Cross Contemporary Art

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HYGGE

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HYGGE: Small Art Holiday Show

HYGGE: Small Art Holiday Show Dec. 1-31, 2017

The word HYGGE is a Danish term that is not found in English. HYGGE (pron. HOO-geh) describes a quality of cosiness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being. As an untranslatable word, HYGGE is demonstrated by over 100 drawings, sculpture and paintings by the 50+ artists who have exhibited or supported Cross Contemporary Art and is celebrated with the community during the Holiday Season. The opening reception is Sat. Dec 2, 5-8pm and the gallery will serve traditional Danish Glug (mulled wine) every Sat. and Sun. afternoon until the end of the show on Dec 31.

Participating artists include:

Gregory Amenoff, Jeffrey Bishop, Richard Bosman, Katherine Bowling, Colin Chase, Mike Cockrill, Gregory Crane, Ford Crull, Peggy Cyphers, Carol Diamond, Josh Dorman, Richard Edelman, Mary Anne Erickson, Stuart Farmery, Brian Fekete, Jeanette Fintz, Deborah Freedman, Ginnie Gardiner, Ashley Garrett, Barry Gerson, Kathy Goodell, Jacqueline Gourevitch, Brenda Goodman, William Greenwood, Anthony Haden-Guest, Jared Handelsman, Jan Harrison, Laura Hexner, Jennifer Hicks, Jim Holl, David Hornung, Roshan Houshmand, Catherine Howe, Heather Hutchison, Mark Thomas Kanter, Ellen Kozak, Alex Kveton, Matthew Langley, Ian Laughlin, Linda Levit, Lucinda Abra, Tom Luciano, Iain Machell, Dorothea Marcus, Susan Mastrangelo, Claudia McNulty, Portia Munson, Paul Mutimear, Garry Nichols, Tina Piccolo, Debra Priestly, Lily Prince, Ann Provan, David Provan, Suzanne Rees, Christy Rupp, Christopher Skura, Melinda Stickney-Gibson, Nadine Slowik, Lawre Stone, Jack Solomon, Shira Toren, Marianne Van Lent, Marie Vickerilla, Grace Wapner, Ruth Wetzel, Susan Wides, Brian Wood, Dion Yannatos and more!

HYGGE: Small Art Holiday Show Opening Reception: Dec 2, 5-8pm

SPECIAL EVENTS DURING HYGGE: Small Art Holiday Show

Sun. Dec 3, 4pm: Reading by Larry Littany Litt of his recent book Mad Monk: Modern Parables at Cross Contemporary Art

Sun. Dec 3,12-5pm Holiday in the Village sponsored by the Saugerties Chamber of Commerce featuring a toy raffle, horse and wagon rides and a petting zoo

Sat. Dec 9, Home for the Holidays 3pm-8pm The Village of Saugerties celebrates the holidays with events, gift basket raffle, caroling, contests and special refreshments!

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Ford Crull Solo Painting Exhibit “Red”

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Ford Crull Solo Show “Red”

June 25,- July 17th, 2016   

    “Red” is a survey of contemporary symbolist oil and mixed media works by painter Ford Crull that are united by the color Red. Each work of art is a meditation on the power of this primary color as it supports, weaves, balances and directs the energy and composition of Crull’s art .The exhibit ranges from older works to new paintings, and within a variety of styles from different points in the artist’s career.Ford Crull’s paintings and drawings, the symbolism of the color Red, as well as other basic cultural signs and archetypes, have been obsessions he has explored throughout his career as an artist. According to Crull, Red is an especially provocative and powerful color. Throughout time and through every culture, Red is the pigment of violent forces: war, blood, fire and even Hell. However, Red is also the joyful color of Christmas and of valentines. In Indian cosmology, Red, as the first chakra, represents the life force and foundation for all things.  In Ford Crull’s paintings, Red draws upon any and all of these ideas on works covered in open-ended symbols.
    These iconographic signs are at once personal and universal such as crosses, hearts, words, numbers and other archetypes found in a range of cultures throughout the centuries. As Jonathan Goodman writes, “Crull has been successful in his combination of the old and the new, demonstrating how an image can call up the past and at the same time be responsive to present conditions in painting. Art like this needs to be taken seriously—not only because of the implications of the image, but also because very few painters are trying to build a bridge across time.”

