The intrigue of art has long served as a depiction of ancient civilizations, pop culture, romance, despair, happiness and even mystery. Colors, textures and technique use their powers to stir emotions and create feelings we hold near and dear. From glass and metal to canvas and clay, art is admired in the gallery, but truly inspired in the home. Meet four local artists who are making waves in the art community and creating stunning work that deserves a place in your home.
JON OFFUTT | ASHLEY KUNZ | BRAD BACHMEIER | MIKE MARTH
By Tracy Nicholson | Photos by Paul Flessland and Jon Offutt
At a young age, we’re taught that if we play with fire, we’re bound to get burnt. Meet local artist Ion Offutt, who didn’t heed the warnings. Taking inspiration from the colors of North Dakota’s horizon, Offutt’s glass-blown masterpieces have become a necessity for any true art collector.
THE GLASSBLOWER
Starting out as a potter in high school and continuing this in college, Offutt discovered glass while studying at MSUM. After spending much of his life working with clay, why did he move to blowing glass?
“Glass is more suited to my personality,” said Offutt. “It’s more intense, it’s more focused. From clay I learned how to keep things on center, round things, symmetry, vessels, but glass has a much faster feedback loop. I can make something, I cool it overnight and the next morning I can look at it and it’s done. The only thing I do cold is sign my name on the bottom. With clay, it might be months before you actually see what you’re doing.”
THE PROCESS
Starting out every morning at 5 a.m., Offutt unloads the cooling oven to find his masterpieces from the day before. After inspecting every finished color and texture, Offutt starts planning for a new day of glassblowing. “I spend most of my day standing in front of the reheating chamber making the glass soft. The hotter it is, the softer it is,” said Offutt.
CRASH AND BURN
To explain the art form further, Offutt likens it to playing the piano. “Anybody can sit down on a piano bench and play it, but you’re clumsy, it’s not the right tempo,” said Offutt. “There’s a gradual learning, you get better the more you practice. So, after 35 years I consider myself a pretty good glass blower now. But, I did not master it right away. There was a lot of crashing noises and several burns. It’s a pretty steep learning curve. You really have to want to do it. You have to have that ‘stick with it’ attitude.”
ON THE ROAD
Spending about six months of the year in his studio, aptly named the House of Mulciber, Offutt talks of the name’s ties to the Roman god of fire and how it’s based on the use of constructive fire, not destructive. Working with fire sets the schedule, with Offutt using the colder months to create enough pieces to get him through his summer travels, where he sells his work. When it gets near 70 degrees, it’s time to hit the road.
Some of Offutt’s most recognizable pieces include a horizon we are all familiar with. “I call them my Dakota Horizons. Anytime you’re driving in North Dakota, that’s what it looks like; you get that big horizon. The first ones were just blue and the bottom was green or a light tan,” said Offutt. “Over the years, I’ve added clouds. A couple years ago, I added tree lines. Last year I started doing furrows. So, they’re growing.”
Looking closely at Offutt’s more textural work, it’s easy to see there’s a lot more to it than just choosing the perfect colors; there’s also chemistry and science. Over the years, Offutt has perfected the art of elements working against each other. This is depicted through the peculiar, organic texture of some of his pieces. “I’ve found that some powders don’t like each other,” explained Offutt. “At one point this was all red. Depending on how hot I get it, how much it will break up — that red wants to pull together, there’s so much metal in it.”
Offutt typically sells flowers, ornaments, gourds and pumpkins for $20 to $40. Some of the bigger Dakota Horizon pieces are priced from $800 to $900 dollars, but that’s only if he gets it just right. “I say I price emotionally, because I’m the artist,” said Offutt. “It’s how much I like it. It might be a tiny one but priced at $1,000 because I like it. I think it’s just right. It might be a huge one and it’s a dollar because I don’t like it.”
THE SECRET FORMULA
Offutt believes the key to being a good artist at anything is to be constantly dissatisfied. Like a true artist, his daily goals are to create better, faster, bigger and brighter. “What isn’t right in one of those? That’s what I focus on,” said Offutt. “It’s the what can I do better part. I do a lot of textural stuff, just trying to take advantage of the personalities of the color. Each color’s formulated differently, so it reacts differently. It gets sticky at a different temperature or softer at a different temperature.”
