BEN TODICA: „My other passion is Art”, by Ileana Costea

You’re invited to “LOOK AT ME”

New York artist Jerry W. McDaniel

Opening Reception Saturday 09/21/13 5:00PM to 7:00PM.

Music composed by CSUN Professor Liviu Marinescu (“Echoes”) will be played at the opening.

Brief introduction of the artist at 5:30PM. Opening Remarks: Harry Hellenbrand

Host: Ileana Costea. Light refreshments will be served. RSVP: icostea@csun.edu or (818) 512-3089.

You will have the opportunity to meet the artist and the composer.

Valley Performing Arts Center Gallery, CSUN, 18111 Nordhoff Street, Northridge

A parking permit ($ 6.00) can be obtained from CSUN kiosk at the entry on campus, Nordhoff with Lindley. One can also park in surface lot B1 and pay there at the dispenser. The gallery is located on the Loge Level, north of the Great Hall. Go to the main entrance of the VPAC. You will be ushered upstairs. No need to have tickets for the performing arts show.

Directions: www.valleyperformingartscenter.org/visit/directions

“Unlike other artists, I do not believe one style fits all. The various styles applied to my paintings are dictated by each idea’s own emotional expression. My goal is to create art through surrealistic symbolism via subliminal factors, using color and typographic elements.”

www.jerrywmcdanielstudios.com

http://www.csun.edu/~liviu7/

Exhibition: September 18 – October 22, 2013. Open to ticket holders one hour prior to performances and during intermissions, and by appointment at other times than the performing arts show dates. For more information, contact Sally Adelblue at (818) 677-8800.

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„My other passion is Art”

Ileana Costea, PhD., Professor of Engineering

MSEM Dept. Chair/CECS/CSUN

Manufacturing is as beautiful as Art!

S.K. Ramesh, Dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science/CSUN

and Ileana Costea, Professor of Engineering, MSEM Department Chair

Faculty Retreat 2009 – MANUFACTURING IS BEAUTIFUL poster presented by

Ileana Costea

Below you can find a list of my art contributions to CSUN throughout the years: 2005

http://www.csun.edu/pubrels/press_releases/fall05/romanianart.html

CSUN to Dedicate Installation by Sculptor Patrick Mateescu

Exhibition to Include Chronicle of Works by Constantin Brancusi

“Heavenly Hands” - Sculpture by Patriciu Mateescu 2005 on Plummer Str. / CSUN

Donated to CSUN by Ileana Costea & Ion Baroi

Initiated and coordinated the Artist in Residence activity for sculptor Patriciu Mateescu – a joint activity of the College of Engineering & Computer Science and College of AMC, Summer 2005.

(The sculptor used the kilns of the ceramic program – host Prof. Patty Cox; Deans: Diane Schwartz and William Toutant; Art Department Chair: David Moon)

Organized two Brancusi-Patriciu Mateescu Exhibitions (May – curators Ileana Costea and Ligia Toutant, Art for Invitation Postcard David Moon, and November 2005 – curator Ileana Costea) (Hosts David Moon, Chair, Art Department and Louise Lewis, CSUN Art Gallery Director;technical assistance – exhibition advisor James Sweeter)

http://www.csun.edu/pubrels/community@csun/05-06/december05.pdf

Community@csun Vol. IV No#6D12 page 4

Northridge’s Cultural Landscape Enriched by ‘Heavenly Hands’

Romanian-born Sculptor’s Monumental Work is Dedicated in CSUN’s Art and Design Courtyard

(Placed for a short while in the courtyard, now on N. University Dr. (Plummer St.)

1992

Two exhibitions of Art (in the main and auxiliary galleries of the AMC), one exhibition of Design (at CECS), and one book exhibition, during the American-Romanian Academy of Arts and Sciences (ARA) I organized at the College of Engineering and Computer Science in June 19992 (300 participants; curator of exhibitions Ileana Costea).

