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~ AT LAST!! ~ No, I am not miming the song sang by Beyonce for the new couple to take on the mantle of the leadership of our country, on this inauguration day of 2009. I will try my hardest not to allow myself the liberty of, though I have fought for those First Amendment rights all my life, a political discourse and a simple displaying of facts of a nature having (seemingly) little to do with painting, art, or the world of art, though in reality what I could say, and in reality, what IS the reality of what has occured today, will unfold for all to see in due time.
~ I am signing on to catch up with the events since I last wrote here. With any luck, I'll be able to get back up to speed. =)
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Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
~ "First Friday" Gallery Tour ~ Knoxville, TN. ~ Hallah John Paul Boltik at Deka Bakari Gallery ~ July 4th ~
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My exhibition "The Forest For the Trees" is opening at Deka Bakari Gallery on First Friday July 4th! This exhibit runs through July and features a new collection of my paintings including major recent works. Please stop in and enjoy the opening reception on July 4th! All works featured in the exhibit are available for purchase throughout the month.
Deka Bakari Gallery is located at 221 Cumberland Avenue, downtown Knoxville, just off of Gay Street. The gallery hours are 10-5:30pm Tuesday through Friday (open late for the reception on First Fridays) and 11-5:30pm on Saturday.
Can YOU see the forest for the trees?
http://www.dekabakarigallery.com/
http://www.hallahart.com/
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My exhibition "The Forest For the Trees" is opening at Deka Bakari Gallery on First Friday July 4th! This exhibit runs through July and features a new collection of my paintings including major recent works. Please stop in and enjoy the opening reception on July 4th! All works featured in the exhibit are available for purchase throughout the month.
Deka Bakari Gallery is located at 221 Cumberland Avenue, downtown Knoxville, just off of Gay Street. The gallery hours are 10-5:30pm Tuesday through Friday (open late for the reception on First Fridays) and 11-5:30pm on Saturday.
Can YOU see the forest for the trees?
http://www.dekabakarigallery.com/
http://www.hallahart.com/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
No, I have not blogged daily, as I said I would.
Yes, I am painting instead.
What's really interesting about this show is that Deka Bakari is one of the newest galleries on the "First Friday" Gallery Tours that happen (as the events are titled...) every first Friday of every month... they are one of the most interesting of all of the Knoxville galleries, and their owners are some of THE NICEST HUMAN BEINGS, period. Although off of the beaten path, and a bit of a walk, each month more and more people are making it down to the other end of Gay Street, to find that a little more leg-work allows them to discover a different type of gallery... far more human and humane, with no pretensions whatsoever.
I am truly honored to be able to show in this gallery for this First Friday, and although I will not be there for the opening, I am hoping that people make it downtown early to see the fireworks, and perhaps take in a little of the local art before they do so.
This is also my final exhibit before my big one in September, the most important one of the year for me, and indeed, perhaps the most important of my entire life... It is one of those exhibitions that will either make me or break me, and will be a major turning point in my life I am certain, and of which I will be blogging in greater detail about, as it nears (I PROMISE!)
But as for this July 4th, and through the month of July... HEY Y'ALL!! COME ON OUT AND SEE SOME ART!!
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Saturday, June 21, 2008
"Real Condo Gallery Event" ~ Knoxville, TN. Hallah John Paul Boltik
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Local Artists Featured in Real Condo Gallery Event!
Saturday June 21 5:30-9:30 p.m. Sun. June 22, 2-4 PM
There will be a bunch of artists showing their work during the Grand Opening of those new condos in that nicely renovated building up the street from Corner Lounge on North Central....(Real estate person's details below)
Artists exhibiting:
Lauren Karnitz, Jessica Gregory, Denise Stewart-Sanabria, Rick Whitehead, Alan Finch, Tom McDaniel, T. Michael Martin, Van Walker David Wolff, Brigid Oesterland, Hallah John Paul Boltik, Emily Beckett, and Chris McAdoo. It should be a cool event. Each artist has "taken over" a condo unit to hang their work in. Some are bringing wine and snacks, too.
