Abstract Evocative Exhibition

A few years ago, I was invited to select artists to take part in an exhibition of abstract art and to direct its installation. Abstract art had always kinda delighted me and confounded me at the same time and it was a treat to dive a little deeper into this popular form of artistic expression and to see what contemporary local creators were making in that realm. I was honored to be chosen as the juror for this first ever "Focus" show at WAAM and had a blast curating and naming and hanging the show and writing some introductory wall text and a couple/few sentences about each artist. I always wanted to have a blog that commemorated it. Here it is!! (finally!!)

Abstract Evocative – Juror’s statement

Abstract art seems to spring forth from one of two directions: from the soul or from nature, and either way it has its own evocative power. That’s what the title of this exhibition refers to: does the art take you somewhere? Make you think of something or feel some way or another? Is it evocative?

The great artist Howard Hodgkin described his abstract paintings as “representational pictures of emotional situations.” I would say that many of the paintings in this show fit that description, but that many others are the obverse: emotional pictures of representational situations.

Take Mercedes Cecilia's gorgeous impressionistic paintings of trees and lakes, or Gabe Brown’s landscape-evocative jewels begging us to consider the natural world in these modern times, or Chris Engel’s luscious abstractions with figurative titles that help the viewer to see the source material and to measure the aesthetic distance traveled by the artist, serving much the same purpose as a jazz standard.

Jazz, it turns out, is, for me anyway, a perfect metaphor for much of the work in this show, whether it’s Stephen Niccolls’ expertly created compositions, Diane Dwyer’s moving and serene improvisations or Carol P. Kunstadt’s weavings of musical scores and devotional texts. Virtuosic solos can almost be heard and can certainly be seen in the lyrical abstractions of Ellen Jouret-Epstein; and Paulette Deborah Esrig’s dynamic stoneware sculptures truly evoke the motions and rhythms of jazz dance.

And just as countless jazz composers have noodled with mathematics and compositions, so too do Lucile Colin, a mathematics and fine arts double major in college who writes that she’s “drawn to abstraction because it is similar to a mathematical puzzle”, and Astrid Fitzgerald, whose beautiful precisions have “a formal basis in philosophical geometry … and most importantly the Golden Mean Ratio.”

How delightful are these artists, providing us with so many beautiful creations and so much emotional or representational resonance? This, to me, is the great promise of abstract art: to take the viewer out of their head and to relate directly to their soul. These 10 artists have all succeeded on this front for me. I hope you, dear viewers, agree.

Gabe Brown

Artist's statement:

As an artist, I search for meaning in the unknown. Exploring a world beyond my own tangible reality, I see myself as part of a larger, richer universe. A universe that expands further through a conscious effort to embrace the meaning of that which I create in my own personal life, as well as the experiences generated by the lives of those around me. Art is like magic, an illusion created by the force of humanity. Our choices in life can be amazing portals for adventure. For me, these possibilities present themselves through the process of painting: researching potent images, conﬁguring them on canvas, and struggling to imbue them with a sense of myself and my own wonder at the enormous complexity of the world. I seek a better understanding of truth in nature with constant comparison and evaluation of opposites. Using a visual vocabulary derived from a world that often goes unnoticed, everyday events such as conversations between birds, forces that drive water, or the cellular structure of plant life, I begin to reinvent reality. This experience enables me to come closer to an understanding of how it is that I identify with the world. The concerns that arise from this process reveal themselves to me as subversive dualities existing in both the natural world and the man-made. When we consider something in a new context, having unearthed the intrigue that lies just beneath the surface of the seemingly simple, the original meaning is altered and brought to a new level of consciousness, creating metaphor. In this way, I can see, and show, that the natural world is not unlike our own man-made realm, an alternate universe filled with an active power to recognize desire, temptation, and frailty. The paintings aim to create a secret recipe for an inner landscape of the human condition; narrative vignettes that are both alluring and mysterious. Nature, and those elements existing in its microcosm become metaphors for a strange and at times super reality, a parallel universe that questions the natural scheme of life itself. Gabe Brown

Juror’s statement:

These pieces, for me, at once rebuff any attempt to connect them to the physical world and are completely tied to it. They’re designs, abstract and free of specific evocations, but also, are clearly, for me, landscapes, x-rays of the not always healthy natural world around us.

