before in history: in 1929’s Buchmandel, Stefan Zweig wrote: “Something had gone irrecoverably wrong; he was broken; the blood-red comet of the war had burst into the remote, calm atmosphere of his bookish world.” Are we living on the cusp of such an era or has it already begun? Collage is the perfect metaphorical representation of the disjointedness of contemporary life, of this exact moment in the twenty-first century. We are at once both so interconnected and so siloed; we are so fortunate and so starved; we are so inundated with knowledge and information that we ignore it in order to remain ignorant; our societies are unimaginably diverse and complex yet we fear the stranger, the other. “

“In most of these works, I have chosen to leave expanses of canvas unpainted. This is both an aesthetic choice but also a reference to the paintings’ relationship to poetry. Good poetry says the most it can with as few words as necessary; the impact of one correct word far outweighs the impact of several incorrect words. What a poet leaves out is as important as what he or she includes. Rich and luscious, oil paint has inherently excessive qualities; many colors are made from amalgams of precious minerals and metals, and others are made from earth pigments and charred animal bones. Throughout the process of making this series, I became entranced with the challenge of working with materials that dared me to be excessive while trying to employ the restraint of a poet’s eye. In that sense, these paintings are an exercise in spareness.“

“While these works contain some personal references, experiences and particular depictions of extant LBGTQIA+ life, their objective is ultimately not concerned with the specific; rather they are meant to evoke tantalizingly unreachable atmospheres and to engage with nebulous answers to queries about the search for and ambiguity of meaning and the powerful desire for connection and sense of belonging; they approach an attempt to make sense of the constant disparate noises, voices, and directives which contemporary life seems to exist amidst.”

“Stinson” by John Brooks, 8x10in, Digital photograph, 2018, $250 (edition of 5)

Brooks offers separate thoughts on his photographs:

“I consider myself foremost an oil painter, and it is in my painting where these fundamental themes are most  rigorously probed, but my creative practice encompasses work in a variety of other media including collage, sculpture, poetry, and photography. While painting mostly happens only in long, designated sessions, I live with and work with poetry and photography on a daily basis. I consider them to be essential to my work as an artist.”

”These works were taken with my iPhone 8 Plus and represent the first time I have exhibited photography. Locations include Louisville, Miami, the San Francisco Bay area, New York City, the Hamptons, Athens and other parts of Greece. Even as a writer, I think visually. I see in images; I look in frames. Before the proliferation of mobile phones and the vast improvements made in their camera lenses, I often carried around a Nikon 35mm camera, and later a Leica X1. In the last several years I have become inseparable from my iPhone - less so for internet access than for wanting to have the camera with me at all times. In case a bird comes; in case the light moves. It isn’t documentation of occurrences that I am compelled to capture, but rather what I feel, or see, or what I think I almost see. Permeated with an atmosphere of loss and longing, or what the Germans describe as Sehnsucht, these meditative and emotionally resonant images do not posture a sense of knowing, but rather disclose themselves as unknowing, even unknowable. Joy is present, too, and praise for the ephemeral delicateness of existence. In thinking about this joint exhibition with Letitia Quesenberry, she and I came to understand that what binds these two bodies of work together is the subtle tension between the promise of an attainable understanding and the elusiveness of the answer. There is never any arrival; understanding is just out of reach, tantalizingly beyond what is within grasp. These non-arrivals are, of course, what compels us to revisit works of art time and time again.”

“Statement of Other History” by John Brooks, 72x96in, Oil on canvas, $2200.00

Jim Zimmer / Often the Content is Impenetrable is at Quappi projects through March 3.

Non-Arrivals, with Letitia Quesenberry at O Art, 1000 Swan Street, runs through March 9.

“Statement of Other History” is a part of Imagined Monuments, an LVA exhibit for Metro Hall, 527 West Jefferson Street, runs through July 12.

Hometown: Frankfort, Kentucky
Education: BA in Political Science, Minor in English literature from College of Charleston, SC 2000; continuing education at Central St Martins, Hampstead School of Art, Camden Art Centre, London, England 2006-2009
Website: johnedwardbrooks.com
Instagram: narcissusandgoldmund

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“Wind Is Wild Now”by John Brooks, 42x56in, Oil on canvas, 2018, $3800

“Mother(Darrell)” by John Brooks, 8x10in, Digital photograph, 2018, $250 (edition of 5)

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Written by Keith Waits. Entire contents copyright © 2018 Louisville Visual Art. All rights reserved. In addition to his work at the LVA, Keith is also the Managing Editor of a website, Arts-Louisville.com, which covers local visual arts, theatre, and music in Louisville.

