Saltonstall Salon Series

The Art of Conversation
“Salons could be the antidote for the sense of alienation and malaise that currently infects much of America. They’re fun. They’re glamorous. And yet they’re as simple to produce as a coffee klatsch. I believe they might even change the world. Are you up for a cultural revolution?” — ERIC UTNE

Saltonstall Art Salons

Last Sundays
in January, February, March

Museum of the Earth • 1259 Trumansburg Road • Ithaca, NY 14850

Reservations recommended and appreciated.
Call 607.539.3146 or email us

We recommend using mapquest.com for driving directions.

A MONTHLY ART SALON that is open to the public. Enjoy a delightful afternoon Sunday Tea featuring conversations with four noted visual artists working in various disciplines. Come in out of the cold and find the unexpected: a little food, a little conversation and inspiring art. Arrive at 2 pm for a bounteous and to-die-for delicious Sunday Tea created by HOPE'S WAY CATERING.

Conversations with artists start at 2:30 pm. Each artist will introduce their work and discuss their creative process. The artists' comments invite us to listen and look, and enjoy the richness and diversity of contemporary art. It's fun and inspiring. Stay after and talk about the works.

Admission: $15 adults $12 seniors and students
(includes museum admission and Sunday Tea)

Save the Dates!
January 29, 2006
Barbara Page • Tim Merrick • Kent Loeffler • Joseph Scheer

February 26, 2006
Bill Roberts • Virginia Cobey • Linda Swanson • Craig Mains

March 26, 2006
Bill Benson • Marilyn Rivchin • Alan Singer • Xiowen Chen

About the Artists

Tim Merrick - Tim Merrick lives in Ithaca, NY. He is a graduate of Rhode Island School Of Design. He received the commission to design sculptural elements for the Route 89 bridge project in Ithaca. In 1996 he was the Ithaca Festival Artist.  He has participated in a Residency at Sculpture Space in Utica, NY and was an Associate Artist at the Contemporary Artist Center in North Adams, MA and is a Fellow at La Scuola di Grafica in Venice Italy for the month of March 2005. Merrick's work has been included in the Art In Embassy Program and has been reviewed in Art New England and Sculpture.

Kent Loeffler - I was born in Walnut Creek, California in 1954. I spent the next 12 years in heaven and then my family moved to St. Louis, Missouri in 1966. Orlando Cepeda was traded from the San Francisco Giants to the St, Louis Cardinals that same year and after 2 World Series (3 games of which I saw in person after camping out all night for standing room tickets) I considered myself a Missourian. At some point my father lent me his Argus C3 camera and helped me set up a darkroom in our basement. He had been in charge of a photographic unit in the Army Air Corp during WWll and had tremendous patience getting me started. Throughout junior high and high school my favorite times were Saturday mornings when he would drive me down to St. Louis Photo on Grand Ave. and we squeezed into the huge crowd to buy film and chemistry and sometimes look at the new SLR cameras.

Years passed, I took cross country bicycle trips, worked at oil refineries, ice cream shops, and sub joints, got a degree in Biology at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and became a devoted fan of Ralph Eugene Meatyard. After spending 4 years dicing eyeballs at the Central Missouri Eye Bank I decided to pursue a career in photography and enrolled in the Biomedical Photographic Communications Dept at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

RIT provided the answers to all the questions I had about photography. The faculty and facilities were superb. I was able to learn the Zone System, color printing, photomacrography, photomicroscopy, high speed photography (bullets blowing up oranges), archival matting, and numerous other curiosities. I am forever indebted to my mentors, Nile Root and Andy Davidhazy, for their unselfish sharing of decades of experience.

Since 1985, I have worked as a photographic specialist for the Dept of Plant Pathology at Cornell. Initially, the work was all film and darkroom based but in the past 10 years it has become mostly digital. My personal work has also become more digitally oriented. After 30 years in the darkroom, it is very exciting to use the unlimited tools of Photoshop and the new generation of large format inkjet printers to create artwork.

Joseph Scheer - “I describe myself as a digital artist that works across mediums. Digital technologies have broken down borders across many areas within the arts as well as other fields as with my current work that blurs the boundaries of Art and Science from exploring the environment of what can be found in ones back yard.

The images of moths are not derived from photographs either traditional or digital. They come from using a high-resolution scanner and are scans of the actual insects that I have prepared specifically for the process. It is important that I collect the moths myself to control all aspects of the work to achieve the level and quality of detail that the final images possess. Also digital sound recorders are used in the field to record sound of the moths shivering which is then processed on the computer to produce the "sound prints" that have small digital speakers embedded in the paper. I use an Iris printer for the printed works. New work is incorporating digital video to make multi-channel Video Projections.

Over the past five years with the help of scientists I have collected and imaged over 1000 species of moths from one location in Allegheny County. When I started the project I had no idea that this many existed.

My project involving moths continues to reveal new layers of meanings and questions to pursue. It seems as though the moths themselves bring up questions that spark my curiosity. To follow these questions I increasingly turn toward studying the science of Lepidoptery that describes each species in detail. I find out more about the visual characteristics of individual insects, their life cycles, nutrition sources, feeding habits, and when they should be on wing. Thus starts a string of other inquiries that goes beyond just the moths. By whom and why did certain family groupings get formed in the way they have been? How do we settle on our criteria for ordering things? What justifies the values placed on certain things over others? ...At one point concern with beauty must have entered the picture and it is likely that desire has played a significant role. I was brought up to regard butterflies as being beautiful but was never steered to link moths with any pleasant associations. I find these creatures of the night much more interesting and worth studying than their daytime counterparts that that they outnumber 12 to 1. They are attracted to the light, which in itself is a very powerful metaphor for the yearning for knowledge, growth, experience, and even death. They fly into the flame -- a strange, intoxicating, and self-destructive act.”

