new england art

Krieble Gallery at Connecticut’s Griswold Museum Features Landscapes of Tula Telfair

Fine arts magazine — Tula Telfair, Non Invasive Methods of Examination Were Lacking, o/c (2010) Photo: Griswold Museum

Imagine a medieval troupe with a pageant cart carrying the universe inside, waiting to be unpacked. Tula Telfair could be their set designer. The borders to each of her canvases are marked by alternating strips of solid color, save for the lower edges, creating a series of proscenium stages. This is scenery in several senses, then, waiting for performances as well as observers.

But the players never appear, only the audience. These paintings throw what is the forgotten obvious into high relief; we make them appear by looking. For many of them, our observation becomes the only recognizable human presence. There is something here of the 19th century passion for the panorama, encompassing the world in a single view.Fine Arts MagazineMore

Contemporary Artist Wolf Kahn: Discovering Symbolism in the Ordinary

What do you think of when you think about Wolf Kahn? Is it the fantasia palette, the barns glowing ember-like, the tangled rushes as if singed by a fire, or his hot pink shirt, green tie and strawberry socks? The artist did not disappoint on Thursday evening at the Center for Creative Printmaking in Norwalk, CT. His molten colored monoprints on exhibit downstairs, Kahn fielded questions about his work and life upstairs. Fine Arts MagazineMore

Griswold Museum’s Krieble Gallery Features Modern Art of Sewell Sillman

When it comes to matters of art, progress rarely takes a straight, clear, and single-minded path. Sewell Sillman’s career, however, suggests a different model—one that allows for stops and starts, for backtracking and bounding forward—in our consideration not just of Sillman as an artist but of his connection to the people, places, and events of art history. We can imagine this paradigm as a continuous, broken line. [1] That phrase, taken from an assignment Josef Albers gave at Black Mountain College in 1949, in which he asked his students to “draw a constant broken line,” is well suited to conceptualizing Sillman’s life’s work. While his tendency to build upon lessons from his teacher, Albers, and to push limits as he tirelessly evolved over the decades, emphasizes continuity with the past, he also made several definitive breaks over the course of his career. He fearlessly abandoned styles, media, and working environments when, in his assessment, they had run their course. “When Black Mountain was over, it was over; when Yale was over, it was over too, because things, attitudes dry up,” he stressed in a 1971 interview. “As soon as they codify, they dry up.” [2] Fine Arts MagazineMore

A New Abstract Expressionism Finds a Voice in the Work of a Connecticut Artist

David Taylor, Artist — David Taylor, Landscape, o/c, 45″x 36″

The Erector Square Building in New Haven, Connecticut has long stood as a landmark of American ingenuity. For decades, it served as the manufacturing headquarters for a number of well-known children’s toys, including the long-forgotten, Erector Set. Now the building’s maze of hallways, linked by well-worn and patched, honey-yellow oak floors, bear the scars of its industrious history; its imposing, sliding metal doors, at certain junctions, tell of a time when sections of the factory may have been closed off for production purposes. Their quilt-like pattern of shiny steel plates and neatly arrayed nail heads, together with a Rube Goldberg-like system of handles, pulleys and counter-weights have me imagining that these doors may have once seen service on a 19th century, Jules Verne apparatus, leagues beneath the ocean waves.More

19th Century American Artists and the Grand Tour

American Impressionism — Charles Harold Davis, Landscape in France (n/d), pencil on paper. American practitioner in Barbizon style. Collection of Lyman Allyn Museum

Italy had long been the most popular destination for Americans prior to the Civil War, but by the 1870’s, France had become the country of choice. For it then seemed that every young American artist yearned to embark on a Grand Tour of Europe and study in Paris. In fact, approximately twenty-two hundred were documented there during the post-Civil War period. Many were drawn to the city of light by the prestigious government-sponsored Ecole des Beaux Arts, or by the more accessible private academies, including the acclaimed Academie Julian. American artists also discovered, Grez-sur-Loing, Barbizon, and the adjacent Forest of Fontainebleau, where they worked alongside French painters. Their interest in Barbizon was partially in response to the radically modern changes effected by the Second Empire’s urban planner and architect, Baron Hausmann. Many Parisian neighborhoods were razed to allow for the erection of the larger buildings and wider boulevards needed to accommodate the rapidly growing population. The rural life at Barbizon exemplified the antithesis of the industrialization of Paris.More

