April 2008 Archives

A big thanks goes out to The Side Door Gallery's featured artist Stephen Wolverine for "Bearded Iris" his donation to the 2008 Circle of Art. This is Stephen's second donation to the Circle of Art. Turning art into food is the new theme for our 4th annual Circle of Art to benefit Food Gatherers . Our featured artist Stephen Wolverine, besides being a talented painter, is an enthusiastic amateur chef and jumped at the chance to turn this etching into food to help fight hunger where we live. The average painting sold at Circle of Art Benefit raises enough money to provide 25 meals for a hungry child. Come and see this etching and many others at Saline Picture Frame Co. on Sunday, May 18th at the silent auction.

Stephen's show continues on at The Side Door Gallery through the end of May.

Stop in to see his works of art Monday - Friday 10am to 6pm and Saturdays 10am to 4pm.

Q.   Wolverine? That's an unusual last name for an Atlanta artist. Is there a Michigan connection?
 

   Yes, I was born in Cadillac and grew up in the woods and graduated from the University of Michigan at the end of the sixties.  As a child, besides an Indian, I always wanted to be an artist when I grew up, like my mother's sister, who is still a fine painter.  After ninth grade, in the era of Sputnick and then VietNam I studied the sciences and only after college while living on the Big Island of Hawaii did I again begin to hear my call to painting. I studied art at the Hilo Art Workshop Center in Hawaii and the York Academy of Arts in Pennsylvania where I also completed a formal apprenticeship in the stained glass trade and entered my Andrew Wyeth period.  I returned to live in the Petoskey area for many years where my daughter was born and grew up.  I taught art classes at North Central Michigan College and the McCune Arts Center and cut lots of firewood.  I moved to Atlanta in 1988 and have been active in the art scene there ever since.  Thrown into the Deep South, I was so homesick that I adopted the name Wolverine as a way of paying homage to my native land.  I am now married to a native of Georgia and am stuck living where they don't have winter!  I return to Michigan and points north as often as I can.  My parents live in Jackson and among my siblings, my younger brother, Dave Kendall is the reigning senior golf champion of the state and current President of the Michigan P.G.A.
 

Q.    Are flowers your usual subject matter?
 
A.    Although most of my life's work has been in landscapes, I have always painted flowers, especially in Spring.  I think of them as ethereal beings which are the harbingers of new birth and possibility.  I am especially interested in wildflowers and have worked for several years on a series of illuminated etchings which treat them as icons.
 
 Q.    How long have you been painting?
 
  A.   As most everyone, I started painting as a kid in school, but consider my serious painting to have begun in 1976
 
 Q.   What can you tell us about your technique?
 
      I have explored most two dimensional media and am most drawn to acrylic on canvas, pastel, watercolor, etching, and drawing media.  The watercolors in this show are painted wet-in-wet with strong pigment on Arches Cover, an absorbant printmaking paper which allows me to achieve the soft edges which I love.  I started to work this way to emulate the small watercolor flower paintings of the German expressionist Emil Nolde.  I first saw them in a monograph I bought in Hawaii and later saw a collection of them at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
 
Q.    What's your day job?
 
      When art earnings run out, I switch to a routine of just painting in the morning and about noon I go out and look for a job in the building trades doing small renovations, home repair, and, yes, housepainting.
 
 Q.     What current artist(s) do you admire?
 
      I have studied and enjoy all the eras of art history, especially Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.  I love the craft of traditional painting.  My art goals are spiritual rather than political, on the path toward One-ness!  Right now I am looking at Degas and Klimt and Gauguin and Bonnard, thinking of putting people in my world.  My contemporary landscape hero is Wolf Kahn.
 

Q.    What are you reading now?
 
      I read a ton of topical media including the New York Times, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the Boundary Waters Journal and several art magazines.  I enjoyed the Harry Potter series, which my wife, Trisha, read to me out loud ( she is now reading me John Gierach's trout fishing stories).  I recently read Thirteen Moons, byCharles Frazier, a novel about the Cherokee culture and its' peoples' sad removeal from the area near where I live.  I really enjoy the work of Jim Harrison, whose boyhood was spent within 20 miles of my own, and am currently traveling with a collection of his poetry, The Shape of the Journey.