Sunday, November 7, 2010


The Museum School Art Sale

Now in its 30th year, with thousands of works on a changing rotation, priced by the artists and sold to benefit student scholarships.

Wednesday, November 17–Sunday, November 21
Wednesday, 12–8 pm, Opening Celebration 5–8 pm
Thursday, 12–8 pm
Friday–Sunday, 12–6 pm
"Secretive Sounds III", Oil over monotype, 20" x 20"

"Mandolin Airs", Encaustic, oil, collage on panel, 24" x 24"
"Mandolin View", Oil /charcoal on Rives BFK, 20" x 20"

Monday, August 23, 2010

Luminous Landscape on Martha's Vineyard

9 artists working in the luminous medium of encaustic painting, interpret "Landscape" at the John Stobart Gallery, Edgartown, MA



"Behind and Through", encaustic, 24" x 24"

Opening Reception September 9th - 5:00 to 7:00 p.m.
The John Stobart Gallery, 31 North Summer Street, Edgartown, MA

508-627-9066

My fellow participating artists include: Linda Cordner, Janet Bartlett Goodman, Pamela Farrell, Julie Shaw Lutts, Alexandre Masino, Rodney Thompson, Charyl Weissbach, and Gregory Wright.

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Exhibition of new work in Portsmouth

Soosen Dunholter and I will present a series of work that explores natural forms, geometric constructions and the patterns of shape and change titled Biology, Geometry, Morphology.

The exhibition, in the East Gallery of the Robert Lincoln Levy Gallery, 136 State Street, Portsmouth, NH, will open September 1 and continue through September 24, 2010. Biology, Geometry, Morphology will feature works in encaustic, oil, ink, and original prints, from six-inch square panels to a large six-panel work in oil and encaustic, measuring 48” by 96”.

"Sea and Sky", oil, encaustic, mixed media

I've been working in my New Boston, NH studio since 1992. This new work, all from 2009 and 2010, in oils and encaustic, features botanical forms in motion, including still life artifacts with abstracted and overlapping plant leaf shapes and references to landscape. The exhibition will also include a series of black and white ink paintings on panels depicting close up botanical landscapes.

"No Middle Ground VII", ink on panel

Soosen Dunholter of Peterborough, NH works with geometric forms and textures in her collagraphs, monoprints, and paintings. These mixed process “prints” are an evolution of constant investigation and experimentation in pushing the boundaries of printmaking and markmaking. Soosen’s minimalist work focuses on the interplay between form, color, and line upon subtle textures. Her engaging multi-layered surface treatment invites infinite exploration. Says Dunholter, “There were no pre-conceived ideas of what these prints were going to become; no diagram. I just allowed myself to have an immediate response to the wire and ink and a continuous reaction to the markings that were made one print at a time.”

We have come together to examine the theme of Biology, Geometry, Morphology. Each of these is a study, a pursuit of knowledge and understanding. Biology is the study of forms of life; geometry the study of shape; and morphology the study of changing forms. We discovered we shared these investigations into the basics—how to translate the perceptions of life and shape and changing form into visual expressions of our experience. We also share a love of printmaking processes and the varied applications available through the use of the ancient but newly revitalized medium of encaustic.

"Tuscan Sun", Etching ink and oil stick on panel

Encaustic is the medium in which pigments and resin are melted into beeswax. The paint is applied molten and can then be layered, incised, scraped into multifaceted and translucent works. Some works are begun as monoprints that will be integrated into work with oil, oil stick, or encaustic.

"Japanne", encaustic on 300 lb. watercolor paper

Both of us have extensive experience in the visual arts. I received my BFA in Painting from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. I have exhibited widely in Boston and New England. My work was included in the first issue of New American Paintings from Open Studios Press. I am a member of New England Wax the Women’s Caucus for Art, and a juried member of the New Hampshire Art Association.

With a BA in Fine Arts in 1979, Soosen Dunholter’s career as an artist has continued to evolve through master classes with printmakers and painters, as well as a wide variety of artist workshops she attended where she experimented and explored a variety of philosophies and mediums. She is a member of Monadnock Art, Friends of the Dublin Art Colony, and a juried member of the New Hampshire Art Association.

The New Hampshire Art Association is a nonprofit professional art association founded in 1940. It is one of the oldest statewide art associations in the country with over 450 artist members who live and work primarily in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, and Vermont.

For more information:
New Hampshire Art Association
Robert Lincoln Levy Gallery
136 State Street, Portsmouth, NH 03802
Phone: 603-431-4230
E-Mail: nhartassociation@comcast.net
Website: www.nhartassociation.org

Saturday, July 31, 2010

Diptychs, Part 2

Received the partners of the diptychs Lee Ann Petropolis and I have been working on.

