BOWERY GALLERY PORTFOLIO: 42 ARTISTS / 42 WORKS ON PAPER
FEBRUARY 2024
This catalog documents Bowery Gallery's Portfolio Project—the donation of 42 works on paper by gallery artists to Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio.
Conceived by Martha Armstrong in March, 2022 and negotiated by Glen Cebulash of WSU, the project was implemented by members of Bowery in 2022-24.
547 W 27 th St, Suite 508, New York NY 10001 www.bowerygallery.org · 646-230-6655
February 2024
Bowery artists participating in the portfolio:
Martha Armstrong
Kamini Avril
Rita Baragona
Nancy Beal
Temma Bell
Monica Bernier
Robert Braczyk
Diana Cabouli
Simon Carr
Glen Cebulash
Audrey Cohn-Ganz
Anne Delaney
Colleen Franca
Stephanie Franks
Dorothy Frey
John Goodrich
Janet Gorzegno
Barbara Grossman
Suzanne Guppy
Michael Louis Johnson
Deborah Kahn
Howard Kalish
Timothy King
Lynn Kotula
Mark Lewis
Lynette Lombard
Jeremy Long
Younghee Choi Martin
Gael Mooney
Nagib Nahas
Naomi Nemtzow
Iris Osterman
Hearne Pardee
Thaddeus Radell
Deborah Rosenthal
Dena Schutzer
Tony Serio
Rachel Siporin
Sam Thurston
Ian Tornay
Evelyn Twitchell
Carolyn Virgil
A Gift to Wright State University
During the height of the pandemic in 2020-21, the members of Bowery, an artist-run gallery in New York City, organized several themed online exhibitions. All members could propose topics and submit works. Over the course of the pandemic, an impressive body of work was presented and discussed in public Zoom meetings.
Another gallery project was simultaneously in the works. This was an in-the-flesh exhibition of Bowery artists’ paintings, organized by Glen Cebulash and opening at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio on January 18, 2022. Photographs of this notable installation are accessible at: https://bowerygallery.org/wright-state-u-show
Shortly after the close of the WSU exhibition, Bowery artists voted to donate to the University's Art Department a portfolio of members’ works on paper— reproduced in this catalog—as a gift to be used however the Department saw fit: for teaching, exhibiting, or lending to other schools, galleries and museums.
—Martha Armstrong February 2024
Left:
Robert and Elaine Stein Galleries, Wright State University Installation of "Artists of the Bowery Gallery," January 18, 2022
To be put in any category not defined by one’s work is to be falsified.
—Elaine de Kooning
We, the Bowery artists in 2023, recall and celebrate the adventurous founding—some fifty-odd years ago—of the Bowery Gallery. Young men and women who were artists living and working in New York created the gallery as a counter to the commercial galleries, both their programs and their profit motives.
We—Bowery artists now—reaffirm our belief in the continuing life and importance of the craft and culture of painting and sculpture. We embrace the idea of an art that does not depend on subject matter or other categories to guarantee meaning or worth. We assert an art that is a full expression of the language of painting and sculpture.
What is the purpose of art? Is this the right question for our time—or any time? Beauty is in itself a social good. Beauty is part of the fabric of civilized society and all over the
world, people under the thumb of authoritarian rule yearn for beauty.
Ours is the world of line, color, and form, both as a tradition and as an art that lives exuberantly in the present. For us form speaks content and truth is arrived at through line, color, and shape. This truth may embrace myth, geometry, philosophy, or narrative, but ultimately it springs from the conviction of its forms.
To the contemporary question, “What is art for?” the artists of the Bowery Gallery, echoing W.H. Auden, might answer that art “makes nothing happen.” The artist’s task, as Auden said of the poet’s, is to make “a rapture of distress.” With our paintings, we reaffirm the openness of the past to all artists who engage with the past. We assert that traditions of imagemaking transcend national and cultural boundaries.
