Monday, June 1, 2009

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.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009


Pin the Tail on the Dog
Acrylics on foam core and board


This is a toy I made for my daughter.  Her birthday is on Saturday. She asked me to make her a pin the tail on the dog toy so she could play with her friends at the party.  I made her one with a tail you can attach and detach with velcro.


Tuesday, May 12, 2009

The Aljira Fine Art Auction, 2009





May 14, 2009

The Aljira Fine Art Auction 2009


Art is an enduring investment and the Aljira Fine Art Auction is always a great party. 


Featuring extraordinary art by emerging and established artists, The Aljira Fine Art Auction 2009 is the art event of the season. Proceeds from the Auction enable Aljira to support emerging artists and to provide transformative experiences for teens.


For complete information click here.

 

 

Friday, May 8, 2009

ARTIST’S STUDIO TOUR



Ann Lowe is a painter and graphic designer who went to art school in London, England and lived for many years in New York City.  She has exhibited at Conlon-Siegel Gallery in Santa Fe and won a New Forms Regional Initiative Grant for her road signs she installed on HWY 61 in the Mimbres Valley near Silver City.  Her work is eclectic and she will stop at nothing to carry through her artistic visions, including an exhibit she convinced the Wal-mart manager to show in the crafts department called “I Found My Dreams in Wal-art.”  She is currently exploring her doodles and transforming them into classically executed oil paintings.  The resulting images are enigmatic and humorous.



Ann will show new abstract oil paintings in a series called “Marginalia.”  The images are based on her doodles and inspired by the odd drawings found in the margins of Medieval manuscripts.










A GREAT GIFT IDEA

Ann’s imagination Story Cards are a great tool to help unlock your creativity.  Make up fantastic stories with your family or friends.  Only $15.95. www.imaginationstorycards.com



Ann Lowe

1316 West St.

Silver City, New Mexico

534-0005.


Member of the 

Silver City Gallery Association

Monday, May 4, 2009

Exhibition: Jackie Lipton at Corinne Robbins



Corinne Robbins, whose space has functioned, for some 5 years, as a furniture showroom, has opened her first fine art exhibition with the ambitious and energetic paintings of Jackie Lipton.  Ms. Lipton works in oil paint, cold wax and alkyd media.  Her press release speaks about her commitment to process, which is evident in her canvases.  It also speaks of her as an abstract cityscape painter.  This may be less evident, but an abstract painter residing in New York City, as she does, may be an abstract cityscape painter, not literally, but psychologically.


There’s nothing wrong with a little straight ahead abstract expressionism and Jackie Lipton gives it to you.  The notion that pictures made in certain genres already noted in the art history books are passé carry no weight here.  The painter Nell Blaine, for example, made great, very energetic fauvist paintings this side of World War II.  She’s due much recognition from those who like their paintings to demonstrate such energy.  Ms. Lipton’s paintings, too, are generally intense, and give pleasure to those who rock to that aesthetic.


“Because the Night,” 2005, makes the most of its under layers.  Its bumps and ridges achieve a uniform, atmospheric crudeness.  If you could work yourself up you could call it ugly.  If the surface were a sound it would possess the chronic raspyness heard in Bob Dylan’s late recordings.  It evokes a dusty, pocked and neglected plaster wall (abstract cityscape, anyone?)  Its narrow palette, the consistency of its scratchy brushwork, and the singularity of its appearance among Jackie Lipton’s work, make for a savory picture viewing experience.


That painting, measuring 52” X 64”, along with others in that size range, among them “Whirl Away,” and “Ghost Dance,” show Ms. Lipton is comfortable working on a large scale.  In them, she effects a bold gesture that carries at a distance.  Forcefully executed statements on this scale say, “monumental.”  When I stand before these I experience the artist’s bravery in the exploration of pictorial issues.


