Fine art news: Gallery 1261 (Denver, Colorado) is currently hosting a solo exhibition featuring Michael Workman, a landscape artist the gallery describes as “one of the major new American tonalist painters.” The exhibition is open through January 27.
“Black Willow Sketch,” oil, 8 x 8 inches
“Michael’s use of color, texture, and light create a balance between realistic and abstract interpretation,” says the gallery. “Following in the footsteps of his hero George Inness, Michael’s works go beyond the visible surface of a landscape and seek an emotional-spiritual response from the viewer.”
Famous cities carry an endless number of associations. One can almost feel the pulse of a city when thinking of it, and each has its very own. It should come as no surprise, then, that artist Brad Aldridge, featured at an upcoming “Within the City” exhibition at Bonner David Galleries, has devoted his life to painting cityscapes that are “honest and grounded in somber realism” and simultaneously “encouraging and hopeful.”
“My art is romantic, and I paint an ideal,” Aldridge says. “I think I’m drawn to paint cities such as New York City, London, Paris, Rome, Venice, and Florence (all included in ‘Within the City’) because they also represent places I grew up hearing about, and I idealized and romanticized what they might be like, teeming with art, ideas, culture, and multiculturalism. I also think I was drawn to visit these places, not only as a tourist as well as an artist visiting the greatest art museums in the world, but also as a small-town army brat, still proving to myself that I belong wherever I choose to go.”
Keep reading for an exclusive Q&A with Aldridge.
Fine Art Today: Please tell us a little about your travels and how they inspire your art.
Brad Aldridge: I have had the opportunity for the past five years to paint landscape murals in religious temples for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) in three different countries including Peru, Japan, and the U.S., so I’ve had opportunities to travel to those places. My wife and I also enjoyed becoming more acquainted with New York City as we have traveled there to visit family and attend my art shows. Also, I recently took my wife on a wonderful trip to France, England, and Italy where I took extensive photographs of major cities and countryside from which to paint.
I live in a very small town in rural Utah with a population of 1,500, in a county with only two traffic lights I can think of, so I ask myself why I might be drawn to paint such large urban cities in addition to the more idyllic pastoral landscapes I’ve painted my entire career. I also ask myself if I can paint urban scenes with authenticity and not merely treat them as tourist postcards. But I was born in Japan, raised as an “army brat,” and moved every two years around the U.S. from Alaska to Washington, D.C. and one important lesson my parents and my upbringing taught me was that the world is my home and I belong wherever I choose to belong.
What has been your favorite city to paint?
I know it’s a cliche, but I love painting Venice! Venice has a rich history of being painted by some of the greatest artists the world has known. There are so many paintings of Venice in the world that the challenge is to rise above all the poor examples, but the history, architecture, narrow streets, water, and abundance of high towers to gain different perspectives makes Venice an absolutely magical city to paint and I look forward to painting more Venetian pictures in the future.
What are some of the challenges you’ve experienced when painting a subject so vast?
The way I made the transition from landscape painting to include cityscapes was to realize that cityscapes are landscapes, complete with light and shadow, distance and atmospheric perspective, weather and varying times of day. For years I have been interested in painting landscapes from a higher perspective to see the vast depth and complex intricacies of fields, farms, streams, and small villages as they lead to a seemingly endless distance, and so I have been enjoying painting cities from a higher perspective as well.
I think I like the idea that though one can look over a city from a high vantage point, such as the observation deck at the Tate Modern Museum in London or the top of Rockefeller Center in New York City, and look down on so many individual and countless streets, cars, apartments, office buildings, and people with their unique sorrows, struggles, joys, and victories in a shadowed foreground, yet in the distance observe an overarching glowing and hopeful horizon. To paint that honest hope using a vehicle of seemingly infinite jigsaw-like complexity, and to strive again and again for the proper balance between realism and poetry, is the great challenge.
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A Word About “Within the City” From Bonner David Galleries
Three artists, three friends, all who love the city. Join us for the sights and sounds and experience urban life as these three award-winning artists each showcase what the city means to them. From the distinct architecture rendered by Brad Aldridge after extensive travel abroad and domestically, to the denizens of urban life so poignantly depicted by the brilliant brushstrokes of Joseph Lorusso, and the rich palette of the city windows and glimpses portrayed from Francis Livingston, this show promises to be unforgettable for anyone who’s ever yearned for city life.