—Deborah
Rosenthal April 2023
A Brief History of the Bowery Gallery
During the summer of 1969 a group of artists, most of whom were in their 20s, began talking about starting a gallery. The impetus was the desire and need to show work in an art world that did not pay enough attention to representational art. We knew each other from a few different establishments; Cooper Union, a drawing studio on 14th Street, as well as friends of friends. After a few months we numbered nineteen members:
Nancy Beal, John Bradford, Charlotte Bunting, Lynda Caspe, Larry Faden, Sherron Francis, Barbara Grossman, Howard Kalish, Garitt Korfitzen, Bette Lang, Eugene Maise, Frank McCall, Bill Moore, Tony Siani, Jack Silberman, Frank Smullin, Bill Sullivan, Sam Thurston, Robert Yarber.
299 Bowery was a rough storefront between Houston and First Street. With renewed flooring, reconstructed walls and paint it was a worthy space. The opening show was on October 31, 1969. It was the first of the new wave of co-ops coming after the 10th Street days. The Bowery itself was still inhabited by homeless individuals who were mostly either down and out men and/or serious alcoholics. They often checked out the gallery swerving in the door and wondering
where they had landed. It was almost always easy to guide them to the exit. In the initial Bowery space there was great interest from our artist peers but not much traffic from interested customers.
We were mostly painters and a few sculptors and were confident in our various points of view, some of which were generated by a few of our teachers, but mostly driven by our personal passions. The majority of us worked perceptually, thus the outcome was representational ranging from the figure, to stilllife to landscape.
Today the members still apply and are chosen by their peers. The gallery has evolved towards a broader aesthetic view. The artists tend to be more established and often recognized. The Bowery has become part of the New York art world. The fact of their independence from the pressure of commercial establishment has allowed each artist to pursue their own vision. The original ideas embedded in the values of the gallery; authenticity, rigor, invention and the expression of the visual language are the bedrock. It is a unique and vibrant exhibition space that has promise to continue far into the future.
—Barbara Grossman, Founding/Associate Member —Sam Thurston, Founding Member
October 2022
Martha Armstrong
The Singer 2021
watercolor, 7 x 5 inches
This is a painting I found on my studio floor of Brandon, my grandson, a singer. Thinking? Singing? I don’t remember. I know I painted most of it out of my head but I may have been inspired by a photograph.
Now it feels acutely accurate, so I chose it for this Portfolio. Translating something you see or think with all the tools of painting is what we want to do.
Kamini Avril
Pine Barrens (I) 2022
watercolor, 10 x 14 inches
I grew up near the South Jersey Pine Barrens, an area of rare pygmy pine trees in sandy soil not far from the coast. It was an uninviting place you could get easily lost in since everything was the same height and flat. The trees looked stunted with tortured branches and evenings brought mists; the stuff of Jersey Devil legend.
On a recent trip back, I saw the place with new eyes.
Although still strange and a bit scary, I find it fascinating and inspiring.
I feel it with empathy now, as if I too am still managing to grow, albeit in sand and salt. Arabesque branches are not hidden in pine needles but dance separate and connected. Late afternoon light filters all the way to the ground, through wild blueberry bushes. It has its own beauty.
acrylic, 21 x 15 inches
My process is a perceptual dance. When I paint, I search for moments of connection with the flowers, trees and oceans. I revel in painting ever-changing patterns of color, light, and space; searching for the energy that informs mass. In Fall Blooming I responded to the vibrant color of the flowers against autumn trees, just before the frost kills them. I filled the surface with luminous spatial color rhythms. All is in flux. I am aware of how my eyes gather color vibrations, as they move from place to place and then how my mind interprets this information as a still picture. My sensations are recorded in irregular marks on masses of color. My colors become a metaphor for energy that inhabits mass and my rhythmic marks for change. I stop painting when the painted surface feels energized. Although I like to understand ideas, by asking visual questions, in the balance between intuition and understanding, I lean on the side of subjectivity. I am not painting this still life to describe it, but to experience it. When I paint from nature, I am in a state of heightened awareness, looking outward to go inward.