FIND THE WORK
To find Offutt’s latest work, visit The Rourke art museum in Moorhead and the Plains Art Museum in Fargo. Retail locations include The Underbrush Gallery, Reed & Taylor Antiques and Gallery 4 in the Black Building.
“These are all my colors. I spend a lot of time just standing here breaking glass color chunks off,” explained Offutt. “I pick those up with my pipe and make my first little bubble out of that chunk of gray. That would be like the sky on that landscape. You’re looking through the clear glass to the little layer of gray glass in the core. So everything’s built in layers. I have a furnace full of clear glass at 2,000 degrees and I’ll gather that out, that’s the majority of my material, it’s clear glass. But then I get glass as rods or little chips or ground into powder that I can roll onto the surface.”
To create perfection, Offutt works with an assistant, taking roughly an hour and a half to make each piece. “See the accent color that I put on the lip?” said Offutt. “Somebody’s got to pick a chunk of color out of the oven, get it hot while I’m working on the piece and then bring it to me so I can draw it on the lip. It takes a minimum of two people. Glass blowing is really a team sport. I’ve seen teams of up to 10 people working on one piece.”
STUDIO CRAWL
If you’re yearning for a glance behind the scenes, make sure to attend the Studio Crawl, which invites anyone to tour local artist’s studio spaces. Offutt is the director of the Studio Crawl and was also the 2015 member of the year.
WHAT IS THE STUDIO CRAWL?
Established in 2004, the Studio Crawl was developed to bring awareness and appreciation for the quality and diversity of the visual arts to others in our region. During the free two-day event in October, the public is invited into the studios of the many working artists in the Fargo- Moorhead area. “The Crawl” is one of the only opportunities in our community to visit with visual artists in their studio spaces.
CONTACT THE ARTIST
Jon Offutt, House of Mulciber
701-298-3936
mulciberglass@hotmail.com
Facebook
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Fargo-Moorhead Visual Artists
701-298-3936
info@fmva.org
Website
By Hailey Colbrunn | Photos by J. Alan Paul Photography and Ashley Kunz
Finding a passion and making it into a way of life requires the right mix of spunk, talent and diligence. Fargo-native Ashley Kunz exemplified a love for creative expression at a young age but had no expectations that her talent would take her into a new realm of creative production. Years later, however, her pieces have accumulated into a beautiful collection of abstract representation.
“Lost Treasures of the Deep”
“I Caught Fire”
“Floral Stems”
“Pinnacles of Abstraction”
MUSHROOMS & ART
“Now you have to make a hundred of them.”
A few remnants of Fargo artist Ashley Kunz’s high school ceramic mushrooms inhabit a windowsill of her cozy home studio, a little family of personal trinkets and treasures that represent her creative character and journey into her craft.
“The mushrooms, that was my first introduction into art,” said Kunz. “I took a ceramic class in high school and the first day my teacher told us we could make anything we wanted, so that’s what I decided to make, mushrooms. Later, he told me if I didn’t make a hundred mushrooms, I was not going to pass this class. I keep them as a reminder that you gotta stick it out, even if you don’t like what you’re doing.”
Although Kunz’s craft has manifested into elaborate, abstract paintings, the mushrooms are the allegory from which her journey has blossomed. Kunz began painting four years ago as a way to supplement her income but has developed her creative process, from beginner to professional, as the basis for her work’s uniqueness and substance.
CREATIVE PROCESS
That creative process developed into an art because, for Kunz, painting was, and is, anything but a thinking game. “I don’t plan anything,” said Kunz. “I just pick up a brush and paint. Some days I’ll start with my left hand, grab the brush, put some color on it and just see what happens. The painting will take shape from those few little first marks.”
Kunz’s abstract style gained recognition after she hit several milestones last year. Kunz participated in a contest last June through Liquitex Paint. The global paint company was picking 12 artists throughout the year, with Kunz as their winner. She was also asked to have her work displayed at Uptown Gallery and was accepted into the Plains Art Museum’s “Art on the Plains” exhibit. A turning point for Kunz was joining the Arts Partnership and Fargo-Moorhead Visual Artists and they proved an essential component for her moving forward.
