Tremont ArtWalk to celebrate 20th Anniversary

For Immediate Release:

Tremont ArtWalk to celebrate 20th Anniversary on Friday February 8, 2013, 6-10pm in Historic Tremont

Cleveland, Ohio –Tremont ArtWalk

6pm, Dedication by invited guests Cleveland Mayor Frank G. Jackson and Ward 3 Councilman Joe Cimperman at Brandt Gallery, 1028 Kenilworth Avenue

Since the late 1980s, artists have been moving into the historic Tremont neighborhood. In September 1990, Tremont resident Jean Brandt exhibited the art installation, "Olde Stuff" by Terry Durst, in her storefront law office on Kenilworth Avenue. Two years later Ron Naso, owner of Studio Gallery on Professor Avenue and artist Robert Ritchie teamed up with Sandy Rotokowski of Edison's Pub and The Literary Cafe's Andy Timithy and Linda Baldizzi for a multi-venue Halloween art celebration. The seeds a "Tremont ArtWalk" were being sown.

Two months later, in December 1992, the same team marked the opening of Wildflower, an exhibit and performance space in Lemko Hall, with another neighborhood "ArtWalk". To celebrate, The Lit exhibited paintings by Tim Herron, another Tremont resident and proprietor of The Manly Pad. Herron customarily left his sketchpad at the end of the bar at The Lit, to be reviewed and even added to by others; echoes of this custom continue today in the monthly drawing club that meets on Friday nights in the back room of The Lit.

The first official Tremont ArtWalk occurred on February 12, 1993--the second Friday of the month. Seven businesses pooled their resources to promote the event, with a card designed by Mikel Mahoney that included the ArtWalk logo and a neighborhood map. These seven businesses included not only two exhibitional galleries but also Bookworm and Bugjuice (a bookstore on Kenilworth Avenue) and The Guerilla Theater.

From these humble beginnings 20 years ago, Tremont ArtWalk has blossomed, now boasting monthly participation from almost 30 restaurants, pubs, galleries, museums, churches, social clubs, boutiques and specialty merchants.

Much of this activity would be hard to imagine without the tireless energy and creativity of local artists and residents who have made Tremont ArtWalk the premier monthly event in Cleveland's original arts neighborhood.

Come out and celebrate with us - Twenty years of ArtWalk February 8, 2013.

20
A show of Artists that shaped the Tremont ArtWalk.

2393 Professor Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio 44113

Artists include Dana DePew, Matt Dibble, Dana Oldfather, Jeffry Chiplis, Amy Casey, Bruce Edwards, David Szekeres, Laila Voss, Stephen Yusko, Jeannene Mathis-Bertosa, Scott Radke, Jim Votava, Barbara Merritt, Angelica Pozo, Steve Mastroianni, Douglass Max Utter, Tim Herron, Rebecca Yody, Clay Parker and Reverend Albert Wagner.

Open for public viewing for free from 6-7:30pm, one night only.

Followed by the Amazin' Cajun Crawdad Bash party in honor of the 20th Anniversary of the Tremont ArtWalk. The party runs from 8 p.m. - 11 p.m. and attendees must be 21 and over. Tickets are only $20 and include:

Samplings of Amazing Cajun Cuisine from Chef Johnny of Zydeco Bistro (a Tremont Farmers' Market prepared food vendor) www.zydecobistrollc.com
MENU: Crawfish étouffée, Jambalaya, King cake, Lagniappe (vegetarian) & Red beans

Live music from Mo' Mojo a hard driving, high energy, Zydeco-based “Party-Gras” Band. The female fronted group features three-part harmonies, accordion, fiddle, guitar, rubboard, sax, trumpet, harp, bass, percussion, and drums. http://www.momojomusic.com/

Craft Beer Cash Bar $4

If you can't attend the Bash there are a lot of great things free to all on the Tremont ArtWalk which runs
6-10pm:
Great Art in Tremont!
Free Lolly the Trolley throughout Tremont to enjoy the ArtWalk!
Tremont Wide business specials!

A limited number of tickets are available so order them now at www.crawdadbash.eventbrite.com or by calling Tremont West at 216-575-0920 ext, 103.

Make it an Amazin' Cajun night out and celebrate Tremont!

All proceeds benefit free community programs and events including: Tremont Arts & Cultural Festival, Tremont Farmers' Market, Taste of Tremont, Arts in August, Tremont Steeplechase, Tremont BrewHaha and more!

For info on the 20th Anniversary Tremont ArtWalk visit www.tremontartwalk.org or https://www.facebook.com/events/319331508180023/?fref=ts

About Tremont West Development Corporation

TWDC is a non-profit organization that works with residents, business owners and other community partners to create a dynamic community. TWDC strives to maintain and improve the living, business, and cultural conditions for all of Tremont. For more information call
216-575-0920 or visit http://www.tremontwest.org.

###

Media Contact:

Michelle Davis

Director of Marketing and Fund Development

Tremont West Development Corporation

2406 Professor Avenue

Cleveland, Ohio 44113

Phone (216) 575-0920, ext. 103

Fax (216) 575-0998

michelledavis@tremontwest.org www.tremontwest.org

Follow Us!!!

