Rich Harrington, fine artist, illustration professor & Philadelphia Sketch Club board member is just one of the local art activists featured in Midsummer Invitational @ Off The Wall Gallery, 13th & Pine Streets. Harrington’s paintings of rusting hulks of old cars and trucks are indefineable: part landscape, part still life and part portrait, the paintings are loaded with secret narratives and unanswered questions. Harrington is a driving force@ PSC, always prepared to problem solve, take on projects and promote other artists - just ask his students, they love him.
Morris Klein is VP of the Photographic Society of Philadelphia and organizes ongoing art show at the Bonte Cafes in Center City, his style of photography is hyper-realistic with enhanced color and edges. Getting photographers to participate in ongoing events is like herding cats, Morris is always even keeled and fair without being condescending - guys like Morris make such clubs like PSoP last hundreds of years.
Michelle Anne Clements @ Off the Wall in Dirty Franks - curator & gallerist Jody told DoN that Clements is donating a portion of the proceeds of her drawings of coral to Gulf relief. The alien forms are wonderfully rendered drawings of different kinds of corals, the simple black and white drawings, beautifully presented, pay homage to the complexity of the simple and vital life form.
The Midsummer Invitational @ Off the Wall Gallery includes:Michelle Anne Clements, Rebecca Cross. Rich Harrington, Morris Klein, Kelly A. Kozma, Don McPartland, Karen Rodewald, Peter Smyth, Michael B. Tantaros & Lauren Westenhiser through October.
Model Meredith Battite of ExploreTalent embodied the spirit of International SuperstarLeon Rainbow’s genius black light art show in the dark back room of Smile Gallery. The intense blue light is projected across the room with two big projectors and a Dan Flavin-like florescent mounted on the wall - the paintings vibrate with day glo color and bikini girl Meredith time tripping right out of Laugh In like a Goldie Hawn for the modern age. The similarities between then & now are nostalgic yet with a grok of how the futuristic 60’s was like while we fought the American War in Viet Nam compared to the exit this morning from Iraq - it’s a party @ ground zero, baby.
Jim Hancocks, Untitled, mixed media & black light in the back room @ Smile Gallery. Artists in the show include Leon Rainbow, Mike Ciccotello, Joe Iurato, Josi Luv 1, Aja Washington, Jim Hancocks, Papermonster, Dave Orantes, Demer, Kortez, Jon Connor & Will Kasso. Super-Kawaii!!
Bangkok & Black Light @ Smile not only stirred memories of the 60’s, in the trippy vibrant glow, dreams of absinthe drinkers and green fairies emerged from the purple haze.
is using light in a completely different way, reflecting the ambient light off metal, embelleshed, hammered, painted and polished into ethereal worlds all unto themselves, each one gives a different feedback experience as you move about the gallery. The collision of hard edge metal reflections and the zany black light art creates a dynamic inversion of perception & reality like a Star Trek holo-lab.
Vichoke Mujdamanee, Philadelphia, mixed media @ Smile Gallery on 22nd Street near Chestnut.
I Was Here, DoN Brewer, digital photograph @ Da Vinci Art Alliance’s Apocalypse Soon: 2012.
With money bombs, pandemics, oil spills, World War III fresh in our consciousness and the 2nd Wave Depression looming, Apocalyse Soon: 2012 is prescient, nihilistic funk-a-rama drama. Curator Dr Deb Miller and Juror & Awards Judge, Elin Danien, Consulting Scholar, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology gleaned a strange harvest of occult dreamscapes, blob-a-zoid sculptures and paranoid visions of the end of the future.
“I know it’s the last day on earth
We’ll be together while the planet dies
I know it’s the last day on earth
We’ll never say goodbye”
Marilyn Manson - The Last Day on Earth
Curator’s Tour, Lecture, and Opening Awards Reception: Sunday, August 8, 1pm-4 pm(doors open at 12:30)
Brujo de la Mancha, Mexican Identity in the XXIst Century Debra Miller, PowerPoint lecture, Calendar Cycles of Creation and Destruction in Pre-Columbian Art Debra Miller, Curator’s tour, Apocalypse Soon: 2012
Carol Wisker with her award winning mixed media creation, Machine: War Games Series, when the show first opened at Smile Gallery, Carol won Best in Show. The huge gallery space at RRCA is a wonderful opportunity to see most of the original show hanging together again. 3rd Friday in Millville was really fun with live entertainment tucked into every park, alley and plaza including a glee club performance!!! The creative vibe of the monthly event with art shows, restaurants and shops welcome visitors warmly with small town ambiance and upscale art.
Ted Warchal @ Riverfront Renaissance Center for the Arts special exhibit, Through My Window, A Da Vinci Art Alliance Members Exhibit. Ted, Ona & DoN are members of the Board of Directors of Da Vinci, thanks to all the artists & volunteers who arranged for the art to show up on time and to Dr. Debra Miller & David Foss for the expert installation, the RRCA is a wonderful exhibition space.
