Tag Archives: abstract art

Air

Lois Schlachter, Jed Williams Gallery

Spring’s in the Air, Lois Schlachter, Jed Williams Gallery

 

Spring’s in the Air, Lois Schlachter: April 7th – 22nd, 2018

Jed Williams Gallery, 615 Bainbridge Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19147

Artist Reception: April 7th, 2018, 5:00 – 7:00pm.

JED WILLIAMS GALLERY is excited to celebrate the coming of Spring with its new exhibit, a solo showcase of painter Lois Schlachter. Let’s bring Spring in, in style! With Lois Schlachter’s exuberant, colorful work dHer unique abstracts have a meticulously composed, “clean” feel to them, which goes hand in hand with a wonderful sense of compositional whimsy and a mellifluous, subtle color schemes. The distinctive geometric shapes set off eternally revolving fractal-like hues.

According to Lois Schlachter, “Her paintings at Jed Williams Gallery are examples of her love of geometric shapes and bold vibrant color. These pieces were created by letting her subconscious mind guide her hand. She works directly on the canvas, continually drawing throughout the painting process. The use of line and color help to navigate the viewer across the canvas providing an avenue to discover one fun spot after another.”

Lois Schlachter, Jed Williams GalleryTravel Dreams, Lois Schlachter, acrylic on canvas

This painting is “Travel Dreams” and will be on display at Jed Williams Gallery. How do I do whatI do? I start by heavily coating the canvas. Then, whatever paint is left on my pallet from my previous painting I start applying it to the canvas. I am not really thinking about anything, I’m just having fun. It’s kind of like doodling. Sometimes I’ll splatter the paint and let it run. It is all very loose. Most of the time, I have no preconceived plan or idea. I allow my subconscious mind to wonder. I go to the part of myself that is the child, uninhibited and painting to please myself. Sometimes I get lucky and it starts to look like something. – Lois Schlachter

Lois Schlachter, Jed Williams GalleryFeathered Friends, Lois Schlachter, acrylic on canvas

Lois Schlachter, Jed Williams GalleryGuardian Angels, Lois Schlachter, acrylic on canvas

This piece is “Guardian Angels”. With all three paintings, early on, they started to look like something. At this point, it’s time to get serious and I really start to work the line. The more that I work in a geometric format, the more I understand that shapes and lines are related and it is up to me to find that relationship. It’s time to work the color, balance the forms, study the positive and negative spaces and get a rhythm going. Depending on the size of the piece, I have likely been working for a few weeks and there are many more weeks of work ahead. – Lois Schlachter

About Lois Schlachter

Lois Schlachter is a graduate of The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and Philadelphia College of Art now the University of the Arts. She is a prolific painter working primarily in acrylic and considers herself as an Abstract Expressionist. Previous exhibitions include GoggleWorks’ “Artists Equity” Show (Reading, PA, 2013). In 2014 she received four Special Recognition Awards in the “16th Annual Contemporary Art Juried Online International Art Exhibition” hosted by Upstream People Gallery.

About Jed Williams Gallery

Jed Williams Gallery is a unique art space owned and operated since 2010 by artist Jed Williams. In it Jed Williams showcases up and coming and inspiring artists from the local area including Jed Williams himself, along with providing a look into the workings of an actual artist studio. The gallery shows a variety of thoughtful, cutting edge works in various media with a focus on abstract painting and mixed medium.

Jed Williams Gallery also involves the community through art workshops, as well as local music and fashion talents with free music events, parties, trunk shows. Jed Williams Gallery is part of the revitalization of Bainbridge St., just one block south of South St. It aims to contribute to the vitality and unique, fun spirit of Bainbridge St. and the Queen Village/Bella Vista neighborhood.

Jed Williams Gallery has shown local talents such as Kevin Broad, Lorraine Glessner, Dennis Flynn, David Stanley Aponte, and more.  The gallery has also collaborated with social/art non-profit organizations such as Philly Stewards, InLiquid, Project HOME, and Art Sphere, Inc., other art venues such as the Hex Factory, and curators such as Sean Stoops and Anna Cherniahivsky.

Thank you to Lois Schlachter and Jed Williams for the content of this post.

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DoNArTNeWs celebrating ten years reporting on Philadelphia artists and art.

Leaf

Bill Scott, Hollis Taggart GalleriesLeaf and Line, oil on canvas, 63″ x 42″, Bill Scott, 2017

Bill Scott: Leaf and Line, Hollis Taggart Galleries

This month, Hollis Taggart Galleries will present Bill Scott: Leaf and Line, the artist’s seventh solo exhibition at the gallery, featuring twenty-five of Scott’s recent paintings. A catalogue accompanies this show with condensed critiques by eight contributors – artists, curators and writers – who offer very personal and inspired reactions to the painter’s lively compositions.