Given works disappoint me, though such works are in the minority.  “Christopher,” 2007, one of the large ones, is one such picture.  For me, the relentless and over saturated yellow that runs throughout this surface gives the other colors, all of which look wan, by comparison, “no chance to talk.”  Color is always a matter of relationship, regardless of the content.  For that yellow’s expressiveness to bloom it might have to congregate with other, equally strident colors, on some other canvas.  But, again, as I looked around the show, I found much to enjoy.


Some of Jackie Lipton’s notable smaller statements include “Breath to Breath Series #6, 2007, with the colors and texture of watermelon pulp, which may cause you to salivate in anticipation of a tasty summer treat.  Also, “Up There Down There #11, 2006, with it’s subtle and alluring tonality.  Looking at this one you may forget, momentarily, that Ms. Lipton is adept at play with more flamboyant colors.


Corinne Robbins is off to an exciting beginning with her fine art exhibitions.  We should also expect many more ambitious and satisfying statements from Jackie Lipton.  The current show continues to May 17, 2009.


Corinne Robbins Gallery

147 Atlantic Avenue (Between Clinton and Henry)

(718) 855-1672

E-mail Corinne Robbins at: corinnerobbinsartdesign@verizon.net.

Transportation: #2, #3, or #4, #5 Trains to Borough Hall, or R Train to Court Street.

Friday, May 1, 2009

Announcing: SOULEYMANE KEITA - RECENT PAINTINGS: Ndokalé Gorée / Homage to Gorée

SOULEYMANE KEITA - RECENT PAINTINGS: Ndokalé Gorée / Homage to Gorée

May 7th – June 13th, 2009
Host:
SKOTO GALLERY
Type:
Network:
Global
Start Time:
Thursday, May 7, 2009 at 6:00am
End Time:
Saturday, June 13, 2009 at 6:00am
Location:
SKOTO GALLERY, Chelsea
Street:
529 West 20th - Fifth floor
City/Town:
New York, NY
Phone:
2123528058
Email:
Homage to Al Loving I, 2007, Mixed media, 98.5”x79”(250X200 cm).


Skoto Gallery is pleased to present Ndokalé Gorée / Homage to Gorée, an exhibition of recent mixed media work by the Senegalese-born artist Souleymane Keita. This will be his first New York show since his last appearance in the 1990 landmark exhibition Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The reception is Thursday, May 7th, 6-8pm and the artist will be present.

Souleymane Keita’s recent work is characterized by a carefully structured and organized rhythm of dynamic lines and organic forms, a mastery of the nuances of color and composition, a deep sensitivity to texture combined with a display of emotional intensity. Widely regarded as one of Africa’s most accomplished artist of his generation, he has consistently explored the expressive possibilities of abstraction in his encounters with history and global transformation over the past three decades, and in the process developed a completely personal and original style whose true significance lies not merely in formal arrangement but in the spiritual meaning underlying the symbols, signs and metaphors in his work, while simultaneously broadening his vision and making his belief in the human experience visible.

This exhibition continues Souleymane Keita’s long-standing attempt to synthesize his search for creative excellence with a versatile, aesthetically potent ways of knowing and affecting the world around him. He has always worked in series: this selection builds on recent exhibitions in Dakar (Senegal) and Abidjan (Cote d’Ivoire), and he pays homage to the Island of Gorée, his birth place, situated off the coast of Dakar. They possess tactile qualities that are imbued with both personal and collective meanings. Also included is Homage to Al Loving, 2007, a hung and un-stretched canvas sewn into geometrical shapes and saturated with color that makes a compelling venture in a trans-Atlantic dialogue and a fitting paean to the late African-American abstract expressionist artist Al Loving whose work also thrived on experimentation and improvisation.

