RUST & TARNISH
objects from Sub-Saharan Africa
12.8.2024

Like shadow, echo, and fragrance, rust and tarnish are byproducts of materials and events more significant than they are. Iron and silver are rendered restive by oxygen, and processes of fabrication, embellishment, use, and cherished possession, as well as gradual dissolution through rust and tarnish, suggest the “social lives” of things and the stories they can convey.

On display today are 19th/early-20th-century objects of iron and silver from several sub-Saharan countries. Iron is “born” when smelting releases it from rock, and through blacksmiths’ canny actions, forged implements extend hands to realize all manner of essential endeavor. Sudanese silversmiths crafted jewelry from European trade coins, and their works share styles extending across the Red Sea to Yemen, Oman, and the Indian Ocean World – and back again.

All arts raise questions. How did African artisans devise such complex technologies to manage malleable metal and so permit their clients to change their worlds for the better? How did ironworkers know which ores to select, what wood to cut, and how to stoke and control fires of the astounding intensity of 2200°F required to smelt iron? Why did African metalsmiths choose a particular design for a tool, emblem of status, item of jewelry, or embodied divinity, and how was aesthetic perfection achieved, recognized, and rewarded? Many iron objects displayed here were precolonial currency tokens; how could such remarkable forms serve as “money”? The nature of value itself was at play. And how did rituals summon spiritual forces to assure that craftsmanship would fulfill human needs? Above all, what does African smithing reveal of the keen intellect of the individuals undertaking such crucial activities, as well as the enduring human impulses to do a job well for its own sake and to create beauty along the way?

- Allen F. Roberts

The Fifth Year Show
12.17.2023

Celia Bowker, Marsha Burns, Michael Deyermond, Ovidio Federici, Nancy Kyes, Vince Montague, Philip Vaughan

All of the artists represented in The Fifth Year Show have exhibited at the Redmetal Barn in the past. Although we opened in 2015, with the work of TS Heckler’s “Liking Art,” we had a few years’ break due to Covid. Therefore, The Fifth Year Show is being celebrated in 2023 – three years late.

The goal of the Redmetal Barn is to bring artists together in a supportive environment where their work can be shared and experienced in a unique setting. Our mission is to present a diverse slate of artistic disciplines to our community to view and discuss, and we are so pleased with the positive reception and response.

Represented in this show are artists from Los Angeles, Seattle and Cloverdale, and include: Celia Bowker (sculpture), Marsha Burns (photography), Michael Deyermond (sculpture/painting), Ovidio Federici (painting), Nancy Kyes (sculpture), Vince Montague (ceramic sculpture) and Philip Vaughan (painting).

I would like to thank our community for supporting these and other artists who have shown here through the years.

- Jenness Brewer

TS HECKLER
10.1.23

Year of the Rabbit 

Rabbits, rabbits, rabbits. This year is the year of the rabbit. In 2011 it was also, the year of the rabbit. TS Heckler had cut back his workload at his advertising agency, Heckler Associates, to three days a week. He wanted to spend more time at his place, Oyster Point Gardens, on the Hood Canal in Washington. Often, while doing walking meditations, between his art studio and the bluff, overlooking the canal, he would see rabbits. An abundance of rabbits. It was a plentiful year!

At a point, he realized that everywhere he turned there were rabbits, causing mischief, eating the garden, darting in and out of hidden rabbit holes in the wild salal on the bluff. With his pellet gun in hand, he decided to take out the older ones, an unnatural selection, but a solution, to the overabundance. He killed 44 rabbits that summer and fall and it made no difference. 

By the winter, with remorse and guilt in his heart, he felt extremely bad and had misgivings. For penance TS Heckler decided to do a crayon drawing, for every rabbit he killed, honoring each one of the rabbit's lives. 

Here they all are. 

