Tag Archives: art

Lou Beach

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I always begin a picture with the intention of creating something poetic, but invariably end up with a cartoon.
He became. He ate. He shat. He made stuff. He slept. He died.

Brandon Graving

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Artist’s Statement

My work has a natural immediacy, like a snapshot, capturing the chemical reaction of liquid inks as they are pushed into paper with a press, or sculptures that move with ambient air currents around them, interacting with the viewer.

I am interested in new realms within the field of unique prints via innovative technique and scale. The deeply embossed prints begin with an elaborately textured matrix consisting of natural forms, including aerial views of landscapes. I love the sensitivity of a wet piece of paper which perfectly records the wild and varied objects and inks, allowing saturation deep into it — or thick, reticulated ink poised on its surface, translating the moment the chemistry is caught and transfixed into this sculptural monoprint. The visceral quality of large scale prints offers a highly textured physicality only possible with the specialized equipment we have built for this purpose.

After years of bronze casting, my interest in paper has turned to casting trees with paper. Using crepe myrtle trees felled during hurricane Katrina, I form the spines of these sculptures with archival abaca paper over the trunks and branches, with the help of a structural steel armature. Comprising a series called Wonder, these sculptures are finished with individually torn translucent vellum tendrils. Some have drops of crystal at their extremities, which hold points of light, and defy gravity, like beads of water traveling along strawberry leaves. While these appear fragile, the abaca paper is incredibly durable, adding to the work’s conceptual information. With close inspection, the surface reveals the individual placement of fingertip-like pieces of abaca, forming a complex, textured surface. The kinetic aspect of these works allows them to exist in space, as we do. Animated by the viewer’s ambient air movements, they become directly involved with their audience, while producing a dance of shadows.

My work attempts to elicit an experience rather than recording or depicting an object or place; ideally, communicating aspects of being human, as I continue to grapple with that complexity.

Brandon Graving is a sculptor and printmaker, best know for her large-scale monoprint/sculpture installations. Graving’s 10.5 foot by 32 foot Ephemera: River with Flowers is the largest monoprint ever made by a single artist, and was on view at the New Orleans Museum of Art when the city was hit by Hurricane Katrina. Purchased by the Frederick R. Weismann Collection, this work has recently been exhibited in more than a dozen museums nationally. Graving’s work is in numerous private and public collections including the New Orleans Museum of Art. Her many grants and awards include the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award. A few years ago, she consolidated her print studios to found Gravity Press Experimental Print Shop, and has been working for the past four years on woodcut prints with S. Hannock and Sting which will open at the Metropolitan Museum in January, 2018.

Jill Parisi

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Artist’s Statement

My works celebrate the plant and animal kingdom’s wide palette and intricate patterns. The process for creating the flora and fauna existing in my imaginary ecosystems can be likened to jazz- I’m riffing on nature, taking colors, structures, etc. from a variety of species and places, and reconfiguring them in a new way. Materials such as translucent tissue weight papers and glass inform these fantastic and ephemeral species.

These hybrids of various botanical and zoological species employ careful hand-color application, drawing, hand cut components, and a combination of printmaking techniques. The resulting fictional works reflect a delicate intricacy that requires time-intensive craftsmanship. Many of my works react to viewer proximity, or the airflow within an exhibition space, making the pieces seem to come to life when approached, evoking a sense of playfulness.

Observation in the field, and the study of botanical and zoological texts and illustrations, from antiquity to the present, are important to my work. I am interested in all the possibilities for transforming paper and use techniques including sculpture, pyrography, lithography, intaglio, digital printing, and ebru and suminagashi marbling methods (from Turkey, Iran and Japan). I make some of my own papers, and others are obtained from sources in Nepal and Japan.

I’m influenced by numerous sources, such as the work of Maria Sibylla Merian, Mary Delaney, and Winifred Lutz; the writings of Donald Culross Peattie, the expertise of the master papermakers in the Japanese prefectures who specialize in refined hand-papermaking, and many of my contemporaries who explore print and paper in ways both old and new. But mostly my work is inspired by my curiosity for the rich possibilities that printmaking, handmade papers, and glass offer for creating works that push traditional boundaries and reflecting a reverence for the natural world. The works I make require patience and dedication, and serve as a meditation for me. It offers the viewer something to wonder at, a tonic to the fast paced, screen based world that we live in today.