Rita Baragona Fall Blooming 2021
Nancy Beal
Fruit East View
2020 oil on gessoed paper, 10 x 14 inches
Most of my work I do in the country where I have gardens and a long view of the Taconic Mountains. I also have wonderful views in New York City which inspired this painting. I paint a lot of still lifes and am always challenged by the “background.”
Vala and Posie
ink drawing on paper, 18 x 24 inches
I like working with brush and ink because I am primarily a painter and usually work with brush and color. So I enjoy the flow and try to get the subject to work on the page, which sometimes it does and other times not.
Temma Bell
gouache and cut paper, 9 x 12 inches
The cutouts have grown out of a life-long fascination with collage as a kind of poetry of the temporal. They represent an internal response to the visual even though many are abstract. In most cases I have deliberately veered away from references to observed nature, opting for shape in its essence. Two dimensional structure and rhythm is accomplished through repetition, variation, positive and negative echoing. The musical sensibility—with underlying rhythms, repetitions and harmonies both in color and shape are informed by my many years drawing from nature.
Monica Bernier
Robert Braczyk
Study of Meridians 2015
graphite, 17 x 22 inches
As a sculptor I rarely make finished drawings. However, the act of taking in nature with the eye, passing that through the brain and then directing that out through the hand onto paper is fundamental to everything I do. As Rodin said, “To draw is to be one with nature.” For an artist working on paper is a tool for looking.
The process of making my sculpture is, in one way or another, drawing in three dimensions.
Drawing requires editing and processing to put an image down and therefore gets to the essence of a thing. It helps me understand what I see.
Drawing is also a device with which I can notate ideas observed or imagined. In addition it can be a format to experiment with changes.
This drawing is a study of a sculpture in progress (Meridians, 2015). Through it I tried various ways to connect the upper element of the piece with a base. The finished work is on my website: www.robertbraczyk.com.
Row of Trees, Germonds Park
2012
oil on cardboard, 6 3⁄8 x 11 inches
I’ve always worked from observation regardless of the subject matter and have concentrated on painting outdoors for several decades. When I paint outdoors, I’m actually a part of nature, its smells and sounds, its constant changing light and unpredictable color and form. Immediately my sensibilities are heightened, and my decision-making is quicker and more spontaneous. This unexpectedness of being outdoors, continues to excite and challenge me in new ways.
Diana Cabouli
Two Riders 2022
watercolor, 18 x 24 inches
This watercolor is a scene from upstate New York. I know the horses and I know the riders.
It was not painted from life, though it is a place, a scene that I know very well in general and specific terms.
A lot of what goes on in the studio is from memory, that’s why I like working from drawings, it means color is free to work within the composition as the painting develops. One drawing often reappears in different paintings. The drawing gives a framework to start from.
But I depend alot on memory. There is a difference between memory and a photograph. Photos only reproduce, memory sorts out, changes, rebuilds things under all kinds of pressures. That seems to fit well with the process of a painting as it grows and changes. There is no specific scene being recreated, sometimes I’m not sure where I am or what I’m looking at. That gives freedom for dramatic changes in the painting. But the event of the painting should be clear. Its hard, things change so much as you work, so much falls by the wayside trying to bring the painting to resolution.
In the end the painting is more real than any scene or place, the painting is what’s real. The world changes and fades but the painting holds on to something. That’s the most important thing to remember.
Simon Carr
Glen Cebulash
Self Portrait
2015
charcoal on paper, 21 x 18 inches
I was born and raised in northern New Jersey and studied art at Boston University (BFA) and American University (MFA). My undergraduate training was traditional and my graduate and post-graduate work was primarily concerned with issues related to perception and representation. For many years after I painted the landscape. Although I work now in a non-objective manner, I still draw from observation mostly self-portraits.
Audrey Cohn-Ganz
Punctuation
2015
acrylic on paper, 10 x 8 inches
Over the course of four summers, 2011 through 2016, I stationed myself at the same spot overlooking the Long Island Sound in New Rochelle. I invented visual equivalents to capture my experiences of the space.
