Jill Krutick, “Ray of Sunshine.” Oil on canvas, 40″ x 30″
After more than 20 years in the corporate world as an investment analyst and media executive, Jill Krutick W’84 was ready for a change. Why not, she thought, give “full-time artist” a try?
Krutick had been painting since childhood, initially copying the old masters —Van Gogh, Monet—but over time evolving her own style. She kept painting through business school and the jobs that followed, returning to her art during maternity leave or “whenever my job allowed a little extra time.”
Over the years, her work transformed from “geometric” to a “much more free-form” style, she says. “I’d describe my work as abstract expressionism, but each piece is different from the last. Depending on how the light, color and texture interplay, my paintings can range from fairly representational to truly abstract.”
Krutick now spends most days painting inside her bright Scarsdale home studio—or, when time permits, traveling the world to “collect colors.”
Jill Krutick, “Stairway to Heaven.” Oil on canvas, 36″ x 24″
“If we’re out on a family vacation to Antarctica, for example, I’ll be looking at the way the icebergs reflect the sun and each other and the water and the mountains,” she says. “All of that will be seared into my mind, and when I come home, I try to capture a lot of that feeling on canvas.”
She’s had several solo and group shows over the last few years, and was named a “trending artist” last year by the art gallery website Artsicle. “Of course, the ultimate dream is to have my paintings hanging in the Museum of Modern Art,” she says. “That is a lofty goal, but one I’d definitely love to achieve over time. I really want to develop this craft and this art, continue to grow as an artist and continue to broaden the public who enjoy following my work.”
This Friday, Saturday and Sunday (May 10-12, 2013), Krutick will open up her home studio to present a solo exhibit of nearly 100 works. “I see it as an opportunity to share my passion with the community and generate more interest and excitement,” she says. You can find more on that open house here.
Jill Krutick, “Field of Dreams.” Oil on canvas, 36″ x 36″
Jill Krutick, “Lady Liberty.” Oil on canvas, 30″ x 24″
As Penn has been preparing for the Time to Shine festivities tonight, we’ve been watching a chalk artist’s work take shape at the 34th and Walnut entrance to Locust Walk.
Here’s what we spotted on Tuesday morning:
By Wednesday, it had evolved into this:
And then yesterday evening, we finally got to see the completed piece:
The artist’s name is Hani Shihada, and this isn’t his first time making art on a sidewalk. Shihada’s website features numerous examples of his past work, and here he is drawing Spongebob on a New York City sidewalk:
Greg Dunn, Cerebellar Lobe (2012) 22K gold, dye, and enamel on aluminized panel Depicts the cerebellum, a region of the brain required for movement and motor memory.
Though he came to Penn as a Ph.D student in neuroscience, Greg Dunn Gr’11 always had a strong artistic bent. First his fascination was with music, then graphic design, then paintings from the Edo period in Japan. “I always needed a creative outlet,” he says, and he found his latest muse right there in the University labs.
As a neuroscience student, “you’re just looking at these gorgeous images of neurons all day,” Dunn notes. As he examined gold-leaf-stained neuron slices, “I just instantly thought of classic Chinese and Japanese art. It was such beautiful source material.”
He began painting based on what he saw under the microscope, and by graduation, he’d produced numerous works that now hang in universities, medical centers and private homes. “I don’t consider what I do to necessarily be ‘science art,’” he says. “I’m painting something that scientists happen to be studying, but painting a landscape of the brain is no different than painting a forest.”
While the people buying his work are “mostly academics” — neuroscientists, neurologists, doctors — Dunn says people with neurodegenerative diseases have also shown interest. “I think it helps them to see something good about something they’ve been so frustrated with,” he adds.
Cortex in Metallic Pastels (2009) 21K gold, palladium, enamel, mica, and dye on aluminized panel Layered structure of the cerebral cortex, where processing of sensory and motor information occur.
When he’s not working on his art, Dunn meditates inside the sensory deprivation tank he bought himself as a graduation present. He says the darkness and quiet inside the tank can “really aid in reaching deeper states of meditation…things become very calm and you’re starkly alone with your thoughts. A lot of times ideas for my art will come to me while I’m in the tank. Without question, I always paint better after I’ve meditated.”
Is there any chance he’ll leave the artist’s life behind and go back to the lab someday? “No way. Absolutely no chance,” he says. “But I really love the scientific process, and it’s something that I try to bring into my art in various ways. And I wouldn’t be doing this in the first place without my background in neuroscience.”
With Dunn’s permission, here are some of the paintings he’s created, starting with Glomerulus, which hangs on campus inside the John Morgan Building’s Barchi Library (click any image to see the full gallery):
You may remember our “best of” (i.e. most-viewed) blog post countdown from last year. We’re back with another for 2012, only this time with a twist: We decided that only posts written this year would be included.
Before we get into our countdown, ever wonder where people are reading this blog?
It seems the answer is “all over the place.” This past year, we had visitors from Zimbabwe, Argentina, Australia, Thailand and 90 other countries. (Long-distance readers: please say hello sometime in the comments!)