Are you interested in being on Artebella? Click here to learn more.

Vignette: Sandra Charles

“Living Monument, Angela Hollingsworth” by Sandra Charles, Oil on canvas, 48x60in, 2019, $4750

What makes a person royalty? Perhaps it is when they are seen in a regal aspect. Angela Hollingsworth would likely reject such a lofty position, yet Sandra Charles’ portrait of her for the Imagined Monuments exhibit places her in the same attitude that the artist has previously assigned to her series of African Queens. Hollingsworth’s humility is not absent, but it is clothed in rich fabrics and colors that connote a woman in a position of power and respect honestly earned achieved through accomplishment. Imagined Monuments, a Louisville Visual Art exhibit for Louisville’s Metro Hall, runs through July 12, 2019

“My work celebrates the self-esteem of African American women through interpretative portraiture,” Charles explains in her artist’s statement. “Each painting focuses on the expressions that represent our history and the expectations of the future. I look behind the facade of social perceptions that weighs down each of us. My work attempts to capture the removal of this hegemonic veil that covers the struggle between self and the perceived social order. It acknowledges this internal struggle as it fades away from the stereotypical norm towards a truer self. Moving away from traditional portraits, my body of work mixes this history and self together with color and stances that project an attitude of defiance. The facial expression of each woman contains the history of her progress and is a personal statement that captures the confidence of self.” 

“Cynthia as Queen of Ethopia” by Sandra Charles, Oil on canvas, 48x60in 2016, NFS

Charles will be featured with two other notable African American women artists in The Art of Elmer Lucille Allen, Sandra Charles and Barbara Tyson Mosley, which will be on display at The Carnegie Art Center For Art and History in New Albany Indiana February 22 through April 20, 2019. It will showcase Charles’ vision of contemporary women who are African Queens walking amongst us, women changing the world through the hard work of social activism and public service. Their leadership is built brick-by-brick, step-by-step, against the fusillade of slings and arrows that are the daily experience in a country divided against itself.

Charles came to her painting career later in life, but since earning her BFA in 2015, she has rapidly gained a high profile in the Louisville art community, selected to be a member of the first cohort of Hadley Creatives (Community Foundation of Louisville) in 2017, granted a solo exhibit at Wayside Expressions Gallery n 2017, at Art Sanctuary for the Kentucky Foundation Of Women’s Summer Residency Exhibit in 2018, and having two paintings chosen for permanent installation in the newly renovated Kentucky International Convention Center. 

Other recognition:

2017 Mellon-Oberst Family Award, 23rd Annual African American Exhibition, Louisville, KY
2016 Kentucky Foundation of Women Summer Residency Grant, Louisville, KY

Hometown: Hazard, Kentucky
Education: BFA, Painting, University of Louisville
Website:  www.scharlesart.com
Instagram: sandraspaintings

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”Refections of Us” by Sandra Charles, Oil on canvas, 48x60in, 2018, $4750

“Pam” by Sandra Charles, Oil on canvas, 30x30in, 2018, $2750

“Restrained Dreads” by Sandra Charles, Oil on Canvas, 48x60in, 2015, $2750

“Fourth of July” Sandra Charles, Oil on canvas, 36x48in, 2016, $3750

Written by Keith Waits. Entire contents copyright © 2018 Louisville Visual Art. All rights reserved. In addition to his work at the LVA, Keith is also the Managing Editor of a website, Arts-Louisville.com, which covers local visual arts, theatre, and music in Louisville.

Are you interested in being on Artebella? Click here to learn more.

Vignette: Laurie Fader

“Vestal Virgin and the Truckrat” by Laurie Fader, Oil on canvas, 64x56in, 2018

​For centuries, artists have looked to ancient forms and motifs to develop their skills, and more than a few have brought such iconography into their own contemporary work, with all of the associations of the past tagging along for the ride. So what Laurie Fader has been up to may not be surprising on an academic level, yet her choice of motif and the relationships she builds to current events feels unique.

While a Visiting Scholar at The American Academy in Rome, (funded by Great Meadows Foundation) Fader connected to the history of the pre-Christian Vestal Virgins, six priestesses, representing the daughters of the royal house, who tended the state cult of Vesta, the goddess of the hearth. Their lives as living symbols of the state were extraordinarily privileged, circumscribed, and brutally shortened in the event of impropriety. 

