Art by John Lee
Photo by Emily O’Donnell

Imaginary people dominate the paintings of John Lee, he calls them ‘Clohn People’ based off his brand Clohn Art. Wide eyes peer out of colorful faces in surreal scenes, and there is a chance you might find them looking up at you from a Pittsburgh street, when you least expect it.

Lee’s work is a colorfully bizarre wonderland full of strange figures and creatures. He works primarily with acrylic on cardboard and utilizes a good deal of mixed media and impasto with his thickly applied paint and burnt matchsticks composing one figure in a painting. He says that he started painting on cardboard because it was a low cost medium, “I found that if I could work on reclaimed things, then I had a lot more freedom than if I was working with oil and canvas.” The board that he works on provides a unique texture to underlie the thickly applied paint that form the ‘Clohn People’ which encompass one eyed women with purple hair, men with three or four eyes and a cat dressed as a human riding a unicycle. The illogical elements of the work invite comparisons to surrealism, while the disjointed figures echo some elements of the cubist styling’s of Picasso. Lee says that he cannot name any overt influences on his work, other than Van Gogh, but that artistic influences have seeped into his unconscious creative mind from pop culture and media.

Lee spent eight years living in China before he moved to Pittsburgh, and he says that his small studio became filled with paintings so eventually he started leaving them on the street for people to take. He says, “I have probably left at least 400 paintings in different parts of the world.” Each painting is marked with his ‘Clohn Art’ stamp, so people can contact him if they like what they have found.

“I always wanted to be a street artist,” Lee says. “But I feel bad about spray painting a house and breaking the law. This is pretty harmless. It’s street art for chickens.”

The practice of giving away these paintings hasn’t hurt Lee’s inventory of art, because he is so prolific. “If writers write, then painters paint and I try to paint every day, whether I like it or not.”

Although he has no qualms about giving his art away for free, Lee says that he does hope to make a living off of his work. It was in China that he decided to become more serious about his art, and it is in Pittsburgh that Lee made the decision to quit his job and forge a career out of his ‘Clohn Art.’ Having applied for the emerging artist scholarship in previous years, Lee was ecstatic to be accepted as one of this year’s emerging artists for this year’s Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival.

Check out the Clohn Art booth and the work of John Lee at this year’s festival from Friday, June 7th to Tuesday, June 11th at Booth 76.

For more please visit John Lee’s ‘Clohn Art’ facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/clohnart or his instagram at http://web.stagram.com/n/clohnart

“For me, the jazz scene was the music scene in Pittsburgh,” Wingfield says of her childhood. “My father [Ronald Wingfield] is a jazz musician here in Pittsburgh. He was always playing jazz in the car. I remember riding around with dad, listening to jazz and blues.” From her father, she got the jazz. From her mother and grandmother, Wingfield got gospel and choir. Every Sunday, she’d be singing right along in church, and even at home, gospel records were part of the musical atmosphere of the Wingfield house. “My grandmother, she loved Mahalia Jackson. She’d always say, ‘Oh, I love my Mahalia Jackson!’”

Wingfield eventually broadened her musical repertoire. In her high school choir, she learned began to learn traditional classical works and opera in addition to gospel and R&B. She focused her vocal talents on opera and attended IUP on a full tuition scholarship, spending her college career training her voice in classical and operatic performance. “In college, I never sang much jazz and gospel. When I came back to Pittsburgh, Dad wanted me to come out to jam sessions. I told him, ‘Dad, I want to be an opera singer.’” Fortunately, Wingfield attended some jazz sessions and began to discover in herself an art uniquely her own, blending the jazz and gospel influences of her childhood with the classical training she’d developed in adulthood.

In March of this year, Anqwenique Wingfield premiered the Groove Aesthetic at Fe Gallery in Lawrenceville. For that show, she performed opera, jazz, and spoken word, with a string quartet, a jazz trio, a dancer, and a poet behind her. “I’m still trying to find my own artistic identity,” she says. “I’m trying to find a niche for [the Groove Aesthetic] musically and creatively.”