Souleymane Keita was born 1947 in Gorée Island, Senegal and studied Fine Art at the Ecole des Arts du Senegal in Dakar 1960-64 and proceeded to the Atelier de Céramique, Senegal 1964-67 for further studies. His instructors included the late Senegalese modernist painter Iba Ndiaye. He is a widely traveled artist and lived in New York in 1979-85, a period during which he further strengthened his philosophical and improvisational approach to art-making. He has exhibited extensively in Africa, Europe and the Americas. Awards include the Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts, République Française, 2003, Pa Académie des Arts et lettre du Sénégal, 2003, Chevalier de l’ordre Nationale des Mérites, 2006, Membre du Conseil d’Administration de Gorée Institut, Membre du conseil scientifique de la Biennale de Dakar and Coréalisateur du drapeau de la tolérance de l’UNESCO, Paris. His work is represented in several private and public collections at home and abroad, and presently lives and work in Dakar, Senegal with his family.




A LONG VIEW OF THE ARTIST FROM GOREE



Souleymane Keita is an artist who has put together a unique synthesis of forms, shapes, tonal environments via liquid flow of acrylic wash color tone stains of earth environment and life experience. The mechanics of textile applique color collage sewing, wrapping keys and hooks fisherman’s knots and net pattern of the sea. The hunter’s shirt is point of departure born in the historical struggle for creative human progress. The linear poles support the weight of the cloth and support the aesthetics and art of the journey itself. His canvas support structure has been square, round, rectangular, and loosely suspended in space. Souleymane Keita has achieved his dynamic synthesis by continual experiment with personal methods of creative construction.

Melvin Edwards
Sculptor
New York City, April 2009

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

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.

Announcing: Andrew Zarou Collages at the Brooklyn Public Library


Andrew Zarou is showing 10 works, all abstract collages, at the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.  All of the pictures were executed between 2008-2009.  In them, he tries to express his wonderment about the (to him) meaningless abstraction he found in certain radio signals.  In his artist’s statement, Mr. Zarou explains, “...I can recall listening, spellbound, to these signals.  I rediscovered numbers station radio signals from the cold war era... on my shortwave radio.  The seemingly random, but repetitive, tests of numbers and odd tone sequences riveted me....”  


The show, displayed is in the building’s second floor balcony cases 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.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

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..

Thursday, April 23, 2009

My Thoughts Exactly


Writing in The New Yorker’s April 6, 2009 issue, in his article titled, “Bearing Fruit: The Art World (Norton Simon’s Taste in Paintings,)” Peter Schjeldahl wrote, in part, about his experience in visiting a certain painting at the Prado.  I was so astounded to read what had been my own thoughts, as I stood before the same painting.  I could have said all the same things in my blog entry of February 13, My Visit to The Prado, but I opted to give a less detailed account, instead.  Now I’m thinking, I wish I’d said that.



Las Meninas
Diego Velázquez



Here’s the pertinent excerpt from the Peter Schjeldahl article:


“ We know what a great painting looks like while we are looking at one.  Turning away, we don’t exactly forget, but our recall of the experience -- how we felt, looking -- starts to edit what we saw.  Some details and qualities are magnified, others evanesce.  With time, the picture becomes ever more ours and less the painter’s.  My several visits to the best painting in the world, Velázquez’s “Las Meninas” (1656), at the Prado, instruct me in the phenomenon.  My first reaction is always disappointment at the coarse, almost drab, handmadeness of the big (but smaller than I thought) canvas, the absence of a glamour that I have cherished in memory and may have refreshed by contemplating glossy reproductions (reproductions are pandering ghosts, they tell us what we like to believe.)  Then, rather abruptly, I find myself under Velázquez’s spell again, as if I had never been before....”


And so it was for me:

*the feeling that Las Meninas is a great pinacle of art;

*my initial disappointment -- its coarseness and drabness;

*the “handmadeness” (including the visibility of the stitching between the sections of canvas that make it up;

*the “smaller than I thought” feeling;

*missing the gloss of reproductions;

*then, falling back under Velázquez’s spell.


I’m glad to know that the writer feels as I do.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

"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.