North Central Village offers new construction specifications while preserving aspects of the exterior character of the historic Graystone Apartment Building. The seventeen unit community is located in the context of Old North Knoxville and Fourth & Gill historic neighborhoods.
Local Artists Featured in Real Condo Gallery Event!
Saturday June 21 5:30-9:30 p.m. Sun. June 22, 2-4 PM
There will be a bunch of artists showing their work during the Grand Opening of those new condos in that nicely renovated building up the street from Corner Lounge on North Central....(Real estate person's details below)
Artists exhibiting:
Lauren Karnitz, Jessica Gregory, Denise Stewart-Sanabria, Rick Whitehead, Alan Finch, Tom McDaniel, T. Michael Martin, Van Walker David Wolff, Brigid Oesterland, Hallah John Paul Boltik, Emily Beckett, and Chris McAdoo. It should be a cool event. Each artist has "taken over" a condo unit to hang their work in. Some are bringing wine and snacks, too.
North Central Village offers new construction specifications while preserving aspects of the exterior character of the historic Graystone Apartment Building. The seventeen unit community is located in the context of Old North Knoxville and Fourth & Gill historic neighborhoods.
Sunday, June 8, 2008
~ The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly ~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Well, as the saying goes: "What do you want to hear first? The good news, or the bad news?" As if one before the other mitigates the bad news. The best you can do is break even, so-to-speak.
First, the bad news: My website is down, apparently Host Monster.com is under attack by hackers. Now, I don't believe in the death penalty, but if I did, spammers and hackers would certainly be on the top ten list. My web designer, the ever capable Ms. Katie, said that we're going to have to move it all over from one server to another, and that perhaps, within 48 hours, it'll be as good as new again. I don't know how it's done, but Katie is a miracle worker and I trust her implicitly... I'm not just saying that because I think she's going to read this, because she has no idea that I'm blogging (that kind of sounds naughty right? LOL, I'm blogging without my web-mistress' knowledge and it's not on my site!! What a strange thing, this modern world...) I'm saying it because my site, in her capable hands, has changed my life. After surviving Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and going through what I went through, and even the events of the subsequent nearly three years afterwards, I almost gave up painting.
When you see your neighbors float past without a face, or an old lady's head blown off by a shotgun-wielding cop for no reason, or a tree hung with corpses after the flood waters recede, it is a hard road home to paint the flowers and landscapes that used to flow so easily from your heart and soul through your fingertips. For me, a website is a reason to keep painting. If I am to be my own greatest collector of my art, either because it's bad, or the economy is bad, or we're in the longest war we've ever been in, or it's an election year, at the very least I can see my art online... because God knows, in my studio, it's scattered all about the place and organized in piles. It just falls off of me like pet dander, for better or worse.
So that's the Bad... wanna hear the Ugly? On top of that, my home computer, on which I am now typing this blog, through a dial-up line going at 14,400 kbps (sweatin' to the oldies!), has been hit with spyware, making the loading of pages take 5 minutes each instead of 3. AND it crashes and I lose what I write. AND it hangs so I have to reboot. I'm supposed to be painting right now instead of typing, but as I said in my very first blog (tsk, tsk! Almost a week ago!) I am going to try my best to be on a little bit every day. I don't want that little bit to take 2 tries and 2 hours, though. So if I cannot get this fixed so a window doesn't cover what I'm doing every 5 minutes, I don't know what I'm going to do. If prayer can move mountains, it's GOT to work on the devil's digital junk-mail, right? LOL.
