College faculty out of the classroom

It is true that the art faculty members at Mat-Su College have a lot in common, including that they hardly ever see each other, except at the occasional conglomerate art show, such as the one happening this weekend.

The public can meet the MSC faculty and explore the diversity of their talents in various art media, which spans the gamut from drawings, to digitally enhanced photos, to cast sculpture, to jewelry, to stained glass, to oil painting, to watercolor and collage.

"College Faculty Out of the Classroom" is opening Saturday at the Dorothy Page Museum, in Wasilla, from 2 to 4 p.m., with the popular Valley Second Saturday offerings. Meet the local professors including Karen Urroz, stained glass; Jim Frei, photography; Karmen Staveland, oil painting; Noel Bell, drawing; John Barton, three-dimensional; Casey Apling, metalsmithing and jewelry; and myself, Suzanne Bach, watercolor.

Karen Urroz’s stained glass art can pictorially be described as descriptive scenes composed of captivating mosaic light and color.

From her large three-dimensional pieces, hanging overhead, to her stately garden stepping stones with broken jagged pale glass fragments, stoically standing in concrete that seem to say "walk on me if you dare", there is an unrealistic mystery in the fragility and strength of the glass.

"Oh, I don’t want to cut myself" and "Oh, is it really glass?" are comments Karen has heard from onlookers. She, however, a self-taught artisan, admired stained glass as a child.

The first visual of an actual piece of stained glass that she saw at 6, was perhaps a Tiffany lamp in Stuttgart, Germany where her father was stationed during military duty. "I thought it was the prettiest thing I had ever seen!" says Urro.

It was many years later she obtained all of the necessary equipment to produce her own art, when a widow traded her deceased husband’s tools and glass for snow plowing services.

When Urro is not teaching and making her glass pieces, she writes poetry and has been published eight times.

Jim Frei, who teaches photography at the college, recently made a humongous leap from silver to digital when the dark room was removed on campus.

Surprisingly enough, his comment was that he was "tired of breathing chemicals." He shared a memorable darkroom experience where he cut his head while trying to develop a sheet of film and his head was bleeding in the tray of chemicals.

Timing is everything in developing, so he completed the process commenting that "the pictures were fine. The blood didn’t seem to bother them."

"It is the shooting that excites me," he says enthusiastically and that "students help shake me out of the analogue mode." He likes the "immediacy and voracity" of digital photography, and says "the hardest part is keeping up with the technology and terminology."

When asked if he misses being manager of Kits Camera, which closed last summer, he says, "I miss talking to the people, with day-to-day conversations on photography."

Frei has been an adjunct professor at MSC teaching six to 12 hours a week since 1982.

Karmen Staveland, oil painter and instructor, was in the International Gallery of Contemporary Art in a two-person invitational show this fall.

She says, "I am a fairly linear painter. Meaning that I like lines rather than soft edges" but comments further that she "also still uses some of the hard-edge painting techniques learned from her first painting instructor, Dr. Saradell Ard, who recently passed away."

Working in her Eagle River studio at home requires daily focus and she adds, "I always start by sketching out my idea and making some basic color choices. I rarely make compositional changes during the painting process, but I may change colors or use different techniques than what I had planned".

Her students seem to like her relaxed classroom manner, never pushy, but quite clear on expectations.

Noel Bell, drawer and painter, says, "seeing the students’ work develop and mature is just a real blessing and encourages (her) to continue moving forward with (her) own endeavors".

She often does field work, as a preliminary to her art, by actively pursuing resource pictures with her camera.

Once, while seeking photos of swans on an excursion near Knik River with another artist, she saw a "wild tom turkey, by the side of the road, with his group of five or so hens."

After hours of hunting swans with no luck, they returned to find the tom turkey in the middle of the road "posturing, making his noise, dragging his wing tips on the asphalt." So Bell knelt nearby and began taking shots and thinking, "it doesn’t get any better than this."

Bell, only 5 feet tall, was astounded to find the bird who was three feet tall "from his beady eyed head to his incredibly long razor sharp claws, clicking across the asphalt" to within two feet before she stood up, and it swung its lethal claws at her midsection, just as she jumped back and retreated to the SUV where her friend was waiting.

The laughter of the two artists did not deter the tom turkey, for through the half-opened window (about four feet off the ground) there appeared a "matched set of turkey feet, complete with claws extended." They left the scene with new found knowledge that "in the wilds of Alaska, it’s not necessarily the bears you have to keep an eye on."

John Barton, Three-dimensional and art historian, has been "working, showing, teaching and selling (his) art for more than 25 years." He came to MSC from the Fairbanks campus.

He describes himself as a cross media and mixed media artist saying, "I am interested in the inquiry, exploration and interrelationships of a variety of media and thematic issues in my work. My creative visualization functions on conscious and subconscious levels. I typically start out working with a generalized idea …and as I work, the work itself begins to inform the decisions I make that causes the final imagery to emerge in its clearest. It’s a kind of poking, prodding, pushing and letting go process that is intentional and intuitive at the same time."

When Barton is not in the classroom or at his day job, he is completing the construction of his new studio, complete with printmaking set up and a kiln where he plans to make "hand-built ceramic pieces" in the near future.

Casey Apling, metalsmith and jewelry artist, has a secondary focus as a professional photographer. Her red hair and overalls stand out in the metalsmith lab among the tools, torches and acetylene tanks, as goggled students pound away in no particular rhythm on a piece of metal of their choosing.

Apling made her first piece of jewelry at 4, "out of paperclips and tape; it was a necklace for (her) mother on Mother’s Day" and she still has it.

Among her creations is a fabricated large chalice, assembled from cast parts.

About her current work she remarks, "I love carving in wax and casting. Wax is inexpensive, and if you screw up, you can throw it away."

She also finds it intriguing to turn wax into metal.

Some of the new products that hold her interest are metal clays and glass clays, but whe warns that they require time and patience as they can’t be rushed.

Having no knowledge of the tools, such as buffers and torches, students can be intimidated. But there is still great opportunity to those who have to learn as they go.

Part of the rewards for Apling, who loves creating textures, with scratches and dents like her silver hand-hammered bowl, is that she finds the tools empowering to create new ideas.

Casey is inspired by her students who "literally come up with something new and unexpected every semester".

Suzanne Bach, watercolorist and oriental ink painter, is totally enthusiastic about the challenges of applying watercolor and ink to the newest painting surface called "yupo." Whether working with elephant size sheets or small 8-by-10-inch-size, the whole process is an exploration with unpredictable results "when sliding juicy paints across the acrylic flimsy surface, like ice skating on glass."

"The last stroke lays the foundation for the next, but the next transforms the latter. As the brush strokes accumulate, the water medium begins to dry, which changes the rules of the game. One is constantly attempting to outguess the unpredictable, which feels a little like playing a computer game where the odds are against you."

When teaching watercolor, she adheres to the more traditional at first; but with personal experience with contemporary and exploratory art, she finds making the subtle shift from technique to creativity "gives the students a chance to develop their own distinctive signature in their art."

The last time the MSC Faculty had a show of this size and nature off campus was in 2005 at the UAA Student Union Gallery in Anchorage. It is true that the faculty members are hoping the public will be curious and stop by to say hello, and also that more people will find this gemstone of a museum in Wasilla, but heck, after five years, it was time for the faculty to once again see each other, out of the classroom.

Suzanne Bach is and artist and teaches at Mat-Su College.