-Talese Heckler

LEONARD RAGOUZEOS: POWER
3.26.23 

The Redmetal Barn

Utility poles, with their strangely organized chaos of wires and cables are so ubiquitous we rarely pay attention. Aside from their stark graphic quality, I see them as symbols of faith and power in a long history of Structures from Stonehenge and the Pyramids to Cathedrals and giant Skyscrapers, representing culture’s reigning faith, be it religion, commerce or communication. Today’s electric messages reach everyone, everywhere instantly, all the time.

The Owl Barn

The Artwork in the Owl Barn spans a period of 25 years of work, representing common objects such as tools or food in a dramatic and respectful manner and with a sense
of portraiture, if possible.

The Medium & Technique

I have been working with India Ink on paper since the mid 1990’s and as in any good marriage, I’m better at what I do for having partnered with it. The ink is waterproof and air dries quickly. The Yupo paper is synthetic and does not absorb ink. The work is done on a wall, and quickly, avoiding or directing the drips and accidents that help or hinder
a piece. A hair dryer and spray bottle are always at hand to help build layers of grays and deep blacks. The work is frenetic and offers me interesting challenges and surprises.

-Leonard Ragouzeos

OVIDIO FEDERICI: REFERENTIAL ABSTRACTIONS
12.23.22

Since an early age, I was encouraged to revere the medium of painting. Still today, I feel that the simple action of pushing and manipulating pigments on a two-dimensional surface is a magical endeavor, which at times, creates compelling images, simply constructed by lines, shapes and textures.

Predominantly, my physical surroundings inspire the subject matter of my work.

Some three years ago, I moved to Sonoma County after a lifelong awareness of mostly urban settings. Immediately, I became mesmerized with the natural beauty of this land, for its idyllic vistas, diverse florae, palpable seasonal changes and its agricultural specificity.

This current work stems from spontaneous visual notes that I might absorb while driving on the freeway or on a country road. Perhaps, while in the car line waiting for coffee, I notice the unusual shape of some vegetation or the silhouette of distant mountains against the sky, or maybe, while walking on a trail, I am confronted by the beauty a decaying bark of a fallen tree.

In the end, I would like to think that I craft my work to be an object that may evoke different emotions to different viewers at different times, rather than a pictorial windows of a static reality.

- Ovidio Federici
Made in Cloverdale

PHILIP VAUGHAN: CHANNEL
4.3.2022

Channel refers to the English Channel, what the French call La Manche — the arm sleeve. Channel also suggests a medium or course of some kind where I can go looking for meaning.

During World War 2, before I was born, my father was involved in the Mulberry Harbor Project, towing floating harbors, part by part, across the Channel from England to France, and assembling them on the D-Day beaches for use by the Allies.

I was born just after the war and so its aftermath was something I saw and felt while growing up in Le Havre, France. My young boyhood friends and I speculated endlessly about what war was, about who these Germans might have been, and about why so many houses in our neighborhood were missing. The war became a subject of great interest for me, figuring out what had happened and knowing that my parent’s generation has lived through it, even though I wasn’t quite sure what “it” was.

My father died before I was old enough to have a real conversation with him about his role in the war, but, during my teens I learned to sail in the rather chilly green waters of the Channel. Later, I started visiting war museums and collected images of the war. In time I began to work on drawings from these images, a new direction for me because I was drawing things that I never had never actually seen in real life. I was reaching back into someone else’s past that in a real sense was also my past.

These drawings eventually led me to investigate the Channel itself. Often drawn from memory, too, these stories of the sea, the Channel drawings suggest a way for me to look at things that are both abstract and real, things that are both in the world and inside me.

- Philip Vaughan

MICHAEL DEYERMOND
3.13.2022

every moment of my glorious and horrific life
i have lived and died
each to its fullest
each in total beauty
both going in opposite directions
simultaneously
fortunately i never miss an opportunity
to draw a dick
and laugh like hell about it all
xomd

VINCE MONTAGUE
3.13.2022

So much of art is decision-making, considering alternatives, searching for solutions to unanswerable questions. My current body of work explores the figure, but taken together the sculptures resemble pieces of language. I’m interested in how language and clay describe each other. Much of the content of my ceramic work comes from reading and writing: discovering the form of a poem feels similar to discovering a new profile in clay.