Using the language of mark making, scale, surface texture, relative tonality, repetition and rhythm I created pathways through and across my rectangular sheet of paper. Punctuation is the result of this process. The ability to simultaneously experience the physicality of the materials with image recognition continues to fascinate me in my current work.
Anne Delaney
Daphne Mourns Her Tree
charcoal on paper, 14 x 17 inches
My mediums are charcoal and pencil on paper and oil on canvas.
My imagery is developed through perceptual drawing such as trees and figures and domestic objects, and with ideas generated from the news and current events.
I rework my initial idea until the image develops into a dynamic and personally relevant moment.
Peppers
gouache on paper, 7 x 9 inches
As a perceptual painter, I focus on painting the landscape, still life and portraits from direct observation. My works are small as I am attracted to the intimacy that the scale allows. My landscapes and still lives focus on space, light and capturing a sense of a time and/or place. It is always the light that I remember most, it’s what attracts me, draws me in and keeps me searching for things that are not immediately obvious on first glance. Similarly my portraits are concerned with portraying the “essence” of a person’s spirit, rather than a direct representation. The challenge is to see beyond the conspicuous to discover a unique quality, uncover the mystery and capture a feeling the scene, person or object(s) evoke in me.
Colleen Franca
2020
Stephanie Franks Percolate
collage, 4 ½ x 4 ¼ inches
Whether deriving inspiration from past masters, the view out the window, an interior with still life, or simply color for color's sake, my works weave together multiple threads, finding connection in the push and pull of their relationships. My drawings take cues from visually perceived reality. In my paintings, the "drawing" and divisions of space relate to the perception of the outside world while the color ls pure invention, creating its own unity. My collages, unabashedly about color, also absorb structures from my drawings and paintings.
My color flies free, giving voice to my Intuited inner reality, while my drawing investigates, in more formal ways, the world I see with my eyes. On the one side, my perception and notation of the exterior world through the language of drawing and on the other, the interior language of color as expressed in my paintings and collages.
Dorothy Frey
Exterior: Deck
2005
graphite on paper, 19 x 24 inches
I grew up on a farm, and have returned to our farmstead repeatedly for my studio work. In this graphite drawing, I depict a large silver maple tree, towering above a small shed and a porch deck. The canopy of the tree creates a shaded walkway between the two buildings. In the foreground, a new silver maple sapling grows. The central tree is like a guardian over the land, providing shelter and protection —its foliage wild and ragged. The young tree represents the next generation, with tender branches and refined beauty. My drawings and paintings are a metaphor for relationships and events experienced in life.
John Goodrich
Schoodic Rocks and Trees
2021
oil on paper, 12 x 16 inches
All visual experience is for me necessarily subjective. We unthinkingly imprint a practical order onto our impressions, simply to function in our environment. The artist’s task is to discard this practical ordering and seek a new, more elemental understanding, one empathetic to the motif and also aware of painting’s unique powers to re-create it in a visual discipline of lines and colors. I’m inspired by the words of Matisse: “A work of art must carry in itself its complete significance and impose it upon the beholder even before he can identify the subject-matter.”
Janet Gorzegno
Stormy Sea 2022
gouache on paper, 6 x 6 inches
My paintings in gouache on paper point to the spiritual dimension of the human experience. They invite for contemplation glimpses of the human; the recurring motif is the human head, which appears as a symbol for human consciousness.
Intimately sized, my pantings discover their form from within. They concentrate the eye on serene faces that appear wrapped in stillness, as if attending a shift in consciousness that has not yet happened, but is about to occur. They suggest themes of transitioning or liminality.
The heads, mostly profiles, are created entirely from imagination, yet they seem to possess distinct personalities and missions.
Painting for me is a practice involving centering and calibration. I believe visual form has the potential to uplift and transform awareness. I strive to create from a place of compassion and positive intention.
oil stick on paper, 24 x 18 inches
Barbara Grossman’s paintings, oil stick drawings and monotypes depict the interplay of women in interiors. They are characterized by intense color, multiple patterns and the interstices. She is deeply involved in the tension between the dynamics of the luminosity of color and the folding and torque of space which is simultaneously deep and shallow. Observation and experience reveals each configuration as a renewed exploration of the visual language. There is an underlying narrative which the viewer is at liberty to determine.
