BIRDS The Barn @ Downing Yudain LLC
Everyone likes birds. What wild creature is more accessible to our eyes and ears, as close to us and everyone in the world, as universal as a bird? David Attenborough
The following pages are representational of works inspired by or of birds by our gallery artists. Downing Yudain LLC represents a stable of artists all of which are influenced in some way by the natural world. Each artist strives through their work to achieve a balance between man and the rest of the world. We are honored to have these artists exhibit with us.
Julie Betts Testwuide
Julie Betts Testwuide, an award winning photographer and artist for over three decades, began her career in Wisconsin. After finishing her undergraduate and graduate degrees at UW-Madison, Julie enjoyed a successful career as freelance photographer working for major corporations, publications and sporting events across the country. Her clients have included, AT&T, Avon, Chase, Chemical Bank, General Foods, Manufacturers Hanover, Miller Brewing, Philip Morris, Simon and Schuster, and St. Martin’s Press. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Daily News, The New York Post, Runner’s World Magazine, Running News Magazine, New York Magazine, annual reports and corporate brochures. She has photographed the New York Marathon from the highest point of the scaffolding on the Verrazanno Bridge. She cruised on Malcolm Forbes yacht, The Highlander, to photograph his private celebration of the publication of one of his books. On firmer ground, she shot the stills of the Rodney Dangerfield/Miller Lite T.V. commercials in L.A. In the mid 90’s Julie branched into fine art photography. She has won many awards for her unique and creative work and has exhibited in galleries worldwide. The past few years, Julie has focused on photographing wildlife, including birds and horses around the world. Testwuide’s latest photographs celebrate the strength, lines, power, beauty, and essence of the horse. Using her "astute photographer’s eye and intuitive painter’s vision," she creates limited edition prints in very large, commanding sizes. A passionate horse lover, Julie uses her talent to capture equine beauty and spirit in dramatic light, finding their curved lines and expressing their power and sensuality. Her beach landscapes that include a lone horse in the sand and water, are evocative of places where you have been or desire to go to. She creates scenes that are inviting landscapes, which are timeless and focus on simple beauty. Her aviary collection includes herons, flamingos, egrets and loons. Aiming for a dreamy, ethereal look, her work was described in the New York Times, "Testwuide uses several techniques that make her photographs look like paintings by Monet or Pissarro”. Her work is included in many private collections worldwide and can be found on display in public spaces around the country as well as in a museum in Europe. She is now being represented on the West Coast by Flower + Hewes Gallery in Santa Monica and Malibu.
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Malcolm Moran
Malcolm Moran is an artist living in Connecticut. His paintings, drawings, and sculpture have been exhibited throughout the United States. Malcolm was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1948, and lived there until his mid-twenties. He is a graduate of the University of the South and the Rhode Island School of Design. He is a painter, printmaker, and sculptor. “Life etches itself on to our appearance through a posture, a glance, or perhaps a well placed wrinkle. These outward signs can point to who we are or how life has molded us in to what we have become. The grandeur of our spirit or lack thereof can be exposed by the way a person carries himself in relation to other people and his surroundings. My work attempts to capture this theatre. To maneuver through the joy and challenge of my own life, I draw and paint stories that remind me who I am and where my feet are planted. These paintings and drawings are part of a process rather than a defining statement. Some of the imagery comes from dreams, stories I have heard, or read, or concoct, and occasionally from observed life. I paint and draw and sculpt as a means of working through that which otherwise would have no voice, to get my arms around subjects which other than through metaphor and image making would have no means of expression. My work is mostly a whisper not a shout”. Malcolm Moran
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Mike Glier
Mike Glier draws and paints to explore topics of common interest. He also teaches, which he considers to be part of his creative output. Masculinity, consumerism and conflict were subjects for much of his early work. For the last two decades’, however, he has focused on the human relationship with the environment. “My landscape projects are propelled by a number of things, including the love paint and abstraction, but most importantly, by a desire to do my part to help make the changes in philosophy that required if humanity is to create a sustainable future. By studying the land and responding to it freshly, I hope to demonstrate attachment, respect and engagement. And if the paintings are good enough, they will find their way into public like to do their job of representing the joy of living in the world and the wonder of perceiving it, and if they succeed at this, to evoke the will to create balance within it.” Born in Kentucky, Mike Glier studied psychology and art