The next generation of artists faces a variety of daunting and complex challenges. Principle among them is the ever-shifting nature of the visual art world and what constitutes art, itself. Paint on canvas or graphite on paper is increasingly relegated to the mundane as installation and performance pieces vie for public attention and the critics’ affirmative nod. Added to this is the increasingly crowded field of self-declared artists who appear to bank on personal style and a well-managed public image to propel them into the spotlight. A third factor is the intrusion of technology into the artist’s studio and the exponential increase in low-cost facsimile works produced with a mass market in mind. The few galleries that attract the uninformed consumer, who is finding it increasingly difficult to differentiate between computer-generated simulations of original art or aftermarket reproductions produced en masse in foreign countries, do so in the name of revenue production. Especially in these difficult economic times, with 125 galleries going out of business in New York City in 2009, alone, the need to survive at any cost is paramount. Fine Arts Magazine

So, what does the future hold for a keen artistic eye, a well-trained hand and the painterly results of hours, days and years spent in the studio? I followed the hallways of the gallery/studio space in the newest portion of the college, lined with drawings and paintings for the recent senior show, across the lawn to the back door of the original campus building. I was then led up a narrow stairway to a comfortable conference room where the recent graduates were waiting for me. This carefully-selected group of nascent artists from the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts, in Old Lyme, Connecticut believe they know and have the credentials to prove it. In this conversation with Leah Albert, Christopher Gann, Nathan Keay and Adam Matano, I discussed their views on the nature of training to work as an artist, their approach to their own work and their perspective on the art world that they are about to step into.

The common bond for all of them was a belief in the integrity of their work and its ability to impact on the world in some way. As sculptors and painters, they had honed their skills through a rigorous four-year classically-oriented training program, focusing on studio methods and the mastery of figurative drawing. They all shared the conviction that their training in representing the human figure formed an essential foundation for whatever was to come next.

Bright, ambitious and talented, they had refined their training at the college to match their own personalities and interests. “At first, we worked to please the instructors, said one, “but after a while we found our own voices and began to explore subject matter on our own terms.” Steeped in the classical forms and techniques of the Renaissance, their world initially consisted of Titian, Carvaggio and Rubens. Immersion of this kind in the Old Masters is tried and true. It may serve as boot camp for star-struck young high school students who believe they are naturally-inclined to be artists. But, the initial round of lessons teaches a different story: Good abstract art, good representational art, good conceptual art are all founded on the basics—and these basics haven’t changed very much for the last millennium or two.

Yet, each young artist was anxious to discover what lay beyond the traditional parameters of endless hours in the studio with model and still life,  gradually able to take their new-found skills and explore the greater world on their own terms. All agreed that scheduled class projects provided too limited a time for such experimentation. But, with the encouragement of individual instructors and the natural curiosity borne of youth, they eventually found their distintively creative voice.  Dean and Vice President of Academic Affairs, Laura Zarrow , explained to me that, in the future, the goal of the institution will be to provide a broad range of liberal studies opportunities for Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts students, allowing them the opportunity to apply their creative skills in a wide variety of work environments outside of an artist’s studio setting.

For these four emerging artists, though, the opportunity to discuss their work in the context of an overall life-plan (two with wives and children to take into account) and to consider the issues of a challenging art market and difficult economic times, seemed welcome. A review of their current work and vision for future contributions to the fine art marketplace suggests that, with the same diligence and determination they have demonstrated to date, the art world will be stronger for them:

Leah Elizabeth Albert– Articulate and focused, Leah examines the work of American painters of the 19th century—specifically, the Hudson River School. Considering the sublime in its true, historical context, seen in the work of artists such as Frederick Church and Thomas Cole in their rendering of  the majesty and terror of nature’s awesome power and beauty, Leah turns ‘these hyper-romantic landscapes [which] can been seen as saccharine, contrived clichés’, by today’s more sophisticated standards , on their ear . Exploring ‘their most beautiful and poignant elements, while leaving the absurd subversions of later interpretations behind, she re-examines ‘the grandeur of the unknown’ through 21st century eyes.

An overtly physical painter who works in larger scale (similar to the Hudson School), her work brings the color and powerful forms of the landscape to the forefront, allowing for the abstraction that occurs when natural shapes are interpreted as two-dimensional objects, removed from our perceptual expectations, and expressed in their purest form. Albert plays in the landscapes of her imagination, allowing colors to drip and fuse, blend or form firm boundaries, rise from earthen tones to meet un-naturally vibrant skies and rolling mountain horizons. The artist interprets the world with palette and brush, in much the same way as the Hudson painters created an invented landscape—that is, a construct reflecting their view of an industrialized world in transition, with nature as the first victim and Man soon to follow.

Albert, too, creates an idealized world of ‘both actual and exaggerated fantastic landscapes’, with cotton candy skies, tumbling waterfalls positioned in her scenes with movie-set precision and towering pines appearing to defy gravity, raising the ante for the survival of these imaginary, fragile settings, along with our hopes for an ideal world. Irony and mild cynicism play like background music in her work, as she catalogues and documents the grandeur of nature’s splendor, but appears to understand better than most, the sad reality that this is a world no longer within our reach.