About Ford Crull:
Mr. Crull’s work can be found in many important museum and public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Gallery of Art, Wash. DC, Dayton Art Institute, and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (Al), as well as numerous international and national corporate and private collections. Ford Crull lives and works in New York City and Woodstock NY.

%22You Thought You Were Safe%22 © Ford Crull 2014 oil. oil stick, graphite on paper 30%22 x 22%22
Replay © Ford Crull 2015 40%22 X 30%22 oil, oil stick, rags on canvas large
Red announcement
Red Sky at Night © Ford Crull 2014 oil, oil stick, canvas 18x 22
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Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow © ford Crull 2014 30%22 x 22%22

Slideshow

Peggy Cyphers & Catherine Howe

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Peggy  Cyphers  and  Catherine  Howe:  Prints  and  Paintings

Cross Contemporary Art is please to present its first Two Person show of the prints and paintings of Peggy Cyphers and Catherine Howe curated by Ford Crull. Both of these New York City based painters have distinguished careers as fine artists and have received numerous awards and fellowships. Opening November 8th, this exhibit showcases the modern expressionist technique grounded in classical tradition of these artists and their individual gestural use of various materials such as sand, metal leaf,ink and oil paint on canvas. Both Cyphers and Howe are inspired by outside world and impassioned brush marks dominate their work. However, the similarities end there as Peggy Cyphers responds to the multi-dimensional experience of the landscape from various points of view (animal and human) and Catherine Howe looks to art history and its exuberant, fleshy subject matter as her starting point.
     In the Brooklyn Rail, Peggy Cyphers art is described by Jonathan Goodman:

“Peggy Cyphers’ painted characters and landscapes vibrate in dialogues of rhythm and repetition that influence sensory perception. Her surfaces recall color field, where abstract forms operate in a psychological dialogue of association – congestion and vast span, hyper-speed and recognizable icons. Cyphers’ painting is automatic writing – a stream of consciousness between geological, primordial and cultural time.”

G. Roger Denson writes about Catherine Howe‘s work:

“Howe especially lingers over exquisite portrayals of beautiful objects, both man-made and organic, envisioned by the Dutch and Flemish masters to convey the transience of life on earth. In this respect Howe disregards the severe and blunt vanitas paintings of skulls and decay in favor of over-ripe and peeled fruit, liquors languishing in food- and lipstick-smudged glassware, and the blooms of flowers showing the first signs of their demise to come.”
Exhibition curator, Ford Crull, has chosen these artists to show together because their personal, emotional engagement in painting is an inspiration to his own career as a painter.
“Both Peggy and Catherine represent what is exciting about gestural and expressionistic art making in the 21st century. They are painter’s painters. The way they both handle the brushstroke and  composition can only be achieved through painstaking time and effort, and continually willing to push the limits. They continue to redefine what can be, and exemplify the continued relevance of painting in our contemporary art forum.This first rate work by these two New York painters is truly art that matters. Its great to curate this two-person exhibit and bring it to a new gallery in the Hudson Valley region where we all derive so much inspiration for what we do.”
 
