ArtSpace

It’s March again, and with it comes that wonderful sense of renewal that we get each spring. One way to shake off the remaining traces of winter’s blues is to give the senses a treat by visiting the many museums and galleries in the region. The museums and galleries in the beautiful Catskill Region and Hudson Valley are offering an abundance of very accomplished work in a wide variety of media and styles that is guaranteed to stimulate the senses and engage the mind.



The art of the still life is the subject explored at Windham Fine Arts from March 12 through April 10, in a show aptly titled A Feast for the Eye, featuring the work of Maya Farber, Keith Gunderson, Marianne Heigemeir and Karen O’Neil. The artists’ reception will be held on Saturday, March 12, from 5:00 to 7:00 pm. In still life the artist is not an observer as in landscape or interior study work. Here the art direction, color balance, lighting and choice of objects are key to the success of the finished piece. A Feast for the Eye presents the viewer with four very different views of the same genre.



Maya Farber debuts at Windham Fine Arts with her unusual mixed-media work. Acrylic paint is combined with found images arranged to fool the eye and create a seamless transition between the collaged and painted surfaces. The result is an opulent mix of photo realism and painterly aspects that give the work incredible depth. Maya has shown extensively world wide and is represented in numerous corporate collections such as Mobil Chemical, ATT and I.C.C. Her work is part of the permanent collections of Museum of Art and Sciences at the University of Maine, the Museum of Art in Jacksonville, FL and the Art Museum of Norfolk, VA.



Keith Gunderson, well known for his landscapes, will present his still life work in Windham for the first time. This work centers on unusual objects as diverse as Chinese pottery, fruit or even a jar of pickles carefully arranged and beautifully painted reminiscent of the classical still lifes of the 17th century Dutch, Flemish and English painters.



Marianne Heigemeir returns to Windham with her sumptuous, jewel toned soft pastels. Heigemeir uses very ordinary objects such as bowls, fruit and flowers, but when she has finished they are anything but ordinary. She will present a new series of rose paintings, a subject for which she has a particular affinity. Marianne Heigemeir shows throughout the Hudson Valley and Windham Fine Arts is thrilled to welcome her back.



Karen O’Neil’s work is on the opposite end of the spectrum. Her paintings have a spontaneity in both the subject matter and painterly aspects. Her brushstrokes are audacious, there is no hesitation. The subjects are everything from flea market tea cups to wedges of oranges arranged on checked tablecloths. She directs your eye with her impeccable color sense, and there is always one part of the painting that demands attention.



Windham Fine Arts is located at 5380 Main Street in Windham, New York. Hours are 11:00 am to 5:00 pm, Thursday through Monday. For more information, please call 518 734 6850 or visit their Web site at www.windhamfinearts.com

From March 5 through April 3, the Roshkowska Galleries will present New York photographer Howard Finkelson’s mural-sized works along with a range of his uniquely mounted pieces, many photographed in China. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, March 5, from 4 to 7 pm.



Finkelson is a constant observer of the environment, natural and unnatural, photographing images neglected by others. For more than 20 years he has photographed everywhere from sidewalks to sand dunes, from Ulster County to southeast Asia, creating a palette of form, texture and color—a world between painting and photography.



For Finkelson, the ongoing exploration of the texture of our planet is the core of his art. By isolating portions of reality, his photo-abstracts shape a totally new image; an abstraction that captures the structural essence of the world around us. “In Eastern philosophy everything contains the seed of its opposite, and this is what I found in my work,” says Finkelson. “Concreteness closely examined becomes infinite space, unfolds an eternal mystery, a timelessness. Form is emptiness, and solids, voids. Objects are as much space and movement as they are form.”



Finkelson’s work appears in exhibitions and theater productions in the United States and abroad. Kaatsbaan International Dance Center in Tivoli, NY, has presented 2 of his dance/theater collaborations with distinguished Asian choreographers, and Bard College exhibited his work in October as part of the Conference on Asian Studies.



The Roshkowska Galleries are located at 5338 Main Street in Windham, NY. They are open Friday through Monday, from 12 to 5 pm. For more information, please call them at 518 734 9669.



There is still time to visit Winter Landscapes, a solo exhibit by Naomi Blum, on view on the Second Floor of the Greene County Council on the Arts’ Catskill Gallery through March 5. This solo exhibit is inspired by the beauty of the northern Catskill Region. A native New Yorker, Blum creates her expressive landscapes from memory in her Windham studio. Her background includes formal training at Parsons School of Design and study of sumi brush painting in Japan. Blum’s work has been exhibited internationally, as well as solo and group shows in Greene and Columbia Counties.