Joseph Lorusso, “Midtown Light,” 30 x 30 inchesFrancis Livingston, “Chrome and Paint,” 30 x 48 inches
“Florida Shanties, Palatka,” Anthony Thieme (Dutch,1888-1954), 1940, oil on canvas, 25 x 30 inches, Cici and Hyatt Brown Collection. Part of the “State of Excellence: Treasures from Florida Private Collections” Exhibition
State of Excellence: Treasures from Florida Private Collections
January 26 through April 29, 2018 Orlando Museum of Art, Florida
This spring, Central Florida will have a unique opportunity to get a glimpse of private art collections belonging to collectors from all over the state of Florida.
“‘State of Excellence’ brings a new level of recognition to the depth and quality of collecting in the state,” said Glen Gentele, director and CEO of the Orlando Museum of Art, which organized the exhibition. “State of Excellence” is drawn from some of the finest collections of European and American art held privately in Florida.
“Highlights include paintings by 17th-century Dutch masters, 19th- and 20th-century French and American Impressionists, and 20th-century European and American Modernists and Abstract Expressionists,” says the press release. “Sculpture is represented with exceptional bronzes by Auguste Rodin, Antoine Bourdelle, and Käthe Kollwitz. Decorative art includes examples of French Art Nouveau furniture and glass, American Arts and Crafts furniture, American Art pottery, and early Steuben Glass. A special focus within the exhibition is historic photography. Selected from four extensive collections in the state, the 48 vintage photographs on view offer a mini survey of the medium from its early decades in the 1840s through the mid-20th century.”
“Collecting art is a passionate and thoughtful enterprise,” said Dr. Jennifer Hardin, the exhibition’s guest curator. “For most of the collectors whose works are shown here, the pursuit of acquiring art is an added joyous vocation; for some it has become their primary occupation. This exhibition is grounded in their willingness to share their passion, and these outstanding works of art from their collections with the public.”
Featured Artwork: Christine Drewyer
“Morning Minuet”
Oil
24 x 20 in.
Available through RS Hanna Gallery
It may be an extraordinary sky, a fog-filled meadow or some ancient tree, which calls artist Christine Drewyer to paint.
“I am very attracted to a sense of drama,” explains Christine. “I’ve been known to stop and just stand before a tree as if it were the Taj Mahal, feeling a profound sense of wonder and even reverence. There needs to be a connection before I paint something, and I especially love painting at dusk and dawn, when there is an ethereal quality to the light, a veiled sense of wonder and mystery.”
Christine paints what she refers to as “the universal landscape,” – those rare places that anyone could gaze upon and find beauty, whether it’s a mountain scene, an ocean, or the plains. She travels extensively and has found beauty all over the world to paint. She works exclusively in oil. Most of her paintings begin as a plein air sketch or study, which she translates into a more developed painting in her studio in Annapolis, Maryland.
“The earth is something we all share. I am quite particular about painting the natural world. I tend to not include buildings or people or anything man-made. I even resist the urge to include a fence or a path. I feel the landscape is one of the true common denominators we all share, and I try to paint the purity of it as a means to unite, rather than divide, us. I adore animals as well, and have no problem in wanting them in my landscapes, as we share this planet with them, and I revere them for their wildness and presence here.
“With my landscapes, I hope to convey a sense of timelessness, this feeling of solidity and endurance and natural beauty. Beauty is a rare and multifaceted thing. It can be a shadow, or a sunbeam, a mother doe with her fawn, the grandeur of a sunset, or the promise of a new day. I find it in the turn of a wave ready to spill onto the shore in a never-ending progression of tides that we are all anchored to in this brilliant Universe that we share. The sacredness of the trees and the natural world and the gift we are offered each day to behold – I want to make work that reminds us that, there by the grace of God, go we.”
National Art Publications:
2016 Art of the West, “Mother Nature’s magic” by Vicki Stavig
2015 What’s Up, Magazine Cover & Feature “Inside the Artist’s Studio” by Kathi Ferguson
American Art Collector:
2014 “Love of the land” ~ Artists Focus
2013 OPA Editorial
2013 Rich Timmons Gallery ~ Artists Focus
2011 “A Visual Experience” by Michelle Borgwardt
2010 “Revering Nature” by Josh Rose
Fine Art Group Memberships:
Women Artists of the West Master, Signature Member, Emeritus Member
American Women Artists, Signature Member
National Oil & Acrylic Painters Society & Washington Society of Landscape Painters, Signature Member
Christine’s work has been selected for many museum exhibitions around the country with nationally acclaimed organizations. The artist says, “I like to believe that my BEST work is still ahead of me, I feel blessed to have found my passion and sincerely hope that I can continue to do this forever!”
