Plantiful 2011
Gail Flanery: Flanery’s monotype prints on paper derive imagery from the natural world, using elements in her composition that allude to landscape and are informed by memory. Through the painterly process of monotype printmaking, she builds layers of pastel colors to create simplified forms and planes of expressive color at once slightly abstract and highly atmospheric.
Susan Greenstein: Greenstein’s oil pastel drawings focus on the observation of architecture and nature within the urban landscape. She finds there is a rhythm and energy between the two that compliment each other and is most interested in how those rhythms change, merge and intertwine — the way nature weaves itself along the urban landscape in a tangle of unpredictability.
Helene Manzo: Manzo’s paintings and monotypes, although representational, push towards gestural abstraction with loosely brushed marks and color. Manzo uses color to create atmosphere and to define space. Close scrutiny of the natural world, however, works to resolve any dichotomy between the non-objective and the figurative.
Remarkable Marks 2011
Karen Gibbons: In this work Karen uses evocative color, energetic marks and adroit manipulations to express physicality, growth and connections. Her drawings and monoprints are both bold and delicate; the use of color is fertile and austere. These contradictions create containers for expansive feelings and familiar impressions which are sometimes precarious, often disconcerting, always rich and poetic.
Jo Bidner: Bidner’s transparent watercolor images may begin in realism and glide into abstraction or begin with a few random strokes to be built into finished images, color by juxtaposed color. Areas of multiple glazes beside lightly painted areas create texture and a sense of receding space. For Bidner, the pleasure of painting is the pleasure of solving a complicated, but visually pleasing puzzle, which has no preordained solution.
Sara Cedar Miller: Miller is drawn to the ocean’s power and beauty that constantly changes with the light, the tides, the winds, and the seasons. She is drawn to the beauty of maps, calligraphy and art of Asian cultures, and abstract expressionist paintings. As an artist she tries to include these disparate visual media into her art making. Although the prints are straight, un-manipulated photographs, she tries to capture the “drawing” that takes place between the sun and the water that cannot be seen by the naked eye.
Martha Walker: When Walker builds her steel sculptures, she uses a unique technique of dripping and bending the metal like wax by heating it with an oxy-acetylene torch. Through this process, drip by drip, abstract and organic forms develop that resemble microorganisms or mysterious aquatic creatures rather than objects made of metal. This slow, meticulous process enables Walker to conjure images from her subconscious.
Kit Warren: Using acrylic and gouache on paper, Warren’s dense, shimmering paintings begin with images found in biological and geographic forms. Whether looking inside or out, at blood cell or landmass, Warren’s work plays with the relationship between pattern and scale. Small patterns intimate the behavior of larger; repetition unifies. Much in the way that millions of microscopic cells make up a drop of blood, or thousands of blades of grass make up a green patch of earth, random repetitions eventually coalesce into larger patterns.
Summer in the City 2011
Eric March: Eric’s watercolors and prints of Coney Island are inspired by the energy, color and craziness of this singular city summer destination. Working on-site, Eric creates his watercolor compositions from within the chaos of the beachfront carnival. Painted over the summers of 2008-2009, these pieces represent a face of Coney Island that has since changed dramatically with new developments and the loss of historic buildings.
Patricia Melvin: Working in the realist tradition but using impressionist techniques, Patricia attempts to capture the light and atmosphere of Greenwich Village and her neighborhood, the East Village. The low height of the buildings enable her to integrate the sky and clouds into her work, and express the beauty of nature even in the heart of an urban metropolis. She aims to capture not only the visual aspects of these city scenes, but also the life and feel of these communities.
Michael Sorgatz: Mike’s paintings of urban landscapes depict the constant evolution of the city. He is attracted to the energy of crowds and the interactions that take place on the streets. Using an improvisational method, he applies the paint with a variety of tools such as brushes and painting knives creating a highly textured surface.
Ella Yang: Based in Brooklyn, Ella usually looks for subjects in her backyard, whether a gritty industrial street next to the Gowanus Canal or a neighborhood sidewalk with colorful mom-and-pop shops and cafes. She is often attracted to views that might not have obvious aesthetic appeal, but where the commonplace has a special patina at the moment she is there.
Landscape Re-Imagined 2011
Gail Flanery: Flanery’s monotype prints on paper derive imagery from the natural world, using elements in her composition that allude to landscape and are informed by memory. Through the painterly process of monotype printmaking, she builds layers of pastel colors to create simplified forms and planes of expressive color at once slightly abstract and highly atmospheric.
Norma Greenwood: In her recent body of work, Greenwood’s oil paintings transform beds and pillows into sensual objects that evoke forms found in nature.The folds, crinkles, and creases of a rumpled bed hint at an unseen presence and create personal, suggestive landscapes. For Greenwood, painting is a means for pushing the boundary between abstraction and figurative expression.
Kamilla Talbot: Talbot’s oil paintings explore the tension between painterly invention and particularity of place. She paints “intuitively constructed landscapes,” in a search for a metaphoric, poetic presence, rather than a literal representation of nature. She has developed a vocabulary of flatness and abstraction which co-exists with the depiction of a perceived, recognizable place.
Ella Yang: Yang paints to honor the beauty and liveliness in nature and the man-made, as a visual homage to the bounty in her life. She seeks to capture the unique quality of light and its impact on a specific place at a certain time of day in her oil paintings. She uses light and composition to find a simple way to capture the spirit of a scene, usually infused with a sense of calm.
Renewal 2011
Jessica Baker: Baker uses leaves, branches and seeds that have fallen from trees to make prints on paper, which removes the plants from their usual context and imbues them with a permanence that does not exist in the natural world. Incorporating multiple plates and colors, along with carefully executed arrangements, Baker creates intricate, multi-layered images and patterns that transcend the singular identity of the individual leaf or seed. Ultimately, she her aim is “to capture a moment in the growth and life cycle of a tree and to convey its transient beauty. It is perhaps this ongoing transformation through the inexorable passage of time, this mirroring of life, that has the greatest effect on me.”
Ellen Chuse: In many of her recent works, Chuse explores the notion of the ocean as the mother of us all, that life begins in water. In fact, Chuse says, “Salty water surrounds us in utero, which is not so different from the experience of ocean creatures floating, carried along and nurtured in sacs and tide pools.” Her focus is on process, however, combining tactile drawing materials like graphite with her exploration of color through acrylic paint. Moving between representation and abstraction, her work explores landscape and the body in deeply personal ways.
Laura Lee-Georgescu: Lee-Georgescu uses a technique evolved from watercolor application and a type of mono-printing with oil paint. These “stain paintings” on fabric, usually cotton, are both explorations of aerial landscapes and color studies evoking a physical sensation. Ultimately, through this kind of landscape painting, Lee-Georgescu says she wants “the viewer to be aware of their place in nature and visually understand the environment they inhabit.” These works suggest the universal landscape in its infinite shapes and qualities.
Purumé Gallery | New York City 