Steel Art, Committed Heart: The Activism and Art of Karena Massengill

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Karena Massengill is both an artist and art activist. Her brilliant sculptural work in mediums from mild steel to fused glass and painted works is infused with the same kind of committment and rich meaning that she puts into the causes she espouses.

According to the artist, “My inspiration has largely been a desire to inspire other people to become a part of the solution and not be a part of the problem of climate change. When people recognize the power of their own voices to be heard and truly make a difference it is very inspiring to me.” She laughs that “Several years ago, a well-known critic (who will remain nameless) looked at my work and said ‘your work is unique and very special. And I have never seen anything like it! Though with your addressing climate change, it will never sell.'” Clearly that assessment has been incorrect.

Massengill has been an activist since high school. “Air pollution was a big problem from the TeePee burners at the lumber mills in Ukiah, California. A couple of friends and I wrote letters and pressured the city to do something about this problem. It worked. Another girlfriend and I got the dress code at school changed to allow girls to wear pants to school. It is so inspiring to me when people stand up for what is right,” she relates.

Her work and her political passions have both continued to evolve. Referring to her art, she notes that “I always did lots of life drawing in art school, [and I] traveled around South America painting,landscapes and portraits, and was invited into people‘s homes for food,” she recalls.

“Metalsmithing took on a passion for me until I realized the scale was too small. I discovered welding and was able to continue with my love for drawing and painting, and incorporating it within my sculptures,” she says.

Massengill loves to work with metal, and prefers recycled metals. “[I go] to scrapyards and pick up what I find on the street if it works as well. Because I love to paint and work with color. I incorporate that within the sculptures and [what I call accompanying works to many of my sculptures], Echoes. I also work with found materials and juxtapose materials in unorthodox ways, all while seeking to have a conceptual meaning behind it. Sometimes, as I work,very intuitively, I don’t even understand what the work means until I’ve completed it,” she explains.

Thematically her current work reflects her passion concerning climate change. “I work with recycled materials to help eliminate landfill as much as possible. I love to create [by] combining unorthodox materials, things that you would normally not see put together into some manifestation of my current passion.”

Indeed, she has at times included beads, sea shells, and a wide variety of metal scraps in her work.  Her steel working skills are unparalleled, and shape a body of work that is quite unusual.

Welding itself is what drew her to work in this medium. “When I immigrated to Canada after graduating with my BFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia, there was an ad in the paper offering successful applicants to be trained as welder-fitters to work on the pipeline transporting crude oil down from Alaska through Canada and into the U.S. ,” she  relates. “I applied and got the job! I trained along-side convicted felons seeking a better life for themselves. I had to earn their respect along with [honing] my craft. When I worked in traditional metal smithing, I found the scale too confining, so this was a perfect fit for me.”

 

Over the years, her welding skills have enabled her to work on large public commissions in both Canada and the U.S.

While working on the artwork for her public work, Gateway to Downey, in Downey, California, she used the opportunity to celebrate the aeronautical history of Downey, as well as addressing the food and shopping venues in the area. “The overhead cutouts create shadows that promote [the city of] Downey and simultaneously provide a shaded area as was requested by my client for having a meal outside.”

Massengill also created the public art project, “Rosie’s Dog Beach” for the City of Long Beach. She says that this piece “has reminded me of the power possessed by artwork, out in the public eye. It can stimulate conversation and generate ideas, emotional experiences, and even an intangible thought-provoking impact. I captured the joy of dogs playing on the beach and in the ocean,” she tells us.

The artist has been busy recently, with social exhibitions first at the Palos Verdes Arts Center and currently at Diversions Fines Arts Gallery. Asked what’s next, she reveals that she is looking forward to focusing on work in her studio without other distractions.

“I get so excited when an idea hits me and nothing else seems important until I can get into the thick of it! I love to make things, but I also love to feel like what I’m doing has meaning and is potentially important,” she says.

