Exhibiting Artists
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West Gallery: Not your mother's drawing show
Curated by Michael Shortell
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Terry Donsen Feder
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When I was younger I made much more fanciful work, but teaching drawing and painting over the years has stimulated my urge to render. I work from photographs and sketches for landscapes, and from life for still life since I can control the light in my studio, and light is a big concern in my work. Color is also important in my work. Most of my concerns are formal, in fact.
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Nona Hershey
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Incrementally we analyze, pixelate, and quantify the components of our daily experiences. Instantaneously, we transform occurrences into digital memory. Although we can’t see the proliferation of signals and techno-chatter that our devices emit, their energy is palpable. And yet, we don’t know the affect this has on us, or the environment.
In my work I imagine the invisible activity of these subliminal signals and juxtapose them with naturalistic clouds. My hope is that in our ever increasing impulse to connect immediately with things and places outside of ourselves, that we don’t forfeit the invaluable time spent on humble meditation of the sublime: those precious, yet enigmatic sources larger than ourselves- wind, light, and air. |
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Jennifer Knaus
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Jennifer Knaus lives and paints in Collinsville Conneticut. She is very inspired by Northern Rennaissance Painting and Her work is a playful combination of portrature and nature.Jennifer is an adjunct teacher at Central Conneticut State University. She has shown her work at the New Britain Museum of American Art and currently exhibits at Littlejohn Contemporary in New York City.
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Janet Lage
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My painting process is an alliance of language and image. The narrative is based on the changing dynamics of love and desire. They are tales of romance, heartbreak and the perception of a thing called Love. I tell bitts and pieces of that story using a confessional approach. Rather than telling a complete story, I leave room for the viewer to form their own narrative. Some of the paintings are informed by poems, some by song, and some by Pierre – an invented lover.
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Jim Lee
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In the fall of 2013 I spent six weeks in the northwest of Ireland on a residency at the Ballinglen Art Foundation, Ballycastle, Co. Mayo. The work from this period focuses on the landscape and sea cliffs, Neolithic stone monuments, medieval churches and stone walls of this mysterious and beautiful region. I was struck by the abstraction of the geology and the omnipresence of stone everywhere I looked. Previously I have made drawings and prints based on various locations in Nova Scotia, northern Maine and New England. The drawings made onsite often form the basis for my color reduction woodcut prints and artist books.
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Dennis Pinette
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The intersecting geometries of fire, water, industrial installations, and the woods form the base for Dennis Pinette’s work. His work is defined by improvisation layered over direct observation. Four old buildings overlooking Penobscot Bay serve as home and studio.
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Andrew Raftery
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These drawing are studies for The Autobiography of a Garden on Twelve Engraved Plates. This project is a narrative showing me working during the months of the year on the garden I make at my mother's house in Providence, Rhode Island. The final work, completed in September 2016, is a set of engravings that are transfer printed onto glazed white earthenware.
