Memoir

The first impression of an exhibition installation is always interesting to me. As I cast an eye about on entering “Memoir,” the current show of art by Nancy Lunsford at 440, the harmony, grace, and consistency of the pictures on the right hand wall (10-14 on the gallery’s list of works) greeted me cordially. A diamond grid runs throughout the set, lending them organizational coherence. These are the most recent products, dating over the last few years. The works displayed on the back wall and the left hand wall have a different effect. These take us to a less homogeneous range of expression. These pieces are from the artist’s archives, older pieces given fourth through different impulses, in different locales, different times yielding different psychological spaces, and the disparate range of media with which an artist may experiment over a large time span. They make of the current show a small retrospective.

Face Time

Nancy Lunsford, 2011

Acrylic and pencil on linen

35" diameter

The theme throughout the exhibition is the memoir, the list of recollections and reflections, their synthesis and analysis, summing up a person’s life experience. To drive the point home, the exhibition includes a “conceptual piece” in the form of the artist’s own person, sitting, for the duration of the show, at a table in the middle of the space, literally writing her memoir. This writer is lucky to have made the acquaintance of the artist’s text and has found it lively, evocative of family dynamics, and rich in incident, emotional color and humor. The same is true of the art work on display.

Among the tender glimpses into the artist’s past is Diptych, 1989. This piece is not so much the artwork, as the documentation of the artist’s true creation: her twin children. In this work we see a quick rendition, cursory and fluid, of the twins. They lie, symmetrically, side by side, viewed from above, on a central rectangle that might be the little mattress they share. This overlaps two peaked arches, like two gothic doors. Within these arched “entrances,” the artist has pasted fragments of various journal entries from the period, covering them completely. These may give us hints about the artist’s experience of motherhood and the balance she sought in the different areas of her life.

Whereas, for most of us, such journal entries may remain obscure as to their meaning, fragmentary as they are, on the evening of the opening, a long time friend and colleague of Ms. Lunsford’s saw his name on two bits of paper included in Preface, Tumbling Blocks series, 2010. He was elated to see the references. He knew what the artist was talking about. The recognition informs our own sense of meaning; it’s good to know that someone outside the artist’s own head received a given message, even a part of one, from the writing.

A Veil So Fine, 1990, depicts a nude female body with red writing seen above it, in bold strokes. This is not depicted writing, words placed somewhere on a surface of the figure’s setting; it is writing on the canvas. The treatment of the body is not probing, yet the slick, abbreviated strokes representing it convey oodles of sensuality, passion, sexiness and vigor. The writing states: “Sister brother mother father husband lover child/You are the woven fabric of them all. A veil so fine I only feel it when I breathe.” The artist, self-deprecatingly, dismissed the bit of writing as “romantic bull----.” However, true literal meaning aside, the expression seems, to me, to come from a place of uninhibited exultation reached at a given moment. Moreover, through the sensual paint and presence of the female body, the exposure of which, we may assume, represents an emotion with which the artist identifies, we sense an intimacy and honesty.

"A Veil So Fine."

Nancy Lunsford, 1990

Acrylic on linen

26 1/2" X 30 1/2"

Ms. Lunsford is an artist who has taken on many challenges throughout her career, including ceramics and sculpture, several examples of which are here in evidence. Yet, within each different mode the artist’s imagination, skill and talent remain in constant evidence. Her work has delighted me previously, and, given the present indications, continues to hold my interest. I invite the reader to take a look, to see what delights he or she may discover. The show runs until June 26, 2011.

As is the practice at 440, delightful works by other gallery members grace the walls in the partitioned area, in the rear of the space. Those also are worth the visit. They remind us that this gallery has much variety and aesthetic richness.

440 6th Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11215-4016
(718) 499-3844

Subway: 7 Av
Get directions - Is this accurate?

Open Thu-Fri 4pm-7pm; Weekends 11am-7pm

The Precursor of the Action Flick

The precursor of the action flick is the work of Gianbattista Tiepolo.  Go to the Tiepolo room at The Met if you don't believe me.