David Foss & Nicole Koenitzer.
Betsy Alexander’s Sci-Fi homage drew some teenage geeks into the gallery who seemed mesmerized at the depth of knowledge in the obscure references. Burnell Yow! told DoN he was hesitant when Betsy voiced her encyclopedic idea - but beam me up!
DoN Brewer’s drawing of Paris rooftops is paired perfectly with Lilliana Didovic’s Boathouse Row painting.
The concept pf Through My Window is that more than 20 artists were offered a window to do whatever they wanted with, the result is a uniquely Philadelphian art perspective: Bobbie Adams, Betsy Alexander, Jesse Best, DoN Brewer, Rachel Citrino. Alden Cole. Lilliana Didovic, Jerry di Falco, David Foss, Carl Johnson, Ona Kalstein, Nicole Koenitzer, Gail Kotel, Rikard Larma, Lee Muslin, Liz Nicklus, Kathryn Pannepacker, Michael Shane Simmons, Mike Sweeney, Ted Warchal, Carol Wisker & Burnell Yow!
The Annual Members Exhibition of the Philadelphia Sketch Club at Newman Galleries on Walnut Street is a wonderful introduction to the many fine artists who belong to America’s oldest art club. The swirly mix of styles, techniques and ideas is evocative of the Philly art community in microcosm; the mezzanine and third floor gallery holds a heady mix of contemporary art by masters, newbies, wannabes of all ages celebrating the first decade of the 21st Century.
Edna Santiago, Museum Stroll, acrylic on plexiglass.
Garth Herrick, Red Barn, 11:00 AM at Beaver Farm and Donald Meyer, Study (Structure) Hosta Series, egg tempera.
Linda Townshend, Holstein, oil on canvas.
Karen McDonnell, Wisdom, mixed media. Karen e-mails DoN phone pics of stickers of this little guy in public spaces, her contribution to the Philly art scene by introducing graffiti style into the mix of traditional media is like when photography put it’s foot in the door. The silver spray paint gives a glamorous luster to the surface of the canvas as if dressed up for the special day when all the artists show their best work.
The 2010 Members Exhibition of The Philadelphia Sketch Club @ Newman Galleries with 156 works by as many Philadelphia area fine artists runs through 6/9/2010.
Ona Kalstein by her three entries in the Envisioning Henry IV, Part 1 in the Black Box Gallery @ St. Stevens Theater @ 10th & Ludlow Sts, Lantern Theater Company. Ona designed images signified with memes, language and typography in a trio of drawings; child-like blood drops spurt from the cracked crown, a “garment made of blood” is saturated with droplets while the King wails and blood soaks the pea fields of the Battle of Shrewsbury with red tear-drops, the simple shapes communicating on multiple levels. Ona designs hippy-style typography into the image as if they are pages in a coloring book for kids with sophisticated adult language.
June Blumberg’s exuberant composition of the hard partying gang hanging around Prince Hal are a buffoonish bunch of clowns - thuggish, scary clowns with swords and big smiles. Blumberg won an honorable mention for her painting from the jury committee…the naive primitivism & quirky composition is fun but not jokey.
Alden Cole attended Lantern Theater Company’s Art Director, Charles McMann’s, lecture @ Da Vinci Art Alliance in late February since the play had everyone scratching their heads, Henry IV, Part 1 is not one of Shakespeare’s better known plays, and the lecture sent Cole into an exploration of the Seven Deadly Sins and how they relate to the characters in the play - Hal is slovenly, Falstaff is corpulent and Hotspur is haughty - all based on self-portraits. To develop the composition Alden acts out the facial expressions, photographs himself, composes the scene in Photoshop then paints in oils on an enormous canvas. Acedia Luxuria Superbia.
Lilliana Didovic, Lilliana Didovic & David Foss @ Envisioning Henry IV, Part 1. Didovic painted abstract weapons and Foss layered and destroyed paint to visualize wounded flesh, the metaphors and significations are not forced but real. The exhibition is loosely divided between “abstract” and “representational” art, like a battle of the art styles, David’s painting is visceral and scarred like a mutilated warrior and Lilliana’s gentle coloration is a contradiction in terms - beautiful weapons.
Mina Smith-Segal with her award winning painting, the brutalist watercolor truly captures the tension & fear of battle.
Hal by DoN, oil on canvas. Photo by Morris Klein. DoN Brewer used a variety of media to draw from such as fitness magazines, hairy bear blogs and Google to find inspiration for a new painting based on the play, after being creatively blocked around painting, having a theme to work inspired DoN to paint again. DoN saw Hal through Jersey Shore eyes with “the situation” and “GTL” representing the young prince, the hairy bear as Falstaff and a leather bar of conspirators based on a painting by John Cawse.
Envisioning Henry IV, Part 1 in the Black Box Theater in the Saint Steven’s Theater is running in conjunction with the Lantern Theater Company’s production of the Shakespeare historical play.
