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Ford Crull Solo Painting Exhibit “Red”

June 25, 2016 by Jen Dragon

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.

Slideshow

Structure/Nature

April 8, 2016 by Jen Dragon

Structure/Nature : Paintings by Claire Lambe, Laura Hexner and Mary Anne Erickson

The ever-growing need for mankind to manage resources for living leads to the building of heroic structures. Human survival demands water, food and housing, and scaffolding, highways and dams are constructions that enable large populations to flourish. At odds with these systems are the destruction of rivers, vistas and natural habitats by concrete pillars, asphalt highways and ill-conceived housing projects. These structures are physically built to dominate and harness nature as well as facilitate the transit of natural resources. However, it is nature’s relentless superpower, entropy, that will ultimately dismantle and destroy all massive efforts to control and re-contour the environment. Dams will run dry, deserts will overtake farmlands and jungles will devour the metal I-beams of empty condominiums.
Artists Claire Lambe, Laura Hexner and Mary Anne Erickson each consider the Pyrrhic victory of human constructions within the backdrop of an immense, relentlessly eroding and infinitely patient natural landscape.

Structure/Nature: Claire LAMB, Laura HEXNER and Mary Anne ERICKSON is on view through April 24, 2016

About the Artists:

Claire Lambe: Born in Ireland, Claire Lambe has a peripatetic artistic focus that reflects her extensive travels and intellectual obsessions. Lately Lambe’s work is concerned with the battle for resources and the lottery that decides who wins a game where one side increasingly holds the majority of tickets.

Laura Hexner: Laura Hexner has been meticulously painting and drawing the often overlooked subjects of everyday life: bridges, dams, telephone poles and highways. Her technical elegance with seemingly mundane subjects creates an abstract drama characteristic of her work.

Mary Anne Erickson: Mary Anne Erickson has long been fascinated by the deterioration and decay of vintage roadside American culture. Her color saturated photo-realist paintings capture the faded bucolic optimism of the Post-War years against the backdrop of a vast and empty western landscape

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Work by Goertz, van Lent & Wood

March 2, 2016 by Jen Dragon

Trio: Augustus Goertz, Marianne van Lent & Brian Wood

Opening Reception Sat. March 5, 2016
on view thru March 27, 2016

“Trio: Augustus Goertz, Marianne van Lent and Brian Wood” is an exhibit of three artists’ abstract meditations of life and its many manifestations. From Brian Wood’s figural/vegetal forms to van Lent’s gestural landscapes and Goertz’ intense textural universes, there is an ambiguity of scale that slides from the cellular to the immense. Each artist contributes to a unique understanding of existence as an eternal shifting of energy from great to small, distant to intimate, fleeting and permanent. This seesawing back and forth in scale allows the viewer the distinct experience of multi-dimensional travel and the compression of simultaneous time.

“Trio: Augustus Goertz, Marianne van Lent and Brian Wood” is co-curated by Ford Crull and Jen Dragon.

About the Artists:

Augustus Goertz:
Augustus Goertz’s paintings involve a building of texture and pigment creating a hybrid sculptural surface. This construction allows the nuances of changing light to participate in the experience of the artwork. The scale of his canvases shifts from aerial to terrestrial, from the vast sweep of a landscape to the miniaturization of a child’s toy. These paradoxical references give the viewer a distinct sensation of swinging from one reality to the next through an environment at once infinitely large and minute. More about the artist: http://bit.ly/ccagoertz

Marianne van Lent:
Marianne van Lent captures the transcendence between the spiritual and material worlds. There may be suggestions of scale in her paintings with the inclusion of landscape references or biomorphic elements however she bypasses that reality by allowing indeterminate and mystical elements to float through, as if they were thoughts in the mind’s eye, intimate psychological states or the elusive space between worlds. More about the artist: http://bit.ly/ccamvlent

