James Patrick Reid, Craig Manister and Caren Canier Exhibition

The Painting Center

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The Painting Center presents James Patrick Reid: Paintings and Craig Manister: Slow Looking in the Main Gallery and Caren Canier: Town & Country: Paintings in the Project Room.

Comprising moody romantic landscapes, portraits and histories, the paintings by James Patrick Reid are presented in the Main Gallery. Apart from the portraits, which are painted from life, all the works in this show are from the artist’s imagination and memory, nourished by long walks in woods and along rivers, and by the mind’s journeys through history and legend. People and nature, and subjects full of action and emotion, take shape in baroque rhythms and moving chiaroscuro.

From the start of a painting, Reid is especially intent on achieving a quality of color which will be subtle and mysterious yet powerful. The color effect should convey the emotion of the scene first of all. Then the color relationships ought to set up a movement and establish the space within the painting. The linear aspects of the drawing fall into place amid the rhythms set up by the colors. It is of utmost importance to Mr. Reid that each painting unfolds rhythmically and organically. It must pulsate with life, its own life, not simply the mode of existence the artist willed for it but something more, something that surprises even the painter and that is all its own, never seen before.

Besides painting, Reid loves to teach and lecture about art, and has served on the Fine Arts faculty at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, the Art Sudents League, and the New York Academy ofArt. He has lectured numerous times at Parsons School ofDesign, the New York Studio School, and at art schools and universities around the country. His lecture subjects range from “Art and Metaphysics” (at Oregon State University) to “A structural Comparison of Tintoretto’s Raising of Lazarus and Seurat’s Evening, Honfleur” (at the New York Studio School). Mr. Reid’s work has been shown extensively in galleries, schools and museums on the East and West Coasts, and he has done many paintings and murals for churches. His studio is in Bushwick.

The Main Gallery will also be dedicated to exhibiting new work by Craig Manister. Manister’s path, from his early work as an abstractionist and former student of Pat Passlof and Milton Resnick, was enhanced by extensive European travel to see many seminal paintings in person, and developed in stages toward making paintings of things in the real world. The new paintings continue to exploit issues raised while teaching a class in still life painting in order to find resolutions to the problems students were finding themselves in with their paintings. The work is perceptual in approach, hence the subtitle of the exhibition Slow Looking. Manister tells students that while we can see well enough to pass down the hallways without walking into the walls, that in itself does not constitute the kind of seeing necessary for painting. A successful painting is like alchemy, as it filters perceptual phenomena with classical formal qualities, art historical precedents and a truce of opposites, to find an unexpected pictorial solution of opposing forces. When a painting finds itself it’s magical. It becomes a marriage of disparate qualities to form a unity that is beautiful but pictorially coherent.

Among the places, Manister has shown work are the National Academy Museum, Beijing Art Institute, Mei Shu Guan Art Museum, Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York Studio School, Staten Island Museum, Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Neilsen Gallery, Farleigh Dickinson University, Wagner College, Ober Gallery, and the Gallery of the College of Staten Island/CUNY. He was included in After the Fall; A Survey of Abstract Painting Since 1970, curated by Lily Wei, at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art in 1996. The current exhibition is the fourth time Manister has shown a body of work at The Painting Center.

Manister was born in New York City and currently lives and maintains a studio on Staten Island. He earned a BS degree at Richmond College/CUNY and then spent two years at the New York Studio School. He completed an MFA degree later at Brooklyn College/CUNY. He teaches studio painting at the College of Staten Island/CUNY.

The Painting Center is also pleased to present Town and Country: Paintings by Caren Canier in the Project Room. Caren Canier’s paintings, executed in mixed media including collaged photographs and paint, are musings about the way people inhabit the landscape, rural or urban. Social norms and relationships transcend the linear conventions of history in these paintings, confounding inhabitants from different times, places and memories. The artist borrows freely from historic and contemporary sources to orchestrate unexpected and curious meetings between past and present dwellers, whether commonplace or idealized.

“West Hall” is a reverie about the parking lot of the Arts Building at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, perched above the Hudson River Valley in Troy, NY, where Canier teaches. Here, Elie Nadelman’s sculpted figures, Edweard Muybridge’s figures in motion and a wooden Sienese saint from the Renaissance, comingle among the parked cars. The mundane, contemporary site is populated by unlikely commuters and set in the context of the majestic expanse of the Hudson River Valley beyond.

“Albergo Sole”, offers a view from a hotel window in Rome, in which a Nadelman head looks down on an urban piazza, alive with ancient Roman figures, Edweard Muybridge’s 19th century figures in motion and Nadelman’s sculpture of the 1920’s. The lineage from ancient to modern Rome to the New World of Nadelman and the transience of life in the hotel are evocative of collective memories of the Grand Tour undertaken by artists, writers and intellectuals since the 17th century.

“Bendicó’s Fall” is in homage to “The Leopard” by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and Lucchino Visconti. Lampedusa wrote the novel, Visconti made the film and here, as the famous ball scene swirls around the picture plane, the actors, director, Garibaldi and his Redshirts meet for a mashup in the Sicilian landscape. Bendicó, the faithful dog, who appears in the closing paragraph of the novel, falls both physically and metaphorically. The actual making of the film becomes a part of the historic context, emphasizing the timelessness of the work of art.

The series “The Nadelmans Frequent the Stettheimers”, chronicles an imaginary visit by Nadelman figures to the renowned dollhouse of Carrie Stettheimer, constructed in the 1930’s and now housed in the Museum of the City of New York. Collaged skyscrapers painted by Charles Sheeler surround the dollhouse and its occupants. These tableaus speak to the social norms of New York society and intelligentsia of the period.
Finally, the McC paintings are in homage to the landscape of rural upstate New York and it’s citizenry through time. Here, classical figures of the ancient world that informed 19th century architecture and artifacts, mix with Shakers and soccer moms to reflect the artist’s experience of life upstate.

Caren Canier is a native ofNew York City, educated at Cornell University and Boston University. A Rome Prize Fellow and recipient ofmany awards, she divides her time between upstate New York, Umbria and Brooklyn. She has exhibited widely in New York, New England and Italy and has been a Professor of Painting and Drawing at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute since 1978.