Now, this is 21st Century computer art! The Decline uses information design, ontology, color, data, memes, motion graphics, iconography, memories, miseries - truly epic.
Eileen Eckstein, Balloons, photograph, DoN Brewer, light being (Mama Cass), photograph, Laura Pritchard, Portrait, mixed media, Dorothy Roschen, Red, White and Green, relief tiles and Alan Klawans, Milan, archival pigment print @ The Plastic Club’sRed, White and Green exhibit.
Michael Guinn,12th Street Still Life, oil.
3rd Honorable Mention Lois Schlachter, My Brother’s Keeper, acrylic, Alden Cole,Good Vibrations, mixed media and Honorable Mention Morris Klein, Love Park, photograph. Juror Rich Harrington has a great eye and excellent taste considering that the theme was ambiguous in that the three title colors had to be used but not exclusively; Harrington chose works who fully met the criteria such as Dorothy Roschen’s wall sculpture in blatant red, white and green squares for 2nd prize and Peter Petraglia’s trippy undersea fantasy in a subtle palette for First Prize to Lois Schlachter’s wildly imaginative abstraction with what seems like millions of colors.
Tracy Landman, Reflections on Stewart, oil, Patricia Wilson-Schmid, Catching the Light, and Lucy Roehm, Radish Trio, color pencil @ The Plastic Club’s Red White & Green exhibit.
The theme is Red, White & Green which one would think should conjure Holiday Cheer but @ The Plastic Club the art is edgy, sarcastic, goth, even scary like Hunter Thompson meets Charles Addams meets Salvador Dali. Some of the work is literal and literate like Roehm’s Radish Trio and some is out and out transcendental like Jake Smith’s Merry Fish Mess. Above: Anders Hansen, Shiva, ink, graphite & charcoal, First Prize Peter Petraglia, Tubulars, pen & ink, Marie Davis Samohod, Funerary Portrait, mixed media and Karen Frank, Totem and Taboo, Acrylic.
DoN is honored to be exhibited along with such wonderful artists as those in the Plastic Club, their shows are always challenging, pushing the envelop, breaking rules yet there’s no stress, the only expectation is making art. And when the art is all hanging together it feels really good to be an artist rubbing shoulders with some of the best in town. A cool thing about writing this blog is that when DoN took the photos he didn’t know that he was shooting the work of some of his best friends, the Plastic Club uses a number system for labeling, it’s kind of like doing your own blind jury-ing and then finding out you picked only your friends such as Lois, Pat, Mike, Alan, Alden, Eileen, Dorothy, Morris, Anders…
Jake Smith, Merry Fish Mess, acrylic and Theodore J. Amick, Untitled, oil.
Alden Cole @ Galleria Deptford - Deptford Municipal Building, 1011 Cooper Street, Woodbury NJ.
While Alden installed his fantastical display of luminaries he was constantly stopped by the flow of visitors to the lobby of the Deptford Municipal Building, everyone wants to know what they are or they have a story about one of the components or their grandmother had a lamp just like that. Cole takes memories, shakes them up in his mind, recombining the pieces into objects with the logic of dreams; people are drawn to the glowing objects, filled with little stories, overflowing with light and love. And people are drawn towards him to find out how he figures this out and if he wants their grandmothers old lamps or why didn’t they think of that? Alden has a story for each luminary and a moment for each admirer.
Stars Stairway, in Alden Cole’s gallery/studio in South Philly.
Starlings Under Glass #4, oil on glass, Alden Cole @ The Plastic Club, Red White & Green Show.
Memento Mori #1, marker, Alden Cole @ Conscious World of Art. Alden is influenced by Nicholas Roerich and Mati Klarwein - Roerich was the first artist to win a Nobel Peace Prize and Klarwein created the famous Santana album cover. Alden Cole’s art brings people together, his art works the room like a good conversation, creating a buzz, upping the voltage with voodoo god-heads & peaceful warriors. Alden’s Starlings series taps into a deeply seated symbol pattern recognition with his sprightly characters playing out human emotions and exhibitionism in a playful accessible way. James Warhola just acquired one of Alden Cole’s pieces at the Da Vinci Art Alliance’s current show.
Starlings #2 & Delicious, shown here @ The Plastic Club, now available @ Dumpster Divers Gallery, 734 South Street. Don’t worry, be happy. Alden Cole currently has work available at the Deptford Municipal BuildingGalleria Deptford (psst…really great prices, big selection), The Plastic Club’s Red, White & Green show, the Da Vinci Art Alliance Under $200, SOTA on Pine Street, Home & Planet in Bethlehem, the Dumpster Divers Gallery on South Street and @ The Conscious World Art of Alden Cole Gallery/Museum.
DoN LoVeS this photo with Alden Cole’s Light Beings and DoN’s “light being (Rick Selvin)” @ Galleria Deptford.
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