Ella Yang – Brooklyn Artisan

Joy’s Best of Brooklyn, December 28, 29, 30

December 27, 2012 by Joy Makon 2 Comments

PART TWO
The Team at Brooklyn Artisan is thankful for:

Here’s Part Two of our list. What are you thankful for? We’d love to know. Share with us on Facebook, email, or leave a comment.

^ Getting to see and play around Natural History, the complex, visually striking stick sculpture by Patrick Doherty, at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Created to be temporary, yet having lasted well over a year, it will be dismantled on December 31 because wear-and-tear and numerous storms have finally broken it down. (Photograph, taken in February 2011 is courtesy of One Little Star.)

Families who’ve donated tons of toddler toys to the Underhill Playground in Prospect Heights

The passing stranger who saw our keys hanging in the lock and kindly put them through the mail slot.

Seemingly unlimited energy and creativity in fundraising for Sandy restoration efforts.
ReStore Red Hook is one such effort, formed to raise at least $5,000 for neighborhood small businesses still reeling from Sandy. Their cookbook, All Hands On Deck, a $15 e-book download, is a collection of well-loved recipes selected from the tightly-knit community. Recipes include home/made’s Flourless Chocolate Torte, Pumpkin Almond Cake from Baked and Lobster Mac & Cheese from Red Hook Lobster Pound. “People put everything they had into their restaurants,” said Monica Byrne, a ReStore Red Hook co-founder whose restaurant home/made and its basement storage was flooded during the storm. This project gives a glimpse into what makes the businesses and the people running them so special. Purchase and download here.

Bergen Bagel for what they do best: bagels.

^ ^ ^ ^ Bagel fight! Terrace Bagels for what they do best: cinnamon-raisin bagels.

Pete Hamill, the former Shabbos goy at Park Slope Jewish Center in the 1940’s, for reading “The Gift of the Magi” at the Brooklyn Holiday Book Fair at Old Stone House.

Our Chemex coffeemaker for its timeless design. No other carafe or coffeemaker matches the elegance of pouring coffee from this glass spout. Ours is circa 1980; the rawhide tie gets replaced every few years.

MTA.info/nyct for keeping us up to date after Sandy flooded the subway tunnels.

Neighbors who’ve turned sidewalks and stoops into free libraries.

December 31 at 11:59:59pm. (Photograph: Prospect Park Alliance/Paul Martinka.)

New Years celebrations in the nabe:
* Fort Defiance. EVE: an evening with Master of Mixology Charles H. Baker, Jr. DAY: Southern brunch with Coca-Cola ham, biscuits, lots more. Yes, reserve. Red Hook.
* Fireworks in Prospect Park at Grand Army Plaza. Thank you Marty.
* Run. EVE: Brooklyn Road Runners sponsors a 5K in Prospect Park at 11:15, complete with glow necklaces and fleece hats for registrants. DAY: Prospect Park Track Club’s 20th annual Harry’s Handicap Race at 10am. One loop of Prospect Park, followed by potluck brunch, coffee, bagels with a great group of runners and friends. It’s been awhile, but we’ve run this one at least ten times, and it’s always a hoot.
* Walk over the Brooklyn Bridge with Dr. Phil. Philip E. Schoenberg, Ph.D., that is. His annual walk is a chance to party and play on the Bridge, complete with fireworks viewings, refreshments, prizes, and lots of chances to pick up little-known facts from one of NYC’s best tour guides.

This kitty via NYC Food Truck Association
and This > “A home without a cat—and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat—may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?”—Mark Twain. Quote and photograph from Home Again, a series of global photographs defining the idea of home, from the blog of photographer Steve McCurry.

Kings County Hospital ER for taking care of 140,000 of our sick and injured every year.

Saint Augustine Roman Catholic Church for their remembrance of World Aids Day.

Everyone in the surf, on January 1, 2013. (Photograph by the Coney Island Polar Bear Club.)

Everyone in the surf, on January 1, 2013. (Photograph from the Coney Island Polar Bear Club.)

Coney Island for an amazing summer with beach walks, Nathan’s, Grimaldi’s pizza, and Tom’s. We’ll be back next summer no matter what. And come January 1 at 1pm, we will be (only) observing the annual New Year’s Day Swim by the Coney Island Polar Bear Club. Happy Happy Joy Joy—so glad to hear the swim is on!

Sally Gil’s work FW1, part of 440 Gallery Small Works Show.

Gorilla Coffee for even a stroll-by creates a caffeine high.