Anqwenique and the Groove Aesthetic will be performing at Katz Plaza from 5-7 pm on Monday, June 10. The set will be a mix of mostly operatic arias and classical music, including works by Mozart, Puccini, Brahms, and more. The performance will also include a duet composed by Margaret Bonds called Three Dream Portraits, based on the Langston Hughes poem “Negro Speaks of Rivers,” as well as two Debussy pieces arranged by Joe Sheehan for jazz band. Accompanying Miss Wingfield will be pianist Gabe D’Abruzzo, Matt Pickart on violin and viola, and Jason Rafalak on the double bass. Wingfield will also be performing with Maggie Johnson, founder of JAZZSPACE, at The Taste of Dahntahn as part of the Jazz Live International Jazz Crawl June 7.

“This is a powerful step in showcasing what Pittsburgh has to offer musically,” says Wingfield. “Having an African American soprano performing classical music at the Three Rivers Arts Festival—that is something I don’t see often.”

“I love the idea of magic,” says the 2013 Emerging Artist scholar. “I’m also a fan of the surreal, the way it grabs your attention and you think differently about something you see every day.” Whether that something is a bridge, a boat, a woman you think you know, Petrulak manages to capture the familiar in a wholly unfamiliar context.

Though older artwork tends to look at the interplay between the living and the inanimate—women with nautical instruments embedded in them, for example—newer pieces explore the interactions between humans and animals, and the idea of escape to a more serene place: vast oceans, endless stretches of land. “Lately, I’ve also been attracted to vines taking over buildings that are unoccupied, or big areas that used to be farmland being overrun by new development.”

A Pittsburgh native, Petrulak spent the last 15 years in Southern California. There, she developed her craft and began showing her work in local coffee houses. Eventually she graduated to showing in galleries throughout Los Angeles and San Diego. The Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival, however, is her first festival show. “I’m a little overwhelmed,” she admits. “I’m really excited to do this festival. It’s something that I used to go to when I was a kid.”

Petrulak moved back to the Steel City last September, and, though she’s been holed up re-adjusting to Appalachian winter, she’s happy to be back. “Moving back here, I do have the dream of making it,” Petrulak says. “Rent is more affordable. I’ll have more time to work on my art. Plus the network—I keep hearing about the community here. Just being a part of this event, who knows who you’re going to meet.”

Find Celëne Petrulak’s work at Booth 64 in the Artists Market from June 12th through June 16th. She’ll have several drawings and pastels, both original works and prints ranging from 5”x7” to 20”x24”, all of them promising a glimpse into wonderland.

Pittsburgh JazzLive International Festival, the city’s biggest jazz festival, is back for its third year, and it’s bigger and badder than ever.  The music begins Friday night with a Jazz Crawl through the Cultural District, featuring free shows from over 150 regional musicians at dozens of venues Downtown, including restaurants, bars, and gallery spaces.  The free sets end at 9 pm, but the music continues at Sonoma Grill with a jam session that goes until last call.

With almost 250 performers, it’s hard to list the Pittsburgh JazzLive International Festival 2013 lineup.  From local legend Roger Humphries to Latin Jazz veteran Eddie Palmieri to guitar virtuoso Pat Martino, who, after a near-fatal brain aneurysm, re-taught himself how to play by listening to his own recordings—the Pittsburgh JazzLive International Festival is bringing giants of jazz to this year’s festival.

The biggest name on the bill, however, is Chaka Khan, the Queen of Funk-Soul, who’s celebrating her 40^th year in music with the “100 Days of Chaka” campaign.  Pittsburgh JazzLive International Festival is bringing the “I’m Every Woman” diva to Pittsburgh on the 78^th day of 100 Days of Chaka—she’ll be headlining one of the main stages off Penn Avenue Downtown.

“What we’d like is for people to move around,” says Janis Burley Wilson, Vice President of Education and Director of Jazz Programs for the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.  “At one stage, they’ll hear someone they know, then move to another stage and hear someone new.”

