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Links...
Cali Hobgood-Lemme, from the Heartland blog
Artist I'm Loving: Cali Hobgood-Lemme, from the mimi and meg blog
“Booklist” by Cali Hobgood-Lemme Cali Hobgood-Lemme makes hand-colored black and white photographs. Her current body of work incorporates objects from everyday life. “Right now I think my pieces have the essence of a stage set; isolating these everyday items gives them an iconic nature that moves the images from the everyday to a moment from our lives.” About “Booklist” she says, “I love this image – the way it came into my mind, the feelings it provokes in the viewer, the reasons I chose each of the books included in the piece. Everyone who sees it has a story about it and I think many people end up taking the piece home to help keep that feeling, that glimpse of who they were and what they were doing when they first read books incorporated in the piece. “I love to hear the stories behind why people are buying the image – a gift for a high school librarian who’d struggled with his school board to allow “The Catcher in the Rye” in 1955, a bookshop owner who was closing their doors after 32 years, a very well-dressed businessman who turned to his lovely wife and surprised her by saying he’d narrated “Our Town” in school.”
About “John Taylor’s Shirts” she says, “I love this image – its simplicity, its precision. It’s about many things - my father, the smell of clean laundry, and precision, and why all of those things together are good. “My father was a very well-dressed man, a professor, and when I was a girl he used to send his shirts out to the cleaners. They’d come back to him folded and pinned around pieces of cardboard and stacked in a box, and when he put them on he’d add the piece of cardboard they were wrapped around to a stack on his closet shelf. Those pieces of cardboard were the biggest prize - my brothers and I used them for drawing paper. The mystery of my father's closet, with its smells of wool and pipe tobacco and shoe leather, was part of that ritual of reaching up on tiptoe to get those cardboard rectangles. Those memories - of a man in a crisp white shirt, of feeling secure, are what I think this piece is about.” Cali lives in Illinois with her husband and son and has been in business as an art photographer since 1986. “All of my photographic work is done by my hand, using standard silver processes in a traditional black and white darkroom. I adore shooting film – the way the camera feels in my hands as the shutter releases and the film advances, the darkroom sounds of running water, the way each image slowly appears on the surface of the paper the exact same way as the very first photograph I ever printed did in 1978 in my junior high darkroom when I was 15 years old.” There’s still more to the process, though. “I use artist’s oils to add color to the photographs – it’s a very traditional technique that gives an almost three-dimensional quality to the images, especially when combined with my high-contrast printing style. Between the variability of printing each negative individually and then hand-coloring the photographs one at a time, each piece in an edition is the same and yet different.” 2010 is Cali’s eighteenth year of exhibiting at outdoor art festivals. She’s been the recipient of several grants and private commissions. Her work is displayed in galleries, corporate collections, shops, museums, and juried and invitational art festivals across the country.
Interview with Uptown Art Fair’s 2006 Featured Artist
Cali Hobgood-Lemme First of all, congratulations on being selected as Uptown Art Fair’s 2006 Featured Poster Artist. That’s quite an accomplishment! Yes, what an exciting thing it is to be the featured artist! It’s very gratifying—and a little nerve-wracking—because Uptown has a great reputation and I need to be sure to live up to the honor. Tell us a little about yourself. I’m a photographer from Champaign-Urbana, Ill. I studied photography at the University of Illinois with an emphasis on the theories of visual representation and art history. I’ve been in business as an art photographer since 1986. This will be my 14th year exhibiting at outdoor art festivals. Describe your creative process. The pieces I exhibit are hand-colored black and white photographs. The techniques I use shooting, processing and printing the black and white negative yield a high contrast print that I paint with high quality artists’ oils, using techniques that vary from brushwork to applying paint with cotton swabs. I do all of my photographic work by hand, using standard silver processes in the darkroom. Have you ever exhibited at the Uptown Art Fair? This will be my first time exhibiting. I’ve been to the Uptown Art Fair before, and have been very impressed with the quality of the work exhibited. I loved the atmosphere of the show. Minneapolis is a great place—it reminds me of a cleaner, more comfortable Chicago. And isn’t it home to American Public Media and Minnesota Public Radio? One of the best parts of my day is 12:48 in the afternoon when Garrison Keillor does “The Writer’s Almanac.”
How would you describe the photo being featured at the Uptown Art Fair? The piece that’s being featured is called “John Taylor’s Shirts,” it’s a hand-colored black and white photograph of a stack of men’s dress shirts. It was such a precise and complete vision in my head—it was just there, all of a sudden, provoked by the “I don’t know where that came from” school of thought. I know that it’s about fathers, and that fresh smell of a clean shirt, and precision, and the mystery about why all of those things together are good. Why—in general terms—do you think people should visit art fairs? What are the advantages of this environment compared to, say, a gallery or studio? People have always shopped in the open air—strolling, fresh air, the panorama of everyone else doing the same thing—it makes us feel connected, like we’re part of something, a community. Bringing art and artists to the people, away from the kind of rarified air of galleries and museums, can make for great moments of connection and understanding. In your opinion, what is your job as a photographer? That’s a good question. When asked for an introduction for one of his books, e.e. cummings wrote that he was “abnormally fond of that precision [in his case with words] which creates movement.” If I have a theory of technique, it would be that I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement in your perception—to move the viewer from the familiar to provoking a thought. With my work people often have a feeling, a memory associated with an iconic object, often of someone’s past, their parents. What kind of feedback do you receive about your work? As with all artists, I’m sure, when someone loves something and connects with it, the stories they share with you can be really personal, or funny, or intriguing. I’m always surprised when people admire my wit or my life as they imagine it from looking at my work. My work and its presentation is very simple and clean-looking, and often funny—my life, on the other hand, especially during creative production, can be very different! What was the nicest compliment you ever received from a customer purchasing your photography? One time, many years ago, a man who’d bought a piece for his daughter wrote me a poem about how he felt certain elements in the image reflected the good things in his daughter’s life. When you’re not taking photos, how do you like to spend your time? Well, my father coined a phrase, “Cali-ing,” when I was in college—it involved a lot of floating in the pool with cocktails. My favorite New Yorker cartoon is by Danny Shannahan, there’s a guy sitting on the examining table at his doctor’s office wearing boxers and holding a glass of wine and a cigar, and the doctor is saying “You should relax less...” But seriously, I have a husband, Eric, and a 10-year-old son, Stirling, and when I’m not working I like to have fun and enjoy my family and friends.
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