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Nan Runde
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Nan Runde’s meticulous graphite and colored-pencil drawings are visual musings on the strangers that move in the periphery of our vision: the people whose eyes meet ours only for a moment; those we view from a distance, perhaps with suspicion or unexamined assumptions; and also the non-human creatures that may collectively comprise the backdrop of our lives — until we look one in the eye, however briefly. Such moments are the basis for her drawings. Because each drawing evolves slowly through countless layers, creating it is as much meditation as a process of portrayal. The series began with birds, which fascinate Nan as ancient symbols for human potentialities and as living creatures both vulnerable and vital. As familiar as the face in the mirror, a bird is at the same time profoundly other, Yet the essential unknowability of the stranger — the human glimpsed across the street no less than the cardinal in the magnolia — is a reminder that all people, all beings, to some extent remain strangers, no matter how well we think we know them. Whether encountered in passing and never seen again or a part of one’s daily life so familiar as to become virtually invisible, another being hides inexpressible depths. Yet it is those depths that haunt Nan as she works. Far from a blank wall, the face of a stranger offers a window, however blurry, into another being, another story. The countless hours spent building up the texture and subtleties of a face or feathers afford Nan a paradoxical sense of intimacy with the unknowable and at the same time a sculptural experience of the two-dimensional. If we can’t know the stranger, Nan’s drawings insist at least that we try — that we look long enough and deeply enough to care about those we cannot fully know. |
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Cary Smith
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Kate Ten Eyck
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Drawing is immediate gratification. The feeling of making marks by dragging charcoal across paper is deeply pleasurable. I am intrigued by palimpsest, traces left behind after erasing, as much as marks themselves. While I enjoy drawing from life, I see that activity as primarily a means by which to make beautiful marks. My drawing practice begins with the fundamental act of mark making. Taking a chunk of charcoal in one hand or attaching smaller pieces to all eight of my fingers, I move my body, running my hands across large sheets of paper in a loose sort of choreography. As I do this, forms emerge. After building up many layers of marks, I step back and interpret what I see, developing the drawing through erasing and adding more marks.
While I could make works that are solely about process, I enjoy the act of interpretation. The forms that I find within my marks reflect my interests in such things as architectural ruins and the anatomy of plants and animals. The resulting drawings created through the process of interpreting marks always surprise me. I enjoy that the images are things I have never seen before, nor consciously imagined. The intuitive nature of this process reveals imagery that comes from a part of me that I cannot access directly. Curious, I continue to draw, intrigued by what I might find. |
TDP Gallery
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Robert Dente
“Come and meet me in a dream" * Final line of Mark Murphy's lyrics to Billy Strayhorn's last completed composition, prior to his death on May 31, 1967, entitled: "Blood Count." In September of 2015, Robert Dente was diagnosed with a stage three, point-eight esophageal cancer, (as was Billy Strayhorn who passed away from this kind of cancer. This exhibition served as a focal point and touchstone to help the artist overcome his change in circumstance. After a year of extensive cancer and surgical treatments the artist is, at this point in time, cancer-free. The following is taken from the catalog essay for this exhibition: Looking back over my life's distinctive moments; at my feelings of longing and wonder at the eternal tapestry of nature’s patterns and textures, I see how these moments compelled my search for a visual idiom that could transform my experiences into an expressive release. It led me from painting to printmaking, a process that imbeds layers of colored marks in the archeology of paper fibers as nature deposits minerals throughout the geological layers of a landscape. It is a magical activity; fraught with challenge and humility, but deeply rewarding when it captures the spirit of one’s unique relationship to existence. My inspirational masters have been Leonardo da Vinci, George Inness and Giorgio Morandi; three enigmas who conquered form, space, atmosphere, light and texture in utterly singular ways. I've always held my breath while in the presence of the touch and marks of these great souls—the atmospheric mystery in Leonardo's landscapes, the melancholy drama of Inness's radiant textures, and the un-dramatic and ambiguous there-ness of Morandi's personal forms in space. My task was to learn, not to imitate, that is, to understand what their work pointed to, and how they managed to be original and true to their own natures. Like them, my dream has been to discover my own dance, while surrendering to core instincts during each step of the creative process. My ultimate ambition, however, has always been to express visually what is essentially invisible. I seek to create a world of form that reveals a world beyond form—a realm of serenity that can envelop an attentive viewer with peaceful elation. With these thoughts in mind, I invite you to peruse the painterly dreams of another solitary pilgrim searching for beauty and truth, while hoping to create a modicum of quietude in our frantic world. Robert Dente, October 2016 |
East Gallery
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Peter Mc Lean
“Synchronous Compilations: Drawings by Peter Mc Lean” Ultimately, I consider the drawings "landscapes of the mind" that blend elements of memory, history, contemporary events, and intuitive impulse. As in the old Abstract Expressionist idiom, "the work talks to me"--it is a complex, dynamic process. |