Pittsburgh JazzLive International Festival will have three main stages on Penn Avenue and Ninth Street, with more shows, art, and events all over the Cultural District, including Showcase Noir, an African American Artist and Designer Market.  Starting in 2003 as a market for regional African American artists, Showcase Noir now features artists from all over the world—from Butler to Bangkok.  Check out the tent gallery on 8^th street for fine art, watercolors, jewelry, and pottery.

Also straddling the line between jazz and visual art will be internationally renowned expressionist painter Al Bright, who will create his big, brilliant abstract paintings before a live audience as musicians play beside him.  Bright’s paintings will be on display at 709 Gallery on Penn Avenue from May 31 through June 30, but he’ll be painting live during the Pittsburgh JazzLive International Festival.

The Pittsburgh JazzLive International Festival will overlap with the inaugural weekend of the Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival, Burley Wilson says, “to extend the festival into the Cultural District.  This introduces people from out of town to the Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival.”  Don’t miss the third annual Pittsburgh JazzLive International Festival June 7^th through the 9^th.

The highly-anticipated 10-day celebration of the arts remains free and open to the public.  This year’s Festival runs Friday, June 7 through Sunday, June 16 and opens with Riverlights at the Point on June 7th – the reopening of the Point State Park fountain and a concert by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros.

Start planning your festival must-sees with our full event schedule, announced earlier this afternoon. Whether you’re looking for a great live concert at Dollar Bank Stage, the perfect art piece to add to your collection from the Artist Market, or creative activities for young and old alike, this year’s Festival has you covered.

There is something on the horizon in Rose Duggan’s paintings.  That something, more often than not, is a cloud.  The 2013 Emerging Artist scholar’s Belvedere series riffs on this motif—flat cloud sitting on a flat horizon—in an explosive exploration of shape and color somewhere between Japanese landscapes and urban graffiti.  In Belvedere (New), a bright red cloud rests on its own reflection at the center of a blue-blue dreamscape populated with enigmatic shapes and primary colors.  Belvedere Railway Station situates a dark cloud above an obscured abstract scene, what could be a commuter train passing through the fog.  “It’s a satisfying shape to look at, to paint,” Duggan says of clouds.  “The horizontal line helps me organize the painting, and it helps guide people to look around the painting instead of looking away.”

The word “Belvedere,” Duggan explains, is an architectural term than means “beautiful view” in Italian.  “It’s also the name of a bar down the street—the paintings were named after the bar.”  Like the shapes in the paintings, the title is an exercise in semantic satiation: repeated over and over until it loses meaning, until it just is.  Clouds and horizons inhabit her paintings not as clouds and horizons but as a vehicle for color.  “I’m primarily interested in color, secondarily interested in form,” she says.  “I’m kind of formalist in that way.  My paintings are really surface, pattern—I’m interested in the interaction between paint and canvas.”

Duggan’s Belvederes and newer work—more interplay between clouds and color, with titles like I Saw This in an Apartment Once and This isn’t Painting, It’s Typing—developed from one spectacular failure.  For her undergraduate thesis at Allegheny College in Meadville, PA, Duggan prepared for an ambitious drawing project: “I gave away all my stuff.  I tried to live with only one hundred objects, and I would draw one object each day.  After three paintings, I got bored, so I started doing abstract stuff inspired by Australian Aboriginal art—lots of repeated shapes and dots.”  Her signature cloud horizon as well as new pieces like I Do This Kind of Thing All the Time, which is a pattern of triangles utilizing a specific color palette, evolved from those early abstracts.

This year is Rose Duggan’s first time participating in the Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival and her “first real arts festival.”  Find her booth at the Artist Market from June 7 through June 11, where she’ll be selling original work (18”x20”) and prints perfect for your Downtown office or Lawrenceville rowhouse.

“’Emerging Artist’ is such a vague term,” Duggan concedes.  “Some people who’ve been Emerging Artists, they’ve been working for ten years.  I realize I will be an ‘emerging artist’ for a long time!”