Bill Scott’s new body of work is rooted in his classic vibrant palette, fluid brush strokes and masterful balance of abstraction. Propelled by inspiration from nature, the painter continues his exploration of form and color in a fresh way. References to the natural world, details of leaves, blades of grass, branches and discernible elements of flora are boldly juxtaposed against areas of pure hues and spirited abstraction that dances with myriad details. The show once again is a testament to Scott’s imposing ability to dance the line between abstraction and representational, creating a tension in the viewer’s mind that asks the question; do we know this scene that is depicted before us? It is through this tension and this line of questioning that the viewer’s curiosity is peaked.

Bill Scott, Hollis Taggart GalleriesA Storybook October, oil on canvas, 48″ x 45″, Bill Scott, 2017

Demonstrating the confidence and control of a seasoned painter, Scott’s most recent studio offering reveals a freer, more expansive pictorial space and use of white. The surfaces of the works are comprised of layer after layer of paint – a skill he has been honing his whole career.  Complex, but never muddy, the overlapping elements in the paintings appear both spontaneous and carefully arranged at the same time.  A Garden in the Studio bursts with energy and is like most of Scott’s work, an affirmation of the sheer joy of painting. Similarly, in Leaf and Line, vague pictorial plant references are placed among undulating free forms of shapes and color and all set against a dramatic expanse of yellow in the upper quadrant. Harmony is always achieved with the painter’s virtuoso talent and pure intuition to combine hues, structure and movement.

Bill Scott, Hollis Taggart GalleriesHomage, oil on canvas, 60″ x 55″, Bill Scott, 2017

Scott, who lives and works in his native Philadelphia, spent what he considers to be pivotal periods of time working alongside Joan Mitchell in France and Jane Piper in Philadelphia.  He formally began his career studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1974, an institution at which he was to become a teacher for many years.  He is represented in countless museums, private collections and institutions, and he is a noted scholar on the work of the French Impressionist, Berthe Morisot.

Bill Scott: Leaf and LineHollis Taggart Galleries , Chelsea, 521 W 26th Street, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10001

March 15th through April 28th, 2018

Thank you to Ginx Hudgins for the content of this post.

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Unwilling

Unwilling: Exercises in Melancholy

EXPLORE MELANCHOLIA AT HAVERFORD’S CANTOR FITZGERALD GALLERY

HAVERFORD, Pa.- What if we saw sadness not as a giving up or giving in, but a getting out? What if, instead of being seen as a passive pain, feeling deep sorrow was understood to be an act of resistance? What if, given the current political and cultural moment in which so many feel ignored, maligned, or repudiated by the systems and people in power, mourning was not just an understandable reception, but a useful action against those systems? A new exhibit in Haverford College’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, opening March 23, showcases the work of five artists from across different media to grapple with such questions of power, agency, and melancholy.

Unwilling: Exercises in Melancholy, curated by Vanessa Kwan and Kimberly Phillips, proposes a re-consideration of melancholia as defined through our contemporary condition. Resisting its historical definition as an affliction that creates disorder or inactivity, this exhibition reimagines passive sadness as a powerful refusal, a conscious (or unconscious) “standing aside,” a willful production of generative failures and resistant potencies. Each of the five contributing artists begins with the idea that outside the boundaries of “contentment” resides a potent flourishing. Unwilling is a resistance and a proposition: it responds to the profound cultural reckoning we are witnessing in this moment in time, as the boundaries and exclusions of state-defined citizenship become increasingly fraught.

The exhibition crosses disciplinary boundaries. Dance artist Justine A. Chambers explores choreographies of resistance, growing out of a studious and embodied interpretation of all the minor gestures on the way to hands raised in surrender. Sculpture- and performance-based artist Mike Bourscheid mines absurdities in relation to our cultural preoccupations with masculinist productivity, while social practice artist Ginger Brooks Takahashi works to create new networks of value in the production of food, drink, and community. (Her piece in the exhibit is a collaboratively created-and consumed-beer.) The “weeping” willow is at the center of media artist Noa Giniger‘s multi-faceted take on reversals of sadness and the refusal to succeed, and poet and critic Billy-Ray Belcourt positions mourning as a defining aspect of an active and resistant subject and proposes that the future must address this subject head on.

Unwilling: Exercises in Melancholy will be on view March 23 through April 27 at Haverford College’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery. To celebrate the exhibit’s opening, there will be several events during its first week. On March 22, ahead of the official opening, a roundtable with four of the featured artists and the two curators will be held from 4:30 to -6:30 p.m. in the College’s new Visual Culture, Arts, and Media (VCAM) building, room 201. On March 23, Justine A. Chambers will perform an all-day, campus-wide, site-specific commission, ten thousand times and one hundred more. And later that day, at 4:30 p.m., there will be a talk with the curators followed by a reception at 5:30 p.m., featuring Ginger Brooks Takahashi’s Wyrt Blod Gruyt, a custom-made beer commissioned specifically for the exhibit and brewed in collaboration with Meredith Rebar Williams and Home Brewed Events. For further event details: exhibits.haverford.edu/unwilling.

Unwilling: Exercises in Melancholy is made possible with support from the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities. The exhibition is organized in conjunction with the Hurford Center’s 2017-18 faculty seminar “The Arts of Melancholy,” which is led by John B. Whitehead Professor of Humanities and Professor of Music Richard Freedman.

