May 11, 2012 | DoNArTNeWs

Eric Hall, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit

Eric Hall has maintained a studio at 915 Spring Garden for more than two years, he used to work at home but desired to create large scale paintings. The high ceilinged bright studio permits the painter to go big, there’s a triptych of bridges that’s enormous. Eric Hall has figured out the largest canvas he can fit through the door – 9 feet high and ten feet wide. DoN commented that that’s a lot of paint? “Yeah, I just need a big idea.” Eric Hall‘s current fascination is a series of paintings based on a glass pyramid. The Spiker, Jeff the photographer and DoN were all impressed by the bold color fields, a visual feast for the eyes during our open studio art crawl.

Eric Hall, 915 Spring Garden

Referring to the canvas on his easel Eric said, “This is acrylic and oil pastels. Did you know oil pastels were originated for Pablo Picasso? He said he wanted something which would give it color and the ability to draw. So he went to Sennelier , his friend and asked them to come up with something and oil pastels is what they came up with. Several companies make them but only Sennelier Oil Pastel has come up with something to fix it with. And they’ve got it heavily patented, so? Remember, oil pastels never really dry.”

Eric Hall, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit

Eric Hall explained that oil pastels are highly susceptible to damage, “Oil pastels have to be covers with glass. But Sennelier has come up with this spray so it’s more like oil paint when it dries. It surprised me because it was only like 1923, I thought it was a much older medium than that. It was about the time Claude Monet was working, his garden was well established, that’s about the time he had his cataract operation.”

Eric Hall, 915 Spring Garden Studio Visit

Eric Hall‘s glass pyramid paintings are based on a gift which he found beautiful and inspiring, he has created a series of almost Warholized paintings of the object, creating a sense of celebrity. The studio is filled with large crystal images in glowing color, like Jim Dine‘s bathrobe paintings, Eric Hall‘s crystal pyramids evoke emotions like love, desire and hope. Another large painting glowing in the sunny studio made DoN think of Gerhard Richter, the canvas could have been large quantities of paint squeegeed across the canvas but it’s actually a huge landscape of canyons lit with bright colors of shadow and light. Eric Hall has big ideas.

Read about 915 Spring Garden Art Studios artiss:

Katya Held

Anne Saint Peter

Laura D. Adams

DoNArTNeWs Philadelphia Art News Blog

Written and photographed by DoN Brewer

[disclosure page] All ad links in this blog post go to Amazon.com

Laura D. Adams, 915 Spring Garden Art Studios, Artists’ House Gallery

915 Spring Garden Art Studios held their Spring open studio tour April 29th, Spike the biker, Jeff the photographer and DoN converged on the fifth floor of the art studio building with the idea of visiting each floor’s artists. The old industrial building, by the decaying aqua duct on Spring Garden Street, is divided into studio spaces and has hosted Philadelphia artists for thirty years. For a time the studios were open only once a year, in the Fall now coinciding with Philadelphia Open Studio Tours city wide art crawl, but many artists in the building opened up for a Springtime tour offering a chance to meet the artists in their work spaces. The first studio our trio visited was Laura D. Adams, a self described realist painter, displaying a group of paintings she had readied for an upcoming show at Artists’ House Gallery in Old City arrayed along the sunny wall of her space, offering us a great preview for her art show opening June 1st.

Laura D. Adams, 915 Spring Garden Art Studios

DoN asked Laura D. Adams what she was doing to prepare for the show at Artists’ House Gallery? “I first agreed to do the show back in May, so I started preparing the work for it, really, in July. I started doing the prep work, planning what work would be in it. I’ve just been working steadily all year towards it, there will be some older works from last year but there will be ten or twelve new paintings. Which is a lot for me to do in a year, I work really slowly.”

DoN questioned Laura about her realist style and if she had a theory of what’s real or not? “Less now than before, I used to be interested in a kind of almost pushing that boundary. Like that painting of the door that’s on the floor. I’m not doing as much trompe l’oeil as I used to, that’s from about three years ago and last year I did some 3D sculptural paintings, they were rolls of tape where I cut them out in the shape of a roll of tape and then I painted the whole thing, all the text, price tags, to look exactly like a roll of tape. I did four of them and then hung them on the wall. The same kind of thing, trying to play with our perception of reality.”

Laura D. Adams, 915 Spring Garden Art Studios

Is there a distinction between realism and trompe l’oeil? Laura D. Adams said, “I kind of veered off, it’s still trompe l’oeil, in the sense that it’s really solid space, I’m still interested in really compressing the picture plane. But I got really interested in patterns, so that’s kind of been a thing this year. Fabric and textiles, I love detail, so that’s a way to explore a lot of detail.”