1985

Donation of “Love Flower” sculpture, by Patriciu Mateescu

(located several years in the courtyard of USU, in storage since the construction for the new buildings started)

“Love Flower”

Donated to CSUN by

Ileana Costea/ Professor of Engineering/CSUN,

and Nicolas Costea, MD, UCLA Professor of Medicine/UCLA

Exhibition of Patriciu Mateerscu Sculptures

USU Building Main Hall (Host Robert Bassler, Prof. Emeritus of Sculpture/ CSUN, AMC)

Computer Graphics Presentation at CSUN Faculty Retreat, Santa Barbara

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“LOOK AT ME”

New York artist Jerry W. McDaniel

www.jerrywmcdanielstudios.com

September 18 – October 22, 2013

Curators James Sweeters and Ileana Costea

Artist Statement

This exhibition represents the beginning and middle of my “billboards-inspired Citiscapes” period of rectangles, circles, and spheres.

During the 60s, when I had my studio in Greenwich Village, New York, many parts of the city were in the midst of large construction projects. They did not have the elegance of today’s big walls to fence the construction sites, but instead used the old doors from the buildings they were tearing down, stacking them two-doors-high to make a fence 14’ wide and 16’ tall. Saul Bass used these doors as background for his titles and credits for West Side Story. Although film credits customarily ran at the beginning, these 28 minutes of credits ran at the end of the film. Bass explained that this gave the audience time to collect themselves after the gripping and tragic love story.

Then came the “snipers”, companies who were hired to paste big advertisements on these door-walls. This business spread quite rapidly and every couple of days they would attach fresh ads on top of the previous ones. After a period of time, these walls got so thick they would curl up at the edge. I tore some 2’ x 3’ pieces and discovered 20-30 layers of ads stuck together.

I was fascinated by this explosion of colorful advertisement, busy and kitschy as Hell. It was like the Barnum and Bailey Circus on every construction site in Greenwich Village. I took photographs and made many sketches of those advertisement walls. This was the inspiration for my “billboard-typographic” art. All my paintings during that period were based on a small fragment of the various torn and ripped billboards with colors coming from the ads underneath.

The idea of circular paintings came to me while studying at the New School for Social Research in New York with Angelo Savelli and Henry Pearson. They taught an experimental workshop where we were exposed to everybody’s wild and fantastic ideas. One night a student came to class with a 30” empty circular canvas. While she was out of the room for a few minutes I made a quick colored abstract pizza slice and placed it on her canvas. When she returned I told her jokingly, “It’s finished. Voila!” That was the birth of my thinking about circles. The first circles I painted were enamel on sized canvas. I went to enamel because the chemical condition of acrylic paint in those days was pitiful. In this exhibit I am showing 4 of my original 13 enamel paintings.

Meanwhile the quality of the acrylic paint improved and I started using it. At a group show in Soho, Manhattan, people were fascinated by the fact that my circle had part left as row canvas. This was the beginning of my second series of circles in which I used the canvas as part of the composition. These are not included in this exhibition.

I do not use easels. I put all 13 canvases on sawhorses in my studio so that I can walk around them. All 13 circles were painted on at the same time. I set up different colors in all 4 corners of the room. I worked from north, east, west, and south back and forth through the canvases. I made all those colors move through each other. The portion where the color was set initially remained predominantly that color, diminishing in quantity as it crossed to the other side of the studio. That explains why all these circles have the same date. They were finished in a 2-3 week period in 1971.

The following fall I had a one-man show with these circles at the Fashion Institute of Technology/SUNY Gallery. At the opening Henry Pearson, who gets credit for being the father of optical painting commented, “You should have mixed the circles with some rectangles”.

Finally after 40 years, I am doing just that in my exhibition at the Valley Performing Arts Center Gallery with the help of the CSUN’s Art Gallery Director, Jim Sweeters: I am combining circles with rectangles.