Exhibition: Quimetta Perle at the Brooklyn Public Library

The exhibition space at the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library is a most appropriate venue in which to view Quimetta Perle’s work, since she spans the realms of fine art and book arts.  Her work, along with Andrew Zarou‘s, is curently on display in the main branch’s second floor, in the balcony cases.  Her books are arranged on the floor of those cases, while individual pictures, which stand alone, or could function as book pages, are displayed above, on the case wall.

Quimetta Perle works in a hybrid medium of graphic arts and fine arts materials applied to canvas and paper, or board, along with traditional “feminine” media such as embroidery, beads, and sequins.  Therefore, her work does not eschew the decorative sense that was anathema to many artists I’ve met in the past, but makes a virtue of it.  The current work is the brightest, most developed, and the prettiest two dimensional work of hers that I’ve seen.

“Lost in Thought,” 2006, digital print, with sequins and beads on canvas, for example, is full of the outrageous, screaming brightness of an expanse of yellow sequins.  It’s the most ambitiously scaled work (about two feet high) in the current offering.  In it, a woman’s face, covering the lower right corner of the canvas, looks out, indeed, as if lost in thought.  Her head of hair, defined by blue black hues, recedes spatially in comparison to the lighter, brighter, and more intense patterned green fabric surrounding her.  Whether this spacial tension is intended to allude to her reverie, or to some pervasive condition in which she exists is a matter of conjecture.

Quimetta Perle

The majority of the works, smaller in scale, about 5” X 7”, show women’s faces filling up most of the surface.  They are handled simply, in the manner that Henry Matisse executed his late, calligraphic brush and ink faces.  In each case, the ink color interacts with the color and pattern within each piece as an equal partner.  These are then framed with sculpture wire forming loops or flame lashing patterns, disguised behind a row of sequins of a chosen color.  

The single work I found the most exciting and attractive was one of these smaller pieces.  “Wonderland,” 2008, digital print, sequins on board and wire, appears to have the largest pictorial scale compressed within it’s boundaries, probably due to the effective combination of broad elements and the fine drawing lines that create the wings of butterflies moving about the main figure.  In this case, unusually, the figure does not fill almost the entire surface, but is confined to the middle third of an image configured like a French flag.  The majority of the background is covered with a bright, very fresh green.  The image is simply winning.

The show will run through June 13, 2009.

Travel information: #2 or #3 Train to Grand Army Plaza.

Library Hours: Mon. 9-6; Tues.-Thurs. 9-9; Fri. 9-6.  Sun. closed.

The Artists' Den

Whenever Under Minerva Gallery has a featured show in the front of its space, the work of the artists currently working in Under Minerva’s Artists’ Den is also represented discretely in the recessed section of the space.  These artists are Nicole Concepción, Matt Harvill, Jake Nelson, Vanessa Juriga, Tony Orrico, and Georgie Porgie.  The several works that got my attention in the current offering are the following.

Untitled, 2009, by Vanessa Juriga, a canvas you might think of at first as a simple black on white composition.  What gives this picture its magnetic pull is the tonal wallop the diagonally placed black delivers to the passive white field.  Where black and white meet a great schism occurs, so far are the two tones from each other.  Oriented from upper left to lower right, the black rectangle, with drawn hints of its being a solid, though not representationally so, disrespects the field by brusquely straying outside it’s borders.  The line, of a different shade of black, at the left flank of the black shape, in a surprising move, traces a new trajectory, divergent from the object’s contour, taking your eye, at a vertiginous pace, further inside it. 

Untitled, 2009, by Jake Nelson, is interesting as evidence of a performance.  Executed from life, before an audience, it depicts a man playing a guitar in bold, black, very broad brush marks, over even broader washes of orange and white.  In this piece, it’s not the “correctness” of drawing that matters, but the gall inherent in these devil-may -care strokes.  This artist has something of the conceptual about him, a fact supported by his previous experience, described in his bio, as a “conceptual artist,” working in films and music videos in L. A., though that is a different type of conceptual -- and a more applied concept.