She welcomes other opportunities to show her work and the “stimulation of conversation…When people look at my work there’s an intimacy when they feel something and are moved to express their own experience of it.”

She says that what matters most to her is the reaction of her viewers, when people “see my work either emotionally, intellectually, or viscerally. I love it when they see things that I didn’t know are buried beneath– and it affects the way I see my work from then on,” she shares. She adds that to her,  “One of the most powerful things about abstract art is that it gives people permission and encouragement to explore the work personally as they have their own filters impacting this experience of it.”

Visit Karena’s multifacted and lovely work at Diversions Fine Arts, 1069 N. Aviation Blvd. in Manhattan Beach: open house and curatorial walkthrough 10/24 1-4; artist’s talk and closing reception 11/1; or stop by during regular gallery hours for a visit.

Annie Clavel: Art That Bursts With Texture

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Annie Clavel’s work is a swirling expansion of the visual soul, bursting with texture and triumphant with color. According to the artist, her inspiration is as diverse as her work. Currently, she says “I enjoy following the launch of new telescopes designed to explore the cosmos. There are so many unanswered questions about the true nature of the universe. Perhaps for me, this is a way to put our existence on Earth into perspective amidst the news and scenes that surround us. That’s where some of my inspiration comes from.”
But she also finds inspiration closer to earth, “I am constantly influenced by what I see in my daily life: the California light, the movement of a hummingbird outside my window, or the shouts of a homeless person near the Taco Bell [in my neighborhood.]”
And then there is a fascinating right-brain component. “Mathematics, which I have both studied and taught, plays a significant role in my art and helps me envision abstract worlds.” The depths of the cosmos, indeed.
Clavel began painting over forty years ago, she says, creating figurative watercolor work while still living in France, prior to her move to Callifornia. While still abroad, she “set out to explore abstract atmospheres using acrylics.  Upon arriving in the United States some twenty years ago, I faced several challenges: gaining a better understanding of American culture, defining what I wanted to paint, and building a network.”
As an artist, Clavel more than rose to those challenges. She describes herself as influenced by Dael Patton, an instructor at the Palos Verdes Art Center, which led her to be “truly immersed  in abstraction. I joined various art associations and participated in numerous exhibitions. I also felt that, as the years went by, figurative painting was losing the meaning I had originally attached to it, whereas abstract art was taking on profound significance for me.”
With that change, Clavel also changed her mediums. “For many years, I worked with watercolor on paper. Today, however, my preferred mediums are acrylic on canvas and watercolor on YUPO.  When painting with acrylics, I enjoy mixing fluid paints to create new colors, then applying them in free, layered strokes onto a stretched canvas.”
The artists points out that she “began using watercolor much more intensively after discovering YUPO as a new painting surface. YUPO is a non-absorbent paper that allows water to flow and colors to blend unpredictably. For me, the medium’s fluidity and watercolor’s vast color palette are major assets; they allow me to give free rein to my imagination as I explore abstract worlds and the events associated with them.”
Thematically, with her family living throughout the globe, she is exploring both her Vietnamese and French roots. “I would like to channel my inspiration into the feelings I have about the diversity of my background and the diverse environment I am now immersed in. I would like to develop a series dedicated to my ancestors and my scattered family. I think I will use a softer palette, without bright colors.”
In her current exhibition at Diversions Fine Arts Gallery, she displays an audacious and awesome mix of color, thick layers of paint, pinwheel-perfect small paper sculptures, and dreamy watercolor Rohrschachs.
She will also be participating in an open studio tour October 3rd and 4th from 1 to 5 pm, at 3101 E 2nd Street, #7C, Long Beach, and in an exhibition titled “Right Here, Right Now” on October 10th from 4-7 at Gallery Hellada at 117 Linden Ave also in Long Beach.
Regardless of where you view her lustrous work, Clavel wants her viewers to know that she lets her “instinct and intuition guide” her work in order to “capture parallel moments of time, advancing each work towards a personal resolution. I never sketch before painting. I put my present feelings directly on the surface, hoping that the viewers will find an echo in themselves.”
Clavel’s solo show in Diversions Fine Arts’ Golden Days exhibition runs through October 4th with an artist talk and closing 1-3 on that date. DFA is located at 1069 N. Aviation Blvd. in Manhattan Beach.
– Genie Davis, photos provided by the artist and Davis

