“An Observant Nature” Exhibition

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts

[Image: Cary Hulbert "Wildwood" (2023) 20 x 16 in.]

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Kathryn Markel Fine Arts presents an upcoming group exhibition curated by Katie DeGroot. Titled An Observant Nature, the exhibition features five artists - Ron Milewicz, Elizabeth Terhune, Alan Bray, Cary Hulbert, and Emilie Clark.

Science and magic share a faculty – observation. Both practices involve looking and thinking, attempting prediction, and aim, finally, for recreation – discovering something underneath what’s visible. There’s an intuition at work that proposes that what is seen can be re-seen, that order can be reordered and that something powerful can be created, discovered or found therein.

Accompanying Katie DeGroot’s second solo show, Resplendent, the group of artists assembled by DeGroot for An Observant Nature swing between these friendly poles. In the heart of NYC is a small cauldron of alchemy where light is somehow both blazing and gauzy, where natural forms disassemble and redefine themselves, where brightly colored shapes unexpectedly reveal passages through thicket spaces, where dreamy mountains shift and shuffle like a deck of cards seemingly dragged about by a gentle wind, and where a moment of quiet sanctuary is undermined by subtle shifts in color.

Alan Bray’s landscapes are dreamlike worlds that we feel we know or have seen, and certainly we yearn for emotionally. He has been painting rural Maine for many years and you can feel his connection, but also his aloofness in his quiet observations of the natural world around him.

For Emilie Clark it is direct observation - her subject matter may change from rotting fruit, or collected animal parts, to microscopic creatures, but she uses her source material to create art through careful consideration.

When Cary Hulbert is working, she’s thinking about building another world where our laws of physics don’t exist and anything is possible. Her surreal, fantastical, and colorful worlds are entered differently by each viewer.

And lastly, Ron Milewicz starts his small paintings plein air and then returns to his studio to work on the paintings by memory and feeling.

Elizabeth Terhune’s watercolors celebrate the melding of remembered landscapes and imagined interactions, using vibrant color and patterns to draw us into her magic worlds.

DeGroot has assembled artists who share in some of what is certainly important to her. DeGroot, like all of these artists, is deeply connected to nature – its forms and spaces, its colors and light – and she is compelled to look deeply, to peer. Nothing is insignificant if you look closely – an edge, a color, a shape, a bit of fungus. DeGroot is also interested in playfulness – a bedrock of creative, generative energy – which is echoed in the shifting, morphing and reassembling engaged in by the artists she has selected. And there is an interest in utilizing the micro/macro shift when representing a world and presenting a sensibility. For all of these artists, they can be in two places at once – in fact they and we are. You can see the forest and you can see the trees, and the leaves, roots, birds, bugs, mountains, mists and clouds.