“Just Paper,” an oil painting, shows the more joking side of Mr. Nelson.  Looking up from the surface of the floor at a man exercising the most private act of toilet sitting, you, dear viewer, might be a cockroach.  From your vantage point, you see the objects commonly found on a bathroom floor: the toilet plunger, the cleaning brush, in its stand, the unclad sitter’s thigh, discreetly masked by the edge of the toilet seat, and a roll of toilet paper.  In this case, one the segments of which are dollar bills.  Whether the artist owned such a joke roll of toilet paper or invented it, the scornful take on the value of money is plain.  Incidentally, the shadow cast by the sink on the bathroom wall shows some sensitive observation of reflected light.

“Damn You,” 2009, oil on wood, by Matt Harvill, consists of four square panels shown as a single piece, with space in the form of a cross between them (for which the artist has no symbolic intent, the title's reference to damnation not withstanding.)  The four consist of red and black paint dripped beautifully on a white ground.  Where red and black wet paint combined, a rich red-brown occurs. 

Untitled, 2009, also by Matt Harvill, an oil in the 2 1/2’ range, very handsomely arrays stains of tan and blue, with may points of white occurring either from spatters of white, or pin-holing.  Over this, thick black enamel stands in some relief, like so much tar.  Jackson Pollock, in his grave, is probably enjoying this one.

This latter picture put me in mind of what happens when a very improvisatory saxophone player leaves evidence of his impromptu exercise in the form of a recording.  Some listeners might be inclined to identify every nuance heard in the recording as “the way the piece really goes,” not realizing that in the next take of the same piece the performer may infuse it with an entirely new set of nuances.  This analogy came to mind because of the difficulty a painter will have in controlling both the stains and the black drips that make up this little honey of a painting with absolute precision.  I’m left with a product that seems quite right despite the elusiveness, or the improvisational, or accidental qualities, of this medium.

“Two Fish,” 2008, an Acrylic painting by Tony Orrico, is executed in this artist’s habitual mode: layer upon layer upon layer of color fields succeed one another, partially revealing the leavings of previous layers.  Mr. Orrico then isolates the resulting shapes with a liner, which he terms his “favorite brush.”  The large amount of black throughout the picture remains harmonious.  The image this abstraction makes, as my own associations would have it, is of some forsaken patch of ground before an abandoned building with many banks of broken windows.  On that ground, the bits of glass intermingle with all manner of debris.  The artist told me that he liked that interpretation.  I didn’t look for the “two fish.”  Why so much devastation should be so gorgeous is a mystery.

“Afghan,” and “Quilt,” by Mr. Orrico, are similar to “Two Fish,” but with purer colors reminiscent of the pure, light filled colors visible on a projected animation film.  In both cases, it was after the fact of execution that the artist saw the texture and colors relating to his grandmother’s, and his mother’s craft creations, respectively.

The current show at Under Minerva continues through May 24. 

Under Minerva Gallery and Event Space

656 5th Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11215 (between 19th/20th St.)  

info@UnderMinerva.com

Gallery Hours: Tuesdays-Fridays 12-6 P. M..  Saturdays 2-6 P. M..

"Druid Dreams of the Danaka," Alice Zinnes at Ch'i Contemporary Fine Arts

Alice Zinnes, showing oil paintings, watercolors and drawings at Ch’i Contemporary Finer Art, in Williamsburg, presents work that is formal, brimming with clean, coordinated color, and neat, despite its vigorous execution.  She’s a landscape painter at her core, but one that draws inspiration from the Ramayana Indian Epic, and from Celtic mythologies, as she states in her artist’s statement.  She does not spell out the personal aspect of her involvement with these traditional sources, but, at the very least, she’s taken with some beguiling characteristics they possess.  These spur her on to produce her abstractified landscapes.  This reflects in her color choices, and, therefore, the mood conveyed.