Brian Wood:
The paintings and drawings of Brian Wood create a powerful experience of organic forms in ambiguous scale. Colorful, biological shapes create their own luminosity in the darkness of the canvas or carve a precise, figurative contour from the whiteness of paper. It is not clear if we are encountering massive planetary movements, minute atomic reactions or intimate bodily sensations, nor is it meant to be. Mr. Wood, a Guggenheim Fellow, is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum among many other distinguished public and private collections. More about the artist:http://bit.ly/ccawood

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Trialogue I: Paintings

February 1, 2016 by Jen Dragon

Trialogue I : Jackson Dembar, Ruth Edwy & Suzanne Rees

It can be argued that Abstract Painting is the most representational of all painting expressions because the subject matter is not a response to the outside world but literally the reality of paint itself. Jackson Dembar, Ruth Edwy and Suzanne Rees explore the dynamism and reality of paint in this group show: Trialogue I.

These area artists have long lived and worked in New York State and their commitment to painting has largely been outside mainstream art marketplaces. For decades, these three have been committed to the goal of painting for its own sake. The result is work that is about a pure and personal vision expressed in color, form and light. “Trialogue I” is co-curated by Alan Goolman and Jen Dragon.

About the Artists:

Jackson Dembar: Although he holds an MBA from Wharton, Jackson Dembar soon found that success in business paled in comparison to the experience of painting. Mr. Dembar’s decades as an artist covers an exhaustive range of materials united by a common theme of light, color, form, surface and passion. The painter says about his work: “I am the paint” and in essence, each painting is a self-portrait. He further writes: “Art is not about pleasing the potential buyer. It is about producing something new, communicative, vital, in that it can hit the viewer in the gut and allow them to see something they have never seen before. It is about going a step further in art history, showing understanding of life, the world around us, the times we live in.”

Ruth Edwy: Ruth Edwy (BFA, MFA Pratt) has been painting in her studio in the Catskills since 1972. Her atmospheric surfaces are often punctuated by geometric edges creating a spatial tension between what is permanent and impermanent. Ms. Edwy writes: “When I begin a painting, I don’t always have a particular idea or emotion that I want to express. Rather, I have the need to paint, per se, and from the act itself–the physical gesture, the movement of the brush on the canvas, the color and shape and line that begin to come from my hand and body–the painting begins to emerge as a coherent entity.”

Suzanne Rees: Suzanne Rees (BFA Parsons, MFA Maryland Institute College of Art) approaches painting as a sculptor in that the illusion of material space is her starting point. Allowing the marks to determine the forms, each painting becomes a study of density and atmosphere, of weight and balance. Ms. Rees says: “I like to keep my work on the edge of representation with regards to space, as well as image. Light is the element that punctuates the work for me. From flat space I like to see moments of dimension materialize. They feel hyper-real. I’m looking for the quality of a dream in which objects, space and people are infused with an emotional meaning, amplified beyond what is experienced in everyday life.”

“Trialogue I: Paintings by Jackson Dembar, Ruth Edwy & Suzanne Rees” opens Februry 6 and continues through February 28th, 2016

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FOUR FORCES

December 28, 2015 by Jen Dragon

Mike Cockrill
In Retrospect

The War Between the States: The Confederacy vs. Arnold Palmer © Mike Cockrill 2016

Opening Reception Sat. May 6th
Cross Contemporary Art
99 Partition St. Saugerties, New York 12477
on view thru May.28, 2017

GALLERY HOURS: Thurs- Mon 12-5pm

Cross Contemporary Art inaugurates its new 1,000-square-foot space at 99 Partition Street, Saugerties, NY, with a survey of paintings, works on paper and iron sculpture by Mike Cockrill.

The exhibition will include over 40 drawings that trace the artist’s evolution over the past 20 years from his gun-wielding clown-killer girls of the ‘90s to his recent modernist drawings and collages of fragmented female figures.

One of the most frequent themes of Cockrill’s drawings is the relationship between artists and their subjects; they are explorations of the moments of creation. In several drawings, girls stand at easels and draw clowns while in other drawings the girls themselves become the studio models for clowns and as well as baboons and chimpanzees who sit at easels with poised brushes studying their human subjects. His large new painting, “New Mom,” (2014), continues this theme in a monumental scale.

