Museum’s ‘Art Talk’ features 2 artists

A “Double Feature Art Talk” with Ruth Arietta and Bachrun LoMele will take place Sept. 3 from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Morris Graves Museum of Art, 636 F St., Eureka.

Admission is $5 for adults, $2 for seniors, students and military personnel, and free for children under 17, Humboldt Arts Council members and families with an EBT card and valid ID.

Arietta will give her talk in the Knight Gallery at 2 p.m. and LoMele will be speaking at 3 p.m. on the main floor of the museum. Arietta will discuss her current exhibition “Narrative Paintings and Fanciful Sculpture,” now on view at the museum.

“My paintings show rooms and environments that I myself and many people would be at home in, with people in the paintings at their best selves, and how they should be,” she said. “I like them to convey humanness, the funny moments, and the private things we all do. They convey to the people that look at them the feeling of coming home.”

Arietta said she knew she wanted to be a painter when she was 16.

“I started painting at around that age. I had terrible acne and few social graces and found refuge in my room, painting,” Arietta said. “Fortunately, both my parents were artists and very supportive, my father being a sculptor and car designer, and my mother a painter, plus we had a house surrounded by trees, birds and wildlife. I was an ugly duckling surrounded by beauty. I was, am, lucky. When I went to Eastern Michigan University, I studied painting and printmaking and find, now, that my paintings are influenced by the burrowing, scratching, and upheaval of the etching process.”

The paintings Arietta does are full of objects in cluttered organization, the perspective altered and yet right, she said, with an array of color and pattern juxtaposed within the rooms.

“The painting process involves joy and risk and longing, like the fool stepping blindly over the hill in the tarot cards,” Arietta said. “Combined with the daily coffee cups and household paraphernalia, order and chaos, they offer a rare display of reality and imagination; inner and outer.”

LoMele will discuss his current exhibition “Burn Pile/The Andromeda mirage that I often see,” now on view at the museum.

“This show will be an installation suggestive of a collapsed home. So, much of it will be spread on the floor of the gallery or leaning against the walls. At first glance this will appear to be a colossal mess, but closer inspection will reveal that all the elements have been hand crafted and carefully considered,” LoMele said.

“Additionally, a major element of this installation will be a continuous presence of words and sentences, written upon the ‘lumber’, the scattered commemorative plates, power cords, lights, etc. — all made using paper,” he said. “The presence of streaming red and yellow LED signage provide a suggestion of flames and embers. There is a backstory to this wording, and to this installation, which will be available to visitors and is part of my artist talk.”

LoMele came to be an artist by being born, he said.

“Born into a family of aspiring artists, themselves the children of aspiring artists, it was natural for me to experience art as a desired possibility, something worth striving to develop,” LoMele said. “Practicality, always necessarily a concern, led me to pursue a career as a freelance illustrator in New York for 26 years, before moving back to the mountains (of) California, intending to mine a deeper art expression particular to myself, and free of outer pressures and requirements.

“Presenting my inner expression publicly has been a particular challenge for me, but also exhilarating (as feedback can be generative),” LoMele said. “As it turned out, my inner expression required massive doses of outer interaction to fully develop and manifest physically. This inner/outer process happened especially through the development of my Burn Pile project over the past nine years.

LoMele added, “I think this show is relevant to anywhere in the U.S. right now. For me — twice evacuated for wildfire in recent years, living in the California mountains — the suggestion of fire-as-transformation has particular relevance. Perhaps this applies throughout California.”