The Greene County Council on the Arts is also presenting Warped, a juried exhibition of fabric and fiber art at the Mountaintop Gallery in Windham. The show opens Saturday, March 5, with an opening reception from 2 to 4 pm, and runs through April 24. Warped is a group show of fiber artists and craftspeople whose work includes wall hangings, quilts and wearable art. Members of the Patchworker’s Guild of the Northern Catskills are featured participants.



The Greene County Council on the Arts Catskill Gallery is located at 398 Main Street in Catskill. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, from 10 am to 4 pm. The Mountaintop Gallery is located on Main Street in Windham. Gallery hours are Thursday from 10 am to 4 pm and Friday through Tuesday from 10 am to 5 pm. For more information, please call the Greene County Council on the Arts at 518 943 3400 or visit their Web site at www.greenearts.org.

An exhibition of 50 paintings by contemporary American realist painter Don Nice will be on view through April 22 at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art in New Paltz.



Don Nice is a classic figure in American art of the past half century. He burst upon the scene in the early 1960’s as one of the innovative groups of “new perceptual realists” who wanted to put content back into painting. Nice integrates a gestural technique gleaned from earlier Expressionist and Abstract Expressionist painters with a realist focus and energy derived from Pop Art. Combining a naturalist’s interest in observation with an artist’s compulsion for artistic vision, Nice embraces aspects of popular culture and certain critical issues of our time. He paints classic American products like sneakers, candy wrappers and soda bottles and juxtaposes them with natural elements, such as bears, fish, birds and fruits—in site-specific landscapes from the Hudson River Valley to the Sierra Nevada. In doing so, he has created a distinctive vision of civilization’s detritus in league with cultural concerns for the environment. He has conjured and created a singular pursuit of new formal ideas and formats in which he visualizes the complicated and often organic interplay between process and product, between that which is common and that which is classic. In all aspects of this endeavor, Don Nice gives definition to the nature of art. Nice has had more than 60 solo gallery and museum exhibitions and is represented in more than 70 major collections throughout the world.



The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art is located on the campus of SUNY-New Paltz. The museum is open Wednesday through Saturday from 11 am to 5 pm and on Sunday from 1 pm to 5 pm. For more information, please call them at 845 257 3844 or visit their Web site at www.newpaltz.edu/museum. Admission is free.



The Woodstock Guild proudly presents a special exhibition of paintings by renowned artist Henrietta Mantooth at the Kleinert/James Art Gallery. The exhibition runs through April 10.



A Life in Paint is a retrospective of 30 years of art by Hentrietta Mantooth. It is a collection of 20 paintings, picture poems and installations that explore personal and political themes through passionate permutations of color, texture and light.



Ms. Mantooth, who is at the height of her creative power, describes her paintings as “witnessing” people (based on stories and photos that appear in newspapers and on television) who are nameless: refugees, rebels, farmers, men and women who tend and defend their land and the homeless men, women and children who are roaming the world, searching for safety and a way to make a living.



Her work is inspired by her raw upbringing in Missouri and her extensive travels in Latin America. From her experience in the Kansas City Streets, reflecting jazz, corrupt politics and racial inequality, to the Missouri farmland where her mother’s people raised grapes and apples and where her sister and herself fashioned toy dolls from mud and sticks, hollyhock, corn husks and corn silk, concocting their paints from mulberries, beets, boiled onions grasses and laundry blueing, and to the Gypsies parked in their live-in wagons along the oiled road in front of their house, Ms. Mantooth extracted the essence of each of these vivid experiences and projected them onto her painted and written canvases.

Likewise, her rustic pilgrimages on oxcart, in the back of trucks and on horses and mules to observe and participate in Ancient Afro-American and Indian rituals in Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, Peru, Columbia, Argentina, Bolivia and Guatemala gave intensity and vision to her artistic endeavors. Traveling to local indigenous ceremonies, ancient ruins, Indian markets and settlements and many out of the way places for 18 years made her acutely aware of poverty and prejudice, of dust wrecked land, lack of education and stunted lives.



The forces that synthesized all these deeply felt experiences were her humanistic compassion and her love of paint. “I feel my real subject matter is paint, pushing it to its momentary limits to give form to the passion of visible and invisible life. The surprises of this process are what hold me to the work.”



Aside from the paintings on display, set design photos will document Ms. Mantooth’s prolific career in theater as a set designer and performer. A video of Ms. Mantooth’s career in art and theater created by Maureen Bisilliat will also be on display.



Ms. Mantooth, an internationally acclaimed artist, has her work represented in the Queens Museum of Art, The American Academy of Arts an Letters in New York City, The Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, The Museum of Modern Art in Brazil and in numerous galleries and collections across America. She has received awards and fellowships from the Mc Dowell Colony, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Santa Fe Institute, The New York Foundation for the Arts and the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation among others.



