Category: Artists

Alan Bray “Inward Maine” at Garvey/Simon. October 12 – November 11, 2017

Alan Bray “Inward Maine” at Garvey/Simon. October 12 – November 11, 2017
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ALAN BRAY: Inward Maine

October 12 – November 11, 2017

Alan Bray, Swallowed, 2017, casein tempera on panel, 18 x 24 inches

September 15, 2017 New York, NY (Chelsea) — Garvey|Simon is pleased to present Alan Bray: Inward Maine, an exhibition featuring the artist’s recent casein landscape paintings.  This will be the eighth solo show in New York for the Maine-based artist, and his second solo at Garvey|Simon.  The opening reception will take place on October 12, 6-8 pm.  The artist will be present.  

Alan Bray explores the landscape of inland Maine via quiet rambles in the woods, kayak trips down forested streams, and most recently, Google Earth, where he can observe his surroundings from a foreign, aerial view.  A poetic and visionary painter, his often-peculiar vistas celebrate the phenomena of nature in the ordinary.

Bray lives and paints in the central Maine Highlands (a less-traveled part of the state), where he was born, raised, and continues to reside. It is the attachment and familiarity with this unique natural environment that provides him with succor.   
 
After studying at the Art Institute of Boston and the University of Southern Maine, Bray traveled to Florence in the 1970s to attend Villa Schifanoia Graduate School of Fine Arts. It was in Italy where he discovered his passion for such masters as Fra Angelico and Pietro Lorenzetti.  Bray was surprised by the modernity of what he previously knew only from books and considered “funny Christian stuff.” During this seminal time in his life, Bray’s interest in casein painting was kindled. Casein is a milk-based tempera paint with virtually no drying time. Bray’s use of it necessitates thousands of miniscule brushstrokes built up in layers from a mirror-smooth void of white ground. Renaissance painting continues to inform his work as a mature artist, seen through the use of defined edges, bold colors, and the lack of atmospheric or romantic aspects in his paintings.  
 
Purity and crispness of line are found throughout Bray’s work.   Some critics see characteristics of the surreal in his paintings.  Says Bray, “I smile and wince when I hear my work described as surreal, because these paintings are based in actual phenomena,” although he admits that his work often displays jarring juxtapositions.  Much of the phenomenological quality in his art comes from terrain vague, a French term that refers to in-between places.  For Bray, this space is between the natural and the man-made world.  None of his paintings feature people, rather we see the hand of man, often from the area’s forestry industry. “Even good forestry can be ugly,” he notes.    His compositions often develop over time as he witnesses nature slowly altering intimately familiar terrain. He captures quiet moments of transformation that would likely be unnoticed by passersby.  
 
His newest painting, Swallowed, 2017, (see image above) is inspired by years of watching a dilapidated old house slowly succumb to the elements.  Bray found inspiration in the huge, undulating cloud on the horizon echoed by the wavelike clump of Sumac.  To Bray’s eye, the movement of grass at that moment seemed oceanic, causing the house to resemble a sinking ship.

Alan Bay, January Thaw, 2016, casein tempera on panel, 18 x 24 inches

In January Thaw, 2016, Bray focuses almost entirely on the icy landscape.  Golden sunlight moves over mountains and is reflected in the frozen surface of a lake, giving way in spots to deep blue areas of snow melt.  Yet in this vista, tracks are seen — perhaps from a cross-country skier, or a snowmobile, but surely manmade.  This is the subtly that defines Alan Bray’s paintings.


Where:  Garvey I Simon
547 W. 27 St, Suite 207
New York, NY, 10001
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 12, 6 – 8pm
Contact:  Liz Garvey liz@garveysimon.com or 917-796-2146

Garvey|Simon is a contemporary boutique gallery with a special focus on drawing, works-on-paper, unusual materials and design. Our art advisory service, founded in 1999 by Elizabeth K. Garvey, specializes in American, Modern, and Contemporary Art

For more information:

call 646-869-7637
call or text 917-796-2146 
email liz@garveysimon.com

 

Todd Watts Blanchard Weather Report at Pho Pa Gallery

Todd Watts Blanchard Weather Report at Pho Pa Gallery

TODD WATTS
Blanchard Weather Report

July 19 – August 19, 2017
Opening Reception | Thursday, July 20, 5-7pm

http://www.phopagallery.com/current-exhibition/

About the Exhibition

Todd Watts’ solo exhibition, Blanchard Weather Report features 40 photographs that explore our relationship with art and the world we live in.

Todd Watts writes: “The Blanchard Weather Report began in 2014 as a conversation about art and the earth, carried out in pictures over the Internet with friends and colleges around the world. The exhibition are the pictures from that conversation. The images themselves are a combination of lessons from art history with reflections on climate change.”