The most important part of my studio practice is to keep my head and my heart open to new ideas and ways to navigate my creativity. I have no rules nor thesis to prove in my work. I have no technical specialty other than learning what I need to know in order to support my ideas. I feel my job as an artist and writer is to step back and let the work show me where to go and how to live.

- Vince Montague

The ART of FASHION
10.13.2019

“A good couturier must be an architect for design, a sculptor for shape, a painter for color, a musician for harmony, and a philosopher for temperance.”

- Cristobal Balenciaga

Powered by the widespread influence of print media during the last hundred years, illustration and photography emerged, along with fashion design, as distinct art forms. Ricky Serbin’s collection reveals how illustration and, later, photography were key to the success of haute couture, serving to underscore the unique signature of a particular house and to introduce new collections to clients faraway from Paris. Artists such as Rene Bouche, in-house illustrator for forty years at Vogue, and illustrators David Downton and Jean Phillipe Delhomme, capture the spirit of their own times in addition to the timeless ART of FASHION.

- Ricky Serbin and Kelley Voss

TS Heckler: Drift Guards
5.19.2019

I was born and raised in a small coal mining town in Western Pennsylvania. The town is surrounded by drift mines. I remembered no time ever in my life that I did not draw or paint.

I’ve come to understand there are two simple things to address in painting…what to paint and how to paint. To what purpose beside personal escape, a lofty suggestion might be to deepen mysteries and confirm truths. 

The Drift Guards and their behavior certainly can deepen the mystery and the only confirmation of truth for me is the degree of engagement they have offered me over the last 15 years. Paintings without an obvious drift mine feel incomplete to me. It’s as if the Drift Guards will always provide legitimacy of originality, escape and fear.

-TS Heckler

NANCY KYES: COASTLINE
12.29.2018

I work with found objects, everything from pencil stubs to mass spectrometers, randomly layering, and weaving things together without using glue or paint. This process yields a kind of new material that I use to make sculpture, gathering along the way everything internal and external, micro and macro. You might say I am trying to find the actual by trying to make a picture of what’s possible.

COASTLINE is an inquiry about our relationship to water.

It is along the coastline where mother nature exposes the entangled truths about our global water crisis, habitat, and climate change. This highly contested space on the planet, the coastline, is a conversation, the parameters of which cannot be measured. Even so, taking that measure, now, is what the coastline enjoins us to do.

- Nancy Kyes

VINCE MONTAGUE: THE WHALE SHOW
10.14.2018

Whales are messengers from other worlds, philosophers exploring ocean depths, journeymen circling one sphere of the planet to the other. The surface of the whale supports its own ecosystem. Within the body resides a protected space, a deeper and wiser consciousness connected to our own.

I started sculpting whales while reading Moby Dick by Herman Melville. About two hundred pages into the novel, I set the book down and went inside my studio to create a whale-sculpture. The whales in my studio arrive from both the past and the future, the skin of the whale becoming a canvas to express my anxieties for our shared ecological survival. As our planet warms and the waters rise, I imagine these whale-sculptures swimming through fire and flame, investigating new waters, vast canyons, toxic waste, and flooded bays, all the while navigating by stars and transforming the space around us.

- Vince Montague

Celia Bowker
3.25.2018

In 2010 I found a four inch square of weathered wood on a pebbled beach on an island in the Pacific Northwest.  It had a friendly, inviting quality.  That became the base of my first sculpture since art classes in the Sixties.  The wood called for a wire, the wire called for a ball of cotton, the cotton called for a feather.  That's how all the sculptures have grown.

When I drew and cut out paper dolls as a ten year old girl, I recognized that I was making something that wouldn't exist without me, but whose life was separate from my own.  That's how I feel making these sculptures, too.

These pieces are my attempt at naming something that is beyond my intellectual grasp-like aiming an arrow at a song floating in the air.  What the arrow hits is the sculpture.  Although the sculpture isn't the song, it's evidence of the song.  The song doesn't stop so I keep making sculptures, painting pictures, and building landscapes. These are the ways I can hear the song.

