Artist Statements in 4" x 6"

We drove south on backroads on a whim; we needed to see art, but saw two disappointing sets of artworks and felt defeated. One more try, we thought. We stopped for the first time at the Chester Gallery (in Chester, Connecticut, one of the most beautiful small villages in New England).

Chester Gallery is hosting this year's Holiday Postcard Show; everything is 4" x 6" or smaller. There are many of these kinds of small works shows, designed to make art affordable and give-able, and this is the best one I have seen. Its final day is today--and maybe tomorrow, Sunday the 13th of January 2019.

On the way down in the car, I was reading various artist statements aloud to my husband. Mostly, they seemed forced. It is very difficult to write about the thing your hand and imagination put together without sounding... odd. If you can write about it, after all, why paint it? [I wrote several posts on the artist statement on this blog back in 2011]. I never stop trying to figure out how best to discuss my own and other people's art.

There will be some reflected light on these pieces; I apologize! as the photographs are all mine. Do go and see these in person. Here is the first little cluster I loved:

Because of scale, these paintings sit quite a bit closer to one another than is usually possible. This allows for a good deal of cross-fertilization: the way the blues in the two left-hand paintings glide into each other, or the way the gray in the lower left is echoed and deepened by the deep blacks in the lower-right painting, where the orange is brought out more fully by the rust-orange in the work above it. Some of this interplay happens in any show, but, for some reason, it happened a lot more in this gallery than usual. Serendipitous hanging, probably, but also really good art.

Okay, so why are these pieces appealing to me? Let me try and figure that out with you. Here is "Day's End," a monotype by Kathleen DeMeo:

On her website, this artist publishes what may be the shortest and sweetest artist statement ever:

"I paint with a brayer and press
A color lover with monochrome moods
Hard-edged geometry or melted lines
Depends on the day"

This monotype (the least expensive, at $45, of any of these works, so an amazing bargain) falls into the middle of DeMeo's statement. It isn't monochrome, though the black lines lend the piece structure. The colors are so subtle, but there is something about the shades of that ochre-yellow that pulls us in. Instead of shadows around the tree, we see rings of a kind of grounded halo (those "melted lines"?).  I can almost feel the weight of air around the tree. DeMeo's artist statement is perfect, as it discusses her method, allows her leeway, and doesn't try to say too much.

The next piece I liked was by Claudia Van Nes, who opened Maple and Main, then, recently, closed the gallery and now works in a group called River Valley Artists.  My favorite part of her biography is her true starting point as a child, where she "spent drawing elaborate homes and villages for rabbits." I bet she almost didn't include that, but it makes perfect sense, because look at the detail in this watercolor, "Oranges on a Dish," where the scale (think of these orange slices up against DeMeo's tree) is so interesting:

Just as rabbit villages cannot be realistic, these oranges are not nudging into photographic realism. They are something seen out of the corner of your eye, an overlooked artistic moment in a day filled with far more important things. But isn't that what art can do, is give us those glimpses that we can hold onto?

Nearby sits "Snow at Devil's Hopyard," by Katherine Clarkson:

I like this primarily because I am often drawn to art that is on the edge of realism and abstraction. If it were not for the tree trunks in the background, this would be a far more conceptual piece. But we see the trees, then that leads us to the boulders, then the water, and the snow of the title. I could not find Katherine Clarkson's statement about her work, so here I go... Robert Motherwell said something like "start with the full picture and pare it down to the essence." The view, here, gets to put in all the detail that Clarkson didn't need: the deeper grays and veins in the rocks, the green-grays running through the water, the footprints and fallen leaves in the snow... It's all there, but she gives it to you to fill back in. Abstract art can be a gift to the viewer: "here, look at this, and imagine yourself inside ..."

"Lines," two pieces by Moya Aiken, go full-out abstract.

She writes of her work that "Even the solid areas of my work consist of many varying lines forming a solid mass in which there are time lines of shadows, a result of the different depths of graphite." Pencils can be under-rated by painters, but not by Aiken. Her pieces here show the lines running off the paper to another unseen place. The negative space here is substantial... and playful.  It looks as though the pencil began the lines and the paint or ink completed them... the lines seem to float.

Catherine Christiano says she "works from close observation of subjects... while also drawing from... art history when determining compositions." Here is an Irish street scene that could have been painted  in another time and place:

Christiano paints perfect forms and edges in her larger oils, but here her brushstrokes are looser, freer,  and the gray day is lit by the soft and misted lights of the storefront. She has given us flat shapes that indicate something more behind them-- a vase, a tray, a book. This is  a street, a painting, to wander in. It reminds us of places we have walked along but, as Christiano's statement says, it also reminds us of streets we have seen in galleries and museums portraying other times.