Now for the Good: I was a part of The Knoxville Museum Of Arts third annual "Artists On Location" event. It's very interesting, and for a little more on it, check out http://www.knoxart.org/ . This was the second time I was a part of the event, the first time being the first year of the event in 2006. It's an event where a few dozen local artists paint on location, either in Market Square downtown Knoxville, or at the new Zoo, or at the UT Gardens on the University of Tennessee campus. The premise is this: you start and finish a piece of art, from the wee hour of 9 a.m. until 4 p.m., upon which you take the painting and/or other piece of artwork, WHICH MUST BE DRY ENOUGH TO HANG (though for my medium, this was not a problem...) to the KMA, where it is hung on display for the auction event which happened today, this Sunday. Then all sorts of people drop on by to eat well-catered food and drink sweet tea and eat ice cream and listen to live jazz music and view and perhaps buy the artwork. Now, I have to say, being at the first one, this event has come a long way!! You can see photos of me at the very first event at http://www.knoxart.org/members/cv_summer06.pdf (which you can also choose to see in HTML format), in front of a piece started and completed in one day, all five sides painted. This collaborative painting I entitled: "Thank You Knoxville! (Smoky Mountains Calling)" to pay homage to the kind-hearted people of Knoxville, for doing all that they could to assimilate all of us evacuees. It didn't sell but that's okay... I will probably treasure it forever... it is a very special painting for me, the last of it's kind, and extremely and deeply personal.
So this year, I did a triptych. It got up to 100 degrees even, and the sun never clouded over. I found a spot of shade at the lower end of Market Square, under the trees past the farmer's market and near the fountain that all the kids play in all day long. I loved it. The sound of the fountain, the children giggling and squeeling and splashing in the cool water, the people coming up and observing you painting (sometimes struggling to finish what your next step was before the paint baked into the canvas) and meeting lots of folks, as well as other artists. I would say, except for the heat exhaustion and sunburn and dehydration (this, I'm sure, all shows in my face in the photo...) a good time was had by all! It really is a unique thing, to see somebody painting in public, and I believe, just like music and dance and theater and the other arts, it is seen less and less nowadays. People seem to enjoy it, and nobody gives you a hard time, though some will talk your ear off if you let them, but that's okay, you still have your legs and your hands and your eyes to paint with. You have to remember, I experienced many times the opposite reaction to the arts in public during my years up in New York City under the veritable dictatorship of mayor (small 'm') Rudy Guiliani and his war on the First Amendment (big 'F' and big 'A', applied to the second noun, not a derogatory abbreviation towards the first person aforementioned...). Pigeon poop was the least of your worries up there!
I cannot even BEGIN to tell you the talent of the artists here in Knoxville. There really are some amazing artists, both in their artistry and their being. To start typing names would wear me out, but suffice it to say, I was happy that many paintings sold, and for respectable prices. I was equally sad that others did not, and to know how hard it was to produce those paintings (and all of them SO beautiful!!), and under what conditions, and a sizable portion of the proceeds of which sale would go to benefit the Museum after all, I felt a pang of sorrow for those who were obviously disappointed in their own personal outcomes... what brings me joy, though, is that in the 3 years that I have been here, being relocated without knowing a thing about this town, I am a witness to a burgeoning art scene and an arts community that is just on the verge of exploding into true national recognition for the caliber of it's artists and the dedication of those people who stand alongside of us and behind us and for us, and those who went before us to make this possible.
For all of those reasons above, and for so many more, I have titled my entry in this year's "Artists On Location" event: "The Heart Of Tennessee" ... by Hallah John Paul Boltik. (Photo by Krishna Adams).
Well, as the saying goes: "What do you want to hear first? The good news, or the bad news?" As if one before the other mitigates the bad news. The best you can do is break even, so-to-speak.
