STEPHANIE BLUMENTHAL
STILL LIFE - UNTETHERED | EAST, WEST & TDP GALLERIES
JANUARY 18 - FEBRUARY 24, 2018
As one author writes, "The Dutch Still Lives were painted with regard to he cultural and economic interests, needs, values and preferences of the public for whom the artist painted. As a way of "updating" this genre, I incorporated contemporary fast food. In this Manner, I too am illustrating current standards, tastes and choices. By placing fast food in a different setting, the viewer is puzzled. The lighting and background are connected with Dutch still life paintings, yet the new objects and not the ones associated with this genre.
JAMES BUXTON
STILL LIFE - UNTETHERED | EAST, WEST & TDP GALLERIES
JANUARY 18 - FEBRUARY 24, 2018
The urge to create is like an addiction-you must have it like air. It penetrates your every thought, your every moment of every waking hour. Each time you create, you see the next creation. It is an ongoing endless cycle of pleasant surprises with each indulgence of the addiction. Many factors play a part in the addiction of my creativity. I not only see the next piece coming from the preceding piece, but the material available will change the outcome of the piece’s final presentation, which leads to new directions and observations. My addiction for the creative process is a wonderful ongoing process of research, discovery and improvisation. Finally, I must be courageous and willing to follow this new experience while learning no matter where it takes me!
NATHAN CARRIS CARNES
STILL LIFE - UNTETHERED | EAST, WEST & TDP GALLERIES
JANUARY 18 - FEBRUARY 24, 2018
My current work is about the “idea of play” and how that functions in our contemporary culture. I use the multiple facets of what the concept of play can be not only to organize and establish parameters with my surroundings, but also as a means to introduce questions of how others create their own public and private environments and exist within these environments. It is through the denial of “actual” play that a desire to understand the potential of how these objects may be played with perpetuates.
PETER COFFEEN
STILL LIFE - UNTETHERED | EAST, WEST & TDP GALLERIES
JANUARY 18 - FEBRUARY 24, 2018
I am interested in discovering shapes and design, both in nature and the constructs of humans, which provoke mystery, affection, wonder and questions. Looking, seeing feeling and getting at the essence of the thing itself keep me interested. Inspiration comes from the work of Giorgio Morandi, William Bailey, Charles Sheeler and a master of natural light, lil Raymond.
PEGGY DEMBICER
STILL LIFE - UNTETHERED | EAST, WEST & TDP GALLERIES
JANUARY 18 - FEBRUARY 24, 2018
Peggy Dembicer is a mixed media artist who creates unique and contemporary artwork. Using her background in textile and fiber arts, she presents a modern take on traditional techniques. She has explored weaving in all its forms beginning with her earliest focus on tapestry. Through experimentation, her work has diversified in both style and materials. Recent work incorporates recycled materials and found objects. Peggy Dembicer often includes beads and specialty papers in her constructs. The work takes its shape through the versatility of weaving, gluing, embroidering, stitching or combining them with each other or with paints, fabric, and polymers. She gets her inspirations from the possibilities she sees in everyday things, from brochures to the rusty metal fragments in the street. She considers how things can be interpreted through fiber or embellished with beads. She continues to delight us with her playful and original interpretations. Peggy Dembicer currently lives in Avon, Connecticut.
JOAN FITZSIMMONS
STILL LIFE - UNTETHERED | EAST, WEST & TDP GALLERIES
JANUARY 18 - FEBRUARY 24, 2018
Plant Life is a photographic documentation of my attempt to learn how to grow things. I thought I could rise to the challenge. Having no horticultural ability at all, I tried to grow wheat grass, later basil, but could only document my failures. My seeds did germinate. They did grow, and the plants were beautiful; but, ultimately I was unable to sustain it. With basil, I finally went to the store and bought plants. They eventually died too. Some endure, Incidental Plants, sprouting roots in spite of unintentional neglect. However, I view this project as not just a failure, but also an act of perseverance. I shall continue. Whether the plants thrive or not, the photographs survive and hold their own enigma.
