Reproduction Junction: Arrowhead Art Finds Niche With POD Process

By Douglas McDaniel
Mythville.com

Artist, art teacher and Glendale gallery owner Bill Drake has made fortunes and lost them during his 30 years in the art business.

During each epoch, during these multiple lives, the self-described "West Side boy" has created, marketed and sold highly accessible art forms. His work has been fruitful. He has multiplied.

Now he is multiplying in a new way, taking advantage of print-on-demand technologies now broadly available in the art world. The process, in the form of replicatable large format giclee prints, which appear to look just like the originals, even down to the texture of the paint.

"The way artists make money in today's market is through prints," says Drake, who is a co-partner in newly renamed Arrowhead Art with artist and former Glendale restaurant owner Margot Gayles. "With this, an artist can say, 'I want to do an order of 500, but he can order them just one at a time."

For example, one of Drake's paintings, titled "Wind Walkers," a portrait of eagles swooping through a deep canyon, is a 36-inch by 48-inch work hanging on the wall of his gallery priced at $14,500. But, as he tells it, the piece is practically priced not to sell. instead, his plan is to create a limited edition of 150 giclee prints, pricing each at $1,100. The beuaty and resiliency of the work -- giclees are said to be durable for at least 50 year -- allows the artist to treat each print in much the same way as a lithograph or reprinted photograph. He can sell the giclees for a total of more than $150,000 and keep the original on his own wall.

"That's why the original is fourteen-five," he says. "I don't care if I sell it or not."

Other ideas include leasing wall space to working artists as Drake continues to move toward the creative co-op mode. At the price of $15 per foot, he says, "they can buy buy as much as wall space as they want, and it`s a really good way to cover my overhead and help these artists."

Behind that is his constant seeking out of local artists leagues such as Westbrook Village Art League and Art League West. "It`s a good way to get my name out."

Recruiting for the Arts

By Douglas McDaniel

A few years back, Surprise gallery owner Paula J. Spears was a recruiter for a company in Illinois providing contract work to aircraft mechanics.

But after 9/11, everything broke loose in the aircraft maintenance business, with a lot of people in her industry looking for jobs, but she had few jobs to give them. "There was a lot of transition," she says. "Meaning: layoffs." She came to the Valley thnking she would do something new. She lived lived her before. She knew the area and did careful research before she purchased the gallery space from a photographer, opening it last December.

Then, she went back to what she already knew: recruiting. Except, instead of recruiting guys with wrenches and screwdrivers in their tool boxes, she started networking for people with brushes, painters, that is, so that she could use her networking skills to develop what has been a successful grass roots community arts effort at Arizona Artworks & Framing (Crossroads Towne Center, 12851 W. Bell Road, #16, Surprise 85374).

"I did a lot of stuff to get this going," she says. "I started by going down to the Arizona Commission on the Arts and I started recruiting. I was on the phone all of the time. One thing led to another, and so, here we are."

From the outside of her jam-packed gallery space in the Crossroads center, which is just on the boundary of Surprise and Sun City West, it looks like just another frame shop. But go inside and you find Spears has been successful in developing a broad stable of local and regional artists. Surprise artists on display in her include Charles Felder, whose paintings capture pastoral scenes of the way the desert may have looked in that very same area a long, long time ago; Anton Nowels, who paints with a mix of daring and humor; Neil Talbert, Sun City West, and Sam Ingram, who is a local legend as a long-time painter of religious and political iconography.

One of the key areas that Spears has been having success with is using guilds to bring the work in.

"The first show I had was for the Arizona Pastel Artists Association, and I offered my place for their spring show," she says. "They had approached and I said, 'Oh, i will do it,' but I had no idea what I was getting into."

But encouraged by that experience, she kept bringing in the guilds. Next came the Desert Sage artists, a group with members from paradise Valley, Phoenix and Scottsdale. In October, the Phoenix Art Guild put on a showing, followed by the Peoria Artists Guild in November. December 3-4, with the gallery stable now bursting at the seems, Spears will be participating in a major outdoors event for the area, the third annual Northwest Valley Arts & Crafts Festival at the Surprise Baseball Stadium (see sidebar).


With each show, in many cases, the work of those artists have remained in the gallery, which is chockful of works by all local artists on every wall. There is only one "generic" artist represented, prints by DeGrazia. In terms of her taste in what remains in the gallery, she says "The criteria is ... things I like. I find there are so many creative people out there."