"Ancestral Fire"

Alice Zinnes

Oil on canvas

38" X 46"

In “Ancestral Fire,” a large mass of dark color in the foreground suggests a mound of earth, upon which stands a mass of pale color, which suggests, vaguely, a spot lit protagonist.  This tableau, the centrally located character surrounded by evocative masses of “foliage” beyond, elucidates a charged moment related to some transition or action.  There is a largeness in the scale; a firmness to the ground plane, despite the gaseousness of the paint application.  The spot lighting of the figure is also a crescendo of attention, maybe denoting a resolution of some mythic sequence of events.

"Beyond Night to Day."

Alice Zinnes

Oil on canvas

48" X 38"

In “Beyond Night to Day,” a mass of darkness, curving up from the somber, but succulent, olive greens of the floor, and wrapping over the top of the image, blankets this vision in a kind of protective embrace.  My subjective vision of the image has it that the figure, again appearing as a somewhat undefined highlight, stands before placid lake waters, with a bluish accent hinting at the landscape on a distant shore.  Again the figure stands in a large place, poised on a moment of transition.  The colors here, as they do generally in this show, elicit some mood I couldn’t name.  

In some of the pictures, oils as well as watercolors, Ms. Zinnes provides no grounding plane.  A case in point is the oil “Light in the Dark,” which appears almost as a look straight up to the sky.  In this unsettling vision there seems to be no gravity.  Here I miss the focus, however suggestive, that the artist usually provides, and the sense of mood and purpose that goes with it.

The three large charcoal drawings in the show are quite handsomely handled.  Each is on a tinted paper that recalls, for me, the SoHo artificiality of the tinting changes in passages of the 1984 release of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.”  At the same time, the artist achieves in them a Rembrandtesque tonal range.  They evoke, quite believably, hillsides full of bushes and brambles.

Ms. Zinnes’ watercolors tend to be quite delicate, and light filled.  Some delve into the lack of gravity mentioned above, but most suggest the sense of landscape and characters I found in the oils to which I responded most positively.

One further note: concurrently with Alice Zinnes’ pictures, Ch’i Contfemporary Fine Art is showing the work of Sy Gresser, a maker of accomplished, massive figures in varying degrees of abstraction.  These have an interesting compatibility with the painter’s oils, and, once or twice, I wondered if they might inhabit their mythic settings.  They are hewed, with great self assurance, out of large girthed trunks of colorful woods.  Sometimes the wood has spots of a reddish brown along side a bright yellowish color, which enhances their sense of fantasy.  Those who come to the gallery during this exhibition will receive a double treat.

Druid Dreams of The Danaka -- Alice Zinnes

Sy Gresser, Sculpture

April 9-May 3, 2009

Ch’i Contemporary Fine Art

293 Grand Street,

Brooklyn, N. Y. 11211

218-8939

Fax: (718) 218-9347

Travel information: L Train to Lorimer Street; G Train to Metropolitan Avenue.

"Hex," The Art of Nancy Lunsford at 440 Gallery

Red Hex (Detail)

Nancy Lunsford

Acrylics on canvas, 2008

36" diameter

At her 440 Gallery opening, on april 2, Nancy Lunsford served, in addition to the wonderful cheeses, wine, and other goodies, hexagonal crackers.  That points to her humor, as well as her obssession, since every painting in her show has the hexagon as its organizing principle.  The bright streak of a vermillion red in her hair, so in synch with the palette of "Red Hex," the painting before which she sat, as we discussed her work, might be evidence of the same thing, if this coordination wasn’t simply coincidence. 

The singular character of each effort stands out, in this show.  Ms. Lunsford is not one to take successive pieces to the same destination where she has arrived before.  Queen, 2008, for example, the largest painting in the show (5’ X 7’), a color field picture predominating in yellows of cadmium and lemon, and blending into pinks of differing strengths, spiced throughout with modicums of green, is vastly different from the more tonally harmonious, Bone (Contained Crazy), 2008, and Study (Contained Crazy) 2009.  The latter two show colors with clean identities, in which a pink is clearly pink, but retain a “silvery” quality.