Here's what LA had to say about it:  "As I looked at it, I thought of leaves being blown off a tree during a summer storm (since they aren’t colored the way autumn leaves would be). So I felt that what it deserved was a piece to go on the left which added to that impression."

It's titled "Tut, Tut, Looks like Rain". About the materials, she says,"I constructed this of marble, vitreous, ceramic “nano tiles” and polymer clay sculpted leaves. The nano tiles are in the tree, and are 5mm square, or for the metrically challenged among us, approximately 3/16”. And I was insane enough to cut some of them." (from her blog,  Art by Lee Ann Petropolis)

And here they are together. What shall I title my half?


Ok, here's my response to "Room with a View". I'm calling this "Passage to India". It's all encaustic with some graphite drawing underneath the wax.


And together:

Saturday, May 29, 2010

40 artists! 20 who work with encaustic, 20 who work in mosaic. We each start work on one 12" x 18" panel of a diptych in our own medium. Last month we met our assigned partner and swapped diptychs. I will complete the second panel in response to my partner's work and she will complete the second panel of my diptych.

I let my fancy wander and riffed on the different attributes of glass and wax. Decided that the theme of my diptych would be just that--wax is soft and glass is hard and what will happen when the two meet up?

I decided to blur the boundaries. I glued pieces of glass to my substrate, and made some 'tiles' out of wax. Plants and leaves and things botancial are the main focus in my work these days, so I cast some leaves with wax in modelling clay molds.


I'm partnered with Lee Ann Petropoulis. She brought me a horizontal panel called "Room with a View", a beautiful little landscape/seascape with just about everything in it, setting (or rising?) sun on the water, tulips, trees, clouds.


It's so complete on its own, it will be a challenge to find a fitting response. I'm leaning toward focusing on the differences and similarities in wax and glass again. Can't seem to let it go. Wax flows easily, and you wouldn't think that glass will, but Lee Ann gets it to flow.

So, stay tuned. Updates to follow....

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Coming Soon...NE Wax at Fairfield, CT

I've had a work accepted for the juried exhibition of New England Wax artists at the Fairfield Arts Council in Fairfield, CT.









Here's the piece I'll be bringing down:
"Pipe Dreams Revision #2", encaustic, 24" x 24"

May 18 - June 25, 2010
Fairfield Arts Council
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 22, 2010 from 4-7 pm
Demonstration and Discussion: Sunday, May 23, 2010 from 12-2
Brown Bag Discussion with Curator Laura G. Einstein and artists: Thursday, June 17, 2010 from 12:30-1:30

For June, an exhibit at the Kensington Stobart Gallery, Salem, MA

17 artists, working in the luminous medium of encaustic painting, interpret "Landscape".
 


"Behind and Through", encaustic, 24" x 24"
Kensington Stobart Gallery, on the Common, at the Hawthorne Hotel, Salem, MA 01970
Gallery hours:  Tue, Wed 10-5 , Thurs 10-8, Fri 10-5, Sat, Sun 12-5
978-825-0022

Particpating artists include: Linda Cordner, Janet Bartlett Goodman, Pamela Farrell, Kimberly Kent, Dorothy Simpson Krause, Maura Joy Lustig, Julie Shaw Lutts, Alexandre Masino, Catherine Nash, Fawn Potash, Tracy Spadafora, Mary Taylor, Rodney Thompson, Charyl Weissbach, Gregory Wright, and Diane Bowie Zaitlin.

Furniture As Art / Art As Furniture


At the Robert Lincoln Levy Gallery in Portsmouth this month, a collaborative exhibit with the NH Furniture Masters, Jim Kociuba (photos coming soon) and I were matched with Portsmouth artist Leah Woods. I chose four small works to create a vertical to mirror the dimension of her 60" x 12" x 13" cherry, maple, and fabric cabinet.

Furniture As Art / Art As Furniture
Robert Lincoln Levy Gallery, Portsmouth, NH
Exhibit dates: May 5 - June 5, 2010
Photos courtesy of Edith Weiler

Monday, March 29, 2010

"Paint records the most delicate gesture and the most tense. It tells whether the painter sat or stood or crouched in front of the canvas. Paint is a cast made of the painter's movements, a portrait of the painter's body and thoughts. The muddy moods of oil paints are the painter's muddy humours, and its brilliant transformations are the painter's unexpected discoveries. Painting is an unspoken and largely uncognized dialogue, where paint speaks silently in masses and colors and the artist responds in moods. All those meanings are intact in paintings that hang in  museums: they preserve the memory of the tired bodies that made them, the quick jabs, the exhausted truces, the careful nourishing gestures. Painters can sense those motions in the paint even before they notice what the paintings are about. Paint is water and stone, and it is also liquid thought." --James Elkins, What Painting Is

True? or no...What do you think?

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Welcome to my blog--Making Something Out of Nothing--which is certainly what we do , in so many ways. I'll post current news and thoughts when I can.