On this model, a tiny cockpit is scratch-built from plastic and wire. Note the penny, which gives a sense of scale.

The instrument panel and rudder pedals are assembled, painted, and ready to install in another model.

With a background in this type of modeling, detail is a vexing issue in my work for Artists of Hawai‘i 2013. My aim is for viewers to ponder the relationships between the forms and images, not to scrutinize minute details—which can add weeks or months to the time needed to construct each piece. I can’t squander time on features that would be invisible, or would not add significant meaning to the work.

On the other hand, “God is in the details,” as architect Mies van der Rohe said. It is an idea I find alluring; If I am to present a scale model as a persuasive symbol, doesn’t a more richly detailed and convincing replica make it more so?

So I aspire to as much detail as time will allow.

This attention extends to the finish of each piece, which consists of many layers: white primer, photographic image transfers, paint, decals and multiple clear coats. All are meticulously applied with episodes of sanding and polishing between each layer. It is a process that mirrors historic art practices, including the polychrome wood sculpture common in many cultures. The result of the effort is meant to equate with a conceit of the Renaissance, when the fineness of a work of art was believed to enhance its spiritual gravity.

Here, photographic images are applied over the white primer coat

“Polychrome” simply means multiple colors. Artisans without access to fine materials such as marble would often sculpt in wood, which was inexpensive and plentiful. (I prefer using scale model kits for much the same reason—today plastic is inexpensive and nearly ubiquitous.) To add vividness to their ordinary medium, the wood was often brightly painted. Then, multiple layers of clear resins were applied and vigorously polished to create a deep gloss. Applied mostly to likenesses of Christ and angels, the gleam was meant to portray the divine light of the subjects.

With the images applied, the rest of these models are in the process of being painted.

The fixing of images on my aircraft models is meant to allude to the camouflage and markings of real warplanes, which are often seen in drab finishes. But these models are designed to mimic this genre of representation, while imagining some eccentric, rogue ideology. The deep gloss—this divine light—proves quite tempting.

The real thing: A photograph of the famous Flying Tigers on mission over Burma in 1942. Photograph by Robert Scott.

Here’s a nearly completed piece, based on the vintage photograph.

At the museum in September, I imagine my little airplanes shimmering like jewels.

I use human and anthropomorphic figures as the vehicle to explore the results of these prevalent emotions on society. The results form an uncomfortable contrast between the external face of content and the inner destruction that they pose. I reference art, contemporary culture, religion, mythology and other forms of social determinism in non-traditional ways to engage my subjects in activities that confront the viewer with the results of the human condition.

For the Artists of Hawai‘i exhibition I have been working on a piece that is a reflection of my feelings about the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Weapons have been part of human existence throughout history and how each society has chosen to regulate these have varied. The extremes of weapon use have resulted in nuclear bombs, gas chambers and items of torture during periods such as the inquisition. An opposite of this would be the banning of guns in the United Kingdom where even police do not routinely carry them.

My sculpture The Innocents speaks to the easy accessibility of guns in America and the perceived results of that accessibility. When the innocents become victims, it is time to look at the laws and regulations of that culture and determine what the priorities of that culture are.

I am primarily a ceramic sculptor, though I will use whatever media is necessary for me to achieve the look that I am seeking in a piece of work. To accentuate the narrative I use various surface treatments to emphasize different aspects of the work. Along with a minimal use of colorful glazes, I use a surface technique that I developed known as “Naked Fauxku.” This approach reproduces a likeness to Naked Raku but is created in a high fire, oxygenated atmosphere with no reduction.  The advantage of this technique is that it creates a cracked and painful looking surface that adds subliminal meaning to the work, while technically imparting the work with a durability that is unattainable from unvitrified raku work.

Beyond the museum, Mr. Stupski was the mastermind behind bringing Teach For America to Hawai‘i and was a national TFA board member. Mr. Stupski, who divided his time between San Francisco and Hawai‘i, made many contributions to education through the Stupski Foundation and through The Stupski Family Fund, overseen by the Hawai‘i Community Foundation. “He loved Hawai‘i and was a fierce advocate and supporter of our keiki here,” said Teach for America executive director Jill Murakami Baldemor in a statement. “He was exceptionally wise, always providing keen perspective, both from a business lens and a human lens. He was extremely generous with his time and support. And, what I will remember most is how extraordinarily humble and kind he always was. While he was a very successful businessman, I will remember him as a great mentor and friend.”

