Gallery One, Connecticut: To See and Be Seen

The artists of Gallery One: ten artists, working without their own gallery space, but working, as one of their members says, “with the strength of ten,” exhibiting where they will.  Their current show is on through this Sunday, May 15, 2016, at the Mill Gallery in The Guilford Art Center.

Here is what the artists say about themselves on their website, where the show is always on, www.galleryonect.com :

Gallery One is an association of mid-career artists working in a wide variety of media and styles from representational to abstract, including painting, sculpture and works on paper.  Our vision is to provide Southeastern Connecticut with a stimulating resource and to support one another as artists. 

In the absence of patronage of church, guild or wealthy merchant, artists have to find their own way “to see and be seen.”  Commissions are rare; artists have the freedom to “see” and choose our own subjects, which sounds lovely. Yet the absence of patrons also means that, in the absence of a guaranteed space (a church window or a parlor-room wall), we must find our own ways to “be seen.”  Gallery One does not pay a year-round lease ... they move.  Their shows (every few months, as a group, and artists also exhibit on their own) exert a little more pressure on the viewing audience: find us, because here is something special. Here is a breath of fresh air, a space to wander, for two or three weeks only, for now: a terrific idea.

And it seems to be working rather well.  I have just seen their show in The Guilford Art Center, up through this weekend. I wrote about one of the gallery artists, Judith Barbour Osborne (this blog, May 10, 2016).  At Guilford, I spoke to another of Gallery One’s artists, Diana Rogers, who explained about the gallery as a group and then talked about her own process.  Rogers says that she does a layer of “underpainting” with her pastels first, which, I think, makes her final version that much more open to suggestion.  Here is her “Marsh Grasses, Mid Summer,” a work in pastel on sanded paper:

I am drawn to the separate, abstracted bits of color here.  The materials and gestures suggest flowers and grasses without going into fussy detail; the mix of colors allows viewers to create the final mix of colors and shapes themselves, as they would if they were walking through the landscape.  Here is another pastel, “Marsh and Sky, Summer Palette”:

and a detail:

The marks have a beauty and a depth all their own.  Close to, we can see the artist’s hand and her view as she was creating this piece; farther away, the colors merge in our minds into those watery paths to the sea.  It’s very hard, a collector friend of mine said once, to get the greens right in a painting; Rogers has captured them perfectly, without using every other color to rein them in. This is a limited palette that busts with color.

Another painter who suggests -- without filling in every line -- is Catherine Christiano. Her cottages have that summer haze over them, the one we all find at the Connecticut shore. She’s got it just right, here, in “Cottages, Hawk’s Nest #4”:

I was lucky enough, a million years ago, to stay in that red cottage for a week; I would look back from the Sound and see the house shimmering in the heat.  We don’t need to see each individual shingle in these paintings, because we don’t when we are looking, even if we are really looking. We put the picture together in our heads.  And we are grateful for the chance to make that momentary image.

And then, moving around in the gallery, I see glowing abstract works. Gray Jacobik says, on her website (grayjacobikartist.com/about) , that “my art is two-fold: imagination-brought-to-bear upon received images joined with the rapidly transforming events of process, the entirety a means of making sense.”  Jacobik arrives at her worktable with ideas and expectations, but does allow the materials (encaustic on cradled panel, most often) and accidents to move the work forward, and the exchange continues, back and forth: “ I may go through 4-5 metamorphoses before the final work emerges,” Jacobik says. Her titles sound as though she paints realistically, and, in her own way, she does. Here is “The Sea Mollified”:

I had to look up “mollified”; it isn’t a word I use every day! Jacobik is also an award-winning poet, with a national reputation, so the wording of her titles is quite deliberate.  But “mollified” means appeased, soothed... can the sea be mollified?

Is this painting calling up the image of a calm sea? The work is beautiful; I stood before the painting for a long time. Turquoise waters, pictured (abstractly!) here, generally offer an invitation to wade in and cool off.  Serenity. Yet this water is reaching upwards, moving in a great wave.... in life such a wave would make lifeguards nervous and vigilant.  But the title is the one certainty we have, so the soothing of the sea must come from treating the work of art as itself.  This is a mollified, imagined, controlled sea, on a canvas small enough to carry.

Jacobik’s painting “I Saw It Raining Fire from the Sky” is also a beauty with a puzzling title:

If I were to begin a conversation with the sentence of this painting’s title, “I Saw It Raining Fire from the Sky,” I would frighten my listeners.  But, viewing the painting, we see a gorgeous combination of colors at ease with one another, filled with energy, yet well-matched in their opposing reds & oranges, blues & purples. Perhaps we have wandered into a dream that has been (encaustically) executed into a small portion of space. Jacobik’s paintings come from deep within, from experience and from art itself.