Enhancing the space and transporting the viewer are forefront in creating my public commissions. They reflect my desire to bring joy and beauty to viewers in public spaces. My designs begin as works on paper, are translated into digitally, and then realized in durable materials. The resulting fictional works reflect a delicate intricacy that requires time-intensive craftsmanship. When translated into glass, the viewer can see the changing light of day, and the resulting colorful reflections moving accordingly, cast onto the viewers and/or the surrounding architecture.

Jill Parisi lives and works in Washington, DC and High Falls, NY, and is an Associate Professor of Printmaking at SUNY New Paltz. Awards include a 2005 NYFA Fellowship in Printmaking/Drawing/Artists’ Books and public art commissions for NYC’s MTA/Arts for Transit program 2012 and DC Government Services 2015. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including the Krakow Print Triennial 2012 and 15’, and is in the collections of University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital; NYU Hospital Women’s Center; and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. She is represented by Kenise Barnes Fine Art in Larchmont, NY.

Brenda Goodman

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Artist’s Statement

Most of my work comes from many marks I put on the surface. Then one shape pops out and starts to speak to another shape, and I just sort of put them in touch with each other until a feeling emerges and I develop it. When I worked earlier with symbols, I created the shapes. I would have something or someone in mind and draw those shapes until one appeared, and I would say, “That’s the one!” Later the marks were all from my unconscious. It becomes a very intuitive process. I am as surprised as the viewer very often because I don’t always know why or how I arrived at a certain painting, but what I do know for sure is it is from my gut and it’s honest and real and speaks its truth. Sometimes they reveal something to me; sometimes it’s not so clear. But either way something strong and emotional is being communicated.

In between my primary interest of abstract /figurative work I do series of self portraits which always satisfies a deep emotional need in me.

I would say endurance is just built into my constitution. I don’t do things halfway or give up easily. If I lose something I will spend hours, days, or weeks till I find it. I resolve every painting I do and won’t let it leave the studio until it feels absolutely right to me. At almost 74 now, my knees and back are giving me trouble (welcome to the club), but I won’t stop painting what is in my heart, and I will never retire! Anyway, have you ever heard a painter say they have retired? No….they just paint till they can’t anymore.

Brenda Goodman was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1943, studied at the College for Creative Studies, and moved to New York City in 1976. Since 1973 she has had 38 one-person shows and been included in over 200 group shows in galleries and museums throughout the United States, including the 1979 Whitney Biennial, Edward Thorp Gallery, Nielsen Gallery, David & Scweitzer Contemporary, and Jeff Bailey Gallery. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, New Yorker, Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, The Detroit Free Press, and Huffington Post and is included in a number of collections such as Agnes Gund, Santa Barbara Museum, and Detroit Institute of the Arts. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2015, she was included in the American Academy of Arts and Letters annual invitational and received an Award in Art. In May 2017 she received an honorary doctorate of fine arts from her alma mater. Since 2009, she has lived and worked in the Catskill Mountains.

Malala Andrialavidrazana

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Artist’s Statement

Cartography is both art and science as well as a powerful tool to control civilisations. Maps and atlases are fascinating because of significant information they can offer within a specific period of time. They are not faithful representations of reality, but they sometimes convey strong ideas which are the keys to understanding historical narratives — a determining element in my selections.

Influenced by my formal architectural training, I use the photographic medium to explore the crossing universes and boundaries of nature and culture. Social changes and spatial structures in a globalized world are at the heart of my artistic reflections; by examining in-between spaces, I propose an open frame where borders do not exist.

Malala Andrialavidrazana (b. 1971, Madagascar) lives and works in Paris, France. Her work has been shown world-wide, including at Fondation Donwahi, Ivory Coast (2016), Bamako Encounters, African Biennale of Photography, Mali (2005/2015), Théâtre National de Chaillot, France (2015), New Church Museum, South Africa (2014), La Maison Rouge, France (2014), SUD Triennial, Cameroon (2013), Gulbenkian Foundation, Portugal/France (2013), SAVVY, Germany (2013), Focus Mumbai, India (2013), Biennale Bénin, Benin (2012), KZNSA, South Africa (2012), Tiwani, UK (2012), DIPE, China (2011), Pan African Festival, Algiers (2009), UCCA, China (2008), Centrale Électrique, Belgium (2007), Rencontres d’Arles, France (2007), Herzliya Museum, Israel (2007), Force de l’art, France (2006) and more.

Jeanne Heifetz

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Artist’s Statement

[W]ayfarer, there is no road, the road is made by walking.
— Antonio Machado, Proverbs and Songs 29

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
—Theodore Roethke, The Waking

As a child, I was always afraid of making the wrong decision. Selecting from many possible options was torture unless I could find a convincing rationale for my choice, some external justification beyond my own desire. Fear made me superstitious. I enlisted numerology, mythology, arcane patterns of all sorts to confirm the “rightness” of my decisions.

This body of work confronts decision-making head on. Still craving a system, I borrow one from nature: Plateau’s laws, which govern the branching and growth of many natural forms. Within that system, I improvise, lighting out for the territory without a map. Each drawing grows by slow accretion as I allow myself (or force myself) to make hundreds of tiny sequential decisions.

Working at the micro level, I have no idea of the macro consequences until I step back from the piece. Even then, because I work in ink, I can only move forward, building on what I have already laid down. There’s no turning back. The tiny decisions are irreversible, like scars and other indices of the unidirectionality of our lives. In this way, making the work is like life: a series of incremental choices whose full import we may not know for years.

There is no road: we make the road by walking, and learn by going where to go.

Jeanne Heifetz is an artist and independent curator based in Brooklyn. She has had solo and two-person shows at galleries, nonprofit art centers, and universities in California, Connecticut, Idaho, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, and Oregon. Her work has also been included in group shows at galleries, universities, and museums across the United States as well as in Italy, Germany, England, France, and Israel. Her drawings have been included in Manifest’s International Drawing Annual and in the curated registry of The Drawing Center. Heifetz holds an A.B. from Harvard and an M.A. from NYU, neither of them in art.

Nathan Brujis

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Nathan Brujis was born in 1971 in Lima, Peru. He studied art and philosophy at Brandeis University and graduated from the American University of Washington with a master’s degree. He has been awarded the Deborah Josepha Cohen Memorial Award for Excellence in Painting in 1992, the New York Studio School Faculty Award in 1994, and il Premio per la Pittura Lorenzo il Magnifico at the Florence Biennale d’Arte Contemporanea in 2001 and 2003. He has exhibited extensively in New York, Lima, Peru, and Italy. He lives and works in New York.
Artist’s Statement

My paintings and drawings have evolved over time and continue to do so. They have undergone several shifts, like the one in 1996 when my work became completely non- objective. At that time I abandoned any direct representation of recognizable objects in favor of the abstract forces of two-dimensional images to convey the meaning in the works. Nevertheless, the works continued to carry the feeling of nature. I allowed them to remain on the side of the expressive and lyrical through a painting process of instant reaction and subconscious image searching. I never know what a work is going to be when I begin. Each piece is its own search, related to other works of the same period via form and content. Some works find themselves quickly while others take years to make. Some are like a song or a short story while others are more like a complex symphony or novel.

All the paintings and drawings arrive at their own image. To achieve this image, I allow personal experiences, events and ideas of the times, nature, mood, my environment, the art of the past, and most importantly the visual language I have developed over the past 14 years, to come together and create a sense of place. This place, a window or mirror into a landscape, still life, or por­trait, made up of simple geometric forms arranged in layers and organized in groups, solidifies into a multidimensional experience of color, space, meaning, and light.