Ella Yang for allowing us to showcase her Brooklyn-without-irony paintings: see Day Four from our 12 Days of Brooklyn posts. Ella is a member and exhibitor at the artist collective 440 Gallery where the 8th annual Small Works Show is currently on. Juried artwork is no larger than 12” and represents a strong Brooklyn artistic presence. Great things come in small packages indeed. Park Slope. Through January 6, 2013.

Holidays at Fort Defiance. (Photograph by
Basia Hellwig/Brooklyn Artisan Photo Pool.)

3rd Ward and all the other co-working spaces that help give cred and shelter to the artisanal work being done here.

Mixologist and Fort Defiance owner
St. John Frizell for sticking it out.

If you missed Part One, catch up here.

Joy Makon curates Brooklyn Artisan’s Craft & Design coverage and creates the weekly Best of Brooklyn lists.
Send items for listings to brooklynartisan@joymakondesign.com

Filed Under: Brain Candy, Collectives, Community, Coworking, Food/Drink, Guilds/Fairs, Joy's Best of Brooklyn Weekend Listings, Think, Uncategorized Tagged With: 3rd Ward, 440 Gallery, All Hands On Deck, Baked, Bergen Bagel, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Brooklyn Bridge, Brooklyn Holiday Book Fair, Brooklyn Road Runners, Charles H. Baker, Chemex, Coney Island, Coney Island Polar Bear Club, Dr. Phil tours, Ella Yang, Fort Defiance, Gorilla Coffee, Grand Army Plaza, home/made, Jr., Marty Markowitz, Nathan's, Natural History, New Year's Eve, NYC Food Truck Association, One Little Star, Park Slope, Patrick Doherty, Pete Hamill, Prospect Heights, Prospect Park Track Club, Red Hook, Red Hook Lobster Pound, ReStore Red Hook, Saint Augustine Roman Catholic Church, Small Works Show, St. John Frizell, Steve McCurry, Terrace Bagels, Underhill Playground

12 DAYS OF BROOKLYN: Reflecting on the Gowanus

December 14, 2012 by Anne Mollegen Smith Leave a Comment

Day Nine • 12 Views of Brooklyn

Painting by Ella Yang. See Who’s Who

TWO KEY WORDS ASSOCIATED WITH THE GOWANUS CREEK CANAL are “toxic” and “sky.” Extra emphasis on the first came with reports of the woman’s body pulled out of the canal on Tuesday and immediately whisked off to Methodist Hospital, no more said about her condition. News accounts recapped the well-deserved EPA Superfund rating of one of the nation’s most extensively contaminated water bodies. True, all true, enough to make you gag . But the – literally – upside of our canal is the amount of open sky over both the waterway and the low-rise, mostly industrial buildings that line it. That is just how the light over the old downtown (in what we call Outer Brooklyn) Gansevoort Meatpacking District used to be, before high-rise development began to – again, literally – cast its shadows over what had become a “hot” area. The eternal urban tradeoff. While the debate over canal clean-up continues, it’s good to take some time before change comes to Gowanus to admire the big sky and its reflections. The landmarked Carroll Street bridge is a possible vantage. Help in seeing what you’re looking at comes from Ella Yang, whose painting is surely one of the most appealing representations of a Gowanus water scene since Henry Gritten‘s in 1851.

Filed Under: 12 Days of Brooklyn, Look, Uncategorized Tagged With: 12 Days of Brooklyn, 12 Views of Brooklyn artists, 440 Gallery, Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal, Ella Yang, EPA rating, EPA Superfund site, Gansevoort, Gowanus Creek, Henry Gritten, Meatpacking District, New York Superfund site

12 DAYS OF BROOKLYN: Families in the Winter Wonderland

December 9, 2012 by Anne Mollegen Smith 1 Comment

Day Four • 12 Views of Brooklyn

Painting by Ella Yang; see Who’s Who

BROOKLYN CHILDREN AND GROWNUPS are blessed to be able to play in beloved Prospect Park. The 585 acres include Brooklyn’s only lake, the lovely Lullwater. In 1861, after Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux had practiced up on Central Park on Manhattan, the great design team moved on to Brooklyn to start work on their masterpiece. There’s plenty of credit to go around, but some say the true father of the park was James S. T. Stanahan, city parks commission from 1860 to 1885, who championed its creation and expansion. (Stanahan also favored the merger into New York City, which some grumblers still say was the very, very worst possible thing to happen to Brooklyn – until the Dodgers left town, that is.) This snow scene, like yesterday’s, dates from the spectacular snowfall of 2009. The artist who captured it, Ella Yang, explains, “We finally had enough snow to transform Prospect Park into a winter playground. I was taking a somewhat slippery walk through the Park when I ran across this family heading home after an afternoon of sledding. The sun was low and threw pinks, ochres and purples across the different snowy surfaces. Great fun to paint!”