In 2018, contemporary realist Dina Brodsky had a show in London that celebrated her “twin passions” of bicycling across countrysides and cities and painting miniature landscapes on copper. The exhibition at Pontone Gallery, titled “Cycling Guide to Lilliput,” featured a collection of these miniature paintings. Each of them, the artist tells us, “is an attempt to capture a specific moment throughout my travels that I can return to vividly in my memory.”
Enjoy an inside look at the deep connections of Brodsky’s twin passions in this exclusive interview.
Fine Art Today: As you’re cycling, do you stop and take reference photos and/or make sketches?
Dina Brodsky: Yes; I take a sketchbook with me when I travel, and stop cycling every few hours to sketch. I usually come back with a book full of small drawings and travel notes, as well as a lot of reference photos, which I use to inform the miniatures I make in my studio.
How are your miniature paintings displayed or framed? Tell me about the surface, for example.
I’ve been experimenting a bit with painting on copper over the last several years, but I only discovered it properly with this series of work. I was looking at some paintings on copper at the Met a while ago, and was blown away by how the surface seemed to glow, and how clear the colors were, even 500 years after the painting was finished. I fell in love with copper as a surface, so this part of the series is all oil on copper. Because the paintings are so small, I put them in a frame with a linen mat around it, and attach the miniature to the mat with tiny magnets.
I’m sure that each of your miniature paintings tells a story; can you share one with us?
Since a lot of the landscapes are from imagery directly along the bike path, my stories are mostly connected to being on the road. The two below are from the last days of my last trip, in Prague — I was first there many years ago when I was making my way through Europe at 19, and was completely blown away by its beauty, but didn’t have a place to stay (or any money), so I spent two nights sleeping on a bench near Charles Bridge. On the third night it started raining, and I remember being completely soaked and a little scared but looking at the Prague skyline, and the moon coming out after the rain, and thinking that I have to come back here and paint this. I didn’t get a chance to come back until last year, but it is just as breathtaking as I remember (this time I slept in a proper bed). I spent a lot of my time drawing the view from the bridge where I spent the night 15 years ago.
Top painting: Dina’s old sleeping place. “I tried to capture the moon after the rain,” she said, “with the old city skyline in silhouette against it.” Bottom painting: From the top of the bridge.
I can see how cycling is a form of meditation, as painting is, of course. Do you think the two have anything else in common, or is there anything else you’d like to share about your “twin passions”?
Cycling, as well as painting, can be both a meditation and an adventure. The adventures that cycling offers are connected to the external world — unknown cities and forests, new people, the fact that you never quite know what happens next. The adventures of painting are internal ones, and sometimes seem minuscule — something unexpected that paint does when mixed a certain way, the juxtaposition of colors or shapes — but to me they are equally exciting. For me, cycling and painting are also closely intertwined — my cycling trips inform my paintings, and when I paint, my memory returns me to the places and experiences I’ve had cycling.
Artist Dali Higa with her outstanding work in the California Museum of Fine Art Booth.
By Vanessa Françoise Rothe
Last Wednesday, January 10, 2018, top fine artists and collectors gathered at the Los Angeles Convention Center for the opening-night party at the 23rd annual LA Art Show, Modern and Contemporary. With slightly fewer booths geared toward representational work, and a slow start on attendance, the show was nevertheless a success, and the works themselves were as strong as ever. Fine Art Connoisseur was there for the opening-night preview with greats such as Jeremy Lipking, Aaron Westerberg, and Casey Baugh and was intrigued to learn about J. Louis, a newcomer to the show and to the Arcadia Contemporary booth.
Steve Diamant, owner of Arcadia Contemporary, boasted a larger-than-usual booth, with up to seven works by each artist. Maxwell Alexander Gallery displayed a winning mix of contemporary works by Jeremy Mann, Michael Klein, Joshua La Rock, and Joseph Todorovitch while keeping its Western traditions with Logan Hagege and other Western-themed artists. Another gallery of note for our readers was the California Museum of Fine Art featuring works by Dan McCaw, Dali Higa, and new Russian selections. MS Rau Antiques sparkled again with its impressive walk-in booth showcasing top historical Impressionist and realist works, including a beautiful large-scale Berthe Morisot and a unique self-portrait sketch by Vincent van Gogh.
