by Eva Dameron
Daily Lobo
Artist Jim Kraft, 67, said he made a list of things he wants to do before he dies, and putting on an art show is one of them.
His show at the Harwood Art Center is one of five on display.
"I don't know if it's my last. I may do another one," he said. "I wanted to do it, so I did it, and now I'm glad I did."
Kraft's "First and Maybe Last One-Man Show" features 18 same-size paintings. He used circles of dried paint peeled from paint cans and glued them to a digital decoupage on particleboard. It all started when he found graffiti on his wall and bought paint to erase it.
"Our house had about 300 feet of cement block wall that the graffiti guys painted," Kraft said. "I started to buy primer in five-gallon buckets. I would go out and roll out the stuff I didn't want. So every time I opened up a bucket of oil-based paint, there would be this skin on the top of it. I kept throwing them down on newspaper and letting them dry, and those dried for about three years now."
As for the background, he said he works with a scanner, a digital camera and a big ink-jet printer.
"I make up the digital collage, and then I make an ink-jet print of it, which is the master image," Kraft said. "On top of that I'll draw, or I'll paint, or I'll screen print or whatever seems to be necessary. Sometimes I'll glue things onto it. But the last thing that goes on is that paint."
The titles read like poetic phrasing - "Point A to Point B," "Paper Moon," "Reflexive Sea" and "Eclipse of a Notion and Greybeard's Fluids." He attributes these to his love of crossword puzzles.
"I'm not a poet, I'm not a writer, but I do love words," Kraft said. "I do crossword puzzles every day. It keys off a play on words that crosswords, a lot of the time, have in them. I've always loved words as things."
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As for the other exhibitions, upstairs in the North and South galleries is the "Artists of the Rio Abajo" show, which features landscapes, churches, clouds, flowers, people posing in their natural settings and still lifes.
Downstairs is Alexander Ferguson's "Albuquerque Pedestrian Project," in which he taped down processed film around parts of Albuquerque and left them there for weeks or months. Light, people, elements and time formed the images, he said.
Josephine Sittenfeld also has a show of photographs called "Look." The images are portraits of pre-adolescents and young teenagers.
"This work is about the transition from childhood to adulthood," Sittenfeld said.
"People often think of adolescence as a terrible, ugly, awful thing, and I think it's really amazing, so that's what I try to convey," she said.