ERIC FORSTMANN
STILL LIFE - UNTETHERED | EAST, WEST & TDP GALLERIES
JANUARY 18 - FEBRUARY 24, 2018
Eric Forstmann studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston under the tutelage of Barnett Rubenstein and Henry Schwartz. In addition to his many solo exhibitions, he has had four one-man shows, all before the age of fifty, at the following institutions: The Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio; The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri; The Evansville Museum of Arts, History and Science in Evansville, Indiana; and the Mattatuck Museum of Waterbury, Connecticut. Slated for 2018, Forstmann has an upcoming solo exhibition to be held at the Brenau Galleries at Brenau University in Gainesville, Georgia. Eric Forstmann’s work is proudly held in many public and private collections. The artist lives in Sharon, CT and works in Torrington, CT. In 2016, Forstmann was featured in "Naples Collects" alongside works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Pablo Picasso at the Naples Museum of Art, Naples, FL. He was also featured at the Norman Rockwell Museum in the exhibition Rockwell and Realism in an Abstract World. His work has been featured in Architectural Digest, American Art Collector, and many other publications through the years.
LINDA PEARLMAN KARLSBERG
STILL LIFE - UNTETHERED | EAST, WEST & TDP GALLERIES
JANUARY 18 - FEBRUARY 24, 2018
My still lifes probe life’s fragility, struggle, contradictions, and inscrutability. Indelibly affected by the untimely deaths and suffering of love ones, I have learned that the pain of tragedy reverberates throughout life; still, delight and fulfillment can enliven our days. Amongst others, but most affectingly, death claimed my seven-year old niece and her father from brain cancer, thirty three year old niece from breast cancer, this family’s mother from metastatic lung cancer, as well as my own father from lung cancer. Layered over these wrenching experiences were my child’s extended struggles with learning disabilities and my own personal artistic and emotional strains. Burdened by the cumulative ache that was the residue, I have worked on imagery that would address these feelings and the challenges of these trials. Sustaining questions drove my image making. Is there a way to describe the delicate and harrowing dance between death and beauty? How to represent the precarious presence of joyfulness stalked by numbing discouragement? Is there imagery that suggests the haunted path that winds between wonder, possibility, fear, and world-weariness? My fascination with human dilemmas and the conflict between our internal, emotional lives, the life of the mind, and our outward public beings also informed my image making and exploration. The ”Constrained Bloom” series and still life works grapple with these questions and the duality of experience. I use light’s startling play on space and form, it’s ability to describe and obscure, and render a mood and drama as a catalyst to explore the expressive potential of objects. The drawings and paintings embody spaces that reflect the complexity of experience as a woman, a mother, an artist, and a witness. They probe the tensions that result from one’s experiences, one’s troubles, one’s creative drive and the limitations that result from events or circumstances, either chosen or imposed. These constraints frustrate and challenge our quests, quests both personal and universal. The news, in every moment, mirrors and tallies the continuum of trials from simple to overwhelming. These works grapple with tragedy and loss. They acknowledge that so much good, energy, potential is sacrificed, persecuted, denied, withheld and lost in life; and yet there is still life. Incredulously light arises from darkness. Even as one holds pain and sadness, possibility, imagination and creativity await release, exploration, and cultivation. One moves forward. John Ruskin judged the twin purposes of art to be “to make sense of pain and to fathom the sources of beauty.” I find particular resonance and motivation in this charge.
NANCY LASAR
STILL LIFE - UNTETHERED | EAST, WEST & TDP GALLERIES
JANUARY 18 - FEBRUARY 24, 2018
Whether in drawing, painting, or printmaking, the process for me is about layering and energizing space in such a way that objects are fluid, interconnected and full of energy and movement. I try to utilize a variety of lines, marks and media to suggest both stasis and openness to possibility and transformation as well as the passage of time. As I attempt to describe the multiple realities which intermingle in memory, imagination and daily life, images emerge and diverge – reconfiguring in new relationships. Everything is open and flows back and forth: empty and full, defined by its opposite -fleeting yet tangible – air and space dissecting form and formless in an effort to capture the unity and delight of life experienced, remembered, longed for.