“Vestal Virgin and the Hurricane” by Laurie Fader, Oil on canvas, 64x56in, 2018

Fader writes, "My Vestal Virgin... evolved on large canvases as a kind of heroic figure embarking on odysseys relating to loss of freedom, uncontrollable climate change, and fear. Current events resonate and subliminally determine epic journeys, such as traveling with immigrants across a desert in a ‘rat truck’, or racing through a hurricane. A previously lighter, slightly humorous and self-effacing painting of a crying child turned darker when it was reported that children were being irreparably separated from their parents at the Mexican/US border.”

As the crisis on the United States/Mexico border escalates, and the American character struggles with its own inherent sense of privilege, Fader’s use of the Vestal Virgins casts the dialogue in an oblique framework that allows a more removed perspective. Is such privilege earned or assumed? 

Laurie Fader has been the recipient of many honors and awards, including a Pollock-Krasner Award, an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Emergency Assistance Grant, and the Helen W. Winternitz Award for excellence in painting from Yale University. She has attended residencies in Italy, France, Haiti, Hungary, and Italy. Fader lived in New York City for 25 years where she taught at Pratt Institute, then lived in Baltimore where she taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She came to Louisville in 2011 to launch The Kentucky School of Art (now KyCAD), where she was Chair of Academic Affairs and Associate Professor. She is now a full-time practicing artist.

Garner Narrative welcomes Laurie Fader for her first solo show with the gallery, Odysseys. It runs December 7 through January 11, 2019 with an opening reception Friday December 7, 6 - 9 pm, and a closing reception Friday January 4, 6 - 9 pm.

Hometown: Louisville, Kentucky
Education: BS, Honors, New York University, NYC; MFA, Painting, Yale School of Art.
Website: https://www.lauriefader.com/

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“Cry Baby” by Laurie Fader, Oil on canvas, 48x52in, 2018

“Vestal Virgin” by Laurie Fader, Mixed media on inkjet, 9x7in, 2018

“Handmaid’s Story” by Laurie Fader, Mixed media on inkjet, 12x13in, 2018

Written by Keith Waits. Entire contents copyright © 2018 Louisville Visual Art. All rights reserved. In addition to his work at the LVA, Keith is also the Managing Editor of a website, Arts-Louisville.com, which covers local visual arts, theatre, and music in Louisville.

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Vignette: Patricia Standard

“Explosive Volcano” by Patricia Standard, Acrylic on canvas, 11x14in, $45.00

“Rolling River” by Patricia Standard, Acrylic on canvas, 11x14in, $45.00

How an artist applies medium to a given substrate has grown over time to a state of freedom that allows virtually any approach – anything goes. Action Painting is, in fact, a rather old-fashioned method, “…a technique and style of abstract painting in which paint is randomly splashed, thrown, or poured on the canvas. It was made famous by Jackson Pollock, and formed part of the more general movement of abstract expressionism.”

Patricia Standard pours acrylic paint onto her canvas surfaces, and the control comes from color choice and a careful, tenuous manipulation of the canvas. It is a particularly intuitive process, and we can imagine no small amount of risk in the unexpected nature of this approach. Perhaps more importantly for Standard, there is a sense of discovery: “I never go into the studio with a plan, but respond to the spontaneous interaction with the colors.” 

“As I use acrylic paint on canvas, wood, or glass, I can create unplanned and fascinating colors on different material.” The naïve aspect of her practice can be received as a cross between a folk art aesthetic and a reconnection to the pure joy of making art as a child, before all of the roadblocks to creativity collectively known as adulthood get in the way.

Hometown: Louisville, Kentucky
Education: Associate in Fashion Design from Academy of Arts University working towards BFA
Instagram: standardpatricia

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“Roaring River” by Patricia Standard, Acrylic on canvas, 14x18in, $55.00

“Creeping Willow” by Patricia Standard, Acrylic on canvas, 8x10in, $35.00

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Written by Keith Waits. Entire contents copyright © 2018 Louisville Visual Art. All rights reserved. In addition to his work at the LVA, Keith is also the Managing Editor of a website, Arts-Louisville.com, which covers local visual arts, theatre, and music in Louisville.

 Are you interested in being on Artebella? Click here to learn more.