 

                               Carcajou (mixed technique on canvas) 50"x46" 2012
                               Matt Dibble

 

                                         Debonair Language- New paintings 2012

Torn Shoulder

                 Torn Shoulder (Mixed Technique on Canvas) 48"x 46" 2012

http://vimeo.com/34028050

Randall Tiedman interview-2011

Shaheen Modern and Contemporary in Cleveland honors the Bill Radawec legacy

Steven Litt, The Plain DealerThe Plain Dealer
The late Bill Radawec, a nationally admired Cleveland artist who died in July at age 59 after a yearlong battle with lymphoma, was a miniaturist who practiced a gentle art of nuance and fine distinctions.
A retrospective of Radawec’s work, now on view at Shaheen Modern and Contemporary Art in Cleveland, is full of delectable microphenomena, which attune the eye and the mind to small visual events that might easily be overlooked.
A tiny, copper-painted bird lies on its side on a square piece of plywood painted to resemble a piece of turf, which is in turn mysteriously set on the floor in a corner of the gallery. Another bird, this one painted silver, sits in a small wire basket suspended from the gallery ceiling.
On the walls, two small video cameras whir quietly on their mounts, turning this way and that, scanning the interior for some inscrutable purpose not revealed to the visitor. Also on the walls are pastel-hued geometric paintings inspired by paint chips and images of contrails left behind by jetliners in patches of clear blue sky.
A collection of small, wooden boxes mounted on the walls at oddly differing levels might escape notice entirely. But if you get close and peek inside, you’ll be treated to bizarre miniature tableaux, including one in which a woman strips naked at what appears to be an open-air tea party, while a construction worker stands nearby with a coil of cable in his hands and another fellow guzzles a bottle of wine.
The show is an eclectic mix of objects and images resembling the visual equivalents of Zen Buddhist koans, or riddles, that could produce effervescent moments of intellectual bliss if understood properly. Taken as a whole, the show is a fitting introduction, and tribute, to an artist known for having an odd, quirky and eccentric sensibility, liberally spiced with a well-developed sense of whimsy.

View full sizeIbojka Toth-RadawecA whimsical sculptural construction by the late Bill Radawec evokes the mystery of small events which take place around us everyday.

Born in 1952 in Parma, Radawec grew up there as the son of William Radawec, a firefighter, and Irene Radawec, a homemaker. He earned a bachelor’s degree at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea in 1974 and pursued a master’s degree at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in 1975 and 76, but he ended his studies short of completion.
Radawec taught in Berea schools from 1979 to 82 and then spent the following decade teaching in Cleveland public schools. It wasn’t until he moved to Los Angeles in 1992, however, that he began attracting serious attention as an artist and as a promoter of works by other artists.
Radawec’s widow, Ibojka Toth-Radawec, explains that in 1992, commercial galleries were closing in Los Angeles because of a recession. Radawec responded by inaugurating a series of exhibitions in the apartments or homes of friends, under the rubric “Domestic Setting.”
The shows caught the attention of the noted critic and curator Peter Frank, who gave Radawec a plug in LA Weekly, which in turn helped turn the shows into something of an underground movement.
“He loved to promote other artists,” Toth-Radawec said.
Radawec returned to Cleveland in 2000 to care for his aging mother after his father’s death. And he continued to produce art and to participate in exhibitions that caught the eye of reviewers from Art in America and other publications.
The show at Shaheen, assembled and installed with the assistance of his widow and friends, is characteristically oddball, with works hung high or low on walls or stuck in corners, as if to require extra effort and to encourage the viewer to take nothing for granted.
The cumulative effect is that of a quiet sense of joy and delight. Radawec never swings for the fences in any individual work but seeks instead to prick the conscience and tickle the funny bone.
Radawec was a conceptual artist, motivated more by ideas than by a drive to fashion imposing objects. His work pulls you in close and asks you to attend to fine details, like a comedian with a flat affect who tells short, droll stories with enigmatic punch lines.
At times, Radawec’s work is autobiographical. One framed panel re-creates a section of plaster wall in Radawec’s Los Angeles apartment, which formed a crack after the 1994 Northridge earthquake.
The images of jet contrails were inspired by the arcs of jetliners changing course on Sept. 11, 2001, after terrorists took control.
It’s not strictly necessary to understand the personal meanings behind Radawec’s work in order to enjoy it. It casts a spell, even if you don’t know the back stories.

View full sizeIbojka Toth-RadawecA small construction hung on a wall in the Bill Radawec retrospective treats viewers to an overhead view of an unlikely scene in a mysterious roomlike setting, in which a woman strips bare while ladies appear to sip tea at a table and a guy in the corner guzzles a bottle of wine.

The most important personal narrative is that of the artist’s romance. He met Toth-Radawec at a gallery opening in Kent in 2004, four years after he returned to Northeast Ohio from Los Angeles. They married on Sept. 16, 2010, on the intensive-care floor at MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland, where Radawec was undergoing treatment.
Toth-Radawec says the ceremony was a first in the history of the unit.
The show at Shaheen is a first attempt to come to grips with Radawec’s artistic legacy. It admits the viewer into an aesthetic world shaped by one of the gentler artists who have worked in the region in recent decades. And it shows that Radawec’s unusual sensibility
lives on in the body of work he left behind.

Related topics: bill radawec, ibojka toth-radawec, peter frank, shaheen modern and contemporary art, steven litt

 

In a Glass Darkly / Elisabeth Sunday’s Spiritus at Tregoning & Co.

By Douglas Max Utter

www.douglasutter.com

 The impact of Elisabeth Sunday’s photographs showing one or two persons in their native landscapes comes in part from imagining how and where they were created. Personal interaction and shared psychological space are implicit in the melting gray and black tones of the images themselves, which show their subjects reflected along the undulating surface of a specially made mirror.  During extended international journeys over the past quarter century Sunday has used this device to establish an unusual ratio between her own sense of self and the persons / personas that ebb and flow through her mirror, taking the psychological measure of observer and those observed alike as she places her subjects at a double remove from direct observation. This distancing technique tends to outflank the usual questions and doubts that often linger in the wake of both documentary and artistic photography, appealing (somewhat in the manner of surrealism) to a different authority: the timelessness characteristic of the unconscious mind. Farther in the background of her work’s content is Sunday’s exploration of her identity as a woman born to a family of successful artists, and as the daughter of the African American stained glass artist and painter Douglas Phillips.

            Sunday’s most recent photographs of men and women living in Ghana, Mali, and Ethiopia are at once forceful and oblique. The figures, dressed in traditional garb or sometimes elaborately painted (as in the case of pictures showing the Koro men of Ethiopia’s Omo Valley region), loom monolithically, expressing a superhuman intensity. Typically Sunday captures an elongated vertical reflection, rushing and bleeding like a single expressive brush stroke. Although Sunday herself is never visible in the frame, she is as much actor as she is director within the drama of these photographs, as she strives to represent not so much the personal characteristics of her subjects, but an essential gesture that connects a given incarnation with the long history of the soul.  