Christopher Gann– Serious and mindful of his responsibility as an artist with the skill set to document the world as he sees it, Gann constructs landscapes of a very different kind. His intricately-rendered, vertiginous heaps of high-tech detritus are stacked to a point of tumbling back on all of us—an apt metaphor for the technological nightmare that has befallen contemporary civilization (see above). Less a cascade than a symbolic explosion of the collective tension we all feel as privacy and free time are devoured by the machines we feel we need to own, his narrative paintings serve as a sophisticated parable for our modern-day, high-tech plight.

Gann begins with a loose sketch and builds his visual story from there. He considers his work ‘sculptural’, in that his shapes take on weight and form as he progresses. Working on the border between abstraction and representational ism, his goal is to achieve ‘a feeling of momentum, excitability and vertigo.’ In both his painting and his installation work, the artist embraces a charged social and environmental agenda. Waste and abuse, mis-use and mis-appropriation are themes that resonate in today’s world. When these issues finally spill from the canvas, out into the room, he has our undivided attention.

In a hauntingly prophetic work entitled, Oil Spill, Gann captures the claustrophobic sensation that all living creatures must feel as a glut of crude oil blankets the landscape. Dark, iridescent and viscous, heaps of the black stuff flow toward the viewer, threatening everything in its wake. A slender thread of civilization sits on a distant horizon, backlit by a narrow, but increasing dimmer (one imagines) band of light. Intelligent life is being squeezed from both directions. With all signs of life eradicated by the flood of crude, we can only be reminded of the pictures of the Gulf of Mexico disaster being broadcast into our homes each day. The fine line between art and life is blurred, once again.

Adam Matano– This sculptor brings big ideas to the table for future galleries and museums. Focused and intent on the role he wants to play in the professional art world, his small studio office is crammed with ideas. Reflecting his focused training as a figurative artist, he has extended his creative hand into the animal world. In Barbara Kingsolver’s, Prodigal Summer, she points out that one trait of plants and animals is that they exist in the pure realm of the present. The fact that they do not have the capacity to consider their own aesthetic beauty makes them all the more worth cherishing and preserving. Matano would agree.

He points out that ‘animals simply exist. They don’t require [or look for] meaning.’ They are fully immersed in the present moment. Matano’s work is a search beyond the intellectual exercise of aesthetics in nature to the essential beauty that lies beneath the surface. He seeks compelling gestures to fit abstract ideas. He believes that the gestures and structural elements of animals, in particular, hold representations of the emotions that translate concepts like beauty, suffering and love into tangible form.

In a monumental work that clearly served as the centerpiece for the recent exhibition at the Lyme College of Art was, Zarafa, a nearly nine-foot tall, acrylic sculpture in earth tones of a giraffe, writhing in obvious distress. Its position on an undersized, three-foot pedestal in the gallery’s towering rotunda only adds to the drama. Zarafa is portrayed in an awkward and seemingly hopeless tangle of its own limbs, producing a uniquely uncomfortable emotional state for the viewer, as well. Presenting the same dilemma that many naturalists experience in the wild, the gallery visitor’s choice is to intervene in some way—to offer relief or help for this suffering animal—or to stand passively by and let nature run its course. Survival of the fittest is a primal instinct that runs deep in our veins. And so we decide, like passing strangers, stepping over a fallen stranger on a sidewalk, to move on to the next gallery. Zarafa is a brilliant and detailed study in muscular tension, anatomical features extended to the limit without breaking and the unspoken story of this living creature’s private struggle. Matano’s version of the ‘essence of beauty’ does in fact, lay on an entirely different plane that anything we might ever experience or know.

Nathan Alan Keay– On the opening night of the exhibition, a beaming Nathan Keay stood at the center of the gallery with his creations, as though he had just given birth to something important—and in fact, he had. His multi-media installation demonstrated his command over a variety of materials and techniques, but also his ability to bridge the gap between two apparently unrelated artistic mediums and create a coherent artistic statement. His work is a deceptively simple exploration of form and texture, as he first weaves thousands of feet of sisal fiber into tubes large enough to accommodate a Persian princess being smuggled out of an ornate palace as contraband ; but, then he shapes these amorphous, fibrous ‘pipes’ on internal stands into biomorphic forms that seem to take on lives of their own. Free-standing and wall-mounted, these sculptural objects invite closer scrutiny and perhaps (like all good sculpture demands) a gentle touch when no one is looking, to get a measure of the textural properties of these creatures-come-to-life. Simple is best in most cases and, in this case, Keay’s work takes on dramatic, life-like proportions. Painstakingly created on an 8 ½ foot tall loom, the artist interlaced one thread at a time, like a DNA scientist creating a new life form, in order to explore the creative possibilities with this mundane and plebian material. Out of the laboratory came previously unknown organisms, quizzically named after their dictionary-bound phonetic equivalents: yü-ni-?valv and gas-tr?-?päd.

Drawing on the texture and contours of these free-form sculptures, Keay then turned the tables and had his newly-created objects serve as subject for a series of monoprints. Here, he translated three-dimensional forms into two-dimensional images. Drawing on an inked plexiglass sheet, the result was a series of images of rich black, abstracted bands, some incised with twisted lines, like thick, knotted ropes; others merely flat planes of black against warm white paper, flowing like a wide, inky river of black on a diagonal across the page. Perhaps informed by Robert Motherwell’s black and white Expressionist genre, Keay builds a seamless visual bridge between his suite of monoprints and the dimensional objects of twine nearby. But, like the importance of a bride and groom at a wedding— without one or the other in the room,there may still be a party. But with both present, Keay’s combined work becomes a celebration of form over function.

by Richard Friswell, Executive Editor