Meinsje's Exhibition_ Sublime Puppets and Paintings

Roy L Hales / Cortes Currents - At the Old Schoolhouse Art Gallery: Meinsje's Uncanny Puppets and Sublime Paintings The “Uncanny and the Sublime” exhibition opens at the Old Schoolhouse Art Gallery at 6:00 p.m. on Friday, June 19, and runs until July 5. In this morning’s interview, exhibiting artist Meinsje Vlaming discusses her puppets and paintings. Meinsje: "I’ve been involved with the Academy of the Wooden Puppets. That’s a two-year education online by Bernd Ogrodnik, a German teacher, master puppeteer, and carver who lives now in Iceland. That’s one of the good things that happened with COVID: we have a lot of things online now, and we don’t have to go there. “Bernd put together a program on carving puppets—from the beginning, very simple puppets, to a very, very complicated marionette. Of course, being a puppeteer, that had my interest. So I enrolled.” “Well, actually, I first applied for a grant. I got it, I enrolled, and I started carving. I got all these puppets that are not really related, and I haven’t put them in a puppet show, but it would be nice to hang them on the walls in a gallery and display them.” “So we thought about that, and then it’s like, well, I don’t have enough to fill the gallery. And then I also enrolled with a wonderful painter teacher, Michael Orwick, whose style is really resonating with my own style—my own work. So I thought, ‘Why don’t I put those two together?’ - But how do you connect the wooden puppets with the paintings that are about light?" “If you look through my work, it’s very diverse—there’s a lot of different styles and trying out styles. But the thing they all have in common is the light. So I took two elements from two different disciplines and tried to connect them. What they have in common is painting and puppets—then I started to dive a little deeper into what they have in common, which is the sublime in the paintings.” “The Romantics, the Tonalists, the Luminists—they’ve all used that. I personally think light is the most sublime thing on this planet. It’s in paintings, and it’s connected to the spiritual.” “That’s how I came to decide: ‘Let’s put puppets and the paintings together into the show.’ And that works—I think, I hope.”