            In the gold-toned silver print titled “Hope” a man stands on the shore. Five long silvery fish are draped over his shoulders and clutched cape-like across his chest – he seems a god from the sea, dressed in a dream. In “Lifeline” another man hugs a large fish, holding its long body against his own and its sharply tapering head next to his face, while just behind him the sea churns enormously, exploding in painterly-looking rhythms below a narrow strip of blank sky. These and other gold-toned silver prints were shot in Ghana and are the fruits of a relationship that Sunday developed over the past several years with five Akan fishermen who still sail hand-hewn boats into the dark waters of the Gulf of Guinea during the hours before dawn. When Sunday asked them to express their love of the sea the results were startlingly iconic, suggesting primordial links between daily human experience and ancient natural forces.

            Implicit in the intertwining skeins of light that bounce across a curved reflecting surface is the recognition that there can be no sure way to capture the rhythms of human life. Sunday’s art is part vision, part accident, and her method is a kind of invocation. She writes about the role of her mirrors (she has had more than one made; last year one became cracked) in a recent blog posting:  “The muse is tuned and waiting for me to engage it and bring out the images, calling them forward.”  Sunday makes it clear that not just the mirrors but the journeys and events surrounding her photographs work together to cultivate the “muse,” deepening and focusing initial inspirations. All of this, as well as her central mirror-recreated trope of elongation, is part of a profound process of personal growth that began for Sunday in 1982, when she had a number of ongoing dreams about Africa. These were what C. G. Jung might have recognized as dreams of deep transformation, calling forth instinctual energies, and their point of departure was an unusual depiction of flattened and elongated women’s heads and faces painted in 1931 by her grandfather, the noted Cleveland School artist and African traveler Paul Bough Travis. In a kaleidoscopic swirl of imagery the dreams went on to show Sunday nothing less than the creation of the world, from mountains to animals and peoples, stretching and bending in great waves across long ages. Sunday’s first trip to Africa was made soon after this intense period of dreaming, as were her initial experiments with mirror photography.

            The largest recent works are 70 inch tall pigment on rag prints from Sunday’s Anima and Animus series. If even her smaller platinum prints often seem to loom, these larger than life figures are all but hallucinatory in the impending power they project. Sunday here is meditating on eternal masculine and feminine energies, using warlike Koro men and nomadic Tuareg women as subjects. The Anima women are hidden under flowing garments, slanting to left or right or reaching upward like dark flames against the steady white curve of a dune. Their dance-like postures show just the angle of an elbow or a knee, suggesting the geometry of the human body swathed in smoky potency, yielding and enveloping.

            The Animus figures rise like tough young trees or spears, rooted somewhere beneath the picture plane. Grace and violence here seem cast together in a solid block, as in Animus 1, which shows a ghost-like figure daubed in white up to the top of his chest. It’s as if the sheer thrust of aggression has fused his arms and legs into a single mass, and his whitened profile tilts downward, like a giant regarding the earth.  As with so many of Elisabeth Sunday’s figures, these seem composed of stone or bone more than living flesh, bent along universal lines of force, long-buried or drowned but astonishingly rediscovered through the photographer’s process and passion.

Dreamers Are Tough

Wishing God Well

Before I begin to paint I sit quietly and gather my
attention.

I begin to pray for all artists and artists families.

All families.

All human beings.

All living things.

The Angels and Archangels.

Wishing God well.

I’m ready to work.

Preview- Exhibition Catalogue: Aspects Of Modern Life @ Tregoning and Company

MATT DIBBLE by Tregoning & Company

Make Your Own Book

Jackknife (oil on canvas) 73"x80" 2011

Venus, Amigo? (mixed technique on canvas) 75"x80" 2011

The Body

It's been said that even the angels ache for a body, sometimes. If I did figurative work what would it look like? I asked my self this question recently. I soon realized that figures were part of my work for many years, an ongoing series of pen and ink drawings.

Projecting them on larger canvases I was able to find many new compositions and entanglements. I’m often asked where the figures originate. Their is an ache in my body, on the outside everything is calm, the inside is much different.

The postures here are not meant to be literal. I’m trying to create an impression, as simply as possible that describes my two natures. One grasping and one allowing.

This figurative paintings are very personal and I resisted doing it for a long time, but over the last 4 or 5 years it just poured out of me.

The work in this show is a continuation of the “Puzzled Biped” series; I’ve experimented with dress samples and news print to bring more interest to the surface.

Sacrebleu is a mild French oath, meant as a cry of surprise or anger.

After I exhibited some paintings at Asterisk Gallery in 2009 Dana and I began planning a show together. This exhibition is a result of those plans.

Matt Dibble

May 3rd, 2011

I’m pleased to announce that nationally recognized artist www.randalltiedman and acclaimed painter/sculpture www.lorennaji.com will be selecting the work of Dana Depew and Matt Dibble for a Spring 2011 Painting Exhibition in Cleveland ,Ohio.

To open May 6th at the Loren Naji Studio Gallery 2138 West 25th St. Cleveland,Ohio 44113

(Ample parking across the street.)

Our Harsh Reality: Matt Dibble's paintings share the gritty thrill of local life @ Tregoning and Co.