at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts before attending the Whitney Museum Independent study Program. An Advisee of Robert Morris, Glier received an MA from Hunter College. His master’s thesis, “The 1979 Dime Store Figurine” appeared in Art Forum Magazine. In the late 70’s and 80’s, Mike was an active member of Collaborative Projects, participating in the Time Square Show and organizing Art Direct, a mail order catalogue of art by Colab artists. Also, during this period he participated in several Group Material exhibitions including “Mass”, “Resistance”, “The Constitution”, “Politics. and “AIDS Timeline”. In relation to the feminist dialogue at the time, he made a series of satirical drawings about masculinity which were exhibited at Anina Nosie Gallery, NY under the title, White Male Power: Senators, Game Hosts, National Monuments, Popes, Etc. Between 1979 and 2000 he was engaged in Printed Matter Inc, NY serving on the staff and the Board of Directors. Mike is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in painting and the New England recipient of Awards in Visual Arts 9. Solo exhibitions of Mike’s drawings and paintings have been presented at a variety of public and private institutions including Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston, Gerald Peters Gallery, New York and Santa Fe, The Kitchen, New York, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, Galerie Tanja Grunert, Cologne, The Cambridge Arts Council Gallery 344, Boston, San Jose Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 2004 Town Green, a permanent wall drawing installation for the Cambridge, MA City Hall Annex was selected by Americans for the Arts as one of the best public art works of the year. A ten-year survey exhibition was presented at Hallwalls, Buffalo, NY in 1988 and a 35-year survey was offered in 2014 at Opaika Gallery, the Sage Colleges, Albany. A book accompanies this exhibition. In 2007 Glier completed Along The Long Line, a series of plein-air paintings created along a line of longitude that stretches from the Canadian tundra to the Ecuadorian rainforest. A book accompanies this exhibition. His current series of drawings and paintings, The Forests of Antarctica is based on the plein air drawings made in the forest of Berkshires , the coast of Maine, the central mountains of New Mexico and the Virgin Islands.
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Robyn Geddes
Robyn Geddes, a Choate and Lake Forest College graduate, worked at Andy Warhol's Factory in the early and mid 80's. After the Factory, he relocated to California where he has focused on his own painting full time. He paints in all media. We have illustrated several series in our summer catalogue. Whether it is Geddes's crow series, which a culmination of his mature work using his varied paint style with silkscreen cutouts or his new Sea Mint or Via Real series where he pushes the concrete used in his previous bird series to the foreground, the birds are lost and the painting is now about the juxtaposition of media and surface. He has exhibited extensively in California, Texas and New York.
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Steve Cope
Steve Cope graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art, and received his MFA from Boston University.  A long time fixture of New York and Philadephia art scene, Steve has taught at the New York Studio School among other places. His exhibition history is extensive having been both privately and publicly shown and collected. While he painted large scale works for years, recently he changed his format to miniature panoramic landscapes with the impact of monumental work of art. The works are painstaking rendered to the utmost detail.
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Rafael Soares
Rafael Soares, a Brazil native turned Rhode Island resident, paints in the traditional manner of Andrew Wyeth. He has works at the Albright Knox in Buffalo, and numerous private collections. He has exhibited through out the country and has been included in several books. His animal works comment on the human condition, echoing the tradition of historic animal painting and illustration
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J Henry Fair
Roberta Smith, chief art critic of The New York Times said “The vivid color photographs of J Henry Fair lead an uneasy double life as potent records of environmental pollution and as ersatz evocations of abstract painting…information and form work together, to devastating effect.” Originally from Charleston, SC, Mr. Fair divides his time between bases in New York and Berlin working on different art projects and portraiture. Best known for his “Industrial Scars” series, abstract-expressionist photographs of detritus and externalities, his new series “Southern Charms” points the unblinking eye at the people, traditions, relics, and landscapes of his native region. Mr. Fair’s work has been featured in by The TODAY Show, CNN, NPR’s Marketplace, and WDR German TV, as well as in most major publications, including The New York Times, National Geographic, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, New York Magazine, Die Zeit, Le Figaro, Harper’s, Smithsonian, and Scientific American. Additionally, Mr. Fair’s work travels around the world as exhibitions at major museums, galleries, and educational institutions. Mr. Fair has served as Artist-in-Residence at some of the nation's top educational institutions for art and environmental studies.