Sandy Litchfield

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Artist’s Statement

My recent work explores evolutionary cycles of cities. My paintings are informed by a diverse collection of imagery including old distorted maps, pictures of ancient and mythic cities, utopian blueprints and early renaissance landscapes. These are typically combined with my own photographs in studies using collage and paint. I look for compositions that emphasize our positional relationships to place- like being over, under, around, or inside. I also pay attention to the flows of traffic and the ways that transportation and infrastructure are formed over and around the existing environment. As living systems, cities share an uncanny resemblance to forests– both grow upwards and outwards on vertical and lateral frameworks; both can appear as glittering spectacles of light with variable contrast; and both harbor diversity and sustenance. The – the ways that urban infrastructure grows over (and out of) an old collapsed edifice- is also comparable to forests. Just as a dead tree provides nourishment for new under-growth, so do the old structures of a city enrich the cultural heritage of the metropolis. My approach to making art is initially research driven. Once an artwork has begun to take form, my process shifts away from the research towards a more intuitive approach, responding to formal elements, materials and surface. I use a range of painterly mediums along with collage and digital media. This method- of layering, cutting, drawing, tearing, painting, scanning, printing and gluing- obscures the distinctions between the mechanical image and the handmade.

Born in New York City, Sandy Litchfield lives in Amherst, Massachusetts where she is an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts. She received her BFA from the University of Colorado and her MFA from UMass Amherst. In 2007 Litchfield attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been recognized with grants from the New Britain Museum, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and Puffin Foundation. Litchfield has exhibited in museums including the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Nicolaysen Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, and Hunterdon Museum. Her work has been selected for review by the Brooklyn Rail, New American Paintings and the Boston Globe.

Yura Adams

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Artist’s Statement

I am a painter working within a contemporary practice; using color and energy to conduct the voices of poetry and science in my work. My studio is in an industrial building located in the middle of fields that have mostly gone back to nature and my paintings are a visual response to rhythmic forms I observe in the environment.

My most recent body of work is titled Nature Dress and is based on diversity of pattern and fluid motion in nature. Walking the farm road is an influential activity. I look at the flow of the adjacent Williams River, the visuals of the storms I have to beat to get back to my car, bird and plant patterning, and especially, color temperature shifts driven by changing light. When painting, I like to improvise with hand-cut stencils, sprayed and poured paint, and loose drawing. I jumble my painting supplies; quotidian and refined materials side by side. It is important to me to instigate chance encounters with materials. Taking as many risks as I can, I like to hook my intuition to my painting practice as I search for an idiosyncratic version of beauty.

Yura Adams is a painter with an interdisciplinary career based in the San Francisco Bay area, Lower East Side of NYC, the Hudson Valley and currently Western Massachusetts. Adams received her BFA and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and is currently represented by the John Davis Gallery in Hudson, New York. Her work has been exhibited extensively on both coasts of the U.S. and she has been the recipient of two NEA grants, three DEC grants and was selected for the New York Foundation of the Arts Mark program.

Mark Perlman

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Artist’s Statement

Although there is seldom a preconceived image that I start with, there is a clear determination of where I want to travel with each painting. It is rather like being blindfolded and asked to walk around the land you have lived on most of your life. Also, imagine cliffs surrounding all the exterior edges. Although there is a familiarity of the space you have walked many times, there is the danger of going too far in any one direction. Over the years I have been continually fascinated and in search of combining luminosity with the layered surface of buried or forgotten images. In an attempt to record my present and past thoughts and memories, I place as many images, markings and words as possible into the process of each painting. I am continually editing myself in hopes of reaching a balance of noise and solitude. The images and textured surfaces represent the energy and activity level I experience throughout the day, while the light and open space of the paintings signifies the more reflective moments.

Mark Perlman was born in a small steel mill town outside Pittsbugh in 1950 and moved several times before settling in Sebastopol, Ca. in 1988. After teaching at several universities over a 35 year period he settled in 1988 at Sonoma State University, where he is currently still teaching. His paintings have been exhibited throughout the United States as well as in museums in Russia, Japan, and China. In addition, his work is included in hundreds of private collections as well as several public institutions. He has been the recipient of two National Endowment grants.