Announcement
Come celebrate our one-year anniversary at our 'Talk and Quaff' the first Friday of December (12/4) from 5:30-8pm kindly hosted by
the Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery in the Aronoff Center for the Arts. Introduce yourselves to the writers, meet artists, curators and gallerists, and learn of the
future vision of the journal. Wine, hors d'œuvres and a brief speech at 7pm by Daniel Brown. $15 Donation requested.
*Please note that the donation amount is a suggestion; any amount is appreciated. It has been a tough year financially for many people, and we do not wish to deter anyone. Most important for us is for people to come by and meet each other.
Also, please click here to take our ten-question survey!
With the recent publishing of Carl Jung's Red Book, it is an occasion to revisit his perspective on the arts. Jung never considered psychology to be qualified to determine whether a work of art was art as such; this he considered to be the domain of aesthetics. Psychology (and particularly Jungian psychotherapy), though, focuses on an essential aspect of art, namely that which involves specific psychic contents. Like art criticism, it finds its inspiration in knowledge of the viewer's inclinations and cultural heritage, the artist's history and personal growth, and the symbolic forms within the art object. In sum, Jung's psychotherapeutic approach, though a limited perspective, is all-encompassing within that perspective.
Jung, beloved for his broad interest in culture and its symbols, offers a broad body of thought: his unusual concept of the collective unconscious and its corresponding archetypes (the Shadow, the Anima/Animus, alchemical dream symbols), precise characterizations of psychological types and their inherent mode of creating, and more. The full range of Jung's thought is inexhaustible; the following is my application of a couple of aspects to two artist's works that have shown recently in this region.
[Full article] [PDF]
Energetic. Dizzying. Dense. Flat/infinite. Harmonious/jarring. Joyous. Disciplined chaos. And, of course, colorful and hard-edged geometric. Those are some of the words and concepts that Tarrence Corbin's paintings and sketches evoke.
Corbin, who teaches in the fine arts department at the University of Cincinnati, is the subject of a large solo exhibition, mounted by Cincinnati Art Galleries, which is not known for its forays into the contemporary realm. 'Tarrence Corbin: Blue Nocturn (sic)' features the monumental finished canvases that he is well known for, smaller acrylic-on-paper works that are as finished as the paintings, and looser sketches.
Superficially Corbin's work appears to be a purely formal exercise, and the casual viewer might be forgiven thinking they are primarily decorative and eminently suitable for corporate spaces. In Corbin's nonobjective compositions, squares recede in space, becoming distorted as they speed away, introducing some sense of perspective in these insistently flat works. Circles bounce like balls around the canvas leading the eye in a rollicking dance. Ribbons curve, sometimes back on themselves, like symbols of infinity. With Corbin's brilliant color, these colliding shapes create a cacophony, and every note— shape—is played fortissimo.
[Full article] [PDF]
The 'Feet Girl'
This is the first in a series of three interviews to be offered over the next three months exploring the challenges of three Cincinnati artists in various transitions in their careers
by Jerry Stein
Northside artist Jessica Grace Bechtel was so serious about putting her principles before profit she stopped her career cold.
Bechtel's talented brush ranges over a myriad of subjects including botanicals, small still lifes and mundane scenes like an abandoned golf cart filled with ferns in which one finds mystery and meaning.
Preeminent, though, is her portraiture that intrigues with faces often partially or totally obscured. One's gaze does not easily leave them.
The artist's career started out with a burst of speed in 2002 immediately before her graduation from the Art Academy of Cincinnati.
“We had a senior thesis show,” Bechtel said. “I was able to sell half of my work. We had been given a pretty good background in how to promote yourself and do press releases.”
She does qualify her first success. Some of the buyers were “family and friends — people who had supported me up through the years. I don't know if that one counts,” Bechtel laughs.
[Full article] [PDF]
Jungian Perspectives