This show will be coming down, but the gallery owner, Nancy Pinney, can talk to you about any of these artists. Chester Gallery has shows coming, and here are two large paintings that were hanging in the back room to give you an idea of what kinds of things might be in store. The landscape is by Nancy Pinney and the still life with cat by Sheila Barbone:

Saratoga Arts and The Laffer Gallery: The Real Upstate New York

Not Bedford, not Poughkeepsie. People who really live UPstate want you to know that there’s beauty along with that deeper snow.  Drive up past Westchester or on through the Berkshires and along slower roads to Saratoga Springs, New York. There’s a lot going on. Step away from the great restaurants and boutiques and into some great art. 

The 30th Anniversary Invitational (through October 29,2016) at Saratoga Arts (tucked into the corner of Congress Park) is rewarding.  Well-known local artists who are participating include Katie DeGroot, Anne Diggory, Anne Francey, David Miller and Laura Van Rosk.  But I want to single out just one work.

The sculptor Beverley Mastrianni has created sculptures a person could walk through; one, on Skidmore College’s campus, offered the sounds of people speaking (insulting, as I remember!) as visitors walked through. Mastrianni is still working in three dimensions, but has also begun “painting and engraving through the paint into aluminum panels,” she says, and the new series suits her.  Here is  “Mountain Sketch #15” :

I have read the description of how she has worked this particular small wall piece,  but I remain mystified... and that’s a good thing.  Painted can diminish a mountain; Agnes Martin said of her attempts: “I used to paint mountains here in New Mexico and I thought my mountains looked like ant hills” (from “The Untroubled Mind”).  But Mastrianni’s mountain, while measurable in inches, looms large in the gallery. The sunlight’s etched reflection dazzles, just as it would in a distant vista. The combined textures and colors surprise and delight, and continue to pull the viewer in as s/he stands before this painting.  See the complete show... find your own favorite, and visit this artist’s website (beverleymastrianni.com).

Schuylerville, down the road a bit from Saratoga, might be best known as the site where General Burgoyne surrendered in 1777, a defining moment in the Revolutionary War. Schuylerville’s main street houses a few small businesses in lovely buildings; the Laffer Gallery is at 96 Broad Street (thelaffergallery.com).  Two artists here kept me walking back to their paintings to take another look: Leslie Peck and Teri Malo.

Leslie Peck’s still lifes are perfectly executed in flat strokes made of muted colors. In a different way than Cézanne’s, the objects float off the foundation tables and shelves and move forward, creating two planes (for me, anyway) on a single canvas.  What Peck does to pull the layers together is to add the color red. See “Martini Shaker and Frost”:

and detail:

The colors just keep coming forward and receding, in a kind of flow and rhythm that is unusual in a still life.  The frost outside is pushed far away, even though the whites and grays show up throughout the picture.  All that we see is warmth, and the textures of china and metal and tablecloth; yet, somehow, there is also air.

The second painter is Teri Malo, whose one-foot square painting, “Revisiting the Climbing Rock,” is here:

If Vermeer had painted cliff-face instead of drawing-rooms, if all those backgrounds of Annunciations came forward at once... they might look like this. The detail here and the overall impression of time etched into rock is incredible.  I found myself sitting in front of one of Malo’s works just trying to see how it was done... really, you must go and see for yourself....

Not a portrait, not a still life...

not a landscape, not an abstract work...

Not even an artist's studio, which had once been painted containing whole worlds, from Velazquez's "Las Meninas" to Courbet's model and "family" circle ...  but later in the nineteenth century, starting with Cezanne and with Van Gogh's bedroom, and then early in the twentieth century, Braque and Picasso and Matisse painted the stoves, the chairs, the easel, the bare walls, without any human presence. Lovely stuff, too.

But, instead, paintings of rooms. Just rooms: living rooms, dining rooms, without people. Painted, with all the attention and gestural brushwork of a bowl of fruit, or a vase of flowers. So still, no people.

"Still life" painting is a kind of calling card. "I can do this." The petals of a flower, the shine on a silver bowl, reflections of the wine, the bones of a fish. Always something that can be set upon a table.

But not a table. There may be a wall behind the table, but it will be: one wall.  These paintings that I have seen include a couple of walls, a door, some chairs, drapes sometimes, a rug... and they are very mysterious, and beautiful, the way a hill in France looks so perfect, somehow, with a small stone farm in the distance.  Someone has placed the BIG thing in just the right spot. And it waits.

Maybe the closest term is mise-en-scene, a term that means the sets, the props, the visual ideas of a film... the kinds of cut-outs and collages that will help a director and cinematographer work out the scenes of a film. I'm going with that... unless someone has a better idea. Here is my sketch, with easel, and so I promise a more perfect mise-en-scene soon: