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| Raw materials n7. Acrylic and collage on paper. Virginia Paquette (Photo Credit: Spike Mafford) |
MATERIE
PRIME/raw materials
Virginia Paquette
June
6 – 29, 2014
Reception with the Artist:
First Friday, June 6, 6-8pm
This is a series of
works, both large and small,
that combine painting and elements of collage.
The texture, color
and contrast are both sharp and organic,
inspired by body and landscape.
Music Performed by Bill Smith.
Location: The Island Gallery, 400 Winslow Way E., #120, Bainbridge Island, Washington
About the Artists:
Virginia
Paquette: An MFA graduate in painting from the University of Washington, Virginia
Paquette has worked and exhibited internationally. Her art frequently depicts a sense of
movement and change, and is inspired by natural form, color, and
phenomena. Winner of numerous public
art commissions, Paquette completed an environmental installation celebrating
the Millennium and Education for a Washington State “Art in Public Places”
project on the campus of Bellevue Community College, a work in glass for the
Redmond campus of Lake Washington Technical College, and “Velocity” for the
entrance to Columbia Basin College technical arts building in Pasco, Washington. She continues to explore more processes and
media, develop performance-installations with her husband, clarinetist and
composer William O. Smith, as well as teach and exhibit.
In my art I have sought to
depict motion, memory and contradiction.
I am drawn to the sense of objects and space on the move, of color and shapes
and lines in flux. And sometimes the
connection between the shape of nature and the shape of the human gesture is an
inspiration: The similarity of the tendril, the curve of the hip, the cascade,
the vocabulary of posture. I often work
with images of movement, from natural forms and phenomena: floods, “deluge,”
the vortex and spill of moving water in defined spaces, whirlpools. The “memory” is transplanting visual cues
from one place/time to another, perhaps fragments of classical figures or architecture
– or “time” from my own history.
Bill Smith - also known as a classical composer under his full name, William O. Smith - was born in Sacramento and grew up in Oakland, California, where he began playing clarinet when he was ten. He put together a jazz group at 13, and at the age of 15 he joined the Oakland Symphony. He idolized Benny Goodman, but after high school, a brief cross-country tour with a dance band ended his romance for the life of a traveling jazz musician. He gave two weeks' notice when the band reached Washington, D.C., and, encouraged by an older band member to "get the best education you can get," headed to New York. He began his formal music studies at the Juilliard School of Music, playing in New York jazz clubs like Kelly's Stables at night.
Bill returned to California upon hearing and admiring the music of Darius Milhaud, who was then teaching at Mills College in Oakland. At Mills, he met pianist Dave Brubeck, with whom he has often played since, in both the famous Dave Brubeck Octet and The Dave Brubeck Quartet, as well as other groups, notably with Brubeck at the Lincoln Center. In 1947, he composed Schizophrenic Scherzo for the Brubeck Octet, one of the earliest works that successfully integrated jazz and classical techniques, a style that later was given the name "third stream" by Gunther Schuller. He studied composition at the University of California, Berkeley, where he graduated with a bachelor's and a master's degree.
Winning the Prix de Paris presented Smith the opportunity for two years of study at the Paris Conservatory, and in 1957, he was awarded the prestigious Prix de Rome and spent six years in that city. He has since received numerous other awards, including two Guggenheim grants.
After a teaching stint at the University of Southern California, Smith began a thirty-year career at the University of Washington School of Music in Seattle, where he taught music composition and performance from 1966 to 1997.
Smith has investigated and cataloged a wide range of extended techniques on the clarinet, including the use of two clarinets simultaneously by a single performer, inspired by images of the ancient aulos encountered during a trip to Greece, numerous multiphonics, playing the instrument with a cork in the bell, and the "clar-flute," a technique that involves removing the instrument's mouthpiece and playing it as an end-blown flute.
As William O. Smith, he has written several pioneering pieces that feature many of these techniques, including Duo for Flute and Clarinet (1961) and Variants for Solo Clarinet (1963), and he compiled the first comprehensive catalogue of fingerings for clarinet multiphonics. Smith was among the early composers interested in electronic music, and as a performer he continues to experiment with amplified clarinet and electronic delays. He remains active nationally, internationally, and on the local Seattle music scene as well, where in 2008, he composed, recorded, and premiered a "jazzopera" titled Space in the Heart.
For More
Information Contact: The Island Gallery, 206.780.9500 or ssn@theislandgallery.net
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