Cockrill’s never-before-seen sculptures, “Iron Men,” relate to his Existential Man series of paintings; cast in iron from styrofoam constructions and given a rich patina, Cockrill’s sculptures seem to rise and crumble at the same time.

Blending both the playful and the serious, Cockrill’s challenging art continues to foster compelling conversations about social values and artistic expression.

Mike Cockrill has had over 20 solo exhibitions both nationally and internationally. His paintings were included in the 2016 Outlaw Bible of American Art, published by Last Gasp.

MIKE COCKRILL: In Retrospect opens with a reception for the artist on Saturday, May 6, 5-8pm and runs through May 28, 2017.

New Mom © Mike Cockrill 2014 oil on canvas

Artist and Model (Monkey Shoes) © Mike Cockrill graphite, ink, charcoal on paper

Iron Men © Mike Cockrill 2016 cast iron, wire, patina

Blue-Eyed Lady © Mike Cockrill 2017 mixed media on paper

Iain Machell “Platte Clove Lens”

October 25, 2015 by Jen Dragon

Iain Machell “Platte Clove Lens”

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Iain Machell is committed to form and meaning. Sometimes these forms make words that play with concept and context. Sometimes they manifest themselves as blurred digital images seizing motion at the expense of clarity. And sometimes abstract form is explored in an intricate 16th century engraved style of ink laboriously crosshatched on paper. The most recent explorations comprise the exhibit “Platte Clove Lens” and are a result of a July residency in 2015 at Platte Clove, in the Catskill Mountains. Emerging from the tradition of landscape art that romanticizes nature, Machell instead focuses on the “dark, twisted, dangerous and angry power” nature has over humans, and the troubled relationship humans have with nature. The dark woods and blurred streams that infuse Machell’s multiple studies hint of the mystery of deep, burrowing spaces and the sharp, fleeting nature of light. Iain Machell writes about “Platte Clove Lens” that it is “A visual reaction to the idyllic, romanticized landscape paintings of the Hudson River School. Platte Clove was a favourite location of these artists and I chose it deliberately to rattle their cages.” By invoking the past, Machell propels the landscape concept forward into the 21st century.
“Platte Clove Lens” opens October 31st and continues through November 22nd.

About Iain Machell:
Originally from Scotland, Iain Machell studied at Grays School of Art and received his MFA from SUNY Albany. A well-respected visual artist and teacher, Mr. Machell was awarded the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and is currently a Professor of Studio Arts and holds the position of Chair of Art, Design, Fashion, Music, Theatre and Communication Department at SUNY Ulster, Stone Ridge NY. Mr. Machell has been a visiting artist and lecturer at numerous colleges and universities including Bennington College, Parsons School of Art, University of Massachusetts, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ball State University, SUNY at Albany, West Virginia University and Montserrat College of Art. Iain Machell was also the recipient of a NYSCA stipend and was a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Finalist (Sculpture). Iain Machell’s drawings, book projects, paintings and sculptures have been shown in galleries and institutions throughout the United States and United Kingdom notably The Drawing Center, The Sculpure Center and the Center for Book Arts in New York City and a handmade book is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art/Franklin Furnace/Artist Book Collection.

More information about Iain Machell can be found:

Artist’s website: http://www.iainmachell.com

New York Times Art Review: http://bit.ly/ccaimnyt

Chronogram Magazine: http://bit.ly/ccaimchron

Conversation: Katherine Bowling & Suzannah Lessard

September 22, 2015 by Jen Dragon

Conversation Between Katherine Bowling & Suzannah Lessard

On Saturday Sept. 26th at 7pm, writer Suzannah Lessard speaks with Katherine Bowling on the union of memory and the landscape in Ms. Bowling’s current show “The Presence of Leaves” at Cross Contemporary Art. Katherine Bowling’s passion for contemplative landscape spaces has long been an essential trait of her paintings and prints. Inspired by the woodlands of the Hudson Valley and Catskills region, Ms. Bowling’s recent artwork captures the luminosity of golden dappled forests and the quiet shadows of moonlit nights. Writer Suzannah Lessard will steer a lively conversation with the artist about her intentions and techniques and the symbolism of the landscape in Ms. Bowling’s artwork.