EMOTIONAL ABSTRACT
Her paintings have since developed into something she hopes can be the landscape for viewers to project their own emotions and experience. “Abstract work is complicated in that you can’t really talk a lot about it,” said Kunz. “I don’t want to either. I want people to form their own opinion. That’s one of my favorite parts about it, that somebody else might look at it and see something completely different or get an entirely different feeling from it.”
Her passion and technique demonstrate an emotional experience, for herself as well as her audience, created through images. “The way my daughter smiles, that can trigger what colors I’m going to use in a painting because that’s just how I feel at the time,” said Kunz. “A lot of it is really emotionally driven for me.”
AUTUMN INSPIRATIONS
Kunz’s 8-year-old daughter is a driving factor for her work. She displays her work on her Instagram account, Autumn in December, named after her art studio and inspired by her daughter’s name and birth month. “She’s just beautiful. She’s happy, she has such a kind heart and a huge personality. She just loves things so much. I want her to know that no matter how far- fetched your dreams are you just have to do it.”
As for now, Kunz continues to paint. A hundred plus works later, that just-do-it attitude has developed her creative passion for abstract art, from mushrooms to masterpieces, into a craft. “This year I’m just going to try and see what happens,” said Kunz.
CONTACT THE ARTIST
Ashley Kunz
701-729-3667
rubyredcherry2000@yahoo.com
Website
Facebook
By Tracy Nicholson | Photos by J. Alan Paul Photography and Brad Bachmeier
After 23 years of throwing pottery, Brad Bachmeier wouldn’t change a thing. He’s combined his 15 years
of teaching in public schools and at Minnesota state university Moorhead to create a thriving career as a local potter. Inspired by pottery’s link to ancient civilizations, Bachmeier is always a student and never stops learning about history, geology and honing his craft.
Arriving at the home and studio of Brad Bachmeier, we knew we’d made it to the right place simply based on the flower bed filled with broken pottery. As we stared down at the remnants in awe, Bachmeier laughed, “That’s the pottery graveyard. It’s all the mistakes from the past 30 years.”
DISCOVERING CLAY
A Milnor, N.D., native, Bachmeier entered college with no formal art training and having never touched a piece of clay.
“As a junior, I didn’t even know what ‘Intro to Ceramics’ was and I took the class because I needed another intro class. It was the only one that fit in my schedule,” said Bachmeier. “It turned out that when I touched it and made something with it for the first time, I knew that was sort of my thing. Before that, I had always thought I was going to be a painter. That was kind of a life-changing moment. There’s something pretty magical about clay. People touch it and just love it and want to do it the rest of their life once they’ve experienced it.”
SPINNING THE WHEEL
Starting with a cylinder, Bachmeier can turn a simple piece of clay into almost anything. “That first step, the centering, is actually the hardest. It takes nine hours just to learn how to center a piece of clay. So the first time you’re teaching it to college students, that’s the part that’s so frustrating,” said Bachmeier. “When you’re younger, when you’re learning the skills, you have to be a perfectionist to get everything right. As you get older, you get to loosen up because you have the skills and everything looks more casual and easy.”
“It’s kind of fun to watch, and most people don’t make plates like this. This is a really elegant, sort of daring plate. I don’t want to sound arrogant, but you have to have some skill to drop something this thin down into a large plate without it flopping over.” Having studied Islamic writing, Bachmeier finishes this piece using the beautiful language as art, giving the piece a sense of age and history.
If you’re wondering how Bachmeier creates his large-scale pieces, often four to five feet tall, it begins with a much bigger bat and a lot more muscle. “I start with a real big piece of clay, fighting it and trying to get it centered and then starting to pull it into a form. Then I start adding huge coils on, smooth it together and keep building,” said Bachmeier. “To stiffen it up a bit, I’ll literally take a weed blower and blow flames or start a fire on the inside of it to stiffen it up and keep building. That piece was so big I think two or three of us lifted it and carried it. At one point to take it out, we had to get a forklift to move it. Some of the larger-scale ones are actually made in three pieces and fired separately and then reassembled.”
When Bachmeier does Raku firing, he fires the kilns up to 2,000 degrees. Donning a fire jacket, he opens them up, using his tongs to pull out the glowing red pieces and puts them outside in cans to smoke them.
ANCESTRAL EXPERIENCE
Well known for his authentic techniques and antiquated-looking pottery, Bachmeier did not gain the experience to create these pieces overnight. “I’ve spent a lot of time the last few years doing artist-in-residencies and seeing how clay has been used all over the globe by different people. I’ve been investigating a lot of prairie- firing techniques, how people used to do it a thousand years ago,” said Bachmeier.