Douglas Max Utter
www.douglasutter.com

Matt Dibble's abstract painting "Lake Erie Shoreline" feels like a long minute lived somewhere along Ohio's north coast. The small work mixes brutal masses of bluish black with streaks and splashes of white, as if the painter had ripped a cold chunk out of a March day. It's a painting that remembers intimate, difficult things — the way an early morning fits roughly over the night before, and how easily the wind unravels the sunshine.
At least that's the way Cleveland often feels during its long winter. And some of Dibble's latest oil paintings, now on display in Aspects of Modern Life at Tregoning & Company (www.tregoningandco.com) bring it all back. Not that everything is so grim. A few of the works, like the large, almost impressionistic "Emptied Countryside," positively bloom, with bursts of light pink and gray-blue pushing around a six-foot-square surface.
Plus, there's the fact that this painter's rough, patched-seeming, highly textural visions often have a sort of curbside appeal. Not that Dibble's view is from the curb. There's no ad for a cozy lifestyle embedded in this work. The hard-looking surfaces he paints are often actually much like the curb itself — a place down by the cracked street, where mud and snow pile together during long gray days, filled with the harsh excitement of life's challenges. Like life itself in Cleveland, things may be hard in this painted world, but they're not boring.
Simply put, these are good paintings because they're about real things. They convey the daily contrasts of comfort and unease, effort and balance, while speaking also of qualities of the spirit. Determination, discouragement, and discovery are all part of the action.
Like 1950s action paintings, they're partly about the body's movements and partly about effort. Yet there is a big difference between what Dibble does and what the men and women of his parents' generation painted. His crossings and sudden combinations weave workmanlike solutions to a question that was rarely asked so explicitly in an earlier era: What does it mean — what does it look like — to build a practical exercise that has as few aesthetic or philosophical pretensions as possible? It's a matter of tense, too, and effectualness: What is the nature of the thing that has happened; when is a job done? If the individual expression that artists once sought now seems naive, it's still true that the problem of fitting the gray into the brown, or bending it across the blue, is entirely one's own business, like washing your feet.
That's one way these paintings do their job: by asking no more than that. But they're also successful because, in the process of asking and answering such purely physical questions, they end up describing specific places and states, in terms that have both geographical and spiritual elements. The fact that Matt Dibble has worked as a roofer for more than two decades (though he's been an exhibiting artist for even longer), and that he is able to make paintings that re-create aspects of that perilous and demanding occupation, is literally a big part of the picture here. There's a level of sensitivity that endless climbing and hammering and looking have made possible.
But maybe most important is the fact that the experience he re-creates in such tactile detail is part of the spirit of the place in which he lives.
In a way, Dibble's exhibition is about here and now, and about Cleveland. But it covers more ground than that. Two of the finest titles in the show are "Middle Is Everywhere" and "Starved Wolf." The first describes exactly what Dibble does. And with the other phrase, you can almost see Dibble's wolf chewing away at the empty spaces of the canvas. It's a reminder that every mark makes a home for the mind's zoo of images, and that every line feeds the spirit.

Aspects of Modern Life

Aspects of Modern Life
Opens at www.tregoningandco.com April 15th,2011

My wish is to live in the real world. I have a natural curiosity about my place on earth and a thirst for sincerity in all forms. “Aspects of Modern Life” is a glimpse into what happens when this very active inner life and the outer world come in contact.

I tried to work on these new paintings with “feeling” in my whole body. I’m note quite as interested in brushing the paint on, but pushing the paint around.

In this series, I’m trying to approach the work as a tradesman approaches his job, in a very ordinary way, with a watchful attention and a certain confidence that comes from experience while at the same time searching for something new.

How can I bring more sensitivity to the color? This is the question that would not leave me alone during my painting sessions and at other moments. Coming back to this question often, it became very alive in me.

Matthew Dibble
March 27th, 2011

Sacrebleu : Dibble @ Depew- Spring 2011 Painting Exhibition

I’m pleased to announce that nationally recognized Artist Randall Tiedman www.RandallTiedman.com and acclaimed painter/sculpture Loren Naji www.lorennaji.com will be selecting the work of Dana Depew and Matt Dibble for a Spring 2011 Painting Exhibition in Cleveland ,Ohio.
To open May 6th at the Loren Naji Studio Gallery 2138 West 25th St. Cleveland,Ohio 44113
(Ample parking across the street.)

Above, Below, Within: Matt Dibble at Arts Collinwood-Preview from Giraffe Trap Magazine Issue 2

Matt Dibble’s fast-paced abstract paintings, displayed this past month at Arts Collinwood Gallery in an exhibit titled “Hope for the Picture Guild,” are all about the precarious thrill of physical movement through space, and the dissolution of form that flickers at the edge of vision. Curated by University of Akron professor Del Ray Loven, the exhibit concentrates on recent works by Dibble that take the action-packed gestural repertoire of 1950’s Abstract Expressionism as their point of departure. Willem DeKooning’s virtuoso deconstructed landscapes are the main precursors of Dibble’s works here, and Hans Hoffman’s influential experiments in visual layering, but the similarities can be misleading. The moves look much the same, but add up to a more introspective vision -- one that is still painterly, yet gives a postmodern account of randomness. Dibble’s hard-working manner and often unpretentious scale emphasizes the perspiration part of painterly genius. At the same time, this is a show notable for its profoundly quiet intelligence, grounded in the background noise of visual commonplaces. Far from merely revisiting an older style, Dibble provides entirely contemporary comments on both the art historical moment he remembers, and the way things have changed over the past half century. Dibble’s works reflect on the gathering speed and complexity of the present moment, and the way that personal decisions delineate change. “Knoxville Embalmed” (2008), a roughly two foot square canvas, makes the looming, slashing liberties of a vintage DeKooning seem almost claustrophobic. Deep, distance-like pockets yawn behind deftly entwined marks and strokes, as the eye is alternately coaxed and rushed into a hybrid pictorial space. Dibble’s pale paint has a sun-bleached look, tightly packed on the surface like trash clumped in a cul-de-sac. Scrape marks and brush strokes shove or drag, pushing and pulling against each other. Half-buried rectangles are spread patch-like here and there, like trowelled adhesive cement. In “On Island McGee,” they’re stretched and pulled and twisted upwards. The images that emerge from these actions could be buildings and trees, water and sky – but felt more than seen. Dibble’s textures and combinations are terribly intimate, their rough and smooth passages brought up against the eye. They promise sensation, as if on the brink of sounding, tasting, and smelling. In a statement accompanying the exhibit Del Ray Loven talks about Willem DeKooning. “He said that when he was standing upright and secure on two feet, he didn’t feel like he was getting it right, but when he started to slip, just for a moment before he fell, he’d have a glimpse of the reality he wanted to paint.” Dibble’s paintings are vertiginous by the standards of ordinary vision; the “view” is looking at us. Dibble says of this current series, “Sometimes I felt I was inside and behind the painting, working my way out.” He also mentions an old adage that adds three more points to the usual compass: above, within, and below. The paintings at “Hope for the Picture Guild” find their subjects inside the skin of daily experience, rubbing along the underside of familiar scenes as they mix inner and outer perspectives.