Filed Under: 12 Days of Brooklyn, Look Tagged With: 12 Days of Brooklyn, Ella Yang, Frederick Law Olmsted, Prospect Park

Who’s Who in Creating 12 DAYS OF BROOKLYN

December 6, 2012 by Brooklyn Artisan 9 Comments

Brooklyn Artisan’s 12 Days of Brooklyn is our gift of the season when you visit our site.

12 Views of Brooklyn were gathered from artists and photographers who have looked at Brooklyn through creative and loving eyes and curated by Anne Mollegen Smith. 12 Tastes of Brooklyn were sampled and curated by Basia Hellwig. 12 Sips of Brooklyn were sampled and curated by Bruce A. Campbell.

Typographic designs of the date stamps for all 12 days are by Joy Makon Design.

DEC. 6 Date stamp font: Avant Garde, by Herb Lubalin and Tom Carnese, ITC, 1970.

The arch at Grand Army Plaza decorated for the holidays, photograph by Joseph Caserto. A resident of Brooklyn since the late 1980s, Caserto is an award-winning publication designer and earned a BFA with honors from Pratt Institute. See more of his work at etsy.com/shop/josephcaserto

EDITOR’S UPDATE: Joseph Caserto has kindly offered Brooklyn-Artisan visitors a 30% discount on boxed card sets that include this brilliant image of Grand Army Plaza on a winter night. Go to http://www.etsy.com/shop/josephcaserto and use the coupon code COUNTDOWN12.

DEC. 7 Date stamp font: Mrs Eaves, by Zuzana Licko, Emigre, 1996

Brooklyn Botanic Garden, photograph by Jake Miller. Miller is a writer as well as a photographer and was a Brooklyn resident in the 1990s, when he shot a series called Brooklyn Light. His articles and photographs have appeared in many national magazines. He now lives in the Boston area.

DEC. 8 Date stamp font: Bauhaus, by Ed Benguiat and Victor Caruso, ITC, 1975

Menorah in the Snow, photograph by Joy Makon, taken in 2009 in Windsor Terrace. A resident of small-town Brooklyn since 1983, Joy is a magazine art director+designer and an indefatigable lover of all things new and cool. She curates Craft & Design for Brooklyn Artisan and writes and produces the weekly Best of Brooklyn listings.

Dec. 9 Date Stamp font: Cochin, Georges Peignot, Linotype, 1912

Sledding Home, 2009, is an oil-on-canvas painting by Ella Yang, who is a member of the artist-run collective and gallery, 440 Gallery, in Park Slope. The gallery is run collectively by more than a dozen artists with very different styles and outlooks, but a common commitment. It is located in Park Slope on Sixth Avenue between Ninth and Tenth streets.

Dec. 10 Date stamp font: Chalet Tokyo, by René Albert Chalet (a clothing designer), House Industries, 1970

At right, these 4 panels appear to the right of the children’s panel in the 8th Street mural. Just down the street is a Beansprouts childcare center, and around the corner, a church.

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Dec. 11 Date stamp font: Goudy Oldstyle, by Frederick W. Goudy, Linotype, 1915

When you visit the site of the Mill Basin house, you can sign the guestbook and review the extensive press clippings. At right, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, holding the proclamation, with the Teitelbaum family.

Dec. 12 Date stamp font: Gill Sans Ultra Bold, by Eric Gill, Monotype, 1928

September Rain, Seventh Avenue, 2006, etching by Eric March (edition of 25). Eric March’s first solo show was A Brooklyn Year at the Park Slope Gallery in 2006. His second show at the gallery was Moments in Time: Queens to Coney Island, in 2009. He teaches painting and illustration in the New York City area. The Park Slope Gallery shows by appointment.