Linda Stelling Paints Nature’s Portraits

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Linda Stelling doesn’t paint what she sees: instead she paints what she knows, “from my childhood, from my life. Nature first; the garden, the weather, water, atmosphere, seasonal change, environmental shifts…I absorb it from experiencing it and noticing.”

She describes color as a “physical necessity for me: color is my food.” And she washes that down with a deep perception, she says.
“I’m fascinated by how differently we each see and experience the same thing.”

Stelling’s work is also steeped in memory, dreams, and the subconscious, and she lets her work lead her brush. “I respond to how the painting wants me to go. Inspiration for me can come from anywhere. I think I’m constantly collecting things without realizing I’m doing it at all.”

While the artist began making art at a young age, supported by a family that included those who were artists herself, her art creation has shifted and grown over the years. “Style has alway been difficult to identify from the inside. I’m highly responsive to my surroundings and experiences and these leaves residues which stick to my emotional cavity, affecting my choices…but I don’t think I am always aware of that.”

She notes that change is ineveitable for her, because she is always absorbing her art work. “I can’t remain the same. For me it would be horribly boring.”

Her art has an alchemic energy, whether she is creating landscapes with full moons or blazing suns, calming ocean waves, or bouquets of clouds. She creates abstract, hot pink and orange striations as seemingly effortlessly as she shapes figurative cloud and seascapes and flowers and a wide range of landscapes and emotional scales between the two.

“Place was a big change for me,” she says. Originally living in Wisconsin, coming to Los Angeles was exciting and challenging for her, she notes.  “Sensitivity and experience gave me a different way of seeing. What changed in me is what changed the work. I think what has changed most is not necessarily how I create but how much more life I bring with me when I go to the studio.”

She adds that becoming a mother changed her “internal compass. Time became more real. Time eventually asks us to choose. Wandering has given me material. I’ve taken detours, changed environments, taught, and kept making work. Time is funny thing.”

Stelling works in a wide range of mediums from painting, weaving, and wearable art, to ceramic sculpture, stained glass, and the creations of large scale installations. Her undergraduate degere in ceramic sculpture helped give her “form and dimensionality,” but painting has become her “most immediate language.”

Currently, the artist has a solo exhibition at Diversions Fine Arts in Manhattan Beach,  and a near-future goal in mind, to “develop a two or multi- women show at a large space.”

In the meantime, nature is her manifestor. “[It] is sensory for me. The changing light, a sudden warm current of air that can change all movement. I notice everything…Sound, smell , vibrations, all produce a reaction and a resonance.”

Color is a big component of that manifestation. ” It’s what drives me, excites me, feeds me on so many levels. My emotional brain goes on overload. Color is how nature reaches me. The studio which is like a giant tree house that provides me with a bird’s eye view of blue water, green trees, pink and red flowers, the bluejays flying by ( stopping for the peanuts I feed them). Color is sustenance for me.”  She attests that “Painting is mark making but color says what marks cannot.”

It is also an invitation from Stelling. “It pulls the viewer toward the painting and then asks them to enter it. Once inside, I’m not asking them to understand anything, just allow a memory or recognition. If I’m lucky, the viewer might leave with a sensation or a pleasure.

Diversions Fine Arts is located at 1069 N. Aviation Blvd. in Manhattan Beach. The exhibition runs through October 4th; there will be a curatorial walk through at 3 p.m. on October 3rd; on October 4th, an artist talk and closing reception will run from 1-3 p.m.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by the artist and by Diversions Fine Arts

The Zen of Neon: Linda Sue Price

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Abstract neon artist Linda Sue Prices sees herself as”an investigator of cultural phenomena; one who endeavors, with the aid of
observations, history/science/philosophical readings, to arrive at a point of reference that connects the human experience with all of the other parts of the environment.”