Mercedes Cecilia

Artist's statement:

I love painting when trees and mountains form a relationship with water. I paint exploring space, light and color. I also paint the scenes of my _"inner fields"_ my visions and my memories. These experiences are spontaneous and painting them is glimpsing into an unknown story. Following in the footsteps of the Hudson River Artist, I paint on site, sometimes hiking to find a mountain stream or standing in front of Cooper Lake. I celebrate our environment and wish to preserve the beauty of our environment, The Catskill Mountains and the Hudson River Valley When I was 5 years old, I crayoned a three feet long blue whale on the pink wall of my grandparent's home. I still remember my aunts and cousins looking at .the whale. in silence, and how they agreed the blue whale looked good on the pink wall. When Tia Carmen, saw the whale painted on the wall, she also became silent for a while and then made an announced while holding her laughter: "We can’t have more whales on walls, let's get a ream of paper from the corner store". At 8 years old, my parents gave me a used box with brushes and tubes of oil paints, I painted everyday sunlit scenes and my family portraits.

Juror’s statement:

I love looking at these paintings as abstractions. Sure they’re impressionistic representations of the natural world (as their titles make clear), but, in the implementation of that style, they also become abstracted representations of those scenes, too.

Lucille Colin

Artist's statement:

I make abstract paintings and collages with tactile surfaces, spontaneous mark making and layering of color. I don't have a plan. I work until something feels discovered. I am drawn to abstraction because it is similar to a mathematical puzzle. I want the viewer to wonder how it is made, to ask why, to step around its corners. I studied on the graduate level at Hunter College MFA program. My undergraduate degree was from Brooklyn College. I majored in Painting and minored in Mathematics. I learned to draw from going to sketch groups five to six nights a week. I was honored to be at YADDO for six weeks one summer as well as attending residencies in Sweden and France. I am in the collection of the French Minister of Culture and the National Gallery Costa Rica where I had a One Person Show in 2010. I had a One Person Show at WAAM last summer.

Juror’s statement:

These are, for me, the most purely abstract pieces in this show and, perhaps because of that, are the least evocative of any objects or vistas of the physical world. They remind me of standing in front of a Rothko as a young man, snarkily asking what was, at the time, my one and only art question: “yeah, but what’s it about?” My companion smacked me upside the head and rebutted: “no. how do they make you feel?”

Diane Dwyer

Artist's statement:

I’m the dim cave. I’m the iceberg. I’m the tattered curtain flapping in the wind. The half-closed door blocking your view. My back is to you. I’m in your way, and quiet. We have nowhere to go. Our jittery arms and flapping feet fall still. Last September, intimidated by returning to the studio after a three year hiatus, I grabbed a pile of my old paintings to work back into. I wanted to get straight back to work and not lose time to the frightful sight of a white canvas. I thought I’d reduce their fussiness, obliterate their frills and find out what they really wanted to be, deep down inside. Turns out it was a good idea, a natural way to move back into studio easily. But I was surprised to find, working instinctually and meanderingly as I do, that skewed versions of certain representational images kept showing up—cramped buildings, tumbling hillsides, darkened caves, folded cloths and sometimes a reclining figure—indolent and bossy little characters I don't remember inviting to the party. At times I’ve fought these referential images, afraid I might be foregoing some kind of abstract purity. Mostly though, now I welcome them as they creep in and offer necessary structure, an investigative edge inside which I find my private language, the outlines of my story, a place to hang my hat. Because I’m working back into unfinished oil paintings the surfaces are heavy with paint, dense with lots of history. In some places the paint is knifed on, in others lightly washed. For resource material I make color block drawings with heavily layered oil crayon, which I cut into pieces and rearrange. These are quick, lighthearted studies that refresh and reboot when the paintings aren’t moving along, and that I fantasize will help deliver me unto Simplification. I yearn for the ruthlessness necessary to pare each painting down to its pure essence; empty of superfluous flourishes and finicky gestures. I've a very long way to go and the work is far more congested than I ever intend. In the end I’d be quite happy if one day my paintings landed somewhere neatly between Carmen Herrera, Georgio Morandi and Forrest Bess.

Juror’s statement:

I was surprised to read that these paintings had any reference in the physical world at all. I’d imagined them as pieces of pure abstraction, whose personal evocations of tents and fields and sleeping gypsies represented a kind of a failure on my part, a failure of my ability to relate to them on the level on which I thought they’d been created. Which, really, brings up a great question: can we ever, truly, relate to art incorrectly?