But to have something to show, filmmakers need to share their latest (and greatest) work with us. We will be accepting submissions beginning May 22 for three and a half months. Here are all the details you need to know:

‘Oiwi Film Festival
Films Directed by Native Hawaiians
November 8-10, 2013

Film submissions period:  May 22-September 6, 2013

Subject matter should be related to Hawai’i, Hawaiian arts, culture, lifestyle, history and politics. All formats accepted—documentaries, feature films and shorts. All running times accepted—no limitations.

‘Oiwi Film Festival mission statement: To highlight films by indigenous Hawaiian filmmakers to show Hawai’i through their own eyes and in their own voices.

SUBMISSION CHECKLIST
Your ‘Oiwi Film Festival submission package should include:

•  A single printed sheet that includes your name, contact info, film title, brief film synopsis, film run time, and year produced.

•  A DVD preview copy labeled with the title, duration and your name and contact info. DVD Submissions will not be returned.

Mail submissions to:

Abbie Algar / ‘Oiwi Film Festival
Honolulu Museum of Art
900 S. Beretania St.
Honolulu, Hawaii 96814

Filmmakers selected for the festival will be notified by Oct. 4.

For more information:
Abbie Algar at gro.muesumululonohnull@raglaa
Taylour Chang at gro.muesumululonohnull@gnahct
Ann Marie Kirk at moc.liamgnull@mlifiwio

Usually an art museum curator’s job encompasses working on exhibitions and the permanent collection, doing research and writing, and lots of meetings and emails. Once in a while, an opportunity comes along to do something different, and I had such an opportunity on Friday, May 4, at Punahou School’s Omidyar K-1 Neighborhood. I received an invitation from the Punahou Explorers’ Kindergarten class through museum trustee Stephanie Hee, whose grandson is in the class, to visit them and see their project inspired by the Maurice Ravel opera, L’Enfant et les Sortileges, and their visit to the museum’s Spalding House to see David Hockney’s installation based on the opera.

I met half the class upon arrival (the other half were off at Physical Education) and got an introduction to their project, then they departed for P.E. and the other half of the class returned and continued to tell me about what they created and how they went about it. The class’ remarkable teachers, Resi Ditzel and Myra Fa’atea, who guided the children through the project, filled in details, augmenting what the students told me. They began by listening to the story of L’Enfant et les Sortileges read to them by the teachers and listened to parts of a recorded performance of the opera. They already had a lot of images and ideas in their heads when they later went to see the David Hockney installation about the story/opera at Spalding House.

Then, they set out to create their own interpretation in a couple of spaces next to their classroom. The architecture of the two spaces lent itself to a similar format as Hockney’s two-room work at the museum. Entering the Punahou Explorers’ L’Enfant et les Sortileges, I found many of the same elements as in Hockney’s: a large painted backdrop in front of which were “flats” painted individually by the students, including shepherds, shepherdesses and cats (Hockney’s version has one black cat in front of a fireplace, but the student’s installation had multiple cats and at least two fireplaces). There also was the schematic chair in which the little boy in the story falls asleep reading a book. Passing through a doorway with painted fabric pulled back on either side, we entered the magical garden of the story. The most prominent element is the red tree, which the students kept red but embellished with sgraffito designs. Pronouncing the word perfectly, a couple of the students explained to me that it is drawing an image into wet paint with a pointed object (in this case, forks). There were also “bat people,” one of the students’ favorite things to make.

While the tree trunk remained red, the students, who had been studying colors, followed their own inclinations by using lots of colors besides the reds, blues and greens Hockney used. In the Punahou L’Enfant et les Sortileges, there is a plethora of colors, especially oranges, yellows and browns. The students created individual leaves for the tree, looking at real tropical leaves and drawing their shapes looking only at them not at the paper, cutting those shapes out, painting them and attaching them to the tree branches.