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Dan Rizzie
Dan Rizzie is an artist of paradoxical qualities. His independence is in contrast to his aesthetic conservatism. And perhaps because of his unwillingness to be either revolutionary in his artistic approach, or as flamboyant in technique as he is patently capable of, his work hasn’t been as accurately understood as it deserves to be. Rizzie’s extraordinary knowledge of art history informs his art deeply, but in off-beat, even eccentric ways. One is tempted to suggest that at times absorption in the art of others, subsumes his own passion to express a uniquely individual set of feelings. But on further reflection, and especially in light of his more recent body of work, one sees that Rizzie’s vision is as truly sui generis as it is possible for a traditionally grounded artist to be. The present group of paintings and drawings gives a fascinating set of clues to the artist’s influences and affinities. Rizzie states that perhaps his fundamental allegiance is to Mondrian, Schwitters and Malevich, and that most certainly shows in the work. But so do many other less predictable presences: Robert Delaunay, Paul Klee, Gerald Murphy, the marginal but powerful early 20th century Swedish artist Hilma Af Klint—all of these painters resonate in Rizzie’s work. Though he doesn’t usually identify with these particular sources, he won’t argue with them. The contemporary figures he singles out as important touchstones, are Brice Marden, Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns. Perhaps even more significant than his interest in these artists is his longtime fascination with Indian miniature painting and Tantric imagery. It is important to note that Rizzie spent his junior and senior high school years in New Delhi. It was there that he was first exposed to this world; all of this was dramatically re-affirmed in the summer of 2009 when the artist revisited India. All of these presences resonate everywhere in his work. One of the keys to an understanding of Rizzie’s fundamental aesthetic, is to grasp the dual fascination he has with a rather hermetic, even alchemical, element in his signs and symbols—and his love of collage. There probably doesn’t exist a single Dan Rizzie work that doesn’t have a private, even secret, encryption. Sometimes we catch the meaning of a repeated form or image (the Tantric circle is fundamental); sometimes it helps when the artist tells us its derivation. It is fascinating, for instance, to know that the chair in the painting “Mondrian’s Chair” was inspired by a long pondered photograph of Mondrian’s studio filled with furniture that Mondrian made with his own hands. As for the plethora of other associations, whether apparent or mysterious, in his paintings, drawings, and collages, their aura constitutes a great part of the appeal of Rizzie’s work. Rizzie deals with the surfaces of things. Illusionistic space is his enemy. He wrests light and whimsy and delicacy and wistfulness and depth of knowledge and sensibility, from surfaces. This is not to be mistaken for superficiality; quite the opposite. His allusions are complicated and fraught; his passion for poetic visual art, especially in its subtlest forms, declares itself in everything he makes. It is certainly not necessary, in enjoying this artist’s paintings and drawings, to speculate about their artistic sources; they are enough in their own, inimitable, being. And enjoying them is what they’re all about.
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Geoffrey Gorman
Geoffrey Gorman creates quasi-primordial, artifact-bearing bird and animal sculptures. Created from reconstructed found objects, these sculptures are mysterious; often off-putting and yet at the same time, the viewer is somehow drawn to the creature as if it is long familiar. The works can have a sense of humor, fear, slyness or even nervous energy. Each sculpture has it own unique personality. His work is never static. Materials can include wire, cloth, glass, pool balls, wood, keys, dog tags, door nobs, bronze, bicycle tires and rubber tubes. Each of these artifacts help create the creature’s persona resulting in a completed object which adorns once discarded detritus with honor. Gorman studied at the Boston Museum School and the Maryland Institute of Art and has exhibited extensively thought out the country and is in numerous private collections.
Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) Robert Motherwell was an American painter, printmaker and editor. By 1940, he had settled in New York, where he attended Columbia studying art history under Meyer Shapiro. Motherwell was a member of the New York School. The New York School was a group of poets, painters, dancers and musicians in New York during the 1950’s and 60’s, including among others Jackson Pollock, Willem deKooning, Philip Guston, Mark Rothko. Motherwell’s works are represented in numerous private collections and major museums throughout the world. While Motherwell is probably most famous for his large abstract works including his Elegy series, he also made images related to nature throughout his life. In his 1952 exhibition at Kootz Gallery, New York, he chose this Magpie to reproduce on the exhibition poster, a graceful ink on paper work with a nod to abstraction wrapped in a bird form.
