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Woodstock Times - Smart Art | 7/9/2009 |
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by Paul Smart
One of the subtle secrets of the local art scene is that its best markets aren't necessarily local. Or at least, not in the Ulster County sense.
These days, everyone from our neck of the woods seems to be headed towards Hudson to show art, and hopefully sell their works to the antique hunters, designers and second-homers who still make the former whaling city's long Warren Street an upscale haven, filled with shops, restaurants and enterprising galleries focused on the region's best artists.
Opening this Saturday, July 11 at the newer Posie-Kviat Gallery, half-way up the main drag, is a show of four locally-known women, Phoenicia-based painter Anique Taylor, painter and printmaker Lora Shelley of Catskill, ceramicist and painter Astrid Nordness of West Shokan, and potter Sally Rothchild of Woodstock, collectively entitled "Kraft-Werk."
All four are prolific and oft-showing, as well as in the midst of major leaps forward in their work of late.
Taylor, who started off studying literature at the Sorbonne and Antioch College, has been building up a unique body of works that started off almost kitschly cute in their use of decorative elements, from quilt-patterns and Klimt-like explosions of designs to porcelain heads and other girlish attributes, but have recently grown denser, more mature, and much better assured in their use of multi-media elements. They've recently become more than idealized portraits and journey-like in their exploration of materials, expressions, and the varied meanings of all elements at play in them. We have grown to look forward to whatever new she has come up with.
Shelley, a blue collar-tuned Rhode Island School of Design graduate known for her moody waitresses and yearning young women, has similarly started to play around with her image surfaces, displaying not only her rich imagination and accomplished way with evocative compositions, but also her strong painterly techniques and underlying playfulness and concurrent seriousness of artistic intent.
Nordness, who teaches ceramics privately, is on a new roll, showing in a series of group shows around the area (and obviously on a spurt, to be showing with this group of ladies), as is Rothchild, who has worked as a studio potter for thirty years, participating in national juried shows. And currently reestablishing herself upstate after years in New York City.
The Artists' Reception for "Kraft-Werk" is taking place Saturday, July 11th, from 6 to 8:00 PM at Posie Kviat Gallery, 437 Warren Street, in Hudson.
The show runs through August 3. Talk about a perfect reason for a road trip...++
For further information visit www.posiekviat.com.
Love's 'Amazing Life'
There was a time a dozen years ago when it seemed that Justin Love's paintings were Woodstock's new look. They showed up in restaurants, gallery exhibitions, in people's homes, on post cards, and a roving VW Beetle, even. At first reminiscent of Picassos and Matisses, they gradually became their own thing...the doe-eyed versions of Beatles and teenage sylphs unlike anyone else's art around. Sort of pop, not overly serious, but worked with enough passion and constant effervescence to surpass their own shortcomings.
And then Love seemed to disappear from the scene. Oh, he never went away completely, spending time working out of his own studio gallery on the Village Green for a spell, or placing new paintings by his Loveland home and studio on Route 212 near Saugerties for weeks at a time. But he took to showing, and selling, his works elsewhere...and concentrating more and more on his other persona, the rock star Justin Love whose Loveland Band has become a quarterly regular on the local music scene for years. A great draw for dancers, as well as lovers of jangly, well-crafted pop music with a solid sixties' rhythm backbeat.
You could say Love made the Colony Caf￩, on Rock City Road, his Woodstock home away from home.
Which makes his new exhibition, This Amazing Life, at the once-ghost-like and now thoroughly revived Colony space, opening this Saturday, July 11 with a post-reception dance party featuring the artist's rock band, such a perfect mid-summer show for the town.
The new works, following up on a series of more abstract pieces Love was working on in town and Central America a few years back, were created over the past two years in Costa Rica, Jamaica, Rhinebeck's Omega institute, as well as here in Woodstock and Saugerties.
The opening reception runs 5 p.m.-8 p.m. at The Colony, located at 22 Rock City Road, , followed by the concert at 9 p.m.++
For further information call the Colony at 679-5342 or visit www.colonycafe.com. For more on Love, as in Justin, visit www.justinlove.com.
Sensuous encaustics
It would be easy to say that the encaustic photographer Leah MacDonald, who will be in town for an opening reception for her new exhibition at Galerie BMG this Saturday, July 11, has grown up with Bernard Gerson's gallery, having been showing there since its second show. But that would only be if one saw the borders of the wider art world falling off into nothingness beyond our views from here. Or failed to take into account this artist's rich history in the Bay area and her native San Francisco, as well as her role as a key player in the medium she's made her own for over a decade now.
"Female Fairytale," Gerson's latest collection of MacDonald works (which went on display last week), is made up of sensuous images of 29 different women all posing in the same Victorian wedding dress, each representing a different chapter in the artist's life as a woman, artist, wife and mother.
And yet the work appears to be as much about process, and the actual making of art, as metaphor or storytelling. These are clearly objects that, as art pieces, are desirable in themselves. And indicative of major advances MacDonald's making in her chosen media.
According to the gallery, "Starting with silver gelatin and Hahnemuhle fine art prints, the black and white images are adorned with beeswax, scratched, painted, sometimes torn and reconstructed, resulting in a strong, moody, feminine narrative. Using a diverse collection of film cameras and photographic tools, Leah's work merges nostalgic photographic methods with modern technology, along with an eclectic array of encaustic mixed media and various paper surfaces."
Seen in the context of her first works in BMG's second show, a group outing in autumn, 2004, as well as subsequent showings with two other photographers working with encaustics four summers ago, as well as a solo exhibition in the autumn of 2006, what's also clear is the new simplicity in MacDonald's vision. Which ends up making both her mastery of technique, and eye for composition and narrative, that much stronger.++
Female Fairytale, up through August 3, will be the subject of an artist's reception5 p.m.-7 p.m. Saturday, July 11. Regular gallery hours are Friday through Monday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., or other times by appointment. For more information, please call 845-679-0027 or visit www.galeriebmg.com.
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