Now, without further ado, here are our five most popular posts from 2012:
The University put out a simple request last week: “Show us a day in your life at Penn.” They asked students, faculty and staff to “help us illustrate a single day on campus and at Penn around the world” by snapping and submitting photographs on Nov. 14, 2012. More than 800 photos were posted to the University-wide project, Day in the Life of Penn. You can see the full album on Flickr, but here are a few images that caught our eye, presented in (roughly) chronological order:
Early morning on Locust Walk. (Photo by Luis Cornejo)
12:45 p.m.: The dancing satyr statue, which overlooks the Penn Museum’s Warden Garden.
1:17 p.m.: Drs. Julie Clark, Jessica Midence and Jeffrey Runge perform a minimally invasive colonoscopy on a dog in the Ryan Veterinary Hospital’s minimally invasive surgery suite. (Photo by John Donges)
3 p.m. in the Anne and Jerome Fisher Fine Arts Library. (Photo by Rafiat Kasumu)
Penn students visiting a market in Zürich, Switzerland.
6:52 p.m.: Theater Arts students rehearsing in the Annenberg Center. (Photo by Iris Leon, Office of the Vice Provost for University Life)
Jonathan Mandell GFA’90, the mosaic artist whose work hangs inside Citizens Bank Park, the National Constitution Center and Penn’s Steinhardt Hall, recently invited us to his Bala Cynwyd studio. He showed us some of his most recent creations there and, in the video below, discussed his process and materials. In the second video, Mandell explains how two classes he took at Penn — drawing and color theory — directly influence his current work.
It all began at a cocktail party nearly five years ago. When Sherman and Scheer made small talk about their upcoming trip to Berlin, another partygoer mentioned the shuttered amusement park that had become a “public secret” there. The alumni duo arrived in Berlin a few days later and explored Kulturpark the same way most locals do: by hopping the fence and dodging the security guards for as long as possible. “We spent a good 45 minutes walking along roller coasters and climbing on all these old rides,” Sherman says. “It was really incredible and sensational because these are huge machines that you usually only get to experience at a distance, and we were climbing all over them.”
They both sensed the potential for a project, and returned two years later with a grant from Art Matters. The took an official tour of the park, coincidentally with the same security guard who had kicked them out on their first trip. “We started to think about the dynamics of the place,” Sherman says. “The park closed in 2001. It’s been changing since then, but in non-human ways. We thought about how it’s been abandoned for its original intent, but how in other ways, it’s not abandoned at all. Nature has taken it over. It’s like going into a jungle and seeing the recent ruins of a leisure system just waiting there patiently. The machines have stopped, but the park is still active.”
Another year passed, and when Sherman and Scheer returned to Kulturpark again, they began making plans. “We started seeing the opportunity for a research investigation with creatives and a public opening for anyone who wanted to come,” Sherman says. Now, both will happen next month. From June 1-21, a group of creatives with ties to Berlin will produce site-specific works through a residency camp and outdoor studio in Kulturpark. “We’re calling them ‘visionaries’ rather than artists because we wanted this to be open to architects, designers, writers—anyone doing something creative in Berlin,” Sherman says. They wound up with 125 proposals and from those, selected 50 creatives who will work on 25 installations.
The projects range from photo-narratives to a series dinners cooked from local markets’ excess food. Then there’s what Sherman calls “the biggest project”: a group of architects will attach CDs to the side of Kulturpark’s ferris wheel, transforming it into “a giant disco ball” that will cast light throughout the park.
Once the installations are in place, Sherman has scheduled a “Kultur-exchange” for June 22-July 1, through which students and groups from the U.S. and Germany will participate in discussions, workshops, projects and research in Kulturpark. And finally, from June 28-July 1, the park will open to the public, overlapping with the Berlin Biennale‘s final days.
For those who can’t make it to Berlin next month but would still like to see the installations, Sherman says her team will be “intensively documenting everything and developing a robust online archive.” Check the Kulturpark website for updates.
Calling it a “picture book for adults,” Kleon said Steal Like an Artist began with a speech he gave about the things he wished he’d known when he started out. He ultimately decided to turn that advice into a book for budding artists. Here are some of the main points from his visit to Penn, including a post-talk Q&A:
You are a mashup of what you let into your life. In other words, artists are collectors.
Your inspiration shouldn’t be limited to living artists. “The great thing about dead or remote masters is they can’t refuse you as an apprentice.”
Keep a “swipe file,” either digitally or on paper, of works you see that are “worth stealing.” Then, when you’re in search of inspiration, simply open up your swipe file to find some.
“Creativity is subtraction.” Figure out what to leave out of a given work so you can concentrate on what’s most important.
Assigning constraints can lead to some of your best work. For instance, Dr. Seuss’s editor bet him that he couldn’t write a book that used only 50 words. The beloved children’s book author wound up creating Green Eggs and Ham.
For those whose jobs require creativity, it can be challenging to summon still more creativity at the end of the day for independent artistic pursuits. Become a morning person and use your greatest stores of creativity on your own art before the workday begins.
“We have always had a legacy of spaces that inspire our people,” Laura Alber C’90, the president and CEO of Williams-Sonoma, Inc., told me recently. “It’s consistent with the business we’re in, which is a very visual business.”