Douglas Max Utter
http://www.douglasutter.com/dibblereviewforgt2.html

October 13th 2010

Matt Dibble at Arts Collinwood : Sept. 17th through Oct 16th 2010

“Hope for the Picture Guild” is the title of Matt’s latest show which opened Friday September 17 at the Arts Collinwood Gallery www.artscollinwood.org on Cleveland’s east side and is appropriately named as the show itself seems to be a counterpunch to the Postmodernist assertion that painting is dead.

The show consists of 17 abstract works on canvas selected from the artist’s recent body of work by Del Rey Loven, painting professor at the University of Akron, who served as a kind of curator for the venue. The space at Arts Collinwood provided a perfect setting for this show as the atmosphere of the neighborhood served as the ideal backdrop for Matt’s work. As one approaches the gallery from the street, you feel as if you could very well be in New York in the late 40’s and 50’s as the bold, gutsy paintings by Dibble are evident in this gritty but efficient space.

The first painting that grabs your attention from its position on the street-facing wall is a large black and white 70x76 inch oil on canvas titled, “Bachelors Still Asleep.” Its spontaneous strokes of black over a white background immediately recall the work of Franz Kline. However, Dibble is not imitating Kline here. There seems to be a hidden order of repetitive pattern that the viewer is invited to solve. It is kind of like those aptitude tests where you are given a series of three numbers, discern the pattern, and come up with the next number in the sequence.

Canvases of various sizes are hung well and the show comes together in a comprehensive, purposeful manner. Loven has done an excellent job here and this body of work speaks to a definite thesis. The larger works seem to be more successful than the smaller ones, and perhaps the strongest two are the 72”x84” “Penchant for Dueling” and the 80”x80” “Frowning Alpine”, both oils on canvas. Both works are aggressive multi-layered, multi-colored abstracts which are respectful nods to the patron saint of AbEx painting, Willem Dekooning. The scraps of newspaper impregnated into the paint works like a signature to those familiar with the nitty-gritty of DeKooning’s work. Although his gestures are bold, Dibble’s colors are of a soft muted key and are very carefully controlled to be just unsettling enough to eschew decoration.

As you move through the exhibition and begin to digest these paintings, Dibble’s brilliance becomes more evident. It hits you square in the eyes. These works are not nostalgic imitations pulled from the by-gone era of abstract expressionism, but relevant and valid ideas that resonate today. It is clear from the vibe on the streets of the historic Collinwood neighborhood: the bohemians strolling along the sidewalks, the DJ setting up on the corner, the street musicians, and the funky shops. This is work of the here and now. Painting is not dead. Dibble’s show at Arts Collinwood challenges the Postmodernism notion that you must tear down the past in order to create something new. “Hope for the Picture Guild” articulates nicely that we are not done learning from the past and offers an inside joke to those that are listening.

By Bill Chill www.williamchill.com

The space is surprisingly well suited for the paintings. Del Ray curated a very good show here, well balanced to the room, with each work to the others.
It is also very well installed.
William Tregoning- Art Dealer
www.tregoningandco.com

Matt's paintings are gutsy. He has a firm understanding of underlying structure--his instincts in regard to composition, color and application place him in very select company. This is a powerful exhibition of top-tier work.
Ross Lesko- Director, Kenneth Paul Lesko Gallery
www.kennethpaullesko.com

Matt Dibble gets his work to come to life in the painting process. He creates space there, in the paintings, that’s all it’s own … Dibble puts color upon color, shape upon shape in a manner that is both first rate craftsmanship and high-risk aesthetic adventurism. I selected these paintings because they represent Matt at the top of his game.”
Professor Del Rey Loven-Mary Schiller Myers School of Art.

New Abstract Paintings by Matthew Dibble to Debut

NEWS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CLEVELAND — August 30, 2010 — On Friday, September 17, Arts Collinwood Gallery will showcase recent abstract paintings from Cleveland artist Matthew Dibble in a solo exhibition titled “Hope for the Picture Guild.” The paintings will be on display through October 17.

For this show, works were selected by Del Rey Loven, Director, Mary Schiller Myers School of Art, Akron University.

Loven explains, “Matt Dibble gets his work to come to life in the painting process. He creates space there, in the paintings, that’s all it’s own … Dibble puts color upon color, shape upon shape in a manner that is both first rate craftsmanship and high-risk aesthetic adventurism. I selected these paintings because they represent Matt at the top of his game.”

Steven Litt, winner of the 2010 Cleveland Arts Prize and critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, commented in a recent review, “Dibble has oceans of energy and a great deal of visual intelligence.”

French collector and critic Christian Schmitt (www.espacetrevisse.com), said of Dibble’s abstract work, “Painter of the absolute, M. Dibble requires that art reveal to him the absolute of being. This is why his abstracts are ravaged by an abundance of impulses. The massiveness, debauchery and violence of the brush strokes seem to violently provoke the paint so that the hidden, the unsaid, is unveiled.”

Douglas Max Utter, noted Cleveland artist, critic, and editor of e-zine Giraffe Trap (www.giraffetrap.com), commented, “For a painter’s painter like Dibble, versed in the tensions of modernist work from Cezanne to DeKooning, the central activity of his art is to choreograph an ever more intense dance involving these two eternally incompatible partners [drawing and painting].”

Dibble’s work has been exhibited at various venues such as the Cleveland Museum of Art, www.tregoningandco.com S.P.A.C.E.S., and the Butler Institute of American Art. His paintings and drawings reside in private and corporate collections in the U.S. and France.