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Art and Man Talk (The Paintings of Wayne Moseley)


Wayne Moseley is a painter who lives in South Brooklyn.  I became acquainted with him 23 years ago, when we worked together for a time.  We had not seen each other for years, when we chanced to meet in Park Slope, last year.  In February he invited me to an informal get together, at his studio, with a few friends.  He served crackers, slices of cheese and spicey Italian Sausage with wine.  A few of us shared some man talk.



"Bear Grass"
Wayne Moseley
 Charcoal and Acrylic on Paper, 2009
22" x 30"


Wayne Moseley's paintings engulfed us teemingly.  I would not have put so many paintings out to show.  But there they were, chatting us up, comfortably; a painter's paintings, made by a painters' painter. There was that familiarity of this art I'd never seen before. The rapport was immediate: I sensed Wayne's logic; shared his delight in visual activity; prized that sensuality of paint.  We seemed to agree on what questions to ask: does the shape look forcibly filled in, or do its contents fill out a space with ease?  Does a given image need the two feet of canvas at the bottom?



"Reader's Flower"
Oil on Canvas, 2005
16" x 20"



I couldn't tell you now the meaning of any of it.  I couldn't tell you the meaning of Wayne's titles, though we probably did discuss them. While we drank the wine, laughed with abandon over silly stuff, and reached the point of cursing a bit, the paintings kept us company. 

The Realm of Art was just as silly as we were: Wayne told us that some man, who had previously shown no interest in art, had come into his studio and liked a certain painting. Which one?  The one with two penises coming out of a pair of pants.  I refer you to "Book of Changes #10," below.  If you can find the two penises and the pair of pants you get the Freudian Symbol Award, 2009.



"Book of Changes #10"
 Oil on Panel, 2007
30" x 22"


Friday, April 17, 2009

"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.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Starting This Month at Tabla Rasa








PIONEER WOMEN

curated byTerry Rooney

April 18 – May 30

Artists’ Reception: Saturday, April 18, 3 – 6 PM



TABLA RASA GALLERY
224 48 Street (between 2nd & 3rd Avenues)
Brooklyn, NY 11220
718. 833-9100
 
info@TablaRasaGallery.com
http://www.tablarasagallery.com/

 

For IMAGES:

http://tablarasa.net/html/pioneer_women.html

 

Amherst, MA, 16 March, 2009--More than 20 women who have settled upon the fertile ground of the Pioneer Valley (Connecticut River Valley) have created new artworks that will premiere in New York City at Tabla Rasa Gallery on April 18 and run through May 30.

 

Several of the Pioneer Valley artists have blazed new frontiers with their artwork and studios. Included are: Anne Burton, Liz Chaflin, Cynthia Cosentino, Karen Dolmanisth, Rosalyn Driscoll, Rita Edelman, Oriole Farb Feshbach, Rachel Folsom, Alix Hegeler, Mary Ann Kelly, Deborah Kruger, Nancy Miller, Lauren Mills, Susan Montgomery, Holly Murray, Elizabeth Pols,  Mo Ringey,Terry Rooney, Diane Savino, Deidre Scherer, Nanny Vonnegut, Ruth West, Erika Zekos, and Belinda Lyons-Zucker 

 

Tabla Rasa is very happy that we were offered the opportunity to host this show.

Please join us for the opening reception.  We will look forward to seeing you!

Audrey 


The gallery is located a few short "R" subway stops beyond Park Slope, at 224 48th Street, between 2nd and 3rd Avenues in Brooklyn.
 
Transportation:
From Manhattan, "D" or "N" express train to 36 Street in Brooklyn, cross platform, and take "R" train one stop to 45th Street.  Street parking is available.
 
Tabla Rasa Gallery is FREE and open to the public.
General gallery hours: 1:00 - 5:00 pm, THURSDAY, FRIDAY & SATURDAY.
Call 718.833.9100 for events and schedule updates