Hiroshige - Lady with a Parasol Roughly 150 years ago in Europe, Impressionist and young Post- Impressionist artists were first delighting in the ukiyo-e, wood-block prints from Japan.

These images portrayed popular Japanese actors and courtesans, illustrated well-known stories and plays, showed views of landscapes with everyday people, and documented scenes from ordinary life. These inexpensive prints were wildly popular in Japan, and became a huge influence on 19th Century European artists. These prints changed art history, and as surprising as they seem now, they were even more startling in mid-19th Century Europe.

Nest Tower and Suspended Nest HouseThere is a delicious communication between an artist and an audience through the created works. The movement of ideas into art gives off meanings that we, the audience, can then discover from our own understanding.

Adding the energies and sensibilities of two artists to this mix can be like two cooks in the same kitchen, bumping into each other, working separately but inspiring each other, or blending into a new persona.

Angel Top and Rooster Bottom Sixty works to represent any artist's life would usually be a major retrospective, but for the late Father Edward M. Catich, it's only a glimpse. Catich (1906-1979) was an artist, a scholar, a bookmaker and printer, a master calligrapher, a stone carver, a sign painter, a creator of fonts, a great teacher, a stained-glass window maker, a musician on many instruments, a coin collector, a painter, a traveler, an orphan, a child of the Depression, and a parish priest.

Deborah Butterfield's famous horse sculptures - 16 of which are currently being exhibited at the Figge Art Museum - are created from gathered steel or bronze or wood and formed into horses of great beauty and spirit. There is an elemental surprise that her horses are made this way - abstract and yet real, freely formed and yet completely descriptive. Her sculptures become living, breathing creatures before our senses, expressing the horses' strength and power and also their delicacy and silence. They will remain on the third and fourth floors of the Figge through May 27.

Jeanne Tamisiea - How do you choose from thousands of paintings, illustrations, and drawings to represent a lifetime of making art? How can one express an artist's wide range of vision in only 53 pieces?

Jeanne Tamisiea came to the Quad Cities to teach at Black Hawk College in 1987, after serving as a traveling art instructor in North Dakota and directing her own illustration and design company. Originally from Iowa, she earned degrees from Drake, Michigan State, and Syracuse. She died in July 2006 at the age of 57, of complications from a viral infection of the heart. (See "Quiet Giant," River Cities' Reader Issue 598, September 13-19, 2006.)

Alison Minas - Camus once said that all artists try to reproduce in their work the most moving experiences of their past. By using these memories as a starting point, artists and writers give a delicious emotional energy to their work. These events can then be constructed, modified, and embellished to suit their ideas and images.

The latest show at the Quad City Arts gallery presents an assortment of such remembered associations, made with the perspective and vision of the present. Heidi Hernandez has painted personal, charming, and friendly stories from her family memories. Alison Minas photographed the interior scenes of a familiar haven in her large images of a '50s diner. And Steven Carlson has constructed numerous and startling toy-like "boxes of childhood visitations," full of personal reactions to the past.

"Put-together" by Rosie Lee Tompkins Leonardo da Vinci was famous for improvising poetry while playing the lute. Mozart and Beethoven were legendary for their spontaneous piano inventions. And blues and jazz musicians have always loved the ability to create new combinations of music or words while playing.

Accidentally on Purpose: Improvisation in African Textiles & African-American Quilts, a magnificent exhibition at the Figge Art Museum, demonstrates this gift of improvisation, of turning a traditional form into a fresh and unique creation. And like great musicians, these quilt artists sew a piece together with their own original and surprising harmonies.

 

Sun, Sea & Sand Most of us remember our grade-school art classes, in which we cut up construction paper or magazine photographs and glued them together to make a collage. Few of us thought then that we were making art, for it seemed so much fun.

But this personal and beautiful medium is full of expressive possibilities that can reveal the artist's most intimate thoughts and feelings. On December 16, regionally known artist and calligrapher Shelly Voss opens a retrospective exhibit of her magical collage meditations. The reception runs from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Leger Gallery in downtown Davenport, and the exhibit will be up through January 19.

Jim Riesberg - "Setting the Standard"Jim Riesberg's most recent series of large-format collages originated from an auctioned four-pound box of vintage photographs, musty old invoices, advertisements, and water-stained inventory sheets from a hardware store that had been in business in the 1880s. By scanning and combining these written and visual sources, he has created a many-layered body of images, full of emotion.

artwork by Sara Fletcher Three excellent young painters - Sara Fletcher, Sarah Goffstein, and Greta Songe - shine in their current exhibition at the Leger Gallery in downtown Davenport. Former students of Ron Cohen at the University of Iowa, they are all at the beginnings of their teaching careers. These artists are well on their way in establishing their personal styles in art, and all have something individual to say about experience and memory. One artist is influenced by the light and stillness of Vermeer, another by the colors and patterns of the artist Vuillard, and the third by the flowing music of nature.

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