Arts Collinwood is located at 15601 Waterloo Rd. in the Collinwood neighborhood of Cleveland. For more information, visit www.artscollinwood.org. For more information on Matthew Dibble, please visit www.dibblepaintings.com.


Media Contact

Michelle Maniscalco
m.maniscalco@sbcglobal.net
216-401-8677

Dibble Construction,LLC- Receives Better Business Bureau Accreditation

For Immediate Release – Date 8-17- 2010

Dibble Construction,LLC announced today that it has received Better Business Bureau (BBB) accreditation.

"Accreditation is an honor – many businesses are not eligible," said David Weiss, BBB president. "Businesses that meet our high standards are invited to apply for accreditation. Applicants undergo a review process and ultimate approval by our Board of Directors."

Businesses seeking BBB accreditation must commit to the BBB Code of Business Practices. The Code is a comprehensive set of policies, procedures and best practices on how businesses treat consumers. These standards call for building trust, embodying integrity, advertising honestly and telling the truth, being transparent, honoring promises, being responsive and safeguarding privacy.

BBB was founded in 1912 with a mission of fostering a fair marketplace and continues to be a resource for the public, providing objective, unbiased information about businesses. Reports on over three million businesses and charities are available at cleveland.bbb.org. A key piece of information that helps consumers make informed decisions is whether a company is BBB accredited. According to BBB, seven of 10 consumers say they are more likely to buy from a company designated as a BBB Accredited Business.

"We are proud to be a BBB Accredited Business," said Matt Dibble "It signifies our commitment to customer service, reliability and trust. For any organization to excel in today's environment, it is critical that they be fully committed to excellence. Our acknowledgment by the BBB aligns with and supports our efforts of providing superior service in the marketplace."

Hope For The Picture Guild: Del Rey Loven on Matt Dibble

Professor Del Rey Loven talks about his selections for my up coming show at www.artscollinwood.org opening September 17th 2010

The year is 2010. This is the year Dennis Hopper died. Dennis Hopper was a damn good abstract painter and post-modernist artist. He came out of the abstract expressionist, pop-art era, but was known as an actor. He called himself a painter, who acted for a living.

Matt Dibble is an artist, both post-modern and abstract, who does roofing for a living. Thankfully Matt is not known for his roofing, he’s known for his painting, and he’s a damn good artist.

Jackson Pollock said: “A painting has a life, let the painting live.” In those monumental pictures that Pollock made, he created a space, and noted art critic Robert Hughes said these paintings were akin to the monumental landscapes of the American West. Hughes said, “It’s like a space you can move into.”

Matt Dibble gets his work to come to life in the painting process. He creates space in the paintings that’s all it’s own.

Willem De Kooning said that when he was standing upright and secure on two feet, he didn’t feel like he was getting it right, but when he started to slip, for just a moment before he fell, he’d have a glimpse at the reality he wanted to paint. He called himself a slipping glimpser.

Sometimes, in Matt’s studio (the aesthetic roof he has created) when you look at the paintings, such a dynamic space is created, you can just see the artist slipping on that steep pitch, tumbling into the magnificent, violent, exulted and indescribable space.

It’s been said the aesthetic experience is an ineffable one. You can’t fully put it into words what you experience when you see a Matt Dibble painting. There is so much going on.

He is a man who knows his medium. Every bit as a roofer knows how to put one shingle down on another, Dibble puts color upon color, shape upon shape in workmanlike manner that is both first rate craftsmanship and high-risk aesthetic adventurism. I selected these paintings because they represent Matt at the top of his game.

Del Rey Loven-recorded August 10th 2010

Del Rey Loven's paintings have been exhibited in numerous American venues, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Butler Institute of American Art, the Minnesota Museum of Art, and the Louis Meisel Gallery, New York City. His work as an educator has been driven by the question, "What will be the role of the creative person in twenty-first century society?", and guided by the conviction that "when there is a creative gift, there will be a place of service." This has led him to research and develop academic programs in Art, Visual Communications, and Architecture. The Bauhaus model of integrating academic studies in Art, Architecture, Craft, Design and Industry has been a longtime inspiration.

Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland Releases Design for New Building.

CLEVELAND, OH.- The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (MOCA) today released the design for its new facility, following its presentation and approval at a meeting of the City Planning Commission. The project is designed by the internationally acclaimed firm Foreign Office Architects (FOA), London. The Museum anticipates that it will break ground for the $26.3 million project in fall/winter 2010.

The nearly 34,000-square-foot, four-story structure is FOA’s first major building in the United States and its first museum. It will provide MOCA with street presence for the first time in its forty-plus-year history, and will enable it to present a diversity of innovative exhibitions and programs, while appealing to both current and new audiences. At the same time, it will give the city of Cleveland and its cultural community a signature building for contemporary art and ideas.

Located at the intersection of Euclid Avenue and Mayfield Road, the new MOCA is a flagship project of Cleveland’s emerging Uptown district, a major urban revitalization project undertaken by Case Western Reserve University; developer MRN, Ltd.; and other institutions in the University Circle neighborhood. The Museum will serve as a catalyst for creativity and growth in the area—which is home to one of the country’s largest concentrations of cultural, educational, and medical institutions—with greatly expanded educational and public programs, as well as imaginative collaborations with neighboring organizations and cultural partners.

MOCA Director Jill Snyder says, “The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland is elated that the design for its new building has been approved by the City Planning Commission. This represents an endorsement of FOA’s inspired building-design and a recognition of the critical importance of MOCA to the cultural life of the city. FOA’s design for our building is the perfect expression of our program—one that will not only enable us to operate at the highest level, but that will also be beautiful, intriguing, and sensitive to our urban surroundings and community. The Museum’s ability to realize this project during a period of economic instability is a clear testament to the vision and dedication of MOCA’s Board leadership and community funders.”

Farshid Moussavi, principal of FOA, adds, “As FOA’s first museum and first U.S. commission, this is an especially meaningful and inspirational project for us. Museums today are not just homes for art, but serve multiple functions and host a variety of activities. Our design for MOCA Cleveland aims to provide visitors with a museum that is a dynamic public space in which to experience contemporary art in its infinite manifestations.”