Scottsdale Boy Goes West Side, West, West, Ever West ... Teenage Wasteland ! ... and Other Community Builders

By Douglas McDaniel

What began as an after-school program in the West Valley for wannabe elementary school ballet tykes has become a leading educational program for the fine points of pirouettes, especially the kind found at such major venues as Gammage Auditorium in Tempe during November, when the Conservatory Ballet graces the stage for its rendition of the Nutcracker.

The Conservatory Ballet, now running on the shady side of a strip mall in the community of Arrowhead, has in nine years managed to hatch itself out of the basic desire to offer something more to children and parents who are really serious about the art form of ballet, as well as exploring the tangible professional possibilities that such training might bring.

"This is the best Russian technique," says Carlee Blass, who with co-director and co-owner, Rodney Jenkins, has built a local ballet powerhouse drawing the talented kids from the around state and turning them into professionals. "We are one of the few full-stage youth productions ... This is a serious training ground, a very disciplined school."

From the outset, Blass, who had trained and performed in ballet in the Washington D.C. area, was working toward "a school philosophy versus a studio philosophy." And rather than being a competitive, trophy-driven machine for the students interested in all kinds of dance, the emphasis is on "pure ballet."

The emphasis is also on family and community building. As one of the prerequisites for a child receiving the training provided by the growing network of talented and experienced teachers (including Katherine Frey, who left Ballet Arizona three years ago to eventually teach at the Conservatory), all parents must volunteer to help market, support, and especially, perform. For example, members of one family, including Arrowhead mother Ursula Olinski, are dancing in the production with their three children.

"It is the product itself that keeps my children and my family supporting," Olinski says. "When it comes down to showtime, she (Blass) is a real perfectionist."

Arrowhead mom Susan Lovelace shares publicity duties with Heather Gassert. Lovelace's daughter, Sidney, is rehearsing for her performance just as her father, a fighter pilot, has been called to duty to Qatar.

"What ballet instill in these kids is such a discipline," she says. "It really helps Sidney in her everyday life ... to focus more."

The greater Conservatory Ballet that Blass became involved with on the East Coast has been in existence for nearly 30 years. As artistic director and founder, Blass moved out of the classroom environment into high school educational offerings, taking her recruits, as they have matured, along the way. Many of them are boys, sons of supportive fathers who have overcome the masculine stigmas against ballet, instead seeing the benefit to athletic skills, especially balance. At one point prior to coming to Arizona, Blass taught members of the Washington Bullets basketball team in the art, including Elvin Hayes and Phil Chenier.

"One of the things I noticed when I looked at Ballet Arizona's program was that they didn't have a lot of boys," she says. "I had always had a lot of boys in the schools before. I decided to go to Greenbrier Elementary School and create an after-school program for my sons. So Brandon (and her daughter, Dacia) started there as an alternative to the outside sports. Then, more boys started coming. We had a class with six or seven boys with any given time. Fathers saw that it helped with their balance."

The Conservatory Ballet currently has 16 boys enrolled to be taught by Rodney Jenkins, who has developed the program with agility in mind. The Conservatory also offers classes in other kids of dancing, such as jazz movement techniques and those required to become "The Lord of the Dance," but aside from an Irish jig or two, the emphasis is on pure, Balanchine-style, classic ballet. The skills obtained are wide open.

"People are always surprised the children can do the whole thing," Olinski says of the Nutcracker production, which was in the Orpheum Theater last year, attracting 500 to 700 audience members per night, now moving to the Gammage on the ASU Campus. Blass, as one of the leading lights of a broad, community-based effort drawing students from Arrowhead and points beyond (all over the Valley, actually), views each growing seasonal event as an opportunity to shine.

As Blass says, "We want parents and kids to know they are the best around."

Radio Free Arizona Returns After a 10-Year Hiatus

Former Radio Free Arizona columnist Douglas mcDaniel is no longer former. Shall this restore the memories and histories and futures of this place. Dedicate it to the old Sun Club. That old Taco stand turned into a hotpbed for the best Arizona bands in the early 1990s. The Meta Puppets come to mind, as do the Gin Blossoms. Dead Hot Workshop, and then the Tucson brigades would come up the road, Giant Sand and The Sidewinders.
Well, thngs are better now. There are a lot more people here. In the Valley of the Sun.

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Tramps and Theives made a strong impression during a show in Jerome over the summer. So there is an items for further research. Same for the Walkmen, who opened for Incubus to enliven a dimsal big venue show.

The Hip are touring. here early October. What are we so worried about?

Oh. That.

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