“This is the beautiful thing for me, that clay is at least 500,000 years old and as soon as you pinch it or put your fingerprint on it and you run it through some heat, whether it’s a bonfire or a kiln, you’ve changed that piece of earth forever. You can go throw it in a lake or bury it, and it’s going to be there a million years later with your fingerprint on it. That’s what’s so interesting about studying clay around the globe. You’ve got this record of mankind for 20,000 years or so. It’s like changing the earth and putting your mark on it.”
DIGGING FOR CLAY
For Bachmeier, Finding clay is as simple as exploring the bank of a river or a farmer’s field. “If you’ve ever heard a farmer say their tractor got stuck in gumbo, it’s like that. It’s a slippery porcelain. Minnesota has more clay than any state in the nation, so it’s everywhere,” said Bachmeier.
EXPLORING INSPIRATION
Not bending his career toward trends or other artist’s work, Bachmeier does what he loves, even moving his wheel outside in the summer to be closer to his inspiration. “I love the outdoors and as a kid, I had a ton of freedom. My greatest joy with my family is traveling, hiking and exploring,” said Bachmeier. “I did an artist-in-residency at the National Petrified Forest in Arizona. Then, all of a sudden, I had back-door access that no one else has to their permanent collections of Southwest pottery. They’ll let you collect rocks and things in the park. I learned how to polish rocks and make them into lids. So lately I’ve been doing a lot more that’s informed by geology. At school, I happen to be on the same floor as the anthropologists, so it’s a perfect fit. It’s getting to explore how people have used pottery for 20,000 years and how that earth turns into clay.”
BRICK SCULPTURES
Gaining fame for his vessels, most don’t realize the large-scale, site-specific installation work he’s now taken on. Working with local companies, Bachmeier just installed one piece at Bell State Bank and one at Concordia College. This type of intricate work makes Bachmeier one of only a couple dozen brick sculptors in the country.
Art commissioned by Bell State Bank for their corporate board room
Board room of the Offutt Center for Business at Concordia College
AFFORDING ART
After 23 years of creating, Bachmeier learned the business of being an artist, paying close attention to price points. “If I go to an outdoor art fair, I don’t want just rich people to be able to afford my work. I’ve even fought with galleries to keep the prices down because I’m a teacher. I’d like my friends to be able to afford them,” said Bachmeier. With an array of pieces from $75 to $3,000, Bachmeier keeps his work accessible, which he considers vital in encouraging people to become art collectors.
“One of the questions people ask all the time is if I’m selling a vessel for $500. They’ll say, ‘How long did that take?’ The bottom line is that on the wheel it might only take an hour, but then it’s drying, it’s firing, it’s glazing, firing again, finishing all of that,” said Bachmeier. “A friend of mine that’s an artist said the answer he always gives when someone asks how long that takes. He says, ‘Well, about 25 years and two hours.'”
RARE ROCKS
With his biggest inspiration being the outdoors, Bachmeier showed us his collection, pointing out sea glass, dessert rose, marble and a colorful array of unique stones. “I’ve got bins and bins of rocks and then I’ll start to polish them and work on them,” said Bachmeier. “Every one of these gives me an idea for a piece. In these bins is inspiration for the next 10 years. You know what’s so humbling about this? For every one I pick up, I can say, ‘This is more beautiful than anything I could ever make.'”
THE POWER OF THE ARTS
One of Bachmeier’s main career goals has been to work on improving the atmosphere for the arts and artists in the community. Having a firm belief in the power of the arts to create more vibrant and attractive communities, as well as creating a more well-rounded education for all children helps Bachmeier get involved. Here are just a few of the areas he’s touched: non-profit art and culture boards (FMVA founding board member, Center for Creativity at the Plains Art Museum founding board member, Rourke Art Museum board and later president, The Arts Partnership board and later president, North Dakota Council on the Arts governor-appointed current board member.)
UPCOMING PROJECTS
Keep your eye out for Bachmeier’s two upcoming large-scale projects. One is for Sanford in Sioux Falls and in Fargo and the other is a Fargo public art project, a brick sculpture for a playground.
FIND BACHMEIER'S WORK
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