Among the Artists – Autumn 2010 Issue
Frank Beaman
A Hoosier by birth, Frank Beaman grew up in Los Angeles and settled in central Illinois, where he parlayed an English degree into a long career in broadcast journalism. He covered Chicago City Hall and the urban chaos of the sixties for WBBM Newsradio before becoming the morning news anchor for WGN radio. While conducting scores of interviews with authors and newsmakers, he taught journalism at Northwestern University. In early retirement, Frank travelled widely, and when one of his trips brought him to Mineral Point, he knew he wanted to live there. A year later, he moved into a Cornish rock cottage, volunteered for a variety of community activities, and in 2007 launched the Times of Mineral Point, a vintage tabloid newspaper that tried to capture the history, aesthetics, and agro-artistic culture of Wisconsin’s Driftless Region.
Penny Jo Buckner
Penny Jo Buckner was born and raised in Edmonton, Alberta. She fi rst took commercial arts courses while in vocational high school. In 1990 she moved to Costa Mesa, California, where she lived for six years. It was there that Penny Jo fi rst exhibited her work. Returning to Edmonton, she continued to paint and draw, creating gig posters and designing album covers for friends. She has since participated in numerous group and solo art shows in Edmonton and Vancouver.
Dave Etter
Dave Etter was born in California in 1928. He graduated from the University of Iowa in 1953. He worked for several book publishing fi rms in the Chicago area, including Encyclopedia Britannica, as a writer and editor. Etter is the author of 31 books of poetry and has published poems in numerous American and foreign magazines, anthologies, and textbooks. He lives in Lanark, Illinois, with his wife, Peggy, and their cat, Georgie.
James Hubbell
James Hubbell is a world-renowned, award-winning artist and architectural designer who, for the past sixty years, has shared an inspiring vision of the spirit of nature through his art and architecture. Using nature’s materials, forms, and colors, Hubbell combines his reverence for the environment with art and beauty. This can be seen in many of his works worldwide but is most evident at Ilan-Lael, his property in Santa Ysabel, California. For more information, please visit his Web site at www.hubbellandhubbell.com.
Keith Huie
I paint my life—mostly my childhood. I paint what I remember, good and bad. I don’t try to analyze it or whitewash it or exaggerate it in any way while I’m working. I just paint. In my mind, it is a way for me to understand and appreciate the influences and circumstances that shaped the adult who I am now. It’s a chance for me to forgive and accept and celebrate the events and the people from my past, especially my mom and dad. As I evolve as an artist, the emotions and stress and knowledge that I accumulated as a child have begun to creep in and mix with the images in the form of hatch marks and numbers and words. They add clutter and confusion to the simple reality that the childhood images represent. Sometimes they distort the imagery altogether. But that is fine with me. It’s what I remember. It’s who I am.
Dana Jerman
Originally from western Pennsylvania, Dana Jerman has published poems on three continents and self-published an introductory poetry collection, “Briefly, The Heart,” available through Blurb.com. She is working on fi nding a press in Chicago, her current place of residence, for her next collections of poetry and short fiction/flash fi ction. Her 2010 summer reading list has included LeRoi Jones, Samuel Beckett, Ann Quin, and plenty of graphic novels.
Bruce Rowe
For more than 30 years Bruce Rowe taught Creative Writing at Sun Prairie High School, northeast of Madison, Wisconsin. Though Platteville was his childhood home, he and his wife now live in Mineral Point, where they operate an antique shop and raise American Milking Devon cattle on a small farm in Lafayette County. A graduate of UWOshkosh, Bruce has a master’s degree in Creative Writing from the UW-Milwaukee and has been published in August Derleth’s New Poetry Out of Wisconsin, Brewing, an anthology of Milwaukee poets, and This Book Has No Title, as well as The English Journal, The Wisconsin Review, Tarheel magazine, and other publications.
Caleb Stone
Caleb Arthur Stone is a part-time actor and playwright whose first full-length play, I See Her Everywhere, was produced at Alley Stage in August 2008. He is also the author of several one-act plays, an upcoming short story collection, and the new play The Arsonists (to be produced at Alley Stage in the summer of 2011). He was last seen on stage in Faux Poe II in Mineral Point and Enchanted April in Spring Green. Originally from Poynette, WI, he now lives in Dodgeville.
Jesse Sykes
Jesse Sykes graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1989 with a BFA in photography. For the last 20 years Jesse has lived in Seattle, where she has been making records (three to date) and touring with her band, The Sweet Hereafter. “I’m always grateful when people ask to see my old photographic work, as it is where my obsession for trying to wrangle and understand my emotional relationship with the world began—as both participant and observer.” Jesse is presently finishing up work on what will be her fourth full-length album.
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