First, the bad news: My website is down, apparently Host Monster.com is under attack by hackers. Now, I don't believe in the death penalty, but if I did, spammers and hackers would certainly be on the top ten list. My web designer, the ever capable Ms. Katie, said that we're going to have to move it all over from one server to another, and that perhaps, within 48 hours, it'll be as good as new again. I don't know how it's done, but Katie is a miracle worker and I trust her implicitly... I'm not just saying that because I think she's going to read this, because she has no idea that I'm blogging (that kind of sounds naughty right? LOL, I'm blogging without my web-mistress' knowledge and it's not on my site!! What a strange thing, this modern world...) I'm saying it because my site, in her capable hands, has changed my life. After surviving Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and going through what I went through, and even the events of the subsequent nearly three years afterwards, I almost gave up painting.
When you see your neighbors float past without a face, or an old lady's head blown off by a shotgun-wielding cop for no reason, or a tree hung with corpses after the flood waters recede, it is a hard road home to paint the flowers and landscapes that used to flow so easily from your heart and soul through your fingertips. For me, a website is a reason to keep painting. If I am to be my own greatest collector of my art, either because it's bad, or the economy is bad, or we're in the longest war we've ever been in, or it's an election year, at the very least I can see my art online... because God knows, in my studio, it's scattered all about the place and organized in piles. It just falls off of me like pet dander, for better or worse.
So that's the Bad... wanna hear the Ugly? On top of that, my home computer, on which I am now typing this blog, through a dial-up line going at 14,400 kbps (sweatin' to the oldies!), has been hit with spyware, making the loading of pages take 5 minutes each instead of 3. AND it crashes and I lose what I write. AND it hangs so I have to reboot. I'm supposed to be painting right now instead of typing, but as I said in my very first blog (tsk, tsk! Almost a week ago!) I am going to try my best to be on a little bit every day. I don't want that little bit to take 2 tries and 2 hours, though. So if I cannot get this fixed so a window doesn't cover what I'm doing every 5 minutes, I don't know what I'm going to do. If prayer can move mountains, it's GOT to work on the devil's digital junk-mail, right? LOL.
Now for the Good: I was a part of The Knoxville Museum Of Arts third annual "Artists On Location" event. It's very interesting, and for a little more on it, check out http://www.knoxart.org/ . This was the second time I was a part of the event, the first time being the first year of the event in 2006. It's an event where a few dozen local artists paint on location, either in Market Square downtown Knoxville, or at the new Zoo, or at the UT Gardens on the University of Tennessee campus. The premise is this: you start and finish a piece of art, from the wee hour of 9 a.m. until 4 p.m., upon which you take the painting and/or other piece of artwork, WHICH MUST BE DRY ENOUGH TO HANG (though for my medium, this was not a problem...) to the KMA, where it is hung on display for the auction event which happened today, this Sunday. Then all sorts of people drop on by to eat well-catered food and drink sweet tea and eat ice cream and listen to live jazz music and view and perhaps buy the artwork. Now, I have to say, being at the first one, this event has come a long way!! You can see photos of me at the very first event at http://www.knoxart.org/members/cv_summer06.pdf (which you can also choose to see in HTML format), in front of a piece started and completed in one day, all five sides painted. This collaborative painting I entitled: "Thank You Knoxville! (Smoky Mountains Calling)" to pay homage to the kind-hearted people of Knoxville, for doing all that they could to assimilate all of us evacuees. It didn't sell but that's okay... I will probably treasure it forever... it is a very special painting for me, the last of it's kind, and extremely and deeply personal.
So this year, I did a triptych. It got up to 100 degrees even, and the sun never clouded over. I found a spot of shade at the lower end of Market Square, under the trees past the farmer's market and near the fountain that all the kids play in all day long. I loved it. The sound of the fountain, the children giggling and squeeling and splashing in the cool water, the people coming up and observing you painting (sometimes struggling to finish what your next step was before the paint baked into the canvas) and meeting lots of folks, as well as other artists. I would say, except for the heat exhaustion and sunburn and dehydration (this, I'm sure, all shows in my face in the photo...) a good time was had by all! It really is a unique thing, to see somebody painting in public, and I believe, just like music and dance and theater and the other arts, it is seen less and less nowadays. People seem to enjoy it, and nobody gives you a hard time, though some will talk your ear off if you let them, but that's okay, you still have your legs and your hands and your eyes to paint with. You have to remember, I experienced many times the opposite reaction to the arts in public during my years up in New York City under the veritable dictatorship of mayor (small 'm') Rudy Guiliani and his war on the First Amendment (big 'F' and big 'A', applied to the second noun, not a derogatory abbreviation towards the first person aforementioned...). Pigeon poop was the least of your worries up there!