In addition to Foreign Office Architects, the design team for the new Museum includes executive architects Westlake Reed Leskosky, headquartered in Cleveland and designers of more than fifty cultural buildings throughout the United States.

Building Design
The new MOCA, which will be forty-four percent larger than the Museum’s current, leased facility, will demonstrate that a museum expansion need not be large in scale to be ambitious in all respects. Devised for both environmental and fiscal sustainability, the design for the four-story building is at once technically inventive, visually stunning, and highly practical.

FOA has responded ingeniously to the project’s roughly triangular site by designing a building with a hexagonal base that, with imperceptible changes in the shape of each story, rises to a square roof. Viewed from the exterior, the building will appear as an inventive massing of six geometric facets, some flat, others sloping at various angles, all coming together to create a powerful abstract form.

Clad primarily in mirror-finish black Rimex stainless steel, the façade of the new MOCA will reflect its urban surroundings, changing in appearance with differences in light and weather. Window glazing will be tinted to assimilate with the reflective skin so that during the day the building will read as a unified volume, while at night interior lights will create a dynamic pattern on the dark surface.

Three of the building’s six facets, one of them clad in transparent glass, will flank a public plaza. This will provide a public gathering place and also serve as MOCA’s “front yard,” and will be the setting for seasonal programming. From here, visitors and passersby may look through the transparent facet, site of the Museum entrance, into the ground floor, a space intended for socializing and for civic and cultural events.

While the building’s dark exterior will offer almost no hint of the interior massing and structure, the experience inside will be notably transparent. Upon entering MOCA, visitors will find themselves in an atrium from which they may visually grasp the dynamic shape and structure of the building as it rises. This space will lead in turn to the Museum’s lobby, café, and shop, and to a double-height multipurpose room that will house public programs and other events. From here, visitors may take the Museum’s staircase—itself a monumental sculptural object or an elevator to the upper floors.

Because MOCA is a non-collecting institution—one of the few such contemporary art museums in the country—its new building does not need to accommodate collection galleries. In order to achieve maximum flexibility for the museum’s diverse exhibitions, the main gallery has been sited at the top of the building. There it will be structurally unencumbered, needing only to hold the lightweight roof, the underside of which will be fully visible from the gallery. Moveable walls will enable the 6,000-square-foot space to be divided into a variety of configurations. This floor will also contain a gallery designed specifically for new-media work and a lounge with a view of the city, where visitors can relax, reflect on what they have seen, and read about the exhibitions.

Ms. Snyder notes, “As Cleveland’s only museum of contemporary art, MOCA is committed to presenting exhibitions that break new ground, showing the work of emerging artists from across the globe as well as from our own region. Flexibility is key to a program that, like ours, embraces aesthetic, conceptual, and cultural diversity, and displays works in a great variety of mediums and genres. We are thrilled with the gallery space planned for the new Museum.”

While the main exhibition gallery is on the top floor, all four floors of the Museum contain space for either exhibitions or public programs, with the second and third floors combining public and “back of house” functions. The second floor, for example, will house both exhibition workshops and a 1,500-square-foot public gallery, to be used for more intimately scaled exhibitions; consonant with the openness that is characteristic of the building’s interior, visitors approaching this gallery by stair will also be able to glimpse the workshops. The third floor, home to MOCA’s administrative offices, will also include spaces for classes, lectures, and other educational programs.

In keeping with the ways in which contemporary visitors engage with art, the new building will have wi-fi throughout, enabling the use of wireless devices for on demand learning. MOCA anticipates that the building will receive LEED silver accreditation.