MARNY LAWTON
STILL LIFE - UNTETHERED | EAST, WEST & TDP GALLERIES
JANUARY 18 - FEBRUARY 24, 2018
The old metal gate of the manual elevator opened onto the top floor of the museum under the saw- tooth sky lit roof. Enveloped in the aroma of linseed oil and paint, I was hooked! At nine years old my parents had signed me up for a painting class and I’ve been painting ever since. Careers kept a roof over my head, but a day didn’t go by when I wasn’t thinking about my art, creating it or somehow incorporating it into my day job. The synergy between my art and the environment has evolved along with increasing knowledge and love of our natural environment – a quiet place that is harder and harder to find in this world today. Nature can be interpreted through realism, representational and/or abstractions. I’ve chosen representational and it is through an artist’s prism that my art focuses on ecosystems in nature turning them into microcosms of art opening ideas for others to explore. My passion for art can be seen in my work where nature has been my canvas for years in both drawing and painting. For the past ten years I have painted food and primarily fruits and vegetables for their gemlike beauty. I take a naturalist’s and painterly, not a romanticist’s perspective – looking for the meditative beauty in the ordinary and the extraordinary in the often overlooked. In my work I try to take viewers on a journey into nature less often experienced in our heavily urbanized cultures as well as how to look at the abstractions in nature and objects around us daily. My work always begins by building shapes, color and shadows of objects. Following in the Flemish Master tradition I build on shape in negative space surrounding objects, eschewing lines wherever possible. Whether painting en plein aire, alla prima or direct, I build in layers depending on the requirements of the medium to maintain the translucency of the pigment regardless of the medium in which it is dispersed. My work has been exhibited across the U.S. in Arizona, Texas, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Vermont and Massachusetts and has been curated in over fifty competitive exhibitions as well as solo and group shows. I try to bring to the viewer a feeling of being connected to the planet under our feet (what we call land and soil out in the country) or the objects from nature in one way or another. Connecting with nature holds a special feeling of belonging and archaic knowledge that is part of our genetic makeup and responsibility of living on this planet we all call home.
DANIEL MOSHER LONG
STILL LIFE - UNTETHERED | EAST, WEST & TDP GALLERIES
JANUARY 18 - FEBRUARY 24, 2018
I recently told someone (with a straight face) that I make photographs to ward off evil. Perhaps I am a practitioner of a new and makeshift form of genteel voodoo. Each fresh photograph is a spell or incantation. This is new Juju, sanitized, pseudo-Santeria that employs objects rich with association and/or brimming with nostalgia. With these images I am photographically petitioning and attempting to placate the Gods. I pray for good fortune, boons and blessings. Giving in to my inner hypochondriac, I beg to avoid specific maladies and misfortune. In so many ways, photography is magical. It’s easy to get carried away by the process. From the Renaissance to the 18th century, a number of comfortably curious men and women collected and displayed in their homes the marvels of nature alongside disparate man-made objects in a designated room or piece of furniture – the Cabinet of Curiosities. The Duchess Mary Cavendish had a famous collection, which was auctioned off after her death in the 1780s (and recreated by Yale in 2009). The auction lots were described as a “promiscuous assemblage” of specimens and artifacts. This still life series, started in 2010, pays homage to those collections. I call the series “Miscellanea” and it too is a “promiscuous assemblage.” I‘m photographing natural objects and cultural artifacts often in juxtaposition – the stuff of a workingman's wunderkammer. I often pose my “specimens” on old books and within 19th century frames, arranged alongside “artifacts” and vintage ephemera. I have drawn inspiration from natural history illustration, silkscreen prints, scanography, trompe l'oeil painting and modern mixed media found art assemblage. I am fascinated by old stuff, patina, cracks in the veneer and signs of decay. I present things larger than life and explore and exploit the attraction-repulsion response evoked by vivid color and precise detail (attraction) and insects, reptiles, and all things post mortem (repulsion). I often arrange objects in ways that confound one’s sense of relative scale. And like the surrealists, I love odd juxtapositions and Magritte’s idea of the “poetically disciplined image” that poses rather than answers questions. I begin by arranging objects on a horizontal surface with the camera above pointing down. These images are not collage - they are fully constructed before the camera and I rarely crop in post-processing. I generally shoot with a macro lens and use a process that is unique to digital photography: focus stacking. Focus stacking software was developed for science and research and allows a macro photographer to shoot multiple frames each focused on a different plane in space and then merge the exposures to create an image with extended depth of field. After the objects are arranged and lit, I make up to 30 exposures each focused on an incrementally different spot in front of the lens. While focus stacking is tedious, it provides exceptional clarity from the top (objects closest to the lens) to the bottom (objects farthest from the lens). The resulting images are strikingly detailed and intriguingly un-photographic.