Other differences include the translucency of the field in Queen, in which color without borders blankets a clearly visible, pencil drawn, geometric pattern, in contrast with the opacity of color in most of the elements of “Bone” and “Study.”   Also, whereas the former is stretched on a standard rectangle, the latter two are on 23” equilateral triangle stretchers.  

Bone and Study hang together on the gallery wall, in very close proximity.  The artist sees them as independent pieces, which, by their compatibility, can be seen as complements of one another.   Interestingly, they can also, if the inspiration takes Ms. Lunsford, have four other 23” equilateral triangle paintings added to their number to complete one large hexagon.  Such is her process.

The red painting, mentioned above, gave me great joy.  Its uniformly “wet and juicy” paint application may make you salivate.  The wet “thuds” of the brush elucidate the hexagonal pattern without undue reverence.  The color palette, as mentioned, is of passionate alizarin and vermillion.  The hexagonal motif is very comfortable within this tondo (round) surface, a format I would like to see more often in painting.  Furthermore, the wetness of the paint is such that the artist deliberately held the tondo in two different orientations, thereby creating a pronounced curtain of drips from the corners of her hexagons first this way, and then that.  The resulting complicating element has a precise character that’s paradoxical given the chanciness of a drip. 

Nancy Lunsford studies seriously.  She draws regularly, engaging in figure drawing with a drawing group at her studio, and drawing plenty of geometric patterns on her canvases and on paper, in graphite.  She refers to her draughtsmanship in words akin to “simple drawing,” showing, perhaps, a healthy respect for study, and a wariness of a concern with “the big performance” to the extent of foolhardiness.  

“Hex,” The art of Nancy Lunsford

April 2 - May 10, 2009

Opening Reception: Thursday, April 2, 6 - 9 pm

440 Gallery

440 6th Avenue

Park Slope, Brooklyn, NY 11215

(718) 499-3844

Gallery Hours: 

Thursdays and Fridays from 4 - 7 p. m. 

Saturdays and Sundays from 12 - 6 p. m.

Travel information:

The 440 Gallery is convenient to the F Train's 4th Avenue and 7th Avenue Stops, and to the R Train's 9th Steet Stop in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

Lisa Murgo at the Red Horse Cafe

Cool Evolution

Lisa Murgo

I don’t often take refreshments at cafes, but I’ve followed the shows in Park Slope’s Red Horse Cafe quietly for some time.  Their curatorial bent, often of quirky sensibility, their irreverence and “not too seriousness,” their often spooky obscureness, like that of Tim Burton’s movies, has kept me returning to look.  Lisa Murgo is what I found this time, in late March, a painter of perhaps a more “serious,” abstract expressionist bent than anything I’ve chanced to see there.

Lisa Murgo is an artist who knows what she’s going for.  Or, maybe I should say the several things she’s going for, since she alternates between different manners.  But, with each distinct manner, she sets a course and follows it unwaveringly.  In fact, the art work, hung by the artist, I expect, created passages of amazing consistency.  The eye glides over a conglomeration of pictures.  When the eye reaches an imaginary border, the manner changes.  Then you travel new look country, till you reach another imaginary border.  And then the next ensemble begins, and so on.  I see this artist working single-mindedly each time, gesturing reflexively in some creative nexus.

Quite pure in their black and whiteness, and impeccably paced, with forceful gestures and judicious rests, Ms. Murgo’s large drawings win my attention handily.  The absence of other color conveys an unequivocal self assurance.  To me they say, “There’s nothing to think about, here; I know who I am, and this life I give you comes from who I am.”

Then the lady turns, on a dime, and takes you the barrio; loud, totally boisterous, and unccordinated, but, consistently inconsistent color drowns out your quietude.  I was amazed, when getting a close look at a watercolor in the 10” range, that the assortment of colors I had accused, at first, of calling out, “Me!  Me!  Me!,” without regard to their neighbors, brothers and sisters, were all so evenly matched that they harmonized grandly.

