Kathryn Markel Fine Arts
April 29 – May 3, 2015
On cover (cropped): Deborah Zlotsky Mermaid thoughts, 2014 Oil on canvas 60 x 72 in.
Kathryn Markel Fine Arts New York City/Bridgehampton Booth #509
April 29 – May 3, 2015 Fort Mason Center - Festival Pavilion 2 Marina Blvd San Francisco, CA 94123
Deborah Zlotsky Zlotsky begins each painting with something incidental and personal — a few colors or shapes, a memory of a tangled pile of laundry or the movement of sunlight through her grandmother’s apartment. From there, she responds to relationships and discovers unanticipated proximities that fuel her decisions: correcting, repairing, adjusting, and connecting parts in a responsive process of accumulation and revision. Zlotsky’s language of forms and planes play with our assumptions. Some may appear solid, others hollow. Still others appear as open boxes, flaps out, or cubes stacked on top of one another. Our perspective is constantly challenged. Bold, unexpected colors punctuate the work and contribute to the dynamic space. In each torqued rectangle, another moment is revealed. Hints of under-painting, opaque planes and ghostly forms reveal histories of reversals, accidents and change. Drips and smears also mark time, leaving a visible trace of the artist’s hand. The paintings seem to have no beginning or end, with idiosyncratic forms flowing between flat and more dimensional space. Zlotsky draws us into a world where everything is connected.
Deborah Zlotsky Snowball’s Chance, 2015 Oil on canvas 36 x 36 in.
Deborah Zlotsky Mermaid thoughts, 2014 Oil on canvas 60 x 72 in.
Anne Neely Anne Neely’s work is centered on the process of painting as much as the ideas expressed. She works in abstraction, referencing nature and forming emotive images. She has created a language out of circles, squares and rectangles, which she uses to articulate mood and feeling. Neely’s concern for water issues has deepened her sense of purpose, transforming her paintings into curiosity-inducing scenarios often depicting imaginary water-scapes. Some of the paintings contain cross-sections of ground water and aquifers that move in and out of multiple points of view. Neely begins each of her paintings by pouring washes of paint over stretched linen. She then builds the surface with a series of marks, more layers of washes or drips of varying opacity, honing the depth and complexity of both the image and the subject. They strike a dynamic balance between spontaneity and intention, encouraging the viewer to make visceral connections.
Anne Neely Turlach Turlough, 2010 Oil on linen 56 x 72 in.
Jeffrey Cortland Jones Jeffery Cortland Jones’ paintings have a fine, cool sense of simplicity. They are not concerned with telling a story, or weighty in heavy concept. These, like the great Minimalists of the '60's, are simply about the physical act of painting and the physical experience the viewer has with that creation. They sit patiently and quietly on a wall in a beautifully minimal room, waiting to be spoken to. When discussing his work, Jeffrey Cortland Jones describes his near constant preoccupation with presenting reinterpretations of forms, objects, and colors as optical exercises. These optical exercises serve to see things in ways that others—primarily his viewers who are not artists themselves—may otherwise take for granted, and to teach these others to see these things anew. Within these exercises, he works to explore the dynamics expressed between numerous different binaries: light and dark, matte and gloss, organic and geometric forms. The result of these explorations manifests themselves on his panels; some of the forms contained within—stacks of polygonal shapes, squares, and blocks—create a tension between each other. They seem to struggle for purchase, and some feel as if they are on the verge of toppling over; the work is geometric, and yet, not quite. Nothing is actually as orderly as it may have first appeared. Jeffrey Cortland Jones Disco (Waves), 2014 Enamel, gesso, latex, and graphite on paper 30 x 22 in.
Jeffrey Cortland Jones Workt 6, 2014 Enamel, gesso, latex, and graphite on paper 26 ½ x 20 in.
Jeffrey Cortland Jones Skygazer (Awayness), 2014 Enamel, gesso, latex, and graphite on paper 14 x 11 in.
Josette Urso New York painter Josette Urso paints intuitively in reaction to her immediate surroundings, from both inside and outside her studio. Using an intense, delicate manipulation of paint, she gets lost in the act of painting with blissful abandon, creating sumptuous abstractions that reference landscape, still life, and views of New York City. Urso’s surfaces are dense tapestries of small, energetic marks. She mixes colors softly on the canvas, blending them just enough to leave minute stripes of color remaining in the grooves of her brushstrokes. The obsessive dabs and flourishing marks relay her sense of joy in capturing her observations.
Josette Urso Snowcone, 2015 Oil on canvas 36 x 48 in.
Josette Urso Snow Here Snow There, 2011 Oil on panel 30 x 24 in.
Josette Urso Undertow, 2013 Oil on panel 16 x 20 in.
Diane Carr Diane Carr’s paintings explore our surroundings through investigations of natural spaces. Through heightened color and shifts in scale, Carr is interested in emphasizing the materiality of paint. Similarly, in relying on gesture and alternating thin washes with layered areas, Carr is concerned with creating spaces within the pieces that dissolve into abstraction. Diane Carr holds a MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and a BA from American University in Washington, DC. Carr has exhibited her work across the nation including New York, Boston, and San Francisco. Carr currently works and resides in Brooklyn, NY.