Bill Roberts - Bill describes his painting as an emotional and psychological process that requires a certain “letting go and staying loose.” He does not know what a painting will look like when he begins. “Quite often in these paintings, I’ll do a portrait then completely paint it out and start over again. Underneath each finished painting are probably six to 10 other preliminary paintings.” How does he know when a painting is complete? “Something just tells me,” he says. “I feel good about how things have pulled together.”

Roberts earned his B.F.A. and M.A. from Kent State University and is a professor of art at Wells College. Throughout his career, he has mastered and incorporated virtually every trend and technique found in contemporary art.  He had a 30-year retrospective exhibit of his work in 2001 at Wells College.

Virginia Cobey - Virginia Cobey is a renowned landscape painter whostudied at Art Students' League in NYC. She exhibits locally and regionally. Cobey has been a CSMA faculty member since 1980.

Linda Swanson - "There are few traditions remaining in modern life that mediate between nature and us. I situate my work in this intermediary zone, searching to identify and find meaning in the natural. My work explores natural tendencies such as gravity, evaporation, crystallization and growth. I am interested in how we understand these experiences. Science gives us models for understanding how the world works. My work explores the beauty of how it works.

I moved from Los Angeles to an area in rural Western New York to attend graduate school two years ago. The neighboring woods and the dramatic seasonal changes have had an important impact on my work. While I had incorporated environmental processes in my work prior to coming to New York, now I draw directly from my surroundings, digging clay from the creek and soil from the forest to incorporate into installations. I resituate these materials in an aesthetic context for reinterpretation. It is here in Alfred, New York that I am able to make connections between the ideas I wish to espouse in my work and the surrounding natural reality.

My work incorporates materials that change over a period of time. As my installations are fundamentally temporary and not sold for revenue, I would use a portion of this grant to subsidize the exhibition of my work in non-profit art sites and alternative venues. This type of support would allow me the freedom to do the work I care most about. I make this work because I believe that art is about values and can enrich our lives and deepen the meaningfulness of our experience."

Craig Mains - Craig Means is a BFA graduate from Cleveland Institute of Art and has studied printmaking at Cornell. He is on the board of directors at the Ink Shop Printmaking Center, is responsible for their publications, exhibit design and technical support. He also works at Cornell's main research library. In October 2005, Calamity: Vehicles, Dwellings & Structures, his solo exhibit of monotypes was on display at the Ink Shop Printmaking Center.

Bill Benson - “I grew up drawing everything: people, figures, landscapes, monsters and flowers. My sensibilities in painting have been defined by a continuing respect and admiration for those before who have wielded the great representational brush. Believing also that there is as much power and emotion in abstraction, I am attempting to reconcile the two in my work, whether in landscapes, the figure or still life.”

After Benson received a BFA from the Cornell Final Arts Dept., he began a dual career in art, painting for himself (along with showing whenever he could) and producing exquisite portraits which had the benefit of earning him enough to support his family.

Marilyn Rivchin - (Still) teaching at Cornell in the Department of Theatre, Film & Dance, filmmaker and photographer Marilyn Rivchin created a two-channel video installation for a collaborative presentation, "The Elegance of Motion" on dragonfly flight for the Ithaca Light in Winter Festival, January, 2005, with Cornell physicist, Jane Wang and electronic violinist, Ritsu Katsumata. She created projected video segments for the one-hour dance piece "Reflections in an Eye of Titanium," Cornell Spring Dance Concert in March, 2005, choreographed by Jumay Chu, Byron Suber, Joyce Morgenroth, Janice Kovar and Kathleya Afanador. She is currently working on a series of "slow" color dance photographs and developing a new video project with writer/performance artist/therapist, Yvonne Fisher.

Alan Singer - Born to a family of artists and designers, Alan Singer had his first formal art lessons at The Art Students League and then went on to The Cooper Union to earn a BFA, and graduated from Cornell University with an MFA in Painting. During graduate school in Ithaca, he illustrated the first of many books he has published, and he has written about art for books and magazines as well. Alan Singer is known for the postage stamps he designed and illustrated with his father, Arthur Singer in the early 1980's. Throughout the last 25 years he has also exhibited paintings, prints, and drawings, in museums such as the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. and the Everson, in Syracuse, NY. This October he will be having his 22nd solo exhibition at The Arts & Cultural Council for Greater Rochester.

Xiowen Chen -“I love nature and science. Material and process of making paintings, prints, and drawing are extremely important to me. Recently, I have been working extensively with digital technology to make video, CD-Rom and interactive installations. One question that I have asked myself is how to create works to explore the relationship between art, nature, and science, and, at the same time, to create a tangible environment that allows audiences to experience their connections with nature in a meaningful way. My recent works and projects have demonstrated my different approaches to answer this question.

The interactive video and sound installation "Reflection" is a new collaborative project that I am working on, together with computer science students at Cornell University. It is a site-specific piece for the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University. My concept is to bring "nature," represented by "bird sound," into the museum (social and cultural institution.) The auditory display would consist of a series of wireless speakers placed throughout the Asia gallery. The speakers would emit bird sounds emanating from areas of the gallery with the least amount of visitor traffic. As people move into the space where birds are singing (metaphorically, the bird sounds will stop and move elsewhere. In addition to auditory displays of absence, there will also be projection to display presence or popularity represented by a montage of popular exhibits in the museum. Both the absence and presence information will be drawn from a combination of sensors and use of handheld guides.”

See our other Salon Series...