Christopher Engel

Artist's statement:

These paintings represent a series begun around 2010. Basically, they are abstract with either more obvious hints at what they may be based on, at least, in my mind or representative of some imagery one might use in a still life, as in Still life with Fruit Bowl. Parade is a composition that reminds me of a jaunty parade or crowded street like in Ludwig von Kirchner’s expressionist street scenes. Blue Arc is purely a work about space. Space is something that is ever present around us where ever we are. In an elevator or pine forest or gigantic valley surrounded by the highest cliffs. Every object next or near every other object relating to our position to them describes the space we are conscious of in every step we take. Even in total darkness we are conscious of the space around us, even though we can only feel it. Sometimes I like to rework old canvases that I’ve grown to dislike. Blue Arc was previously a landscape done from Central Park in NYC. I was never happy with it. After years in storage the painting got cracked and weathered so I used it just to get started on something new. Of course, the original is not recognizable but it led me to the result that is the Blue Arc.

Juror’s statement:

As with the paintings on the opposite side of this room, these, to me, are wildly successful abstract paintings given specific reference by their titles more than by any compositional elements. Engel’s colors and paint handling are simply luscious and work directly on my soul, making the evocations feel moot.

Ellen Jouret-Epstein

Artist's statement:

Ellen Jouret-Epstein creates sculpture and wall reliefs in wool felt and everyday materials -- paper, aluminum foil, plaster, and kitchen gauze. Her earliest work was a response to natural forms, including the body, plants, lichens, and landform. Her more recent work sometimes has its “feet” in nature, but has evolved to more directly explore the interaction of form, color or finish, and shadow. Each piece develops formally through imagination, manipulation and interaction of materials, and a good deal of chance. This body of work consists primarily of three-dimensional quilt- or puzzle-like reliefs and sculpture, large and small, constructed from multiple elements: either color-blended wool felt “skins” transformed through shaping, stiffening, burning or stitching; or, paper elements on foil that are collaged, crimped, shaped, and stiffened. In both, the “quilted” elements torque when combined to form unique topographies. The felt work begins with an idea of form and then develops through the working process. Ellen creates her own materials along the way, through the wet felting process that transforms sheep fleece into a “skin,” a kind of fabric with unlimited form-making and painterly possibilities. The raw, unfinished quality of the work is intentional and also retains the playful connotations of felt. The collages are her most recent work. They begin with a chosen color palette of magazine images and one striking center piece, and then develop with the placement of elements according to color and shape, and rarely of content. A swirl of chiffon might suggest water, or have no reference at all. The pieces reveal a character when complete that suggests a title. An early sculpture is also represented here, which uses a yarn skein as an armature for needle felted wool fleece with playful results. Ellen has always made art and first exhibited weavings in museums and galleries as part of the nascent fiber arts movement in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970’s. After a long career in the nonprofit art world and as a landscape architect, she began felting by experimenting with fiber from her mixed flock of sheep. Her award-winning work has been exhibited in regional shows, including a two-person show at the Millbrook Library Gallery in Fall 2016.

Juror’s statement:

I find this path into abstraction very interesting: rather than simply “blurring” out the figurative, she’s exploring and expressing particular qualities of it, and in so doing, finding perhaps, a more analytical rather than less analytical method of creating abstract art.

Paulette Deborah Esrig

Artist's statement:

"These sculptures are an extension of my previous work where I explored movement and dance using a play of light and shadow. I titled these stoneware works "Red" as they were created in a series. I used one of the most ancient colorants, Terra Sigellata, that can be red. As I move along this journey I find myself abstracting my forms more and more. I work intuitively with no set plan, adding, cutting and carving my shapes until I feel the work is complete.

Juror’s statement:

These sculptures worked on me right away. My brain’s natural desire to categorize them as this or that, my lifetime of seeing things “as” this or that hit up against a red brick wall with these beautiful forms. They hinted at the human body, maybe in motion, but never ever gave themselves over completely to that interpretation, leaving open the possibility of myriad other interpretations, including those that exist with no figurative reference at all: emotions.

Astrid Fitzgerald

Artist's statement:

While much of my work explores modernist aesthetic concerns, it also has a formal basis in philosophical geometry and in particular the Pythagorean principles, the Platonic Solids and most importantly the Golden Mean Ratio. This ratio, with its dynamic laws, is found not only in architectural designs from the ancient world to the present but also in nature itself. The squares, rectangles, arcs, and circles generated by this proportion have given me the means to explore the inner order of the creation. In fact, I don’t recall ever starting a work without some geometric configuration – a simple division, a square, circle or grid. The dividing and ordering of the support – whether canvas, paper or wood – gives me a place to stand, a scaffolding, so to speak, from which to work, observing what it is that wants to express itself. Some of my works hint at the underlying order and symmetry of the creation, as revealed in physics and cosmology, while others explore by means of illusionism the insubstantiality of matter. The aim is always to convey the subtle movements from surface to depth, from the concrete to the insubstantial, from outer to inner realities, the effect bringing the apparent solidity of matter into question.