PIG IRON by Matthew Dibble- Review by Christian Schmitt

Matthew Dibble started painting relatively late in life, despite having always drawn since age 13. He began drawing using India ink and has remained fascinated by this dark liquid.
Later, he tried several times to take up painting; however, he often found it too demanding and eventually went back to drawing.
He felt that what he depicted in his small drawings were often times more intense and profound that what he could portray in his large canvases. And it was only recently that he felt truly capable of transposing his greatest aspirations to large paintings.
Furthermore, his early canvases often covered themes and images from mythology that he had already elaborately developed in his drawings.
Now, with the painting “Pig Iron” and others from 2008, Matthew Dibble seems to mark the start of a new turning point in his work leading him to completely abstract paintings. This painting is surprising due to the abundance of paint and violence exhibited. Paint constantly pummeled and lacerated by the painter and which sadly shows a wounded and devastated world.
In doing so, Matthew Dibble returns to the school of abstract expressionism, which has had a strong presence in American painting since World War II.
In fact, the new direction that he has taken surprisingly resembles that of Rothko who, in 1946, with a new series of paintings called Multiforms, would also develop an abstract language in his paintings. He has also previously lived through a period marked by mythological themes.
The same Rothko started out painting shapes like organs giving as a pretext that “my art is not abstract; it lives and breathes.” Furthermore, “…Any picture which does not provide the environment in which the breath of life can be drawn does not interest me.”
De Kooning himself also excelled in abstraction. Even after the war, he quite often continued to mix abstraction and figuration; however, in the 1950s, he would firmly turn to abstract and gestural painting with large brush strokes resembling gestures of liberation.
In this school of abstract painting in the U.S., Jackson Pollock must not be forgotten. Pollock, however, distinguishes himself by action painting, by gestural painting which primarily characterizes his work. Far from being only a technique, gestural painting allows the painter’s work to be objectified.
“Dripping” allowed him to resolve the antinomy between the color and stroke, to unite form and color, drawing and painting in the same spreading gesture. In short, thanks to this method, Pollock’s painting is becoming spontaneously one.
However, none of this is present in Matthew Dibbles work, because if the “Pig Iron” painting is indeed a part of the sphere of influence of abstract expressionism as previously described, it cannot be connected to Action Painting.
Loaded with an overwhelming number of impulses, this work remains in fact decisively abstract due to its torturous look. But since the painter still uses a brush or some other instrument that he applies directly to the canvas, there is no objectification like there is in Pollock’s painting.
This is a dark painting, having generous amounts of pigments distributed with aggressive brush strokes of heavy, violent colors. It is slashed everywhere with large zigzagging, crisscrossing brush strokes.
You can also see large knife strokes, from the spatula or the brush which notably lead to the creation of a deep gap in the middle of the painting and numerous areas of flat tints.
The spatula or knife at times brutally slashes the canvas, skinning it alive and even depriving it of its substance. In certain areas (at the top and bottom of the painting), it is at times literally decimated.
The result of this violence leads to the creation of pockets of paint appearing here and there resembling piles of snow appearing, which once dry creates a sort of tumulus or crater. All these sporadic heaps of paint give birth to the surface of the canvas similar to the surface of the moon.
The title “Pig Iron” which can be translated into French by the melting obtained by fusing iron ore in blast-furnaces justifies the particular painting techniques used in this canvas. Cleveland, the city where the painter lives, was an important industrial centre up until the second half of the twentieth century before undergoing a restructuring into the financial and insurance sectors.
Matthew Dibble thus lived a large part of his life surrounded by this heavy industry and by the intense activity of the blast-furnaces, steel mills and rolling mills that were part of his daily setting. All this must have equally been his inspiration for certain scenes from mythology such as the works of Vulcan, the god of fire.
Moreover, the melting obtained by fusing iron ore in blast-furnaces, iron ore which itself is pieces extracted from the earth forces us to participate in a show that resembles the birth of the world.
The colors contribute to this original world by the use of darker, more mysterious pigments: a dreary palette pulling towards grey and muddy brown. But also the green that springs up from the central gap and a range of other tints which appear by sporadic brush strokes but without bringing any real clarity to the group of colors (pink on the right, blue on the left and other nuances of brown, red…).
By darkening the composition, the color helps to make it even more impermeable and dense, also concealing its interior liveliness.
This original space painted by Matthew Dibble brings to mind what Henri Maldiney said about certain scenes painted by Cézanne:
“The sub-spatial scheme of every space, the sub-cosmic scheme of every world, that is, a metaphysical deepness” (Maldiney Henri, The ambiguity of the image of the painting, Paris-Lausanne, L’Age d’Homme, 1973).
Indeed, like Cézanne, M. Dibble’s work does not follow the path of academic illusionism, it claims to be fundamental, wakes up a dormant song in all things, so that the work becomes a sort of event arriving.
Since M. Dibble follows mythological themes, this must be understood in his works as an attempt to favor universal issues. There is a hidden order deep within his work. Despite an apparent disorder, the space is organized according to an internal logic thanks to an internal animation and an organic architecture.
In all major works, you find the same reality that Ehrenzweig describes:
“The assault of irrationality against rationality” and where a new order appears, “a hidden order in the structure of art.” (Ehrenzweig’s book – The Hidden Order of Art)
Rothko also thought that art must go deeper:
“The love of art is a ‘feast of ideas’… the crucial point for us isn’t the explanation, but rather knowing if the essential ideas that the painting must communicate have any importance.”
He saw a mystical force in his painting. The chromatic expansions, the areas of color, they possessed according to him a real supernatural power.
And quite often to get to this point of no return, you must, according to the poet Henri Michaux “pierce the skin of something” just to “in the words of Husserl, return to the very thing itself.”
“Pig Iron” is the manifestation of these original worlds, the melting by fusion coming directly from the bowels of the earth. But beyond that, the painter sends us to different reality, one in which the world and earth, light and reservation fight.
Painter of the absolute, M. Dibble requires that art reveal to him the absolute of being. This is why this painting is ravaged by an abundance of impulses, the massiveness, debauchery and violence of the brush strokes to violently provoke the paint so that the hidden, the unsaid is unveiled.
This aggressiveness is created particularly by the gestures of liberation on the canvas, by the lacerations from the knife, the blade of the spatula or the brush. The painter seems to surrender himself to the chaos of sensations, chaos which overwhelms things, gives the illusion of movement while reproducing in some way shockwaves from the universal big bang.
Like Cézanne, he is looking for organization within a painting, the fusion of like things to the geological foundation of the world. The master of Aix-en Provence wanted durable, solid art and was constantly searching for the substantial and timeless side of nature.
Here with this painting, which is supposed to reproduce the melted flow coming out of a blast furnace, the painter also aims to convey the depths this flow. Comparable to the being, it deals with restoring the depths of the being.
Thanks to this work which makes the melting by fusion take shape, the painter leads us pass the simple, superficial experience to make it constantly younger et become like a third eye, a vision from a metaphysical scope.
This falls in line with the analysis of Martin Heidegger who believes that only the work of art allows the being to be unveiled.
“Art makes the truth spew out. Taking the initiative with a single step, art brings the truth to light, while protecting the truth of the coming-to-be. Bringing something to light, bringing it to being from the essential origin and the initial leap, this is what the word “origin” means to us.” (The Origin of the Work of Art by Martin Heidegger).
Oddly enough, this revelation of being also sends us to ancient Greece, home of the mythology that M. Dibble is particularly fond of. In fact, Parmenides, a philosopher who preceded Socrates, already said it best with these seemingly simple words: “the being is; the non-being isn’t.”
With these words, Parmenides sums up the question of being which according to Heidegger had been forgotten in the history of metaphysics. However, for the German philosopher, forgetting the being is not a mere negligence in thought, but rather a part of its structure.
For him, Western thinking does not let the being be. Only painters and Cézanne particularly really allow the truth about the being and the coming-to-be to come about.
From this famous statement by Cézanne: “What I am trying to convey is more mysterious than anything. It’s the labyrinth of the roots themselves of the being, at the source of impalpable sensations.”
This is why we can catch a glimpse of the being when looking at the painting “Pig Iron”, while understanding the work from another standpoint and feeling this impalpable sensation.
Metz, June 11, 2010
Christian Schmitt