Diane Carr Squall, 2014 Oil on canvas 60 x 50 in.
Diane Carr Shift, 2014 Oil on canvas 50 x 60 in.
Dan Gualdoni Dan Gualdoni, born in St. Louis received his BFA in painting from Washington University and his MFA in painting at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, California. He worked as a lithographer at Gemini, Ltd, in Los Angeles in the late 1960’s. Following that experience, he co-founded the lithography workshop for Sam Francis in Santa Monica, California. After returning to St. Louis, he taught at Washington University, where he co-founded Washington University Printmaking Workshop and served as its first printer-collaborator. Since that time he has taught painting, drawing, printmaking, materials & methods, and 2 dimensional design at Washington University, St. Louis Community College, Webster University, and Fontbonne College while continuing to produce and show his own work. His work has shown throughout Missouri, as well as in Chicago, New York, Nashville, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Diego and Ireland and Austria.
Dan Gualdoni Coastal Redux #166, 2015 Oil, printer's ink, glue medium on panel 11.5 x 11.5 in.
Dan Gualdoni Coastal Redux #157, 2014 Oil, printer's ink, glue medium on panel 19 x 19 in.
Dan Gualdoni Coastal Redux #170, 2015 Oil, printer's ink, glue medium on panel 18 x 18 in.
Marilla Palmer Marilla Palmer’s faux botanical studies are derived directly from shadows of handheld twigs and branches, and incorporate mushroom spores, pressed leaves and natural elements with theatrical embellishments made of sequins, glitter, holographic paper and beads. Her works on paper reflect her overall interest in combining natural elements with fabricated materials. Her mixed media collages humanize her subjects in a way that questions how what one puts on can shift the the perception of who or what one is.
Marilla Palmer Yellow Swerve, 2015 Mixed media on Arches paper 22 ½ x 15 in.
Marilla Palmer Iris, Ixora, and Flame, 2015 Watercolor, silk, and pressed foliage on Arches Paper 60 x 66 in.
Marilla Palmer A Bit of Velvet, 2014 Mixed media on Arches paper 15 x 15 in.
Debra Smith With the visual sensibilities of a painter, Debra Smith manipulates stripes and forms shapes with a gestural, geometric abstraction. But she is not painting. She is intuitively piecing found silk fabrics from vintage kimonos and men’s suit linings. The outcome is a very specific and well-developed visual language that relates more fully to drawing and painting than to the nature of textiles. These materials from the intimate insides of traditional men and women’s garments also carry a conceptual weight. The austere stripes of men’s suit linings are similar in texture but have a more striking presence than women’s kimono fabric in soft, transparent shades of ivory, creating a strong visual balance of masculine and feminine representation. Despite complex underlying dualities of artist and artisan, masculine and feminine, gestural and constructed, the end result is a pleasingly straight-forward visual vocabulary.
Debra Smith Are you on a Mountain, 2014 Pieced vintage silk 57 x 71 ½ in.
Debra Smith Making Visible #6, 2013 Pieced vintage silk 25 x 19 in.
Martina Nehrling Visual rhythms created by high key colors in short, undulating strokes dominate Martina Nehrling’s canvases and works on paper. She takes the cacophony of the ups and downs, joys and sorrows, meaningful and senseless moments of daily life and translates them into dashes of color. She visually describes a pulsing stream of consciousness written in primary, secondary, and neon palettes. Her brushstrokes accumulate and intermingle like staccato notes in a musical score. The jaunty rhythms lead the viewer up, down, around, and through moments of continuous movement. The contrasting colors vibrate against each other to create the illusion of constant motion gliding in and out of the picture plane. Despite the commotion, there is also a minimalist quality to Nehrling’s work. By paring down to the essentials of painting– paint and a brushstroke– there is a sense that each work is not trying to be anything but itself. The outcome is an immediate, intuitive freshness.
Martina Nehrling Thin Slicing, 2014 Acrylic on Montval paper 20 x 16 in.
Martina Nehrling Much Amok, 2014 Acrylic on Montval paper 17 x 16 in.
Martina Nehrling Up Against, 2014 Acrylic on Montval paper 20 x 16 in.
Don Martiny As an artist, Martiny’s focus of inquiry is the gesture. In his own words, his interest “lies in freeing the gesture from the traditional rectangular shaped support and exploring its potential.” His goal is to create work that encourages a dialogue within the architectural space where it resides. The energy in the work is not not inwardly, but outwardly directed. The works are created on the floor; Martiny uses brooms as brushes to manipulate the “paint,” or polymer mixed with pigment.
Don Martiny Beothuk, 2015 Polymer and dispersed pigment on aluminum 45 x 37 in.
Don Martiny Mbya, 2015 Polymer and dispersed pigment on aluminum 26 x 18 in.