I cannot even BEGIN to tell you the talent of the artists here in Knoxville. There really are some amazing artists, both in their artistry and their being. To start typing names would wear me out, but suffice it to say, I was happy that many paintings sold, and for respectable prices. I was equally sad that others did not, and to know how hard it was to produce those paintings (and all of them SO beautiful!!), and under what conditions, and a sizable portion of the proceeds of which sale would go to benefit the Museum after all, I felt a pang of sorrow for those who were obviously disappointed in their own personal outcomes... what brings me joy, though, is that in the 3 years that I have been here, being relocated without knowing a thing about this town, I am a witness to a burgeoning art scene and an arts community that is just on the verge of exploding into true national recognition for the caliber of it's artists and the dedication of those people who stand alongside of us and behind us and for us, and those who went before us to make this possible.
For all of those reasons above, and for so many more, I have titled my entry in this year's "Artists On Location" event: "The Heart Of Tennessee" ... by Hallah John Paul Boltik. (Photo by Krishna Adams).
THANK YOU ONCE AGAIN KNOXVILLE!! =)
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Sunday, June 1, 2008
~ The Beginning Of Something Wonderful ~
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~ Hello to you one and all! If you are reading this, that means that I am already in the future! I have on this very day, decided to put both of my feet firmly on the road that I am travelling on, and catch up with this millenium. As a life-long artist, my weakest point has always been verbal communication and self-representation, I believe.
Truthfully, on my bathroom mirror, written on masking tape strips are "Brush Hair", and "Brush Teeth", and "Pray". I don't think I'm even in my body half the time, even while it's getting me from point A to point B, and that's fine by me. But a few things happened to me last year. My first cell-phone (still amazed by the damnable thing, although I'm 20 years behind the masses and can't text and do ANYTHING at the same time) and my website. Suddenly, truly, as a self-employed artist, I am in business. I have no excuse to cut off my ear or drink myself to death with absinthe... as a modern-day artist, in theory anyway, I have more possibilities than I would have, say, a hundred years ago to make a living (however modest) doing what God put me here to do. I have no pretenses of being the greatest or even being special; I'm just me, this is what I've always done, it's what I'll always do. I have to live with that choice, and either make it work or fail and die. To me, it really is that simple, and I've been through enough in my life that I know what I have to do to in order to survive. Painting has been that for me and on every level of my existence, and I wouldn't have it any other way, truth be told.
I'm going to make a promise to myself (and if anyone else bothers to read this, I'm promising it to you too...) right now: This is not a Blah-blah-blah-blog, it is not a daily self-aggrandising literal masturbation session, it is not a "Oh you need to know this about me, everything, all the time" waste of both your time and mine. Although it is a bit of a journaling excercise for me, and I am an imperfect human being in an imperfect world, I am not about to subject anyone to what I just ate (Ramen noodles, AGAIN, I'm an artist, so that will just naturally come up over and over and over and...) or who I'm kissing (none of your business. Well, okay, I just gave Rico Suave a smooch) beyond what I just did now in jest.
If you want to hear my rantings, you'll have to catch those in person (far more interesting with the hand gestures anyway) and if you want to see my artwork, you can go to my website or any number of free online galleries I have joined; but this blog will be primarily focused on the few things that I do each day that may be of interest to other artists, my successes and failures in that regard, and miscellaneous tid-bits of information about my day-to-day life as an artist who works on art.