Editor’s Note: Making and printing etchings are special skills: Etching is generally done to a metal plate by coating the surface, then scratching through the coating with a special stylus; an acid is then used to eat away the scratched lines which later hold the ink for the image to be printed. A particular piece is usually identified by the position in the series and the number that are in the edition – 1/25 meaning the first of 25, and so on. A lower number is not necessarily an indicator of quality, since much effort goes into making all the pulls equally good; rather, it is a way of tracking or inventorying the images to discourage theft, loss and forgery, and signals relative scarcity. The artist’s signature – usually written in pencil – shows that he approved the quality of that particular piece. A gallery or publisher sometimes underwrites a limited edition as a form of investment, and value may even rise as inventory shrinks.

Dec. 13 Date stamp font: Shelley Allegro, by Matthew Carter, Linotype, 1972

Porches in the Snow, 2009, by Joy Makon. See her bio above, for Dec. 8. For most of her publications career, Joy has worked as a designer, but as readers of her Joy’s Best of Brooklyn column for Brooklyn Artisan know, she also writes well. Early sign of crossover skills: She was editor of her high school newspaper, and went from there to art school.

Dec. 14 Date stamp font: Rockwell, by Morris Fuller Benton and Frank Pierpont, Monotype, 1934

Canal Cloud Reflections, 2010, another oil painting by Ella Yang (see Dec.9, above).”This was a very still morning, the water in the Gowanus Canal was high and there were plenty of clouds to make great reflections,” she recalls. “I love the contrast between the dilapidated, jumbled items on the left bank and the apparent organization of the buildings on the right bank. That’s the former Williamsburg Bank building on the right – a nice Brooklyn landmark that’s been turned into luxury condos!” Ella is a member of the art collective, 440 Gallery. (Next time you’re on the 440 Gallery site, browse the work of other gallery artists. You can also find other views of the Gowanus, this time abstracts, by 440’s Karen Gibbons.)

Dec. 15 Date stamp font: American Typewriter, by Joel Kaden and Tony Stan, ITC, 1974

The Brooklyn Roasting Co. maintains a phog – a photographic blog – on its site and invites contributions from outside the company. The result is a delightful mélange of coffee growing photographs, of the company’s staff and friends, of DUMBO and elsewhere in Brooklyn. This couldn’t-be-anywhere-but-DUMBO image emerged from that phog. Notice how the image is a study in verticals, from the construction fence through the tall alley and bridge struts to the towers of Outer Brooklyn across the river.

Dec. 17: Date stamp font: Industria, by Neville Brody, Linotype, 1989

Christmas Trees on Sale: Brooklyn-based design professional Joseph Caserto, whose Grand Army Plaza photo launched our series, also contributed this image of a Christmas tree vendor. Joe tweets – @josephcaserto – about his @udemy courses for students to learn InDesign, Adobe PhotoShop, Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, sometimes at a discount. He also sells his work at etsy.com/shop/josephcaserto, with occasional discounts.

In 1851, the same year Henry Gritten (mentioned in Dec.14: 12 Views of Brooklyn) painted Gowanus Bay, a Catskill Mountains farmer named Mark Carr launched the commercial Christmas tree business in New York City with two ox-drawn sleds loaded with forest-cut trees. He sold them all, and harvesting forest trees became a business, a kind of winter crop. In 1901, a from-scratch Christmas-tree farming operation was established in New Jersey, and seven years later their Norway Spruces went on the market for $1.00 apiece. By 2000, the number of American families using artificial trees was significantly larger than those with natural ones.

Dec. 17 Date stamp font: Mason, by Jonathan Barnbrook, Emigre, 1992

Forget those people trying to sell the Brooklyn Bridge to hayseeds, how does one go about finding a large photograph of it suitable for framing? The selection is mind-boggling. You can check museum shops. You can inquire of Brooklyn photographers whose work you like. You can search by subject on many sites such as etsy.com and fineartamerica.com. There’s instagram and pinterest and the Flickr albums of your friends; ask around. Cross the river and check out the Union Square vendors. You can of course go out yourself, camera or iPhone in hand, by night and by day. You can order prints by size and by medium – would you like a print on canvas? Or in acrylic? Or acrylic on glass? Oh, you’ve settled on having the canvas wrapped around the sides of the mounting? You can get that done at the drug store right on the corner of Flatbush and Seventh Avenue. Step number one in a personal Views of Brooklyn gallery.

The portrait of Emily Warren Roebling in the Brooklyn Museum is by the French painter Charles Émile Auguste Carolus Duran. Emily’s older brother, Civil War General Gouveneur Kemble Warren –and the one who supported her interest in becoming educated though a girl – is remembered by his statue at the gateway to Prospect Park. Although the Warren family came from Cold Spring, NY, not Brooklyn, the brother and sister made their mark on this community.