It seemed only natural, then, that as the company readied a new building in San Francisco to house its IT team, Alber thought about how to include eye-catching inspiration. Natural light and open work spaces were clear first steps, but Alber says she also realized the importance of “putting art there that would inspire them and be relevant.” But where to start?
Through her ties to the ICA — Alber is a member of the museum’s Art Council — she reconnected with fellow alum Chris D’Amelio C’88, who runs the D’Amelio Terras Gallery in New York. “We shared and brainstormed ideas about what to do in that building, and he just had fantastic suggestions,” Alber recalls. “We gave him a general sense of what we were looking for, and then we gave him carte blanche to choose the art. At one point, he brought in a manila folder of options, and I thought every piece was spectacular.”
In the end, 35 works of contemporary art were installed in the new building. Last fall, Alber invited Penn alumni to tour the new collection — an event that the ICA blog wrote up here.
When we spoke earlier this year, Alber named Wolfgang Tillmans’s paper drop (star) III (2008, pictured above) as her favorite work in the group. The 20-by-24-inch photograph — part of the artist’s “paper drop” series — celebrates Tillmans’s fascination with paper and turns photographic paper itself into the subject of a photo.
Here are a few of the other works that Alber and D’Amelio selected:
On the last day of 2011, Kien Lam W’06 logged on to his YouTube and Vimeo accounts and posted a video he’d made. He’d been trying his hand at time-lapse videos since October, but there was something special about this new one. It swiftly became an Internet sensation and in less than a week, it had almost a million views on YouTube alone.
In addition to its stunning photography, viewers loved the video’s inspiring back story: In August 2010, Lam left his job as a financial-firm strategist and spent 343 days traveling around the world. He visited 17 countries and took more than 6,000 photos. When he got home, he established himself as a professional photographer and, by the end of 2011, had fused his travel photos into a time-lapse video. (He even squeezed in a nod to Penn. Don’t miss the Locust Walk scene at 3:05.)
Now based in San Francisco, Lam put down his camera to answer a few questions about his incredible round-the-world trip.
Can you run me through the events that transformed you from a 9-to-5 employee into the world traveler who created this video?
I used to be very envious of the people I’d meet on my travels who told me they were traveling around the world for six months or a year at time. Where we met was simply just one of many places they would see on their journey. I would return from my two-week trip wishing that I could quit my job, pack a bag and explore the world more than one country at a time.
In 2010, I felt like it was a good as time as any to take a break from my career and travel before it became too hard to leave. I wrote down all the places I had always dreamed of traveling to, packed a bag and bought a one-way ticket to London, where I’d get to visit some friends and start my journey. I had a general idea of the direction I’d be headed, but I left it pretty open-ended. I didn’t always end up where I thought I’d be going and often times found my “itinerary” was created from city to city.
Along the way, I wanted to capture my journey in a way that could both preserve the spirit of the trip and what I experienced. I didn’t want to only capture beautiful landscapes devoid of people. How do you show the busy maze-like city of Fez without showing the people? How do you capture locals and visitors hurrying about in Taksim Square? Wherever I was, if there was some form of movement in the scenery and I happened to have my camera, I would set it down and take about 40 to 60 photographs timed a few seconds apart. As the pages of my passport filled up with stamps, so did my portable hard-drive with thousands of images that would eventually be put together to form this video a few months after I finished my travels.
Did you have regrets about leaving your job at any point on your trip?
It was a little unusual at first to think that I’d no longer be receiving a bi-weekly paycheck or that I had to wake up a certain time to get into the office, but that disappeared pretty early on. On a few occasions, I would miss the sense of accomplishment you get after delivering on a big project and grabbing celebratory drinks afterwards.
Tell me about some of the most memorable moments from your travels.
I am a big fan of scuba diving and I could go on and on about how amazing it feels to be underwater and watch as a school of barracudas dart about perfectly synchronized or swim ever closer to massive sharks or a baby turtles. Above land, I think about celebrating Christmas in 80-degree weather on a tropical island in Thailand, riding a motorbike through heavy Bali rush-hour traffic and returning the rental in one piece, and sleeping under the stars in the Sahara with nothing but miles and miles of sand in every direction.
Which places are at the top of your list to re-visit?
I would love to go back to relax on the beaches of Lagos, Portugal, dive around the islands in Thailand and Indonesia, and explore the landscapes of Bolivia and Peru. What are you up to now?
Somewhere along the way, I made the decision to pursue photography as a full time professional and it is something I am dedicating my time to for the foreseeable future. Beyond just taking images, I like to tell stories and capture moments whether it’s with a camera, on film or with a brush on canvas. At the moment, I am splitting my time between portrait and wedding photography.
What about travel? Where are you hoping to go next?
I’d love to explore Eastern Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa, take the Trans-Siberian train between Russia, Mongolia and China, and somehow get to Antarctica to get to that seventh continent.
Krutick had been painting since childhood, initially copying the old masters —Van Gogh, Monet—but over time evolving her own style. She kept painting through business school and the jobs that followed, returning to her art during maternity leave or “whenever my job allowed a little extra time.”
