“Let poetry lift your soul”
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April is National Poetry Month! It was first introduced in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets as a way to increase awareness and appreciation of poetry in the United States.
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View my series of unique artwork where I combined a poem with a photo of a piece of my jewelry “Poetry for the Body”.
Transforming non-traditional items to make something entirely new
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Leona M Seufert is a jewelry artist who creates her pieces out of unusual items. She believes that they should be “statement pieces” that tell a story. In the 70’s and 80’s when she started creating jewelry, recycling, upcycling, and sustainability were not trending words. However, when she was in Junior High and her art teacher brought a box of cast off jewelry items to class she experienced the creative thrill of transforming those non-traditional items to make something entirely new.
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She has tried enameling, metal working, loom bead work, clay and the new plastic clay. But she’s always gravitated back to using found objects because, for Seufert, she can use them to create something unique.
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She has created her jewelry out of the following items:
A pipe bowl
Dresser knob backplates
Eyeglass lenses
Large plastic paper clips
At one point she had access to music rehearsal rooms so she went in and lifted loose ivories off the piano keys, then glued silver paper doilies on and sealed with clear acrylic
Belt buckles are a favorite
Antique
Modern plastic
Small enamel
Also she’s taken belts apart and used the individual pieces to create pins
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Buttons, ah yes buttons, she has made many pieces using one or multiple buttons, modern or antique
And she does continue to recycle jewelry, like a favorite earring that lost its mate to become the “Eye of God” pin!
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A new year has arrived! We’ve got a number of exciting virtual exhibits planned for the start of this year. In Feb our curator, Leona Seufert, will have a virtual exhibit of her unique and delightful original jewelry (currently her pieces from the “Digital Gems” series are on display in the Garwood Library at 411 Third Ave, Garwood, NJ through mid February). In April, to celebrate National Poetry Month, we will have a virtual exhibit of poetry paired with photographs of jewelry titled “Poetry For the Body” and in May a virtual group exhibit of small pieces will be “Sculpture to Wear”. A Youtube channel is also in the works to be created by Leona hopefully premiering in June. So stay tuned, something exciting will always be in the works during this year.
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The Holidays have arrived! I love photographing decorations, mine, other people’s, indoors, and out. I don’t consider myself a professional photographer as what I do with most of my photographs is manipulate them into digital art works. But the ones I leave as “pure” unenhanced ones are the record of my life! I have hundreds of these, old ones before digital cameras and digital ones since 2007 I bought my camera.
Sometimes a photograph is touched by a bit of magic. The image of the candle at left “Joy to the World” is one. My professional photographer friends always told me that capturing a burning candle is next to impossible. So one day, I just turned out all the lights, aimed and clicked. No fooling with settings etc. And that shot is the amazing result!
So spend some time capturing magic. Don’t try, just aim and shoot! Let it happen…May your holidays be joyous and filled with magic.
“The point is, art never stopped a war and never got anybody a job. That was never its function. Art cannot change events. But it can change people. It can affect people so that they are changed … because people are changed by art – enriched, ennobled, encouraged – they then act in a way that may affect the course of events.” – Leonard Bernstein, from the documentary film “Bernstein’s Wall.”
I love working digital because I can create worlds that don’t exist. Therefore, I use Photoshop to not only create digital collages but also to “enhance” my photographs. Photoshop has “filters” which when applied to an image can alter it, morph it, turn it in to something unworldly.
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I currently have an exhibit at Alonso’s Cafe in Garwood New Jersey (348 North Ave) through November. It is a selection of 4 of my images from my “The Skeletons of Winter” series. I started this series last Winter after going through my tree photographs (I have at least a 100 taken over the last 5 years!). When the trees are bare they remind me of skeletons. I used Photoshop to alter these tree images to tell a story about them.
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The Lord Shineth On This Earth
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This is an example of a simple enhancement. I loved the sun being behind the tree so I made it brighter and the trees more stark.
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Last Dance Before the Storm
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Here I simply turned the photo to black and white then reversed it. I love this tree and gave it this title because it does like it is dancing, doesn’t it?
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Tree House
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Yes, the original photo did have a house behind the tree. So I played around with distorting things until I came up with this weird view of the house and the tree filling the entire foreground with it’s leafless branches. So is it protecting the house? Hiding it? Or menacing it? You decide.