BRIAN MCCLEAR
STILL LIFE - UNTETHERED | EAST, WEST & TDP GALLERIES
JANUARY 18 - FEBRUARY 24, 2018
I paint what I find. I am that person that buys a rusted hinge because of its frozen shape or carries home a stone because of its feel in my hand. They are the mere beginnings of ideas, hints of themes to be explored. Once home in my studio, objects sit. And there they remain until something unrelated and unbidden draws a connection between seemingly unrelated objects. And when paired together, it’s precisely those differences that emphasize a commonality or brings new meaning that invites interpretation. When people recognize why disparate items have been put together, there is a connection there too. And when they see something else, something that’s personal to them, something I never considered — there is discovery as well.
DONNA NAMNOUM
STILL LIFE - UNTETHERED | EAST, WEST & TDP GALLERIES
JANUARY 18 - FEBRUARY 24, 2018
The vessels in this series are assembled of wheel thrown stoneware clay parts. The process is spontaneous; the clay allows for a material centered approach in which the inherent qualities of the medium help in the aesthetic decision-making process. The forms are usually influenced by nature, and particularly in this series, succulents and underwater plants. In the plant inspired forms, the sprouts, buds and mushrooming forms (all wheel-thrown) are growing from the covers of the ceramic jars. My intent is that the large wheel thrown vessels serve as both the container and the plants' host. The finial inspired forms speak for themselves with surface treatment that refers to our shared history.
PATRICIA WEISE
STILL LIFE - UNTETHERED | EAST, WEST & TDP GALLERIES
JANUARY 18 - FEBRUARY 24, 2018
These small gouache paintings of dish drainers are part of a series I’m calling Kitchen Clutter. I’m not sure what attracts me to this subject. Obviously, I am celebrating daily life, especially the domestic rituals that keep a household from falling into utter chaos. Perhaps the meditative, repetitive quality of the task of washing dishes is not a far stretch from the activity of painting the scene. There is enjoyment in bringing order, even harmony, to a random arrangement of objects, shapes and colors. On another level, the objects depicted — dishes, pots and pans, and especially cups and glasses — can be seen as stand-ins for the deep human connections made in conversation in the kitchen.
JOHN WOODARD
STILL LIFE - UNTETHERED | EAST, WEST & TDP GALLERIES
JANUARY 18 - FEBRUARY 24, 2018
My objective in art is to make paintings which are seriously beautiful. I believe a painting should be an object of meditation; a place one can return to and discover new things one has missed in the first viewing of the piece. A painting should lure the viewer into its world, and give the viewer a place for his mind to play. Through the juxtaposition of objects, their negative and positive shape relationships, and color and value patterns, I attempt to draw out my inner emotions and convey them on a two dimensional surface. The still-lifes are painted directly from set ups in my studio. Through my work, I hope to convey to my audience the mystery, beauty and complexity of life as I know it. The technique I use is watercolor resist. First, I apply the oil pastel in complex layering, to achieve subtle color relationships and texture. Then I apply a watercolor wash. The watercolor pulls away or resists the oil pastels, creating a unique style that is rarely used because it requires an in-depth understanding of color, and expert manipulation of a difficult medium
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