This artist, with her many impulses, will do things differently, sometimes.  I will not like every mood equally.  The pictures that least pleased me tended to be large, and covered with a bramble of circular scrawls that made clutter and unclarity.  And with loud , isolated colors that needed another voice to harmonize, but didn’t find one.  I could no longer find Ms. Murgo’s energy there.  Although, through the abundant energy she delivers elsewhere, the artist will keep our interest for many more seasons.

Review: Ellen Kahn Recently at 440 Gallery

Discussing how artists might survive today’s beleaguered economy in the Art Bistro Issue #103, March 24, 2009, artist and SVA art teacher Amy Wilson told us that, in her experience, “You don’t need a studio in Manhattan or a Gallery in Chelsea.”  They believe that at the 440 Gallery, in Brooklyn’s Park Slope, where artist Ellen Kahn took down a lovely show of paintings last week.  I snuck a peek at it at the end.  I liked it, and, next time, I’ll make sure I see it on time to tell you about it while it’s still up.

Ellen Kahn does different things, but this show was all about Alice.  Yes, that Alice; in Wonderland.  Well, was it?  These paintings I looked at the way I look at DeKooning, or Manet, with a special appreciation for the movement and the feel of paint on the surface. In fact, each image, though it had a segment of text from the story by Lewis Carroll, was a purely visual statement, and I, for one, never once felt compelled to read it.  Each text overlay a traced line interpretation of one, or more of the John Tenniel Alice illustrations, with an occasional floral motif, and the articulations of the background paint. 

This look of the double and triple “exposure” must derive from the technique the artist probably used to make the images: the traced projection.  That, at least, is the way they appeared to me.  As such, the line work here is not an example of strong draughtsmanship of the type that throws a line down with force, and makes you see a form turning in space.  But Ms. Kahn retains her integrity.  These lines have another function: they refract the surface with a delicate, spiderweb-like tracery.  They are like the only sometimes barely discerned edges of fine crystal goblets.  They move the eye in a spreading motion rather than directing traffic.  

I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that Alice in Wonderland has a very special place in this artist’s heart.  The show reminded me that Alice has a very special place in my heart.  This, despite my not reading the text in the pictures.  Nor would it be surprising to discover that Alice has a special place in the hearts of many of the visitors to the 440 Gallery.  Yes, and they’ll all want to come back to the next Ellen Kahn show to see what Alice gets up to next.

440 Gallery

440 6th Avenue

Park Slope, Brooklyn, NY 11215

(718) 499-3844

Gallery Hours: 

Thursdays and Fridays from 4 - 7 p. m. 

Saturdays and Sundays from 12 - 6 p. m.

Travel information:

The 440 Gallery is convenient to the F Train's 4th Avenue and 7th Avenue Stops, and to the R Train's 9th Steet Stop in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

Review: "Better Than Ever: Women Figurative Artists of the '70's SoHo Co-ops."

The artists Dotty Attie, Nancy Beal, Temma Bell, Marcia Clark, Daria Dorosh, Sharyn Finnegan, Janet Fish, Susan Grabel, Nancy Grilikhes, Barbara Grossman, Marjorie Kramer, Marion Lerner Levine,

 Tomar Levine, 

Cynthia Mailman, Juanita McNeely, Frances Siegel, Sylvia Sleigh, Shaw Stuart, and Selina Trieff make up the show “Better Than Ever: Women Figurative Artists of the 70's SoHo Co-op’s.”  The show was curated by Sharyn Finnegan.  Just concluding it’s run at The Long Island University’s Salena Gallery, it will go on, subsequently, to The Dishman Art Museum, Lamar University, Beaumont, Texas, from April 3-22, and The Rowan University Art Gallery, Glassboro, New Jersey, from September 1-October 2, 2009.

This is a show that had deep personal meaning for me, since many of the artists it includes were known to me when I first met artists.  I didn’t know every one of them closely, but this was my scene.  I’m talking about painters who painted, without delving into video, new age materials, or conceptual art.  They were painterly realists; they made representational paintings, expressive, usually without donning the mantel of expressionism.  At its best, the work was traditional and natural.

