meredith cutler :: artist :: designer ::

Friday sneaks up on you, which is no reason to cover your eyes and shriek. High gas prices have kept me a bit closer to home this week, and in my wanderings I've turned out a few Providence tidbits for your easy consumption.

For those who prefer one-stop shopping, hop on your jalopy and bike on down to Olneyville for a weekend of events at The Steel Yard. As part of their annual fundraiser, a full menu of celebratory events and competitions of kiln and foundry peaks with a "Steel Yard Is Burning" dance party on Saturday night.

DownCity, drop by the Gallery at 17 Peck for their special 3rd Anniversary exhibit and sale, pending their June move to a brand-spanking new location on Federal Hill. Particularly stunning: Malcom Furlow's acidicly edgy Coyote paintings.

Above: Malcolm Furlow: "Coyote In Providence", Acrylic on canvas 30"x36"

Across the "way" at 75 Weybosset, fit yourself with some sexy frames at Providence Optical. Now that you can see clearly, step up the winding staircase to Above Providence Optical Gallery, for a glimpse of "Your Idols", a series of close-cropped portraiture prints by Philipp Rumpf.

Opening tomorrow at Gail Cahalan Gallery, photographer Alexandra Broches' "The Natural World Redefined". Her "design-inspired", black and white prints feature collections of fragile, natural materials such as feathers, bone and eggshells. Broches will give a gallery talk on May 21st, 6:30pm. The show runs through June 7th.

I have always had a love for paper that goes beyond the expected excitement of a blank, white sheet ready for the artist’s first mark. As a small child, I spent hours poring over the decorator’s hefty wallpaper sample books, left over from our 1977 home renovations: the mirrored backgrounds…the bold florals or geometric patterns rendered in one exciting colorway after another. In my early days, these enormous, psychedelic volumes rivaled even Dr. Seuss and Eric Carle for my affections.

Many years later, I helped fund my way through art school by working in the cataloging department of my college library. My love for found papers, combined with my passion for words inspired me to stash away hundreds of colorful book jackets, typically discarded during the cataloging process. Fast-forward another decade or so, and here I am in my studio, surrounded by several Tupperware storage bins full of vintage paper ephemera that desperately needs purging!

Unlike my vintage giftwrap and wallpaper collections, these heavyweight, coated book jackets don’t offer enough regular patterning or figuration to make them appropriate for the mixed-media art collages that I often create. They are text heavy, and extremely varied in coloration. With some creative experimentation, and using some tools I had available, I created this unique DIY project for my sturdy and colorful paper source. Click here for my full, illustrated tutorial:

If you happen to be in the Boston area today, take a drive up to the harbor near the new Convention Center, and stop by the Boston Design Center. There, until 4pm today, the Boston Sample Drop/Shop event is open to the public. This event is a fantastic way for design firms to recycle their unwanted sample library materials; from fabrics to papers to 3-ring binders. Visitors are welcome to take any of the pre-sorted materials for use in their own creative projects.

"Keep perfectly usable building and finish materials out of the dumpster and give them a good home!"

The event takes place at the Boston Design Center on Drydock Ave. Post "shop", they will be having a barbeque to celebrate their creative and eco-friendly community-mindedness. Cheers!

Also of note in the creative supply realm, I am offering great discounts and special bonus offers in my crostini*VS Vintage & Supply shop. In honor of my upcoming honeymoon, all items will be on sale for the entire month running May 10th-June 10th. Many items are unique and will run out, so get a head start on your creative summer projects with my unique vintage & supply materials before I close shop and head to Italy!

The calendar page has turned, which brings an exciting new crop of gallery shows to focus those springtime wanderings. Time it right and you'll hit an opening reception, all the better to fulfil your early evening aperitif needs!

Make sure to visit 5 Traverse Gallery, where tomorrow evening, Rhode Island artist Allison Paschke will be opening a new exhibition of her mixed-media works in porcelain, cast-resin and layered pigments. Named after imaginary cities described in author Italo Calvino's 1972 novel: "Invisible Cities", Paschke's "Portable Pieces" invite handling and exploration; an adventure required to unlock the magical, invented spaces insinuated within their modest materials.

Above: Allison Paschke's "Despina", (7.25" x 5" x rice paper, varnish and pigment

Visitors to 5 Traverse will have a chance to encounter Paschke's newest work, scaled back into the "second and a half" dimension, which incorporates a bolder tier of the spectrum to invoke the quiet, imaginary perspectives inherent in the neutral pallete of her 3-D work.

Above: Allison Paschke's "Tabriz Study 1", (7" x 7"), resin and pigments on Mylar

Click here to read my full review, available in print in the May/June issue of Artscope Magazine. The exhibition will be on view from May 9th through June 14th.

On view in the Inner Space: Father and son Bill & Ben Shattuck, "2 Generations Aloft"
5 Traverse Gallery: 5 Traverse Street, Providence, RI 02906. 401.278.4968 / info@5traverse.com

It's a rainy, slow Sunday, made ever more so by the brakes of waiting; a delivery appointment for our long coveted Tempurpedic bed scheduled to arrive between 1pm-5pm. With our doors removed from their hinges and furniture carefully pushed aside, there is nothing more to do except stew in anticipation.

Time for a good read, and while in house-mode, an errant pile of documents reveals a treasure: my long-deceased grandfather's hand-written auto-biography, "Poor Little Me", penned politely in March of 1926, when he was just fourteen years old. Having re-read it for the first time since my own adolescence, I finally realize its true value. I never knew Grandpa Henry, he died when my own father was only 10 years old.

It's a sweet, genuine read, a true time-capsule, revealing a boy who aspired to become a mechanical engineer or draftsman; with a special ambition to design airplane engines in what he predicted to be known as "the motor age". I have decided I should at least make an attempt to adapt the carefully pencilled script into an illustrated book format. After all, Henry wondered aloud whether "an autobiography of a fourteen year old boy would sell as well [as that] of one of our famous men?"