About Katherine Bowling’s Solo Show “The Presence of Leaves”
Katherine Bowling’s imagery uses the landscape to create intimate spaces. Inspired by the environment of upstate New York, her woodlands are illuminated by dappled light sparkling through a leafy ceiling. Often Ms. Bowling’s paintings compel the viewer to enter this shimmering forest realm down a pathway away from civilization. Other images introduce the contrast between the decay of manmade structures and the grand, renewable cycle of the surrounding trees. And like Albert Pinkham Ryder before her, Katherine Bowling sometimes boldly paints a portrait of the moon with a silvery light that is in elegant contrast to the habitual golds of her sunlit forests. Although Ms. Bowling’s paintings and prints are in the tradition of the Hudson River School, her expressive technique, quiet symbolism and masterful spatial illusions take the idea of landscape painting into the 21st century. Katherine Bowling’s “The Presence of Leaves” closes Sunday, September 26th.

About Katherine Bowling:
Since her emergence in 1980s, Katherine Bowling has been well respected as an American painter and printmaker. Ms. Bowling has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellowship. Her work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum and the Fisher Landau Center in New York City, the Orlando Museum of Contemporary Art and the Norton Museum of Art in Florida as well as the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona, the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art in Evanston, Illinois and St. John’s University in Santa Fe, New Mexico

More information about the artist can be found:
Artist’s website: http://katherinebowling.com/
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Bowling
NYTimes Art Review: http://bit.ly/ccakbnyt

About Suzannah Lessard:
Suzannah Lessard is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family (1996). Ms. Lessard has taught at Columbia School of the Arts, Wesleyan University, The New School, George Mason University, George Washington University, and Goucher College MFA in Creative Non-fiction. She was one of the first editors of the Washington Monthly and a staff writer at The New Yorker Magazine. She has also published in New York Times Magazine, Architectural Record, Architectural Digest, Wilson Quarterly and Harvard Design. Suzannah Lessard is the recipient of the Whiting Award and the Mark Lynton History Prize as well as a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Jenny McKean Moore Fellowship at George Washington University. Her latest book, T”he View From a Small Mountain: Reading the American Landscape in the Twenty-First Century” is scheduled to be published in 2016.

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Katherine Bowling: The Presence of Leaves

August 29, 2015 by Jen Dragon

Katherine Bowling: The Presence of Leaves

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Katherine Bowling’s imagery uses the landscape to create intimate spaces. Inspired by the environment of upstate New York, her woodlands are illuminated by dappled light sparkling through a leafy ceiling. Often Ms. Bowling’s paintings compel the viewer to enter this shimmering forest realm down a pathway away from civilization. Other images introduce the contrast between the decay of manmade structures and the grand, renewable cycle of the surrounding trees. And like Albert Pinkham Ryder before her, Katherine Bowling sometimes boldly paints a portrait of the moon with a silvery light that is in elegant contrast to the habitual golds of her sunlit forests. Although Ms. Bowling’s paintings and prints are in the tradition of the Hudson River School, her expressive technique, quiet symbolism and masterful spatial illusions take the idea of landscape painting into the 21st century.

About Katherine Bowling:
Since her emergence in 1980s, Katherine Bowling has been well respected as an American painter and printmaker. Ms. Bowling has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellowship. Her work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum and the Fisher Landau Center in New York City, the Orlando Museum of Contemporary Art and the Norton Museum of Art in Florida as well as the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona, the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art in Evanston, Illinois and St. John’s University in Santa Fe, New MexicoMore information about the artist can be found:
Artist’s website: http://katherinebowling.com/
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Bowling
NYTimes Art Review: http://bit.ly/ccakbnyt