The present survey praises the women for having done much to create a scene in which they stood an even chance of showing, and promoting their own careers.  Though these downtown figurative galleries also included men, the point is that the equal representation they attained through these cooperative endeavors was a way to address the inequality of the male dominated art world of the 70’s. Time, and time again, in the show’s catalogue, the women recognized, appreciatively, the nurturing supportiveness they received from their peers and their public.  They are here honored during Women’s History Month.  

Curatorially, each artist is represented by one early piece, from the 70’s, when the galleries started, and one more recent piece.  This creates some sense of the artists’ maturation in both style and age.  I would like to discuss every piece in this show, but, unfortunately, must limit myself.  Every artist in this show deserves our attention. 

Nancy Beal’s “Late View, 2007, a mid size oil, gives us a feast of delicious, subtly colorful brushwork.  At first glance reminiscent of Jane Freilicher’s work, this piece nevertheless asserts its own personality on closer inspection.  Within this view of a garden with trees in the middle distance, and a range of low-lying hills beyond, there’s hardly a spot where the succulent leavings of Ms. Beal’s loaded brush don’t thrill the senses.  Only one among the many breathtaking offerings on this surface is a vertically oriented rectangle in the lower right, about a foot in height, if memory serves.  It’s a deceptively blank, flat area; seemingly “thrown away.”  Its color, of a green denoting an expanse of the lawn, shows little variation till the eye moves to the lower edge of the canvas.  There, a very slight coarsening of the brushwork, accompanied by a restrained color change, produce the correct, believable resolution change to establish the space.

Janet Fish, easily one of the more masterful artists painting today in any genre, shows an impressively handled, large world in her tabletop still lifes.  Looking from her earlier to her later pictures here is particularly interesting.  They seem to be just the same sort of picture, yet, closer inspection yields a definite dissimilarity between the two.  The earlier picture contains a consistently applied dark accent, which works, correctly and forcefully, to define all things depicted.  But in the later picture, Ice Cream Sundae, 2004, that hard-nosed, defining accent has disappeared, yielding a consistently more harmonious rendering.  Breathtaking is the complete control the painter shows as she evokes every volume, casts every shadow, dissolves every firm surface into translucency, and claims the dominion of every passage over a given pocket of space.

I once heard Marjorie Kramer, one of the artists I did know personally in the 70’s, say that she was very struck by the realization that the rapturous gestures she saw people enact when seeing a baby were also represented in the renaissance nativities she knew.  About this, she said, “I used to think those pictures were about religion.”  Well, Marjorie contemplated the thought at least long enough to express her feeling about her own birthing and child nurturing through the creation of her own altar piece, with a peak on the top.  This is her 70’s picture, in which she breast feeds her daughter, Raloon, in the interior of her home.  The very free and expressive blonde baby girl’s hair, and her engorged, nursing mother’s breasts, translucently showing a network of blue veins under the skin, are very real details.  Her 2008 self portrait shows her holding a photo of Hillary Clinton, and it's titled simply, “Thanks for Running, Hillary.”  It is a much simpler picture than her altarpiece, reducing the background plane behind her torso to a very simply handled wall where a picture hangs.  In it, she uses a “weightless,” light palette.  Her face features the intense, blue eyed gaze I remember.  The cadenza in this painting is her sensuously handled silver grey hair, very liberally brushed, for which she shows a strong feeling.

Marion Lerner Levine’s 70’s still life has the technical weakness I remember from the past.  Her use of the color red seemed always the same: overly saturated, and lacking the flexibility necessary to convey turning forms and refraction of light.  But, thankfully, the “then and now” format of the show comes to the rescue, for “Constellations,” 1998-2001, a quite deftly handled watercolor, shows the great intelligence this artist gained later.  Through her use of the reds, in particular, her progress may be gauged.  She applies her vision quite evenly throughout the entire composition to render a collection of delicate, personal objects, demonstrative of her fine sensibility.  The entire image is radiant with fine textures and rich color.