We don’t just live, we make.

Dale Dougherty, founder of MAKE magazine

“The maker movement is a trend in which individuals or groups of individuals create and market products that are recreated and assembled using unused, discarded or broken electronic, plastic, silicon or virtually any raw material and/or product from a computer-related device.” –techopedia.com

In the spirit of the maker movement’s DIY culture and the first days of spring, here is an upcycled flower that will last you all the way until the Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival (and beyond).

Adapted from the book Upcycling by Danny Seo, this craft requires a few supplies that you probably already have at home: an empty plastic bottle of water, acrylic paint, scissors and paint brushes. Rather than buying supplies, look to Mother Nature as your craft store for today.

Cut the plastic water bottle (with bottle cap still on) 1/4 from the top and cut petals into the small piece of plastic. Before decorating your flower with paint, you can use Gesso paint to prep the plastic to prevent translucency when you paint the petals with acrylic paint. *The Gesso paint layer is an optional step*

Once the paint has dried, the real creativity begins. Using acrylic paint,  paint the petals wherever your mind takes you! With the use of a variety of mediums, the creative possibilities are endless.  I found that using Mod Podge and scraps of newspaper created a unique “scholarly” flower.

To complete the flower, simply use a wooden rod or paint a twig green to create the stem! Hot glue it to the bottle cap on the back of the flower.

As you can imagine, the 10 day festival doesn’t happen overnight, so here at the Trust we’re trying to overcome the bitter cold to think flip flops, not flurries. With a new year brings new elements to this year’s festival. We accepted music and performance arts submissions to help enhance the festival’s overall experience. Pittsburgh, you’ve got talent! We received hundreds of music and performance art submissions so we’ll be busy the next couple of days reviewing all submissions.

What would the Festival be without the popular Artist Market? Applications were flowing in, receiving an outstanding number of applications!   While all these applications are looked over, the wheels keep turning as the Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival Advisory Board met last week for this year’s first meeting and brainstorming continues for the headlining bands of this year’s festival.

Although 101 days might seem like light years away, it’ll be here before you know it so be sure to save the date for the kick-off to the Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival and celebrate the grand return of the Point State Park Fountain on Friday June 7, 2013! Riverlights at the Point is a free evening of fun, entertainment and dazzling lights on the water.

The countdown to the 2013 Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival will continue and there will be plenty of festival news in the upcoming months. Be sure to stay up-to-date on all the latest happenings by signing up for our email updates.

You’re invited to celebrate the grand return of the Point State Park Fountain on Friday, June 7, 2013! Save the date for a free evening of fun, entertainment and dazzling lights on the water. Be there when the 150-foot fountain is turned back on for the first time. Riverlights at The Point kicks off the Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival, so you know it’s going to be an evening the whole family can enjoy.

Learn more at PointStatePark.com.

Attention artists, lighting designers and landscape architects!
Download the Request For Proposals (RFP) to see how you could create a spectacular temporary lighting display in Point State Park as part of the Riverlights celebration.

An additional $5,000 in cash awards was handed out during the first weekend of the Artists Market, for a total of $10,000.

Second Weekend Artists Market Award-winners:

Best in Show: Claire Brewer ($2000)

Festival Award: Danna Rzecznik (she was an emerging artist last year) ($1000)

Juror’s Choice: Toby Fraley ($500)

Juror’s Choice: John Fesken ($500)

Juror’s Choice: Mark Traughber ($500)

Juror’s Merit: Istvan Vago ($200)

Three Rivers Honors: Ryder Henry (also an emerging artist this year) ($100)

Three Rivers Honors: J. Bird Cremeans ($100)

Three Rivers Honors: Allison Glancey ($100)

Photography Services Award (in kind): Allison Jones

Jurors:
Adam Welch, Curator, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts
Nicole Capozzi, Founder and Curator, Boxheart Gallery
Melissa Kuntz, Artist and Art Dept. Chair, Clairion University