Almanac Weekly: http://bit.ly/ccakbaw

CATHERINE HOWE SOLO SHOW

June 29, 2015 by Jen Dragon

Catherine Howe

Supreme Fiction: Monotypes & Mylar Paintings

Solo Exhibition July 3 – 26, 2015

Supreme Fiction: Monotypes and Mylar Paintings by Catherine Howe opens with an Artist’s Reception July 35-8pm at Cross Contemporary Art, Saugerties and runs through July 27th, 2015. Inspired by the luscious paintings of the Baroque era, Catherine Howe’s riotous compositions bring still lifes and botanicals into the 21st century. Her exuberantly expressive brushwork and attention to surface create vibrant works out of uniquely contemporary materials such as carborundum grit and polyester. The luminous results resist being categorized as solely, drawings, paintings, or prints. David Ebony writes “Howe’s still lifes…are anything but still. The images seem to be imploding or exploding, in a constant state of flux.” Michele C. Cone says about Ms. Howe: “Howe’s evocative paintings are not about still life per se, but about the naming of things transposed into paint, and the magical interaction between medium, memory and perception.”Supreme Fiction: Monotypes & Mylar Paintings by Catherine Howe” opens July 3-26.

About Catherine Howe: Catherine Howe received an MFA from SUNY Buffalo in 1983. She has been reviewed in many publications including Art in America, Artforum, Art Critical, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Los Angeles Times. For over twenty years, Ms.Howe has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe including shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, MoMA PS 1 in New York, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. Catherine Howe is on the faculty of the New York Academy of Art in New York City.More information about the artist can be found:
Artist’s website: http://catherinehoweartist.com
Video interview: http://bit.ly/ccachow1

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Portia Munson Solo Show

May 7, 2015 by Jen Dragon

Portia Munson “Little Suns, Hollow Bones”

Portia Munson‘s solo show, “Little Suns, Hollow Bones”, transforms Cross Contemporary Art into a world of flowers, plants, bones and creatures. From brilliant dandelion wallpaper on the walls to magical mandala prints of blossoms and small animal corpses, this exhibition addresses the artist’s interest in environmental issues while infusing the gallery with the spirit of spring.

Although a conceptual extension of her 2013 “Reflecting Pool” exhibit at PPOW Gallery in New York City, Portia Munson’s upcoming “Little Suns, Hollow Bones” presents some new imagery derived from the flora and fauna of the Catskills and Hudson Valley region. Munson’s digital scanning of her subjects is a meditative exercise in organizing the chaos of nature as its elements are caught at a moment in time. Choosing flowers that bloom that day in her garden, Munson creates intricate patterns of color and form that, according to Claire Lambe in Roll magazine, “although preserved through the magic of digital technology, are as ephemeral as sand paintings,” and as a reviewer for The New Yorker stated,“(have) a seductive luminosity; each floral element appears to emit light.”

More information about Portia Munson can be found:

Artist’s website: http://portiamunson.com

New York Times Article about Portia Munson: http://bit.ly/pmccanyt

Portia Munson’s recent Public Arts Project for MTA Arts and Design: http://bit.ly/pmcca01

Portia Munson Review in Roll Online: http://bit.ly/pmcca02

About Portia Munson: Portia Munson is a visual artist who works in a variety of media including installation, painting, photography & sculpture. Solo shows include exhibitions at PPOW Gallery, Yoshii Gallery and White Columns in NYC, among others. Her work has been exhibited throughout the US, Canada & Europe in such venues as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland; the Kunstahallen Brandts Klaedefabrik, Odense, Denmark; and in NYC at the New Museum, Ace Gallery, Exit Art, DC Moore Gallery and Affirmation Arts. Ms. Munson has taught at NYU, Yale School of Art, Vassar Collage and SUNY Purchase. She holds a BFA from Cooper Union and a MFA from Rutgers. Portia Munson has received fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, Skowhegan, Fine Arts Work Center Provincetown, Art Omi, and others. Her work has been reviewed and written about in many publications including The New York Times, Art in America, Newsweek, Harper’s, USA Today, The New Yorker, Flash Art and Artforum.

Portia Munson “Little Suns, Hollow Bones” Solo Exhibition

May 9-31, 2015

Artist Reception Saturday, May 9, 6-8pm

at Cross Contemporary Art, Saugerties, NY