As I said earlier, this show encompasses the work of many worthy artists, and I would write about every one if it were possible.  I only hope that many will see the incarnations of the show set to appear at the Dishman Art Museum and the Rowan University Art Gallery in April and September, respectively.  Those that do will find much sincere expression and invention in these works.

Exhibition: "Passing By," at Under Minerva Gallery and Event Space.

The Under Minerva Gallery’s current exhibition, "Passing By," running from March 6-April 11, presents us with the work of two artists, Eric Graham and Chris Hagerty.  The show is curated by Vanessa Juriga, and is accompanied, in the rear of the gallery, by the work of the 10 artists currently working in Under Minerva’s Artists’ Den, as is the gallery’s practice.  The latter I will review in a separate posting.

The "Passing By" show’s theme is given as “The abandonment of rural America for an urban existence.  Through an investigation of landscapes, isolation and the transformation of culture, both artists... [respond] to this drastic shift in society....”  Where these ideas are not perfectly explicit, they run throughout the exhibition in implied form.

The hanging of the show, which intersperses the two artists’ work, facilitates contrasts and comparisons between the two.  Both artists work with the “and”-ness of disparate juxtaposition.  Chris Hagerty shows us the more obvious juxtapositions in his consistently jarring combinations of malls painted in synthetic, flat, hard edged shapes, and sooty, grungy, immolations of automobiles, always depicted in a powdery touch.  Eric Graham, on the other hand, emphasizes the isolation of his objects by laying in flat grounds all about them.  These flat fields suggest, to me, not emptiness, but the contrast of flat paint with the house, or the window, or, whatever the chosen item.  It may be seen to negate the represented object, or, perhaps, to contrast it’s naturalness with the synthetic artificiality of art.  Whether this flatness represents some concept is open to conjecture.

In one of Mr. Graham’s pictures, “Reclamation,” 2008, what appears to be an adobe house in an arid landscape stands in eternal isolation with its partially caved in rafters of the front porch, broken windows, and a facade badly needing repointing, with red bricks showing through cracks.  I found the depiction of this subject rather handsome.  The isolating agent, in this case, is a coat of a sort of beige-brown.  Here I noticed some rather casual brush marks toward the upper center of the painting.  I hadn’t seen such visible casualness in any of the artist’s other backgrounds, and I tend to think of it as a stylistic “hiccup,” or a weak moment in the execution.  Opinions vary, of course, and the next viewer may be glad for reassuring evidence of the human hand.

Mr. Hagerty consistently sets up his views of urban dilapidation through openings in the mall architecture.  In Atlantic Mall and Wreck, 2008, the space underneath a broad, shallow arch and corridor reveals a mutilated car.  The contrasting handlings of the two sections, the pure pigment and clean edges of the one, vs. the grunge and grime of the other, bring together two locations onto the same plane.  Two coexisting but mutually exclusive states of mind appear before us.

In other pieces, again, Chris Hagerty shows us a war scene brought home to us.  The flat colors of the mall are apt to “burn” brighter than the nominal fire in the urban blight encroaching on the scene, with their unbridled optical vibrations.  This is the case especially in “Atlantic Center Mall and Wreck,” 2009, where the Christmasy, red and green alternating bands describing the escalator steps vibrate so eye-poppingly.

I return to Mr. Graham’s work to describe the piece I found the best by this artist in this exhibition.  “The Last Picture Show,” 2006, is set in a drive-in movie theater with an air of neglect.  The principal character on this scene seems to be a smokestack leaning in toward the left with a great deal of personality.  Here the artist seems to be at his finest in terms of object description.  He shows us the stack’s rusty-looking hat-like shape on top, with a very well observed surface.  The flaking of the paint reveals either silver metal patches underneath brown, rusty looking paint, or a lot of brown, rusty metal under some remnants of silver paint.  I couldn’t tell which it was.  But the depiction, somehow, had the sensation of the real.     

Under Minerva Gallery and Event Space

656 5th Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11215 (between 19th/20th St.)  

info@UnderMinerva.com

Gallery Hours: Tuesdays-Fridays 12-6 P. M..  Saturdays 2-6 P. M..