On any given day, you’re likely to catch Water Lundwall at a coffee shop Downtown, with a ruler, fine black pen and a sketchbook in front of him, dreaming up impossible architecture.
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The meticulous sketches in Walter Lundwall’s “Red Hill,” now at C&O Gallery, are equal parts housing plan and optical illusion.That explains the splashes of coffee on many of the sketches that comprise “Red Hill,” a collection of his “all ink, all the time” drawings now showing at the C&O Gallery.
It’s hard not to sense some aspects of the local streetscape in his work—the low-lying vestiges of largely bygone industry and looming trees, the deep detail of cracking brick—but that makes sense for Lundwall, a longtime Downtown fixture. Standing in the gallery, he pointed back to where C&O once had a concert venue where the Discovery Museum now stands. He played there, and at places like Trax through the ‘90s, when he was principle songwriter for local goth group Fire Sermon. Unike that music, the sketches aren’t dark. They are, however, meticulous and odd.
Maybe it’s Lundwall the local that gallery-goers had in mind at the show’s opening earlier this month. “People kept coming up to me to ask, ‘Is this such and such?’” he says. “And I just said, ‘no.’” You get the sense looking at his work that the third dimension is just a series of finely detailed cutouts set at a distance to give such an illusion. In that sense the sketches recall M.C. Escher, the Dutch artist most famous for drawing staircases and waterfalls that appear to be going up and down, depending on the angle of your head. But Lundwall doesn’t acknowledge those who influenced him, saying instead that most of his artistic education took place by osmosis. “When I’m traveling, I look at buildings and they eventually turn into a collage in my head.”
Lundwall claims that he can’t draw a real building, but as a general contractor he’s regularly called upon to do so. “I pride myself on how fast I can draw up a house plan. It just bores me to death.”
Film this
We’ve got TVs, we’ve got cameras, we’ve got stories. What do we need Hollywood for? That’s what the Richmond-based Virginia Production Alliance has been asking for 20 years. In addition to their Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia chapters, they’re opening one in Charlottesville. At its helm will be Erica Arvold, a casting director and film producer who moved to Charlottesville from Hollywood six years ago. “We would essentially like to be a nucleus for the film, audio, video and new media industry in the state,” Arvold says. The local chapter will also serve the commonwealth’s oft-forgotten Southwest portions, where, let’s not forget, Dirty Dancing was filmed.
The group focuses on education (the local chapter has already organized a workshop in conjunction with Light House that will teach kids to act for film) and networking (there’s a kickoff event scheduled for March 1 at Random Row Books).
A third focus is incentivizing—or, lobbying state bodies to provide incentives to filmmakers, which points to some broader considerations. The organization quotes on its website a VCU study claiming that every dollar spent producing films locally generates $14 for the local economy. You may recall Bob McDonnell’s speech at Luray Caverns over the summer, when he proposed to increase Virginia’s Motion Picture Opportunity Fund (which stands at about $200,000) by $2 million. The commonwealth’s legislature will soon decide whether to offer $5 million in straight grants to the Virginia Production Office.
“What I love about this area is it’s the best of both worlds,” says Arvold, who has worked on films that range from Charlotte’s Web to Natural Born Killers. “It’s an incubator in terms of creativity. There are no rules, in terms of, ‘You’re in A.D. You can’t go outside your box and create something different,” she says.
Feedback Session
We recently had the distinct pleasure of hosting local duo Old Calf (Ned Oldham and Matty Metcalfe) for a few songs at our Downtown headquarters. Click here for an exclusive performance by the band in a rare and excellent trio configuration, with bassist Michael Clem.
