Suddenly Revealed
Our KB Studio community has been working together collaboratively over the past few months to create Suddenly Revealed, a newly published book project inspired by the words of visionary artist and naturalist Charles Burchfield
This book is the result of one of our Tuesday Night Art Gatherings where we meet each week on Zoom to review student artwork and get involved in a variety of art challenges. For this particular challenge, participants were given a series of words or phrase to use as inspiration for a new work of art. To keep things interesting, the name of the author who wrote the words and the title of the written piece was not revealed, and no one knew the words that the others had received.
Each artist was asked to respond to their particular words in any way they wanted, with any approach, and with any media. Watercolor, gouache, ink, color pencil, and collage were put to good use in a variety of ways on a broad range of surfaces including watercolor paper, rice paper, wallpaper, duralar and yupo. The only project guideline that the group was asked to follow was that they work in an 8"h x 10"w horizontal rectangle.
After the pieces were completed, we met again virtually and looked at the works in succession while the words were read out loud. It was then revealed that our project inspiration came from Burchfield's Notes on Orion, a beautifully descriptive piece of writing that expresses the artist's love of the constellations and his attraction to the mystical qualities of the natural world. It was striking to see how all of the works flowed so seamlessly from one to the next, illuminating the essence of Burchfield's words so effectively while at the same time expressing the unique creative signature of each artist.
We decided during this meeting that this project would make a wonderful book. Working with high quality digital images provided by each artist, the book format, design, and layout was completed last month and published in March 2021. Suddenly Revealed: A Homage to Charles Burchfield features original works by Mary Ridley, Katharine Hathaway, Mary Gomberg, Christine Davidson, Phyllis Rabineau, Joan Baer, Kathleen Maltese, Jason McInnes, Karen Hovey, Susan Teller, Virginia Carstarphen, Jan Wishinsky, Janet S Reed, Susan Gamerman, and Kaye Buchman. It is available for purchase here.