Todd Watts graduated from the sculpture department at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1971. From 1972 to 1979 he taught photography at his alma mater and at Hunter College. In 1973, he founded an architectural photography company. His clients included Phillip Johnson, I.M. Pei, Richard Polshek, and he was commissioned by Minoru Yamasaki to photograph the construction of the World Trade Center in its final stages. In 1974, he was commissioned by New York’s Lee Witkin Gallery to print Berenice Abbott’s first portfolio. Subsequently, he produced seven more Abbott portfolios in his New York studio. In 1974, he bought a house in Blanchard, Maine; and he, with Jemma Gascoine, moved permanently to Maine in 2000.

Watts’s work—with his exploration of the changing environment, genetics, and resulting cultural ramifications—has been exhibited and collected internationally, including “New Lamps for Old,” at the Grey Gallery in New York, and “Passenger Pigeon,” at the The Museum of Photography in Chicago. Recent Maine exhibitions of his work include: “String too Short to Use,” at the University of Maine Museum of Art in Bangor, and the “Honors Show,” at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA). His work is represented in Maine by the Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland.

 

Art New England March/April 2017 Mark Wethli: Piper Cub; Sam Cady: Parts of the Whole

Art New England March/April 2017 Mark Wethli: Piper Cub; Sam Cady: Parts of the Whole

Art New England  March April 2017

 

Mark Wethli: Piper Cub; Sam Cady: Parts of the Whole

Center for Maine Contemporary Art • Rockland, ME • cmcanow.org • Through May 14, 2017 and May 21, 2017

By: Carl Little

Sam Cady, skylight with blue shadow, 1979, oil on shaped canvas, 22 x 48″.

The painter Sam Cady is renowned for his shaped canvases in which, to borrow from the title of this retrospective, parts of the whole are presented, often with trompe-l’oeil precision. The 34 pieces in this show, produced between 1970 and 2016, offer a wide-ranging selection of Cady’s cut-outs, from a construction trailer on Canal Street in New York City to a section of the Knife Edge trail atop Mount Katahdin in northern Maine.

Born in Boothbay Harbor in 1943 and a longtime resident of Friendship in the midcoast, Cady has taken a special interest in coastal motifs. Islands are among his favorite subjects, especially Sand and Little Sand, which lie between Hatchet Cove and Muscongus Bay. He presents them in profile or from a gull’s-eye angle, their edges cut to incorporate spruce trees and their reflections. The illusion is astonishing.

The show also features a group of Cady’s urban images. As a teacher in the MFA program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City for 25 years, he had the opportunity to study and render the Big Apple in what might be called a synecdochical manner. Two urban towers, midtown Manhattan, 1998, is a dramatic skyward view of shimmering buildings cutting into the sky like a trapezoidal wedge of glass.

Skylight with blue shadow and stairwell roof house, N.Y.C., both from 1979, bring to mind some of Lois Dodd’s city scenes. Like Dodd, Cady is a tonalist when it comes to color, for the most part preferring a quiet palette. Form, space and chiaroscuro guide his aesthetic.

Occasionally Cady will focus on a single object. F Admiration with center button (husband), 1974, a self-standing reproduction of a green upholstered pillow, recalls some of the witty frescos of his contemporary Barbara Sullivan. In several pieces he captures the svelte lines of boats: a dory tipped up on its keel, a single scull that Eakins would have admired for its precision contours.

The exhibition includes a few traditional rectangular paintings, including a New Mexico landscape and a view of a storm at dusk as seen from an airplane window. While appealing, the pieces, through no fault of their own, lack the edgy dynamic of their neighbors. An exception is loading up on the Mississippi at New Orleans, 2015, a small rendering of industrial dock activity worthy of Charles Sheeler.

One of Cady’s earliest pieces in the show, balsa model plane under construction, fuselage, 1974, makes a nice segue to Mark Wethli’s near-concurrent installation, Piper Cub, a full-scale replica of a Piper J-3 aircraft made from pine, birch plywood and aircraft parts. The plane, which was previously displayed at the Coleman Burke Gallery in Brunswick, ME, in 2007, was reassembled for this showing.

 

Mark Wethli, Piper Cub, 2007, pine, birch
plywood, and aircraft parts, 35 x 22 x 7′. Private collection.

Oldenburgian but without the humor, Piper Cub is a hybrid: an outsize model airplane doubling as a sculpture. The aircraft is mostly seethrough; its warm, yellow wood wings, struts, engine and propeller set on black rubber wheels. The piece has personal significance: Wethli’s pilot father restored a Piper Cub by hand when the artist was a young boy; he also helped his son fabricate the one on view.

Since moving to Rockland in July, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art has returned to offering exhibitions year-round (it had shifted to a seasonal schedule at its former quarters in Rockport in 2009). The new CMCA space provides more room and bigger walls, making it the ideal venue to present the Cady and Wethli works.