LIFESTYLES" FROM THE
MELROSE FREE PRESS

Arts alive!
Real, live artists on Main St.
By Dan Mac Alpine/ Melrose@Cnc.Com
Thursday, September 9, 2004

For the non-artist, even the word "art" can cause chills and sweats. Paintings. Pottery. Even jewelry remains a foreign world designed to confuse and instill insecurity. Afraid to trust what their eyes and heart tell them, the art-challenged avoid art at all costs.

Enter Lori DiCesare and her Hourglass Gallery's Arts Alive series.

In its second year, the series puts a human face and warm smile on art. The public can meet artists, discuss their work and learn about the process, demystifying art and making it more approachable and less of an enigma. The series bridges the gaps between the art, the artist and the public.

"It's a chance for people to meet their local artists," DiCesare said. "It just makes it more personal. That's what these nights are, just more personal." Other artists participating will be Melrose's Ellen Rolli, a painter, and Gail Hamm, a jeweler.

For Hamm, it's a chance to meet with possible clients, explain her work, show some unset stones and come away with some commissions.

For Rolli, who has developed a loyal, local following - her two one-woman shows at the Beebe Estate the past several years sold out - the evening is a chance to show off an evolution in style, connect with collectors of her work and pick up a few new fans.

"These nights are an opportunity for these artists to bring in more of their work and show their new work," DiCesare explained. "In the gallery we can only put up so much work on a regular basis. This is especially the case with an artist like Ellen, for people who collect her work."

DiCesare has three more Arts Alive nights left this year: Oct. 1, Nov. 5 and the final to coincide with Home for the Holidays.

"These nights are a real celebration of art," said DiCesare. "Each time we do them, they get a little bigger. People in the store are noticing the art on the walls more and making plans to buy art. We're lucky we can have this in Melrose. Between us and the shows at the Beebe Estate, it's really helped."

Ellen Rolli: A style evolutionary

Local Ellen Rolli fans may be a little surprised with the work she will show for the Arts Alive evening.

Those who bought and collected her earlier work won't be seeing or buying the same painting style. Gone is the more subtle use of color. The more subdued renderings of a scene. The overall, incandescent glow from her work of several years ago. Gone.

Instead, Rolli has enhanced her strong sense of color and added much bolder brush strokes. Now, she renders a flower with a single brush stroke. No more individual petals. She loads the brush with paint, perhaps even with two or three colors, giving the flower thickness and a three-dimensional quality.

Far from abandoning her impressionistic bent, Rolli has let go of detail even more. She quotes Georgia 0'Keefe: "Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things."

"I'm trying to say more with less," Rolli said. The strong brush strokes, delineated by full, black lines or even the red sketch lines she uses to set up the painting before applying paint, give her work more energy and immediacy than before. Rolli has always finished her paintings in one seating - a la prima - and her evolution captures that immediate, creative energy more clearly than earlier pieces.

"I think that brings a spontaneity and freshness to a painting," Rolli said. "For me, I feel something is lost if I overwork a painting. Maybe that works for photorealistic painters, but not for me. I just react to what I see and get it down in one session."

Rolli will have mostly smaller work at the show - 5-by-5-inch and 6-by-6-inch unframed canvases. At around $175, they're more affordable than her larger, framed work for $400 to $700, depending on size.

The size is part marketing and part artistic choice. "I do them partly for practical reasons," Rolli said. "They are more affordable, for people who like my work, but can't afford one of the larger, framed pieces. I also choose to paint that way, because I like the intimacy. It fits my style and my life."

Mining her imagination

Melrose jeweler Gail Hamm has rocks in her head or at least on the brain. She has since a high school art class introduced her to jewelry making. Hamm still uses the tools she bought in high school and used on her cellar workbench - mom even let her melt metal with a blow torch.

The experience paid off. Today, Hamm specializes in selecting unique, semi-precious stones and setting them, usually in silver, with an occasional touch of 18K gold for additional color. Her settings often blend with the stone, rather than set it off as traditional jewelry might. There are no stones in raised, pronged settings for Hamm. She strives for a unified, organic statement in which the colors and flecks and veins in the stones she selects work in harmony with her settings.

"I use what nature provides and I build on that," said Hamm. "Some stones and settings almost look like landscapes, they have so many interesting lines." In technical terms, Hamm usually works with cabochons - polished, unfaceted gems.

For the Arts Alive show, Hamm will have both finished pieces and loose stones a client may select and develop a setting for a ring, necklace or pendant on a commission basis.

For the first time, she will also have earrings. "It's big for me to do earrings, because I never make two of one thing," Hamm said. "I like to come up with different things."

Available loose stones will include peanut wood, a fossilized cream and brown stone; fossilized tortoise shell, dark brown to almost black, "It's very rugged looking, very interesting," said Hamm; and a variety of other stones, including turquoise and several varieties of jasper she bought on a recent trip to Santa Fe, N.M.

"I try to buy from mines in the U.S. and Mexico," Hamm said. "I just like things from my own back yard. I like to develop a relationship with the artist cutting the stone. I buy from people who sell stones with interesting color and shapes. Now I have a lot of square stones. I go through spurts of color shapes and design around that."

Hamm knows her style isn't for everyone. "It comes down to a matter of taste," she said. "This isn't the mainstream. It's not Tanzanite . I will use small, faceted peridot, amethyst or garnet to complement the stones, where I see a match. I make everything by hand, forming and hammering from wire and metal sheets and I make that part of the design."

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