The show included ten member artists and two invited guests, Steve Llloyd and Deborah Hornbake.  These guest artists fit in perfectly as they, too, give us original and imaginative art. Here is Steve Lloyd’s “Forest Edge,” in full and in detail:

Again, he is... and isn’t... realistic. He makes the air circulate here.

And Deborah Hornbake’s “Caldaria Basin,” (ceramic with wood-ash glaze) is organic but somehow totally new; here it is from the side and then over the top:

There is much more to see on the Gallery One (Ct) website and at the show! I will be watching the artists of Gallery One. This was a wonderful day.

Judith Barbour Osborne: "Synchronized with ... head and heart"

“A really good picture looks as if it’s happened at once. It’s an immediate image ... one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute.”

                                                                                                            Helen Frankenthaler

“Really good” pictures tend not to happen “at once,” though, as Frankenthaler knew better than anyone.  Her “Madame Butterfly” woodcut, below, is composed of 102 colors, from 46 woodblocks, and measures 2 meters (6 ½ feet) wide (www.nga.gov.au/exhibition/Frankenthaler). The print is far wider than one wrist motion, and took a bit longer to put together than one minute. And yet, when we look:

 ... this woodcut doesn’t make us feel anything that isn’t in this moment, right now. All we see is that Frankenthaler had a way of making paint and inks float away from their supports, whether she poured or printed.   And somehow you don’t want to solve the mystery of those floating images. You fall in with them, as you would any compelling natural landscape. 

Her work is sometimes critiqued as “just too pretty,” a damning phrase designed to undercut the work and its maker, yet artist Amy Sillman says there’s no “just” about it:

Frankenthaler’s taste and grace are tough, like ballerina grace: those women aren’t sugarplum fairies but muscular athletes, with machinelike, disciplined bodies. Frankenthaler is in an incredible athletic decision-making process while working... It’s an experiment with the alchemic and extreme reliance on color as material and as optics...

                                    “House of Frankenthaler,” printed in The heroine Paint,  p. 267

Sometimes, it takes another artist to see the underpinnings of a work, along with the artist’s consciousness and experience that remain (almost) invisible.  When I see work this strong, I want to know that some artist, somewhere, has seen the work and is willing to try and take on its challenges.                                                                                                                                                                                               

Judith Barbour Osborne is a likely suspect.  She has several shows on at the moment in Connecticut galleries.  I have just come from her Exit Gallery show at the Essex Art Association (an opportunity given as an award, the highest the gallery offers), and then I visited more work in a show at the Guilford Art Center. 

Osborne has worked with poets and musicians...  She works with words as well as paints, choosing to bring meaning into the light, to make “aspects of non-visual reality visible, as if staining the wind” (JBO artist statement).  Judith  Barbour Osborne’s compact show in Essex, “Staining the Wind,” is a master class in making an intimate space feel immense. She works in smaller spaces than Frankenthaler, yet she manages to create huge effects with her close studies. I think she has found the very next level after Frankenthaler, and pushed it to its very limits. Here is her “Revelation # 4”:

 It has a calming presence, for me, although Osborne says that she generally hears people talk about the energy in her work.  It may be that calm and energy come from the same core place, in us, the place that relaxes by the sea or in the mountain air. In the artwork before us we find words, too, embedded in the paint and inks, just barely there, like a whisper or the strain of a song being sung far away. Osborne says this is an integral part of her work: “My artwork is text-based and utilizes elements of chance and intention. I abstractly write text with tools ranging from small hand-made brushes to mops and brooms, from syringes to batiking tools”  (see the site where she has worked together with a poet on an artist’s book: www.vampandtramp.com/finepress/o/judith-b-osborne.html).

Here is
“Revelation # 3,” also at the Essex Art Association:

 and a detail:

All the marks Osborne makes seem interconnected, indivisible from one another. As we stand before them, we see that there is no looking at one mark, or one place in the painting. The eye moves over the whole surface, the whole “landscape.”  She has made a whole world, here.

Osborne is not only connected back to painters like Frankenthaler, though. She is thinking forward, so she is also the director of a group of ten artists, Gallery One (http://www.galleryonect.com) and they are exhibiting work at the Mill Gallery of the Guilford Art Center (through May 15, 2016). They support and encourage one another, a gallery without walls. The works as a whole make a very strong showing. Here is one of the pieces,  Osborne’s “Revelations # 1”:

and a detail:

This is a painting created with transparent inks, brushstrokes, and splattered marks, and it is luminous.  It was a rainy and gray day outside, so we lingered indoors as long as we could, staying with the art. The courage it takes to leave all that “blank” space in an artwork... fierce.  The words and the strokes from the artist’s hand somehow turn us inward, crawl inside some empty space we must have been leaving there, a space exactly as big as art.