While the students were excited that a curator had come to see their work, I don’t think they knew what one is or does. They knew I worked at the art museum where they had seen the Hockney installation but didn’t ask questions about my job, preferring in good artist fashion to talk about their work. One asked me how old David Hockney is, and when I replied that he is around 75, they all agreed that that was “really old,” and I replied that from their perspective now it seems old but from mine it didn’t seem old. I don’t think they got that. I told them that Hockney is one of the most famous living artists and is going to have a large exhibition of his recent works at a museum in San Francisco this fall (for readers of this who are interested: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco: de Young Museum, Oct. 26, 2013 to January, 2014).

The students went on to tell me about artists besides Hockney that they have been studying—Monet, Matisse, Van Gogh (pronouncing his name perfectly with the guttural sounds that it has in Dutch but which most people don’t attempt). However, they hadn’t been to the Honolulu Museum of Art on Beretania Street to see actual paintings by those artists hanging on the walls, at which point I suggested they ask their parents to bring them to the museum at the next Bank of Hawaii Family Sunday event on May 19. Then it was time for them to get back to more creating and me to go back to my office to catch up on emails.

Stephan Jost gave certificates for years of service those who have supported the museum for 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30 years, then everyone enjoyed a brunch buffet.

Our milestone makers:

30 years: Kevin Chang, Bette Takahashi, Patricia Li, Phyllis Nakasone (pictured above with director Stephan Jost)

25 years: Ethyl Aotani, Allyn Bromley, Beverly Helmer, Marcy Katz

20 years: Nancy Suzuki-Slakter

15 years: Linda Carr, Lillian Chang, Iku Donnelly, Louise Hill, Tori Keegan, Deborah Nehmad, and Mayette Zane

10 years: Betsy Behnke, Mary Lou Botelho, Victoria Hill, Julie Noji, Rebecca Ryan Senutovich, Esther Tanis van Allsburg, Kathleen Ung

5 years: Lynne Armstrong, Shirlee Beasley, Debbie Bocken, Frank Duckart, John Ellis, Brady Evans (who is also our part-time web content coordinator), Lynn Haia, Anne Kase, Carolyn Keane, Lyn Kux, Maria Lopez Haney, Tensie Lee, Tara Liu, Jean McIntosh, Linda Nishimura, Ellen Owens, Karlyn Pearl, Bill Pearl, Diane Reitsperger, Mary Rhine, Art Richardson, Patty Robb, Irwin Schatz, Sandra Simms, Cookie Stephan, Lily Tashima, Nancy Whitman, Debbie Ziemke

At the bottom of the sheet is a 1915 quote from Marcel Duchamp: America is the country of the art of the future. Almost 100 years later, looks like he was right.

Your letters will look that much cooler with Charles Demuth’s I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold on the envelope.

I build plastic model airplanes and glue photographs on them.

It’s hard to even say this and expect to be taken seriously. Worse, it’s difficult to express how this might be a serious intellectual pursuit.

Of course, I began my career as an artist by making portraits and landscapes.

From the series ‘Inconsolable,’ 2003. Color photograph. John Ferdico

Most artists learn through well-defined mediums and genres of art practice. My friend Amber Aguirre, for instance, who is also one of the 11 artists taking part in Artists of Hawai‘i 2013, learned pottery by throwing bowls and cups on the wheel. After learning the craft, she discovered and developed the strange and lovely narrative figures that will be included in the show.

Like Amber, I learned the craft and later wandered away from traditional mediums and genres when I became more interested in inventing a personal iconography: finding a mode of expression that was unique to my own experience and ideas.

And so I began playing around with different ways to present photographs. It wasn’t too long before the model airplanes were thrown into the mix; I had been building them since I was a little boy. My father was an airline employee, and mine is a family of many veterans, so an interest in aviation and the military was then quite natural.

At first, photography and scale modeling intermingled with the same joy for invention and juxtaposition featured in my childhood drawings, where dinosaurs fought army men without regard for plausibility or the limitations of glacial time.