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Guardian of the Forest
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This one is one of my digital collages and it speaks to climate change. The warrior woman within the trees is fighting to keep us humans from destroying the forest. I turned most of the branches white to indicate they are frozen.
Sometimes inspiration can be as hard to tease out as extracting a splinter from your finger! And for an artist, it’s not just finding a concept or theme for a piece of art but how to execute it. No matter what medium is used, an artist still needs to physically engage with the material in order to achieve the vision she has in her mind!
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Here is what our current exhibiting artist, Leona M Seufert, has to say about the process as she discusses her series “When Memories Fade Away”, from inspiration to realization:
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“For me the concept always comes first. Whether it’s descriptive sentences or an image in my mind, that is where the process starts. Then I ask myself ‘what is the story I want to tell.’ I always create a ‘series’ so the ‘story’ will develop over the various pieces.
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With the 22nd anniversary of 9/11 series I knew I had to deal with the sad part that not much is happening viz a vie 9/11. Yes, the names of the people lost on 9/11 are still read and there is the ongoing story of people dieing from the Ground Zero induced illness. However, it was this seeming absence of remembering back to that day that inspired me to focus on the fading away of memories, yes, as all do over time.
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But how does one give form to an idea? I couldn’t just ‘fade away’ photographs. My usual next step in the process is to go through images I have or do a Google search on keywords, to start my mind narrowing in on my story’s images. I knew I wanted the Twin Towers to be part of my story but using them literally was not very creative. And what exactly was ‘fading away’?
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That’s when I realized that we all remember the Towers’ destruction; that hardly has faded away. But what about everything else at Ground Zero? The underground mall, the interior architecture of the buildings, the images that did not make it into news stories, etc. The photographs that I had stored on my hard drive held the key.
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The Towers would be 2 abstract rectangles rising up to the sky and superimposed upon them would be images of what now are the memories of things that they contained. It would be those hidden and lost images that would be faded away. Using Photoshop, my software of choice, I could manipulate those lost images to give them a dream like quality. And I would end the series’ story with an image of the new WTC1 and in front of it, faded away would be one of the hundreds of memorials that had popped up all around NYC in 2001 and, of course, no longer exist.”
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As you can see, Leona’s process is more of a dialog than a bolt of inspiration. She has a question in her mind and spins out a story while “feeding” herself images that spark ideas. Some ideas are tossed way, but others are used to develop the art works from which, in the end, she will select the best that tell her story.
Leona M Seufert is a digital artist using Photoshop to create collages that tell a story. Our current exhibit has the 6 she did around the theme of 9/11 fading from memory. For every 9/11 she writes poems and does research to write essays that talk about the year just passed and what has happened at Ground Zero. This year she was very disappointed to discover that her research turned up only one item: the rebuilding of the St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church being completed. She felt that 9/11, that horrible day 22 years ago, was fading from our memories and thus proceeded to create her series “When Memories Fade Away.” She used images of what was at Ground Zero prior to the fall of the Towers and superimposed that upon abstract images of the Twin Towers. You will notice she “faded away” those images, as being out of focus to emphasizes the fact that we no longer see clearly that past time. View our current virtual exhibit to see all 6 of these stunning images
Visit her website to view other digital collage series she’s created.
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To see the history of the last 22 years since 9/11 and the rebuilding of ground Zero, visit her World Trade Center Journal website.
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Leona Seufert studio-l@att.net
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The following is an excerpt from an essay “Empty Chairs” I wrote in 2007 for the 6th Anniversary:
“…it’s about people: Those who were impacted, those who still try to cope, those whose loved ones just vanished. I fear that some day they will hold a 9/11 anniversary ceremony and the chairs will be empty. Will people then only read names inscribed upon walls? And what will those names mean to the reader? Who will understand the blood, sweat, and tears that went into the long rebuilding of Ground Zero? History is kept alive through art, today becomes yesterday and is immortalized and understood through art. That’s the only way to make sure those chairs will never be empty.”
Our current virtual exhibit is by Frances E Billups, a watercolor artist who lives in Garwood NJ. Her paintings reflect realism and sometimes impressionism and through color come alive. She loves to paint local town scenes and ocean views.
Les Malamut 