Art World friends Steve Diamant owner of Arcadia Contemporary and FAC West Coast editor Vanessa Rothe discuss coverage of upcoming exhibitions at the Arcadia booth
Attendees at the opening-night premiere party got to enjoy a sneak peek at the LA Art Show’s more conceptual and abstract installations, such as Antuan Rodriguez’s “Left or Right” punching bags and Bunnie Reiss’s “Space Boat” in Littletopia. Adrienne Stein’s work was of particular note, with her ethereal figures intertwined with flora and fauna, and was a realist light in the contemporary Littletopia section. Works from across the globe were on view, weaving together art from 18 countries, including the National Exhibition from China.
A new section of the show, titled “DESIGN LA ART,” brought interior and architectural design to the show. “Los Angeles has emerged as a major destination for the arts,” says producer Kim Martingale.“With this new section we are honoring the city’s already rich history in the realms of design and architecture, as well as presenting forward-looking programming about the growing fusion of these two disciplines.”
Actor Jon Hamm (from the TV show Mad Men), host of the LA Art Show premier party. Photo from LA Art Show Staff Photographer
In addition to the wide range of fine art, from realism to conceptual and abstract, the show included programming and discussions on the main stage by gallery owners, artists, and art world journalists presenting on various topics. In addition, there was an element of interior design added this year to the event, with handmade wood furniture installations throughout. Emmy- and Golden Globe Award-winning actor, director, and producer Jon Hamm graciously hosted the evening on behalf of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Though the show was markedly smaller in scale, as noted, the representational selections and top galleries showcasing the work certainly made it worth the visit.
Peter Freeman, Inc. is the host of an exhibition of drawings and paintings by Catherine Murphy, whose “career-long interest has been in decoding reality as a place of constant and inevitable change, realizing abstract ideas through the exploration of everyday objects and situations,” says the gallery.
Catherine Murphy: Recent Work
Through February 24, 2018
New York, New York
Peter Freeman, Inc. is the host of an exhibition of drawings and paintings by Catherine Murphy, whose “career-long interest has been in decoding reality as a place of constant and inevitable change, realizing abstract ideas through the exploration of everyday objects and situations,” says the gallery.
“Stacked,” 2017, oil on canvas, 60 x 60 inches
“Murphy inverts the viewer’s expectations and blurs boundaries — between interior and exterior, flatness and depth, background and foreground — and in doing so, upsets assumptions about the places she represents and the people who live their lives in them. In the newest works, Murphy has looked to her immediate surroundings both within and outside of her own home, continuing — in a profoundly personal way — a keen interest in depicting the most common surroundings that usually escape our notice but nevertheless influence our perception.”
“Painting Drawing Painting,” 2017, oil on canvas, 51 x 72 inches
In an interview with Hyperallergic, Murphy says, “In the beginning, when I first started painting, I thought that I could be the bearer of a universal objectivity. I thought that I could empty myself out enough so that what I saw was what everyone else saw. That was my great lie. And then, in about five years, I thought, Oh God, I really have a style! So, then I got interested in the idea of fiction. I wasn’t a journalist; I was the visual equivalent of a fiction writer. That’s when I gave myself permission to make it happen any way I could.”
“Instead of stable, conventional spaces, Murphy often sets up specifically defined formal situations,” the gallery explains. “With a Minimalist formal rigor, her starting point is scale and geometry: yet her colors, patterns, and textures all bear information and narrative potential. Her depiction of an immediate, often intimate moment, establishes an implied open-ended narrative.”
About the artist: Catherine Murphy was born in 1946 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and currently lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York. Murphy studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and received a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1967. She was awarded National Endowment for the Arts Grants (in 1979 and 1989), a Guggenheim Fellowship (in 1982), and was elected a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 2002. In 2014 she was awarded the Robert de Niro Sr. prize for distinguished mid-career American artists. Her work is included in over 30 museum collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
“Theseus” is a new exhibition at Marlborough Gallery, featuring 10 works that range in size from 5 feet, 9 inches to nearly 14 feet long. “Vincent Desiderio’s painterly practice often plays cognitive readings against optical clues,” the gallery says. “Even within the disjointed and intensely confusing ‘narratives’ of the paintings, a kind of profound emotional impact on the viewer is quickly achieved. He has described his approach as ‘trying to create a sense of what it feels like to be at the threshold of dream images coalescing into sequentiality with no loss of their dreaminess, as it were.’”
The directors of Marlborough Gallery are pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by the American artist Vincent Desiderio. This will be Desiderio’s ninth show with Marlborough Gallery.