Without quite intending it to, the work evolved into something in which I saw an uncanny resemblance to devotional sculpture, especially the tradition of polychrome wood.

Polychrome wood santos in the museum’s Filipino Gallery and a work in progress by John Ferdico

With the term devotional sculpture, I mean to summarize a common theme in the art practice of many different cultures, where the art object is created to address the intangible and spiritual.

In my case, it refers to the trinkets of my Suburban New York-Middle Class-Irish-Italian-Catholic heritage. I now appreciate the connection between those rosaries and Nativities, and the devotional expressions of other cultures: Native American totems, Day of the Dead altars, and deities from the Far East, to name a few.

Polychrome wood crucifix

Tinglit totem pole, Alaska.

Thai figures

Traditional devotional sculpture functioned mostly as tribute or talisman. For my sculptures—though made according to the Modernist tradition where fine art lacks utility—imagining what purpose they might serve helps me choose the images and forms that make up the work. What might be a symbol of understanding and comfort for the specific trials of our lives? What is worthy of our tribute? What might we hang on our walls as protection from our unique peril?

From the series ‘The Protectorates,’ 2006. Photographs, plastic model, wood. By John Ferdico

This is what I try to make.

We at the museum are all so excited about the nomination of The Arts of the Bedchamber: Japanese Shunga  for the award. Have a look at the ballot.

The exhibition was co-curated by Shawn Eichman, Asian Art Curator, and Stephen Salel, the Robert F. Lange Foundation Research Associate for Japanese Art. The exhibition packed a lot of information in an accessible, user-friendly way, and used iPads to allow visitors to page through books that were under glass cases. Installation designer Larry Maruya created the engaging space, complete with sliding shoji doors to make sure under-age museum goers didn’t stumble onto the R-rated material. Graphic Designer Jared Stone designed all the exhibition graphics.

“Shawn Eichman and I are very honored that such a prestigious organization as the Association of Art Museum Curators considers Arts of the Bedchamber: Japanese Shunga to be comparable to this year’s other nominees,” says Salel. “This is a time when the Honolulu Museum of Art is undertaking a variety of new, ambitious projects, and we’re delighted that those projects are being greeted with enthusiasm from both the general public and our colleagues at other art organizations throughout the United States.”

AAMC members will cast their votes for the award categories. The voting deadline is April 20. Wish us luck!

The five miniature boxes of Debris Contained echo the large installation in content, yet they are diametric opposites in scale and containment—the soft tulle bundles have morphed into hard porcelain boxes. As in Hung Out to Die, the boxes and their contents are metaphorical remnants of broken lives, broken toys, and unfulfilled promise.

The work is so painstaking; it has taken quite a bit of time to get the project together, along with the other things I do. In the photo I am working on a small leg and making the toenails on the little foot. I have to use magnifying glasses to see what I’m doing. It takes at least two to three hours to sculpt one small body part. Three sets of body parts are off to my side ready for the first firing. The figures in the top row, to my left in the photo, are being used for models. They belong to one of the completed boxes and already have been fired, which is why they are slightly smaller because of the shrinkage occurring with the porcelain at high temperatures.

Each porcelain box contains identical, unassembled, hand-sculpted white porcelain miniature doll body parts, a clothlike ragdoll, and undecorated, tiny ceramic baseballs randomly placed within. The toy baseballs provide a contemporary note, while the ghostly rag dolls again add a macabre touch. Dolls and toys are intrinsic to mankind; children have always had toys large and small. These anthropomorphic white ragdolls and doll body parts along with the contemporary baseballs signify a union of the past, present and future.

Keraflex is the trade name for a special kind of paper-thin porcelain that is somewhat difficult to work with. All five Keraflex boxes have been made and high-fired to Cone 10 in an electric kiln.

In addition, the miniature body parts and baseballs for two of the boxes have been sculpted and fired to Cone 11, so they are complete. I’ve been working steadily to finish making the body parts and baseballs for the remaining three boxes in order to bisque fire them, and then high-fire them at Cone 11 in an electric kiln.

Artists of Hawai‘i opens Sept. 19. Roberta Griffith is one of 11 artists currently working on a body of work for this biennial exhibition.