The beautiful zen of her investigations is infused in so much of her work. She notes that in the past she created a series of work  about “Connections and Enlightened Systems” that featured a quote from Black Elk, “All Things are our Relatives.” More recently, she reports that she read a book by Malcolm Gladwell, Blink.

“It was an exploration of intuition. I didn’t think I was intuitive, but have since come to recognize that I am and have relied on that
and trust to make my choices. I had always thought of myself as fearful and pragmatic. It has been an interesting process discovering my core,” she explains.

The artist’s current series of neon works is titled It’s Always Something. “So far, I have completed three pieces. I am using a new process of just letting the work reveal itself,” she says.

Her bending process is always developing. “Even benders with years more experience than I, share that they are still learning, too. My bending style is free-form, not to pattern. Most people who bend, do it to a pattern on a work bench. I typically heat the glass and then bend in the air. It has been described as having a conversation with the glass or as dancing with the glass.”

Describing this process, she says “There are three things you have to do: heat the right amount of glass, get it hot enough, and heat it evenly. Sounds simple. I struggled with even heating until recently. It turned out I was too low in the fire.” Price adds that “At times, it feels like therapy because you can’t bring any attitude with you as you enter the fire with the tube. No expectations, no willfulness, you just have to learn how to ‘be’.  Once I finally got to that space, I finally started to really seeing the glass and recognizing what the glass was saying to me. I finally got the message.”

In the past several years, Price has made other changes to her work as well. “I started adding a digital frame with an animated video to some of my work. I realized that when doing video animation, after the structure is defined then I moved into a ‘play’ or ‘flow’ space where I experimented and discovered moments that appealed to me. That caused me to recognize that I don’t do that when I’m bending.”

According to the artist, “Bending, for me, was structure and process. I decided to try bringing flow to my bending once the process was taken care of. I’ve spent the last year moving in the that direction. That triggered a change in how I approach making a piece. Mostly everything is flow now except specific things that have to be structure and process.”

She likes texture and uses a variety fo elements to create the right texture for neon light to “play with.” She says that material can range from “paint to washers, to acrylic rods and spheres, mirrors and chains, fake gemstones, beads, scrub cloth, electrical tape… you name it… nothing is safe.”

Thematically her current series It’s Always Something, serves as a commentary “about the increasing challenges we all face just doing typical activities like paying bills, almost getting hacked, unexpected aches, illnesses, traffic, the cost of everything, the list goes on and on.”

Currently, Price is exhibiting at Diversions Fine Arts in the Manhattan Beach gallery’s exhibition Midsummer, but she has plenty of other opportunities to show ahead, from an art fair in Oregon to a solo show at a downtown Los Angeles.  Regardless of wehre she is showing, the artist’s work is always as fresh, vibrant, and alive as she is herself.

“Each tube I bend can be considered custom because it is. I can’t duplicate most of the tubes I create. My moods change so my conversation with the tubes change. As my skills develop, I do new moves and can’t go back to what I was.” She notes that “Neon light is a peaceful calming energy. It is different from a painting; activating it involves plugging it into an electrical outlet just like you would do with a floor lamp.”

And yet so much more beautiful, experiential, and lustrous. To see Price’s literally and figuratively brilliant new series, is not to be “blinded by the light” but to be enLIGHTened by it.

Midsummer, with Price’s lustrous neon, is on display through July 26th. Open house at Diversions Fine Arts, 12-4 Saturday July 25th; artists talk/closing reception July 26th, 1-3. DFA is located at 1069 N. Aviation in Manhattan Beach.

  • Genie Davis; photos by Linda Sue Price and Genie Davis