PHOENIX GALLERY ASSOCIATE ARTISTS 2011
Phoenix Gallery
This event has ended.
JOHN HAMPSHIRE
Whatever the imagery, I am very interested in the process for constructing a drawing or a painting. The drawing process is easier to describe due to its more direct, and perhaps singular, nature. It starts with a very long line, usually a spiral, of late. I continue to make lines with the "rule" that I not cross any of the previous lines. The result is a self refining process. At the beginning, the lines or marks are very loosely responsive to the image I am building. As this progresses, the remaining white spaces for additional lines become smaller and smaller, and the information that gets built into the drawing becomes more and more specific. Edges, such as the edge of a head, are found rather than started with. This synthesis of process and image, while very time-consuming, feels very fluent and natural to me. The act of making these, I imagine, is like jumping into a big vat of molasses: The initial descent would be fast, but further submergence would be progressively slower until the medium's viscosity stops all movement.
PETERANTHONIE van de KREEKE
I need to communicate by means other than speech or writing. When writing, I keep judging, disapproving and rewriting my words. When I speak, I often regret my words, and cannot later retract them. I can only, at best, excuse myself. Over and over again, the endless experimentations with color, forms, signs and symbols allow me to discover, and to reveal, what I have never seen before. On the one hand inspired by urbanization, and on the other hand by unspoiled Nature and her inhabitants, I hope my work will eventually lead to a kind of collective formula, that overrules symbolic systems like languages. And apart from any religious-, political-, and/or social environment, these paintings could then really make true communication possible.
LOUISE WEINBERG
My work has always focused on the issue of containment: The human desire for the safety of enclosure and structure vs. the terror of possible entrapment. My abstract paintings have depicted an array of containers --- grids, buildings, eggs, spheres, circles and squares --- and these suggest how a container can protect, or imprison or both. In my newest series, "Apparitions," the containers are buildings. Urban images at times appear to emerge from, or dissolve into, a vaporous background. Apparitions began the year my mother died in NYC. These recent paintings are abstract in style, but evoke a sense of the urban landscape. All of the images derive from memories of growing up in NYC, a landscape which is etched into my sense of self. Painting for me is a slow, gradual emergence of form into space. Using palette knives, nails, combs, and rags, I push, pull, dig and scrape, searching for layers underneath as I continue to add more paint on top of older strata. This way of working always allows me to make surprising discoveries, which I find to be an essential part of the painting process. My paintings emerge gradually and only after much struggle, not unlike the way a person’s sense of self emerges over the course of a lifetime.
Media
Schedule
from March 02, 2011 to March 26, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-03-03 from 18:00 to 20:00