- Celia Bowker

THINGS THAT HAPPENED LAST NIGHT
12.23.2017

These things are all true and some quite remarkable.
There are things that have a place outside the logic of daylight.
Many cannot be shown for fear of retribution. On the surface
most can be seen as crude art but a selection of viewers will
look beyond that and discover rather thought provoking
insights. When that takes place, please keep it to yourself.

- Fern

Night Lions Happened

Concerts Happened

Seafood Dinners Happened

Shots Happened

Drive-In Theatres Happened

Black Panthers Happened

Snakes Happened

One Wheel Car Happened

Coal Miners Happened

…and much more happened last night.

MARSHA BURNS
6.4.2017 

If I were a storyteller, I guess I would use words, but my stories are the ones of the people I have photographed. It's their story that is captured in a flash of a second, and barely changes over the many intervening years. Not that they haven't changed, as I know they have, but the one in the portrait we made together, remains the same.

I have never been too sure about what draws me to a subject. At times I wanted to make known a person for whom negative attitudes exist. Other times young people who are still finding out who they are apart from the expectations of them. I have seen a kind of truth in these photographs. I have given my subjects the opportunity to be known just a little. It's the answer to the question "What am I like?".

- Marsha Burns

GEORGE DOVER CRAYON DRAWINGS
12.22.2016

George Dover cannot remember a time when he wasn’t trying to do art, but he remembers clearly in 1967, when a grocery bag filled with broken crayons was sent to him by his third grade art teacher. George was trying to fit oil painting in on the weekends, so the crayons went into the closet. However, between start up and clean up of the oils, he had little time for actual painting, out of frustration, he pulled out the crayons and immediately started to work. There was no clean up time. Soon afterward he rigged up an easel in the living room where he could pick up the crayons anytime of the week increasing his art time exponentially. Since then, he has completed over 2,600 - 20 x 40 crayon drawings. 

MARLYN AGNEW
10.16.2016

The title of the exhibit – Mother, Teacher, Painter, Spy  – comes from Agnew’s unusual and amazing life and her uncanny talent. After raising seven children in Madison, Wisconsin, Agnew discovered her passion and talent for painting, acquired her MFA and taught art at the University of Wisconsin. In the late 1980s she moved to Virginia where she secured significant portrait commissions while working for the Defense Intelligence Agency until her retirement in 2004. She had once expressed a desire to “retire to the Greek Isles to run a safe house and paint” but sadly, the onset of Alzheimer’s took that dream away. She passed away in 2012.
 

TRIBAL ART FROM INDIA
6.30.2016

Andrew and Marisa Mascarenhas brought over 40 pieces of art from two different indigenous tribes in India to the Redmetal Barn to draw attention to the beautiful art from the Gond and Warli tribes. 

Gond artists base their paintings on their ancient myths and folklores of images of daily life, not only from what exists but also from what is drawn from dreams, memory and imagination.

The Warli tribe art is very simple, matchstick-like figures, which most closely resemble prehistoric cave paintings and scenes depicting their everyday village life and social customs conveying a complex sense of motion and rhythm. Produced with white rice paste paint on cow dung, they are a marked contrast to the vibrant colors used by the Gond artist.

These ancient art forms will be lost if not seen and supported.
 

LIKING ART - VARIATIONS AND DETAILS
11.9.2015

FAMOUS ARTISTS HAVE OFFERED
TO SUBJECT SOME OF THEIR MOST
POPULAR PIECES FOR THE SHOW
'LIKING ART' - WITH THE
FOLLOWING CONDITIONS...

SELECTED DETAILS MUST BE
QUICKLY PAINTED IN BLACK TEMPERA
SCALED TO FIT ON 11 X 14' WHITE
PAPER AND LIKED BY JENNESS BREWER
FOR HER BIRTHDAY NOV. 9. 2015.

BE IT UNDERSTOOD, THE WORK IS
NOT COPIES. IT IS VARIATIONS
AND DETAILS.