Print Maker, Roxanne Faber Savage, Lets the Medium Speak for Itself

An industrial park is not a likely spot to discover passion, at least not the kind we report on in ARTES e-Magazine. But, the big, black SUV in the parking lot means that the ‘artist is in the house’. Print maker, Roxanne Faber Savage approaches her task with a particular passion that makes the process of creating art look both deliberative and revelatory at the same time. Roxanne is fast becoming a master of the trade, but allows herself to be surprised by the process of print making each day. This trait serves as a critic’s marker for what expertise in any creative endeavor should be all about: allowing for the element of surprise in a medium that an artist has come to know well.More

Chace Center in Rhode Island Features the Clay Wizardry of Arnie Zimmerman

The Museum of Art’s, Chace Center, the largest gallery at Providence’s Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), was filled to the brim with an astonishing array of architectural scale models and tiny figurines, fashioned entirely out of clay. The mash-up of small male figures – the sculptor’s version of Everyman with strikingly similar facial and bodily characteristics–brings to mind countless crowd scenes found in Hollywood-version, Depression Era movies. A collaboration of New York ceramicist Arnie Zimmerman and Lisbon architect Tiago Montepegado, the convoluted twists and turns of this bustling model city readily invite reflections on the history of man. Think Balzac’s La Comédie humaine or the densely populated panels of Pieter Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch: here mankind is seen variously at work, daydreaming, carousing, or marching off to war–in short, going through the daily grind of an industrialized society.More

19th Century American Artists and the Grand Tour

Charles Ebert, Church in Venice, circ. 1913, oil/canvas

Eighteenth-century American artists relied on European art long before they set sail for the Continent. Mezzotints after French and English portraits were imported by the hundreds during the eighteenth century and supplied the colonists with what was often their only contact with fine art. John Singleton Copley wrote to Benjamin West on November 12, 1766:

“It would give me inexpressible pleasure to make a trip to Europe where I should see those fair examples of art that have stood so long the admiration of all the world. … I think myself peculiarly unlucky in Living in a place into which there has not been one portrait brought that is worthy to be called a Picture within my memory, which leaves me at a great loss to guess the stile that You, Mr. Reynolds, and the other Artists practice.”

Yet Copley was more fortunate than most Colonial artists. He had access to the first art gallery to open in America. English-trained artist John Smibert (1688-1751) brought an art collection to Boston consisting of prints, copies of Old Master paintings, and casts after antique sculpture. Beginning in the 1730s, Bostonians could view oil on canvas copies of some of the best-known European paintings in his gallery-cum-studio. With few exceptions, colonists living outside Boston had to content themselves solely with mezzotints—mainly Baroque-style portraits of aristocracy—to learn about European art.More

Recent Paintings by Connecticut Artist, Lenny Moskowitz, Currently on View

The seaside village of Stony Creek, Connecticut lays under a blanket of white. The January wind whips up a dusting of confection, frosting any figure or form that stands its ground in defiance of the cold with sweet, but merciless, revenge. The Willoughby Wallace Library Art Gallery sits close by the harbor road and tonight, it welcomed guests to an exhibition entitled, Landscapes in Light: Recent Paintings by Lenny Moskowitz. Modestly appointed, the gallery and its installation of colorful works by Moskowitz served as a bastion of light and warmth against the night’s chill.

His work recalls the colors and saturated light of a summer day not so long ago. The collection of twenty-four works includes figurative paintings, a single still life and a generous presentation of landscapes, completed en plein air. The paintings reflect the spontaneity and confidence of an artist who is comfortable with bold color and equally at ease with the deconstruction of nature as abstraction. “A good painting is as much observed into existence as it is painted into existence”, the artist explains. “Paint is liquid, spontaneous and unpredictable. For me, working with an understanding of the subject, but without an attachment to the technical demands of the process, results in a more honest translation.”More

Westport Arts Center Creates a Dialogue with Brutalist Architecture

kornfeld 1 — Detail, Yale University Art Gallery, 1953, Architect, Louis I. Kahn. Photo by Andreas Kornfeld

Driving through New York’s scenic Hudson valley on her daily commute to Westport, Connecticut’s Arts Center, Terri Smith, Director of Visual Arts, always finds inspiration in the sinuous rivers and harmonic hills along her route. But, she often noted inharmonious forms rising like rough-honed pillars from the landscape. “My eyes stumbled upon these apparently clumsy, concrete buildings that seemed so incongruous in their natural surroundings,” she told me. “I couldn’t resist the urge to stop, stare, and wonder: “What is happening inside?”

Smith’s shock and curiosity is exactly the reaction that Brutalism provokes–an unexpected surprise and full engagement of the mind. Originally a European architectural movement that began in the 1950’s in response to Modernism’s sleek lines and machine-like precision, Brutalism’s (in French, béton brut, for ‘raw concrete’) run was brief, as it peaked in the early 1970’s.More