We are, all of us, in this day and age, living in the pupil of one thousand eyes so-to-speak. Soon there may never again be such a thing as privacy. There is nothing that we do that someone cannot be privy to, one way or another, and this is my way of acknowledging that fact and understanding that what someone else shares with me could quite possibly either save my life or threaten it. What I hope to share with you, in whatever small measure, I intend in my heart and soul, to dedicate towards the former, and not the latter. As a survivor of both 911 in New York City and Hurricane Katrina down in New Orleans, just to mention a couple of examples out of hundreds that I could possibly fascinate (or bore) you with, I do know one fact: we are all in this thing together...
So there it is! Don't expect too much from me, other than honesty, because like the bumper sticker says: "Don't follow me, I'm lost too!"
~Until we speak again...
~Yours In Honor,
~Hallah John Paul Boltik
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~ Hello to you one and all! If you are reading this, that means that I am already in the future! I have on this very day, decided to put both of my feet firmly on the road that I am travelling on, and catch up with this millenium. As a life-long artist, my weakest point has always been verbal communication and self-representation, I believe.
Truthfully, on my bathroom mirror, written on masking tape strips are "Brush Hair", and "Brush Teeth", and "Pray". I don't think I'm even in my body half the time, even while it's getting me from point A to point B, and that's fine by me. But a few things happened to me last year. My first cell-phone (still amazed by the damnable thing, although I'm 20 years behind the masses and can't text and do ANYTHING at the same time) and my website. Suddenly, truly, as a self-employed artist, I am in business. I have no excuse to cut off my ear or drink myself to death with absinthe... as a modern-day artist, in theory anyway, I have more possibilities than I would have, say, a hundred years ago to make a living (however modest) doing what God put me here to do. I have no pretenses of being the greatest or even being special; I'm just me, this is what I've always done, it's what I'll always do. I have to live with that choice, and either make it work or fail and die. To me, it really is that simple, and I've been through enough in my life that I know what I have to do to in order to survive. Painting has been that for me and on every level of my existence, and I wouldn't have it any other way, truth be told.
I'm going to make a promise to myself (and if anyone else bothers to read this, I'm promising it to you too...) right now: This is not a Blah-blah-blah-blog, it is not a daily self-aggrandising literal masturbation session, it is not a "Oh you need to know this about me, everything, all the time" waste of both your time and mine. Although it is a bit of a journaling excercise for me, and I am an imperfect human being in an imperfect world, I am not about to subject anyone to what I just ate (Ramen noodles, AGAIN, I'm an artist, so that will just naturally come up over and over and over and...) or who I'm kissing (none of your business. Well, okay, I just gave Rico Suave a smooch) beyond what I just did now in jest.
If you want to hear my rantings, you'll have to catch those in person (far more interesting with the hand gestures anyway) and if you want to see my artwork, you can go to my website or any number of free online galleries I have joined; but this blog will be primarily focused on the few things that I do each day that may be of interest to other artists, my successes and failures in that regard, and miscellaneous tid-bits of information about my day-to-day life as an artist who works on art.
We are, all of us, in this day and age, living in the pupil of one thousand eyes so-to-speak. Soon there may never again be such a thing as privacy. There is nothing that we do that someone cannot be privy to, one way or another, and this is my way of acknowledging that fact and understanding that what someone else shares with me could quite possibly either save my life or threaten it. What I hope to share with you, in whatever small measure, I intend in my heart and soul, to dedicate towards the former, and not the latter. As a survivor of both 911 in New York City and Hurricane Katrina down in New Orleans, just to mention a couple of examples out of hundreds that I could possibly fascinate (or bore) you with, I do know one fact: we are all in this thing together...
So there it is! Don't expect too much from me, other than honesty, because like the bumper sticker says: "Don't follow me, I'm lost too!"
~Until we speak again...
~Yours In Honor,
~Hallah John Paul Boltik
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