“Theseus” features 10 works that range in size from 5 feet, 9 inches to nearly 14 feet long. “Vincent Desiderio’s painterly practice often plays cognitive readings against optical clues,” the gallery says. “Even within the disjointed and intensely confusing ‘narratives’ of the paintings, a kind of profound emotional impact on the viewer is quickly achieved. He has described his approach as ‘trying to create a sense of what it feels like to be at the threshold of dream images coalescing into sequentiality with no loss of their dreaminess, as it were.’
“Hitchcock’s Hands,” 2012, oil and mixed media on canvas, 64 x 66 inches
“A central painting in the show is a large horizontal canvas entitled ‘Theseus.’ It contains some 40 figures portrayed in a state of falling or slipping and, with its turbulence and disorienting impact, the effect is akin to a Northern European Last Judgement painting like the creations of 15th-century master Hans Memling. ‘Theseus’ is directly related to the images of sleep for which the Desiderio is well known. The mythological morphology of ‘Theseus’ is further explored by the artist in two agnate works that hang nearby; ‘Theseus II’ and ‘Theseus III’ are nearly abstracted, X-ray-like versions of the composition.
“‘Wringing,’ another horizontal masterwork in the exhibition, is a deceptively straightforward depiction of a pair of hands twisting a swath of fabric. Its cryptic essence can’t help but captivate. The painting is at once melancholy in its finality and hopeful in its flavor of relief. It is simultaneously an ending and a beginning. Like the other paintings in the exhibition — depictions of no-longer-elegant movie theaters, the exterior of the Duomo in Florence, Italy, or nude bathers perched precariously on the edge of a mountain — the painting exists in an in-between space where time and place are constantly shifting and logic is something mutable and perhaps irrelevant.”
Sabin Howard sculpting "Apollo" in his South Bronx studio, 2011
EDITOR’S NOTE: Work is now progressing on the National World War I Memorial, to be sited in Pershing Park in downtown Washington, D.C. In 2016, its design commission selected the competition-winning team: Joseph Weishaar, Sabin Howard, and GWWO Architects, who had proposed the concept “The Weight of Sacrifice.” For two years, sculptor Sabin Howard (b. 1963) has been creating “A Soldier’s Journey,” the memorial’s 65-foot-long bronze relief, which depicts not only soldiers, but also nurses, wives, and children. The project has taken him often to New Zealand’s Weta Workshop, far from his wife, Traci L. Slatton, who has been inspirational in helping formulate his ideas around the memorial’s narrative element.
The official groundbreaking occurred in 2017, and this February, Howard will make a formal presentation to the Commission of Fine Arts, which has oversight over such projects in Washington. The New York Academy of Art (Howard’s alma mater) will exhibit his preparatory materials March 21-23, and he will give a public lecture there on March 21. Also in March, a documentary film about Howard’s project will be released. For details, visit sabinhoward.com. To mark this major commission, we invited Prof. Donald Kuspit to offer his thoughts on “A Soldier’s Journey” and its contexts.
Sabin Howard sculpting the original clay model (9 feet wide) at Weta Workshop in Wellington, New Zealand
A Soldier’s Journey: Sabin Howard’s World War I Memorial Monument
By Donald Kuspit
The following is a preview of the full article as seen inFine Art Connoisseur (January/February 2018).
Surveying the war memorials in Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital — among them the Iwo Jima Memorial, the American Navy Battle Memorial, the Korean War Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial, all on the National Mall — one quickly realizes how unusual Sabin Howard’s “A Soldier’s Journey,” a World War I memorial destined to be placed in Pershing Square, is.
Initial third of composition: Family farewell and departure
Not only conceptually but physically unusual, exceptional, unconventional: Howard’s soldiers are “very close to human scale so that they’re accessible, and they’re also at almost street level so it’s not way, way up above people so people will reach out and touch the memorial,”* unlike the soldiers on the Iwo Jima Memorial. They rise above us, as though of another world, on a higher plane of existence — certainly in a separate space — than our own, rendering them emotionally as well as physically remote — literally untouchable. Our relation to them is peculiarly abstract rather than experientially concrete: we admire them, look up to them, but we are unable to engage them, share their experience, empathize with them, identify with them.
In contrast, we are participant observers when we view Howard’s memorial, not only because we are on the same level as his soldiers but because they are not larger than life and fixed in place forever, as the Iwo Jima soldiers are. They are immortal, above the fray, but Howard’s soldiers are mortal, still in the thick of the battle.
