Painting by Elaine Ralston.
“Get a leg up and over the icebergs of old man winter at a meltingly warm and notoriously nourishing opening reception,” noted the collective gallery’s publicist-du-jour, Dave Channon, of the always-raucous and specifically-unpredictable exhibitions that ramble through a host of apartment-sized upstairs room and launch each month with one of the best community parties around. All pot luck, of course.
All we can say for sure about the offerings this month, besides a loosely-expected sense of relief in the works on hand, is that Elaine Ralston will fill the solo show room with her neo-realist and somewhat Impressionistic still lives and landscapes, the latter being of local mountainscapes, as well as easily Romanticized imaged painted in Ireland and Italy.
Ralston, who lives in Olivebridge and works as a dowser, is a member of the Arts Society of Kingston (ASK), WAAM, the Kent Art Association, and The Garrison Art Center, has described herself as an artist “who believes that everything we see in the universe is vibratory in its being. Each object vibrates at different rates and it is through our process of realizing these vibrations through color and light that certain forms appear to us.”
The opening runs from 6 p.m.-9 p.m., and often later, Saturday, March 19 at 60 Main Street in Phoenicia. Please bring food or beverages…and an attitude ready for spring forward…++
For more infrmation call 688-2142 or visit www.ArtsUpstairs.com.
Permanently speaking
The Woodstock Artists Association and Museum’s Permanent Collection has had a busy time over the past year, as evidenced in a recent collective thank you sent out to its membership and support community. A number of new works were added to the collection, which has been gaining in stature via both additions and changing attitudes towards many of the Modernists and other Woodstock artists whose work make up its majority. And significant attention was leant the whole of our town’s cultural legacy with the loan of a work to a new exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art that opened last week.
Last year’s donors, according to an announcement and public thank you sent out by WAAM director Josephine Bloodgood, include Janis Conner and Joel Rosenkranz, Ruth Drake, Henry T. Ford and Michael Knauth, Calvin Grimm, Peter and Chagit Heller, Robert Kipniss, Gabriele E. Margules, Janet Nelson, Alan Siegel, and Sylvia Leonard Wolf. Using their own “small purchase fund,” the Permanent Collection also acquired three important paintings: Arnold Blanch’s Portrait of Hervey White (1930s) and Lucile Blanch’s Self Portrait (1922) and Men at Work (1940s).
Most importantly, the institution saw its photography collection grow through two major gifts. In one, 11 works by Manuel Komroff and 27 by Nathan Resnick, both pioneers of the medium’s more abstract uses, were donated by Jean Young…and featured in last fall’s exhibition “The Third Eye.” Noted New York City photo gallerist Howard Greenberg and his wife, Ellen, also donated 92 classic photo works, mostly by Konrad Cramer but including photo works by others, such as Florence Ballin Cramer, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Adrian Siegel, as well as photos of Konrad Cramer by Edward Johnson, Stowall Studios and Alfred Stieglitz.
As for that Smithsonian connection…George C. Ault’s Late November in the Catskills was chosen last year to be part of the new exhibition, “To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America,” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum March 11 to September 5. The whole show, including the WAAM piece, will later travel to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri and to the Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, Georgia. The exhibition centers on five paintings Ault made between 1943 and 1948 depicting the crossroads of Russell’s Corners in Woodstock. Other artists in the collection include Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent and Andrew Wyeth. ++
For more on all things WAAM, visit the Woodstock Artists Association & Museum at its galleries and offices on the Village Green, go online at www.woodstockart.org, or call 679-2940.
Like Thoreau
Ready to start thinking about long languorous summer days punctuated by the constant sound of running water, fireflies alighting a mountain meadow in front of the porch you’ve perched yourself on “for creative reasons?” Got a whole host of creative projects that need finishing, and looking for some time away from everything to get things done?
It’s again that time of year when the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development is accepting applications for its Platte Clove Artists-in-Residence program — which involves the granting of a free week in a rustic cabin, without running water mind you, located above a waterfall high above Woodstock.
The numbers of local artists who have pulled inspiration, and loads of completed paintings, books, photographs, and musical compositions out of this rustic treasure, are legion…and all around us. Think Mariella Bisson, James Gurney, James Krueger…and both me and my wife, Fawn Potash, on separate occasions.
The place is simple in a Catskillian way…a main room with woodstove and dark wainscoting, a simple kitchen with stove and refrigerator, and two upstairs rooms under the eaves, reachable via a ladder-like set of stairs. Outside is an outhouse. Non-potable water can be had, plentifully, from a nearby creek. For drinking water…bring it in.
Bathing is in a nearby waterfall. There’s spotty phone service, no discernible wireless. As the Catskill Center points out, it’s as close as you can get to the old haunts, and experiences, of the Hudson River greats and grand Romantics of the 19th century, from Thomas Cole and Asher Durand to Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau.
And no, it’s not in anyone’s mother’s backyard.
How to gain this bit of heaven? Artists in all mediums are encouraged to apply by submitting applications through Friday, April 1. Materials can be found online at www.catskillcenter.org or calling 845-586-2611.
This is a treasure…apply only if you or your work is one, too…++
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