Painting with Fire

Green Bay native Jeff Greening has been working with metal since he was eighteen.   Twenty four years later, Jeff continues his career in stainless steel specialty work.  His artistic creations, such as the Vase of Flowers, grace many private and public gardens.  He is an avid supporter of The Einstein Project, donating a stainless steel sculpture each year. Greening also worked on the Twin Tower Monument at the Neville Museum in Green Bay. His creative inspiration has been his uncle David Calhoun, also an artist and owner of Swanstone Gardens.

The Vase of Flowers is just over 20' tall and weighs approximately 2,000 pounds. The flowers are made of eighteen gauge stainless steel with steel rod as their stems and the base is made of carbon steel.  After coloring the flowers with heat, Jeff uses a grinder to apply the brush strokes that you see on the flower petals. He used tig welding, the cleanest weld you can achieve, on the flowers.  Greening has developed a talent for applying the precise amount of heat in the right amount of time on certain steel thicknesses to form his own controllable color pallette.   

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All the years of polishing all the cool colors off from welding stainless steel inspired me to develop a color palette for coloring stainless that I call painting with fire."

The sculpture is for sale and on display in the gardens.

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Whimsical garden art by Kim Groff-Harrington

Northwest native and popular recycle artist Kim Groff-Harrington has been using tin, bottle caps and 'Stuff', wired together in her unique way for the past 10 years. Her work can be seen around the northwest and around the United States.

She took the Red Bull Challenge in 2006 and was honored to have her piece as one of the thirty-five pieces selected from eighty-six entries and displayed at the Red Bull Art of the Can Exhibit at the Weisman Art Museum in Minnesota. In the summer of 2008 Kim was invited to attend the South Bridgehampton Children's Museum recycled art event in New York.

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My work comes from my desire and need to reduce/reuse/recycle and the challenge of using discarded and surplus materials to revive and continue in the folk art tradition of taking broken, unwanted, discarded items and fringing new life to them. The process includes much pounding, cutting of metal and my unique way of wiring materials together.

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Posted via email from The Flying Pig Gallery & Greenspace

Classes and events

 

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You really need to visit the gallery and see these in person

Marge Lindemann delivered work this week.  She paints and when she's tired of that and needs a break, this is what she does.  Amazing!  Here's her story:

I love color! My earliest memories are of pressing the crayon as powerfully as I could onto the paper to get the maximum amount of colored wax deposited on my picture. I also love texture and fabrics; I come from a long line of dressmakers and fabric designers and have experimented with dyeing, weaving, knitting and otherwise manipulating fibers to create works of art. For the past 15 years, I have narrowed the scope of my work to the dyeing and painting of silk fabric followed by the cutting and sewing of the silk into collaged wall pieces. I also create scarves and a limited number of silk garments.

The process begins with white silk yardage stretched and hand-dyed with Procien silk dyes. It is then steam set to prevent fading. This is followed by hand washing which is necessary to remove the excess dye. Next comes the fun – I cut the silk into shapes and pin them onto cotton sateen backed by quilt batting. The sateen is also hand-dyed specifically for the purpose of supplying a background for the collage of silk pieces. I then cut, pin and sew. I use various machine stitches and rayon or metallic threads which add to the spark and sheen of the total piece. I continue the three steps of cutting, pinning and sewing until I feel like I'm coming into the home stretch. I then staple the near finished piece to a stretcher frame and then live with it for a day or two. The comes the period of more evaluation and removal from the frame of the piece. Last comes the sewing and final stretching onto the frame. Then, off to the framer.

All the way from South Africa

Wow - we have artwork flying in from all over the world. Look who just flew in from Cape Town, South Africa. These beaded flying pigs are handcrafted by Zimbabwean refugees - and in our very own red, purple and green - love them!! Thank you to our African friends.

All the way from Spain...artwork by Dan Casado

Dan resides on the volcanic island of El Hierro, one of the seven Canary Islands of Spain. He is originally from Argentina, South America. A self-taught artist, upon moving to El Hierro he began making works by transforming junk and found objects into pieces of art: paper collage sand sculptural assemblages.

“I see recycling as a compromise and a lifestyle, giving a second life to old, discarded materials, reusing rejected objects to make new artworks. Reinventing human and animal forms, freely finding and showing the figures hidden inside found materials, I wonder about human relations, the possibility/impossibility of communications, affections and illusions.”

Art is the tool to reconstruct the world. Art is my key.

Flower delivery!

Look what Jeff Greening delivered Friday.  Flowers in a vase...stainless steel...20 feet tall...2,000 pounds...now that's a statement!