Watch a clip from FOX5NY on “A Soldier’s Journey” here:
*Howard quoted in Eric Dehm, “Renown Sculptor’s WWI memorial is coming to DC and it’s epic,” connectingvets.com, September 15, 2017.
Author Bio: DONALD KUSPIT is the Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art History and Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the senior critic at the New York Academy of Art. He has doctorates in philosophy (University of Frankfurt) and art history (University of Michigan). Among his many books are The End of Art (2005) and The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist (1994).
Alexandra Becker-Black, “Woke,” watercolor on paper, 36 x 24 in.; $4,500
The Color of Water Contemporary Watercolor Paintings
Through February 23, 2018
Charleston, South Carolina RobertLangeStudios.com
At Robert Lange Studios, inspiration is one of their art exhibition goals. “If you are a watercolorist perhaps you’ll find renewed inspiration for your medium of choice, and if you are a collector, perhaps you will purchase your first watercolor piece,” says Lange, artist and gallery owner. “We have really tried to find artists with unique voices for our group exhibits. No two are alike in their approach and specifically for this watercolor exhibit we wanted to find painters that didn’t create traditional watercolor scenes.”
He goes on to say, “Local favorite Mary Whyte is responsible for introducing me to contemporary watercolor painting. Before seeing her work I was unaware of how versatile watercolor could be, and since that day I’ve wanted to bring together a group of contemporary painters who are using the medium and choosing subject matter that truly propels the genre forward.”
Mario Robinson, “Freedom,” watercolor on paper, 30 x 22 in.; $7,000 (framed)
“One such watercolorist who was invited to the show is Mario Robinson,” writes the gallery, “who recently began to extensively incorporate rural subjects into his paintings. Each subject is very personal for the artist in both selection and execution. Robinson says, ‘As the work progresses, my relationship with the sitter develops and a uniquely personal story begins to evolve. I frequently depict subjects framed within the context of their daily lives. The underlying narrative counters sentimentality and serves as the underpinning for my figurative images.’
Kerry Simmons, “Frost,” watercolor drybrush on paper, 9 x 12 1/2 in.
“Artist Kerry Simmons, who studied in the Ukraine, has created a figurative piece entitled ‘Frost’ using dry brush watercolor techniques. A single figure is seen gently lying on her side. The layers of watercolor, softly layered on top of each other, lend themselves perfectly to help propel the narrative.
“Alexandra Becker-Black, who paints portraits of contemporary figures, says, ‘Watercolor is a delicate medium with a powerful impact. Every mark must be a deliberate decision because there is no undoing what has already been done. It’s a slow and challenging dance that at first was very difficult and had a lot of disadvantages. But now I only see advantages. As a watercolorist I am forced to work in the moment, to consider every stroke that I make and to proceed with confidence and grace, even if I know that a large painting could be ruined at any moment because of one mistake. I feel that working with watercolor keeps me focused on the true meaning of what each painting is and urges me to remove everything but the key elements. It’s a beautiful dance that I wouldn’t trade for any other medium.’
“Many of Becker-Black’s pieces have large areas of negative space around a single figure. She says, ‘I’m magnetized by the power of simplicity. I think the best stories of any kind are the ones with just enough detail to deliver a message, but still enough space to leave some mystery. Whether it be a painting, a song, a film, or a novel, I love art that makes us wonder.’
Reuben Negron, “Untitled (Catherine nº1)”, watercolor on paper, 18 in. round; $2,500
“Reuben Negron, who will also have a piece in the show, said, ‘I’ve long been interested in using art to tell stories. Beyond the larger ideas that hold up contemporary art, an image’s ability to transport me into a narrative has always resonated most. Taking a page from those I’ve worked with in the past, this new series allows me to turn my lens inward for the first time to tell my own personal narrative. Each image in this new body of work is approached as a passage (and in some cases a full chapter) in what is essentially a visual novella. Over the next year or so this series will touch on themes of loss, sexuality, memory, and discovery… All while pushing and expanding my relationship with watercolor — finding ways to utilize the medium in a manner that challenges public perception of what it can or should be.’”
Artists participating include: Alexandra Becker-Black, Matthew Bird, Denny Bond, Kerry Brooks, Jason Drake, Joshua Flint, Michiyo Fukushima, Katie Green, Oriol Angrill Jorda, E.B. Lewis, Adam Lister, Karl Mårtens, Laurin McCracken, Dean Mitchell, Reuben Negron, Melanie Norris, Endre Penovac, Dylan Scott Pierce, Mario Robinson, Nick Runge, Ester Sarto, and Kevin Taylor.
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