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Checklist: 6. Julie Betts Testwuide, Great Blue, 2017, Carargue, France, limited edition print on rag paper: 20 x 30 inches, 2/30 7. Julie Betts Testwuide, Heron Walking on the Dock, limited edition print on rag paper: 28 x 20 inches 8. Julie Betts Testwuide, Snowy Egret, 2017, limited edition print on rag paper: 20 x 30 inches 2/25 9. Julie Betts Testwuide, Foggy Loon, 2017, limited edition print on rag paper:15 x 33 inches, 1/25 10. Julie Betts Testwuide, Three Flamingos, limited edition print on rag paper: 20 x 30 inches, 1/25 11. Julie Bettes Testwuide, Happy Herons, 2016, limited edition print on rag paper: 5 x 5 inches, 3/25 (right) 12. Julie Betts Testwuide, Two Nests, 2016, limited edition print on rag paper: 5 x 5 inches, 2/25 (left) 13. Julie Betts Testwuide, Rooster, 2017, limited edition print on rag paper: 20 x 30 inches, 1/25 16. Malcolm Moran, Bird Reflecting on his Own Shadow, 2009, monotype: 17 x 12 inches 17. Malcolm Moran, A Japanese Crow, 2015, monotype: 15 x 19 ¼ inches 18. Malcolm Moran, Pelican’s Minding His Own Business #3, 2011, monotype: 22 x 20 inches 19. Malcolm Moran, Mr. Crow, #7, monotype: 22 ¾ x 21 inches 22. Mike Glier, The Forests of Antarctica #78, 2013, oil on aluminum: 50 x 40 inches 23. Mike Glier, July 4, 2012, Croak Hoosick, NY, 82 degrees F, 2012, gouache on paper: 16 1/2 x 18 inches 26. Robyn Geddes, Series of Crows, each panel is 14 x 14 inches, 9 panels in all 27. Robyn Geddes, Peace, mixed media: 10 x 8 inches 28. Robyn Geddes, Seagull on grey, silkscreen and acrylic on panel: 14 x 14 inches 29. Robyn Geddes, Untitled, mixed media, 10 x 8 inches 30. Robyn Geddes, Seagull, Stormy Skies, silkscreen and acrylic on panel: 24 x 34 inches 31. Robyn Geddes, Charles Adams, mixed media: 23 ½ x 23 ¼ inches
34. Steve Cope, East Hampton, 2012, oil on panel: 2 x 8 inches 35. Steve Cope, Rangeley Lake, 2012, oil on panel: 2 x 8 inches 36. Steve Cope, Sagg Main Town Beach, 2012, oil on panel: 2 x 8 inches (top) 37. Steve Cope, Amagansett, 2012, oil on panel: 2 x 8 inches (bottom) 40. Rafael Soares, Great Blue Heron #2, 2015, watercolor on paper: 10 x 13 inches, 41. Rafael Soares, Between Seasons, 2016, watercolor on paper 14 x 18 inches 42. Rafael Soares, Ostrich, 2016, watercolor: 27 x 21 inches. 43. Rafael Soares, Pelican Study, ink on paper: 8 x 5 inches 46. J Henry Fair, Waved Albatross, Isla Espanola, c-print 47. J Henry Fair, Yellow Warbler, Santiago Galapagos 48. J Henry Fair, No Safe Landing, Pink Roseate Spoonbills flying over radioactive fertilizer production waste, Bartow, Florida 49. J Henry Fair, Pink Roseate Spoonbills flying over phosphate tailings, Bartow, Florida 50. J Henry Fair, Rufescent Tiger Heron, Xaras Lodge, Mato Grosso Do 51. J Henry Fair, Burrowing Owl, Bahia das Pedra, Pantanal, Mato J Henry Fair’s work comes in three sizes:; 20 x 30; 30 x 45 and 50 x 75 inches 54. Dan Rizzie, Raven’s Garden, 2004, aquatint: 24 3/8 x 19 3/8 inches, 6/25 58. Geoffrey Gorman, Maricopa and Costalis are Building a Nest, mixed media and found objects: 34 x 34 x 22 inches 59. Geoffrey Gorman, Bird Head Studies, mixed media, pool balls: 12 x 8 x 2 inches 60. Geoffrey Gorman, Bird Head Studies, mixed media, pool balls: 12 x 8 x 2 inches 61. Geoffrey Gorman, Hova Lands (Magpie on child’s chair), mixed media and found objects: 32 x 21 x 24 inches 65. Robert Motherwell, Magpie, 1952, ink on paper: 27 1/2 x 21 1/2 inches
The Barn @ Downing Yudain LLC www.art357.com info@art357.com all works in this catalogue are copyright of the artists included