Overseen by the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities and located in Whitehead Campus Center, the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery is open Monday through Friday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays 12 p.m. to 5 p.m., and Wednesdays until 8 p.m. For more information, contact Matthew Seamus Callinan, associate director of the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery and campus exhibitions, at (610) 896-1287 or mcallina@haverford.edu, or visit the exhibitions program website: www.haverford.edu/exhibits.

Haverford College is located at 370 Lancaster Avenue, Haverford, Pa., 19041

Thank you to Rebecca Raber for the content of this post.

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Calm

Deann Mills, March 2018 at Muse GalleryHeat Rises, 48” x 48”, oil on canvas

Madness and Calm,

Deann Mills, March 2018 at Muse Gallery

March 1st through April 1st, 2018, Muse Gallery52 North Second Street, Old City, Philadelphia, 19106, 215. 627. 5310

First FridayMarch 2nd, 2018 from 5:00 – 8:00pm

Artist’s receptionSunday, March 11, 2018 from 2-5 pm

Artist Statement:

“When starting a painting, I try to be crazy and paint with whatever feels good at the moment:  old acrylic test paint, rollers, squeegees, stir sticks, wire mesh, oil sticks, and lots of smearing and dripping.  It is pure madness and lots of fun.  After a time, the painting has to calm down, be edited, have a composition and hopefully a dominant color.  My paintings are all about the tension between madness and calm, my striving to keep the energy, chaos and color while imposing an order and coherence.”

Mission: Established late in 1977, the Muse Gallery is an artists’ cooperative dedicated to encourage and promote its members’ artistic expression through abstract, conceptual and representational forms. Reflecting an aesthetic that awakens awareness, the Muse Gallery affirms the shared experience of art between the artist and the community.  Please see the membership page to view a detailed history of Muse.

To join the Gallery: Muse Gallery is always interested in potential new members. We are often fully staffed and maintain a waiting list. Please visit our membership page.

Thank you to Charlene Lutz for the content of this post.

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InvisAbility

InvisAbility, Art in City Hall Gallery

InvisAbility

February 12 – March 23, 2018
Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy, Room 116
Reception: March 7, 2018, 5-7 p.m. in Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy, Room 116

The Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy presents InvisAbility, an exhibition featuring the work of professional artists with disabilities. The exhibit is in partnership with five programs from the Philadelphia region that provide opportunities to artists with disabilities: Allens Lane Art Center’s Vision Thru Art programArt Ability from Bryn Mawr Rehab Hospital, Center for Creative WorksCultural Arts Center of SpArc Services, and Moss Rehab’s All About Art program. The exhibit is featured in City Hall within the Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy, Room 116. A reception is tentatively planned for March in celebration of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Month.

37 Featured artists:

Meri Adelman, Nancy Alter, Robin Antar, William Bolds, DoN Brewer, Joanne Brothers, Kelly Brown, Ronald Bryant, Elizabeth Core, Martha Cowden, Jenny Cox, John Creagh, Charles Domsky, Alysse Einbender, Gerard di Falco, Terri Fridkin, Zila Friedman, Gregory Gans, Michael Gieschen, Cindy Gosselin, Tim Heflin, Clyde Henry, Michael Hogin, Thomas Jennings, Cindy Lally, Sarah Lewis, Eric Mohn, David Neiser, Timothy O’Donovan, Olubunmi Ojo, Victoria Pendragon, Randy Perin, James Sanders, Carla Schaffer, Sriharsha Sukla, Maxim Tzinman, Anthony Zaremba.

As an exhibition without any apparent central subject matter, InvisAbility is a break from City Hall’s standard juried thematic showcases. However, it does follow a trend of recent exhibits aimed at raising awareness of Philadelphia’s diverse and talented cultural community. InvisAbility affirms the notion that within the People’s Building, the people behind the art, their stories and concerns matter as much as the art they create. By weaving art with identity, the show aims to provide some insight into the creative experience of artists living with a disability, and perhaps even challenge traditional notions of quality.

Artist Nancy Alter:

“My current work reflects personal physiological struggles in the day to day struggles with my MS symptoms. Through the deconstruction and reconstruction of monotype prints, there is great satisfaction on how unrelated pieces fit together to make a whole. It is an expression of push and pull and the physiological rhythm of the body.”

Artist DoN Brewer:

“Living with Crohn’s disease has both positive and negative effects of my artwork. On the one hand, I stay home on the computer a lot and have created an on-line persona that reaches a wide audience. On the other hand, sometimes I don’t feel well enough to travel to art shows and events, to attend art workshops or even to write my art blog. My fans don’t know me as a disabled person; they support me for who I am, as an artist.”

InvisAbility runs thru March 23rd.

Questions about Art in City Hall? Contact City Hall Exhibitions Manager Tu Huynh, tu.huynh@phila.gov or call (215) 686-9912

Thank you to City Hall Exhibitions Manager Tu Huynh for the content of this post.

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