Juror’s statement:

Astrid’s beautiful geometric forms encourage the viewer to explore their underlying intelligences. They seem very much to spring forth from the intellect and yet, in spite of (or perhaps because of?) their inscrutability, they work quite effectively on the viewer’s emotional self, too.

Carole P. Kunstadt

Artist's statement:

The Sacred Poem Series takes physical, material, and intellectual inspiration from the Parish Psalmody, A Collection of Psalms and Hymns for Public Worship, published in 1844 and 1849. The complete body of work from this series spans ten years and numbers over a hundred works. A book is not only the way in which text is presented but it is a container. An irreplaceable aspect of the book is that books absorb histories. Paradoxically the limitations of the form/codex presents us with important conversations, intimacies and the possibility of expansive experiences. The primary element used in this series is paper: the pages are taken from two volumes of a Parish Psalmody dated 1844 and 1849. These pages of psalms are manipulated and recombined, resulting in a presentation that evokes an ecumenical offering: poems of praise and gratitude. The disintegrating pages suggest the temporal quality of our lives and the vulnerability of memory and history. Utilizing both a reductive and additive process, embracing its inherent qualities while transforming the book’s pages, the paper itself gains significance through the process and merges with a new intent. Visually there is a consistent and measured cadence to a page of psalms which is echoed in the repetitive weaving or restructuring of the paper: pages are cut in strips and woven creating an altered dense surface. Although fragile, the paper is surprisingly resilient. The stitching emphasizes the repetition of the lines of text - suggestive of the passage of time, alluding to the age and the history contained within. The continuous repetitive action of sewing, knotting and weaving is similar to reciting, singing, and reading: implying that through the repetition of a task or ritual one has the possibility to transcend the mundane. The use of gold leaf elevates and heightens the rich textural qualities presenting a sumptuous visual experience. The interplay alludes to the enticing presentation of illuminated texts historically. Explored and displayed in this visual context, the alteration of the papers’ linear, tactile, and facile nature emphasizes transformation, while the possibility of revelation is playfully realized. The intended use, as well as the nature of a psalm as spiritual repository, both imply a tradition of careful devotion and pious reverence. The physical text evocatively and powerfully serves as a gateway to an experience of the sacred and the realization of the latent power of the written word. This process of interaction is played out visually in the piece, mimicking the internal experience. Thus, through the individual evolution … Carole P. Kunstadt (continuted) …of each page, culminating in a transformation of the whole volume, the material and the conceptual interface delicately and suggestively with one another. Interlude Series My works reference the material of antique papers and books, deconstructing paper and text, and using it in metaphorical ways. Hand written music manuscripts from the nineteenth century, drawn with oak gall ink on handmade paper, are cut and recombined. The deliberate notations and linear guides are divorced from their intended musical equivalent and present a cacophony of lines, notes and marks. Threads are repetitively knotted into the woven surface of fragmented notations and lyrics creating a densely textured surface. Through the exploration and manipulation of the materials - resulting in alternative rhythmic patterning, the process reveals how musical notation can become visual through re-interpretation. History, memory and time merge in a hybrid form.

Juror’s statement:

I’ve always loved the obsessive in art. From the insane details of so much outsider art to the million dots of Yayoi Kusama and everywhere in between, the visible manifestation of time and patience has always drawn me in. So it goes with Kunstadt’s work shown here: she puts in the hours and the results are magnificent. As pieces of abstract art, I was especially keen to include them as they take the most concrete source materials (books, musical scores) and make them live as pieces of powerful and evocative pieces of abstract art.

Stephen Niccolls

Artist's statement:

All of these paintings share a kind of "modularity in design", in that they incorporate modules, components that are normally consistent in size, shape and probably several other qualities. But the “modules” in my paintings resist conformity. I like the idea of setting out with a structural idea built with modular forms, and then seeing how far I can disrupt the composition by variations in color, size, shape, value, texture, et cetera. The anomalies in the modules and the structure are what make the work interesting to me.

Juror’s statement:

When I was initially approached to juror this exhibition, solely from artists on UlsterArtistsOnline.org, my first question was: “Is Stephen Niccolls one of those artists?” Despite not really knowing him, he and I share a certain overlap in the social media realm and every so often, one of his ridiculously gorgeous new compositions comes through my instagram feed. It’s always a treat; his work is definitively abstract and unabashedly joyful. For me, it evokes those wonderful days when my eyes are most wide open and I am most receptive to the beauty of the world around me.