   Peggy Cyphers & Catherine Howe Two-Person show runs November 7th through December 1st. For more information, please contact Jen Dragon, Director, Cross Contemporary Art 81 Partition Street, Saugerties, NY 12477 845-399-9751

Ford Crull Solo Show

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Painter Ford Crull will have a solo show at Cross Contemporary Art in Saugerties, NY opening Friday August 29 with a reception for the artist Saturday August 30 from 4-8pm . Mr. Crull, whose work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery and the Brooklyn Museum, exhibits his latest paintings, encaustics and mixed-media drawings throughout the month of September. Included in this show is Ford Crull’s poignant encaustic series, White Rose, dedicated to the German student resistance movement against the Nazis during WWII. According to ArtNews critic Eleanor Heartney, Ford Crull’s paintings are “powerful, deeply felt” and convey a “genuine sense of mystery and wonder”. According to Mr. Crull “This mystery is where I find the real pleasure in painting. There is a beauty, simplicity and elegance in symbols, especially ones that are historically and culturally used over and over and often in different contexts with different meanings.”

Although based in New York City, Mr. Crull has long maintained a studio in Willow where many of the current artworks in the upcoming exhibit have been created. Gallery director Jen Dragon describes Mr. Crull’s exhibit at Cross Contemporary Art as an “important exhibition of a modern symbolist. Although internationally known and NYC-based, Ford Crull has always maintained a studio in the Hudson Valley and derives much of his creative energy from the quietude of the Catskills forests, mountains and streams.” Ford Crull’s solo show will be on view starting Friday August 29th and continues through September 29, 2014.

Cross Contemporary Art opens

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Cross Contemporary Art is open! Located in the same space as the recently closed Imogen Holloway Gallery, Cross Contemporary Art will continue to show paintings, sculptures, performances and installations with an emphasis on artists who work in the Hudson Valley and Catskills region. The first exhibit “Collection” is an “installation about one art collector’s aesthetic environment and the creation of the personal museum”.  Currently on view are works by various artists that include: David Chambard, Gregory Crewdson, Ford Crull, Albrecht Dürer, Antonio Frasconi, Adrian Frost, Sir Terry Frost, Brenda Goodman, Heather Hutchison, Mark Thomas Kanter, Robert Mangold, Garry Nichols, Judy Pfaff, Fionn Reilly, Rebecca Purdum, Melinda Stickney-Gibson. August hours are daily 12-7pm.  Please phone 845-399-9751 for more information. 

Curator’s Essay for “Collection”

“Collection: An Exhibition of a Personal Art Installation”
As we live, we collect and what we collect becomes our totems-reliquaries of our hopes and poignant representatives of who we are and want to be. The private art collection is an installation that becomes a personal environment. Each collector acquires objects made by others and creates a private museum.
Life events such as death or divorce can force the dismantling of a collection. The objects are no longer relevant to a lost marriage or possible in a downsized location or of interest to heirs. The attempt to connect to timelessness through art acquisition is heroic. To seek connectivity through disparate elements is an art in itself. The dispersion of a collection is natural to its life cycle as paintings and sculptures scatter again across the world to be recombined in another space and time. And a new installation is born.

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Studio Visit with Ford Crull

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I’ve been a follower of Mr. Crull’s paintings since the early days when he was showing in NYC’s Lower East Side and later at the M-13 Gallery in SoHo. Although a longtime resident of New York City, Ford also maintains a studio in the Catskills Mountains near Woodstock, NY. It is here that I enjoy Ford’s paintings the most: the intimate encounter surrounded by nature. His new studio is hidden in the woods behind his simple mountain cabin and blends in with the lush forested surroundings. Ford’s work has long called on the mystical for inspiration and his process involves a constant invocation of symbols that tell a timeless story. The gift of being allowed to visit an artists studio and being privileged to see their process is that you see the layers of art clearly which later merge and become a magical presence in the finished work. This time, I saw the whirling, uplifting space that made me think of the painted ceilings of Tiepolo. For the first time, I was aware of how Ford Crull creates a physical sensation in the viewer of vertigo as you feel your center ascend into a brilliant height (or contrarily, descend into a dark comforting depth). It’s the art that makes one emotionally fly, swim, float or coast and Mr. Crull controls the velocity, tension and power like a master Commodore. More of Ford’s latest work can be seen in Seattle July 1-Aug 3

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