The Kleinert/James Arts Center is located at 34 Tinker Street in Woodstock. Gallery hours are Friday to Sunday from12 to 5 pm. For more information, please call them at 845 657 9714.



Also in Woodstock, the Woodstock Artists Association opens the 2005 season in the Towbin Museum Wing with the exhibition With Affection: Personal Inscriptions and the Art of Giving, which will be on view through May 1. Prints, drawings, paintings, and other works drawn from the WAA Permanent Collection and inscribed with one-of-a-kind messages will be shown, as well as select loans from local collections.Towbin Wing, Woodstock Artists Association



Many of Woodstock's most renowned artists will be featured in the exhibition, including Eugene Speicher (1883-1962). Speicher inscribed many works to friends and fellow artists throughout his career, including an oil portrait of fellow painter Harvey Emrich, dated 1945, and a drawing of an unknown actress dedicated with the following message, “To Andrée Ruellan with my compliments—July 4, 1942.” These simple inscriptions bring to light many of the personal connections between artists, which might be otherwise overlooked in archival records.

“Through a NYSCA grant in 2002, we began a full cataloguing of the collection, which includes recording any inscriptions and marks on the works of art,” explains curator Josephine Bloodgood. “Over time I came to realize how many works in our collection were exchanged between artists or given as gifts to friends in the community. I was fascinated by the fondness with which these pieces were inscribed and how these notations reveal the tremendous camaraderie that has existed in the Woodstock arts community.”



The exhibition will include several works from the collection of Adrian and Sophie Siegel, one-time Woodstock residents who had been all but forgotten to many in the area when their rich collection of art was given to the Woodstock Artists Association in 1994. According to Linda Freaney, director of the WAA Permanent Collection, “The Siegels were both wise and generous in that—in addition to donating wonderful works of art to the collection—they provided funds that have been used to help preserve these and other works we have in our care.” A small oil entitled Clown by artist Andrée Ruellan (born 1905) is one of the works inscribed to the Siegels and will be part of the exhibition. Other works inscribed to these popular friends and patrons include a lithograph by Eduardo Chavez (1917-1995) entitled Segovia (1938) and a sensitively drawn portrait of Adrian Siegel by Julius Bloch (1888-1966) dated 1932.



Other revered friends of the early Woodstock art colony were John and Fritzi Striebel and Wilna Hervey and Nan Mason. John Striebel was a cartoonist best known for the comic strip “Dixie Dugan” and he and his wife enjoyed closed friends with numerous artists in the area. Hervey and Mason, artists in their own right, were recipients of many original drawings from Woodstock friends. One such work is Barns and Apple Tree by Charles Rosen (1878-1950) that is inscribed, “Happy Birthday to Nan from Charlie—1933 (and “Willie” too!).” Howard Mandel’s (1917-1999) lithograph Age of Reason was also inscribed to the couple “With Affection for Willie and Nan / love Howard.” These messages, like so many featured in the exhibition, signify the deep regard and tenderness with which Woodstock artists held their friendships.



Works by Philip Guston, Julio de Diego, Konrad and Florence Cramer, Harry Gottlieb, Carl Walters, Pele de Lappe, John Carroll, Leon Kroll and others will also be on display.



The Towbin Museum Wing of the Woodstock Artists Association is located at 28 Tinker Street, near the Village Green in the heart of Woodstock. They are open Friday and Saturday from 12 to 6 pm, and Monday, Thursday and Sunday from 12 to 5 pm. For more information, please call them at 845 679 2940 or visit their Web site at www.woodstockart.org.



The Farfetched Gallery in Kingston is presenting a solo exhibition of paintings, drawings, and mixed media pieces by Korean artist Ho-Jin Kwak. Opening the Diary will open on March 5, with a reception from 5-10 pm, and will run through March 26th.



Professor Amy Cheng of the Art Department at SUNY-New Paltz has said that “Ho-Jin is an extremely versatile artist, able to handle a range of materials in his work. He has a talent for collage, assemblage and drawing. His work, which range from idiosyncratic, and very personal drawing using graphite and inks on paper to paintings which incorporate bas-relief elements, to free-standing assemblage sculpture explore personal, sentient, and cross-cultural issues of identity, sexuality, and material culture. His works, which often have a diaristic feel to them, have the virtue of communicating an intensely personal intersection of the self with the world.”



The Farfetched Gallery is located at 65 Broadway in Kingston. For the month of March, they will be open Saturday and Sunday from 12 to 6 pm or by appointment. For more information, please call them at 914 907 9332.