Barbara Grossman
A Cappella 2022
Suzanne Guppy
59 th Street Bridge
2003 charcoal on paper, 10 x 15 inches
This is a charcoal drawing done while living on East 53rd Street in New York City. I created a series of drawings and studies in charcoal, pencil, pastel and oils to gather material for a 6-foot by 7-foot oil painting of the 59th Street Bridge.
This drawing investigates the structure and form of the bridge as well as the space under it. I became very interested in the connection between these things. The way the bridge links two islands, spans the river and the arresting power of its form. The bridge came to symbolize New York City to me. It is a place of energy, power and interconnections.
Michael Louis Johnson
Bruges at Night
1988 casein on paper, 7 x 5½ inches
My objective has always been to paint what’s in front of me, to live in such a way as to be ready to paint. To have supplies with me, and have them easily accessible, at home, when traveling, or walking around the neighborhood.
I recognize the importance of being able to look first thing in the morning at what’s on the easel or what’s being started that day.
This particular piece is a late night painting of a church dome in Bruges, Belgium, a trip made in 1988. It’s a very spur of the moment piece, a view from my guesthouse window, that I enjoy looking at as a reminder of a fantastic month long painting trip to Holland and Belgium.
At seventy-two I can honestly say that my Freshman Foundation courses at Rhode Island School of Design are still the basis for many of the compositional choices I make in my work. That year and those professors took me out of uncertainty, and helped me construct opinions about how pieces might succeed.
Deborah Kahn
Untitled 2022 ballpoint pen on paper, 18 x 24 inches
I believe that art, like emotion, contains coexisting contradictions. My paintings are an attempt to make this idea concrete.
For days, weeks, often months, I intuitively weave color planes across the canvas surface. This process of lacing color marks remains constant; what changes is that the marks begin to suggest figuration: a head, a torso, or a group of figures start to appear. The fiction on the canvas becomes real, and I work to realize the image.
A painting is complete when there is no separation between color and drawing. The image, the skin of the paint and the colored marks are all one: nothing can be separate.
Howard Kalish
Untitled
c. 1980 pencil, 20 x 16 inches
I try to be a good matchmaker. I introduce the abstract to the figurative (or vice versa), and if I do my job well they realize despite their differences that they have a lot in common, and they fall in love, marry and have children. The children are called Meaning, Association, Form, Content, Design and Etcetera. Sometimes they are twins, or triplets, or more. In each case they look like their parents, or rather a combination of their parents (a matchmaker might say “a perfect combination,” but this would be hyperbole). Each family, happy or unhappy, has its own characteristics and peculiarities, whatever Tolstoy says. So it is with these families. In spite of their peculiarities they are trying to be good, and fruitful. Look carefully and you will know whether they are.
PS: I am a sculptor. I don't make many drawings (this is an old one), preferring to make small models as studies. You can see current work on my website: www.howardkalish.com.
Timothy King
Airlite Street, Elgin
2007
pastel on paper, 12 x 16 inches
Ever present in any painting and any human being, emotion is a subject and theme that stands the test of time. Within my studio practice, I search for meaningful expressions that envelope the essence of emotion and natural sensation in the world around me, in this way, my art forms a critical relationship to the contemporary world. I’ve chosen an approach that connects my thinking and works with the past great traditions of painting and drawing to the current perceptual science and the conceptual review of psychology and aesthetics. The elements of my compositions thematically extend my spatial and temporal sensual realm. Through this, the sense of contemporary landscape and human form ties to the symbolism and metaphor of man’s relationship to the environment. But in the end, a painting is about using color as a plastic, spatial, sensual means to our shifting emotions.
Lynn
Kotula
Study for "Shell, Cabocha, Butternut and Bottle Gourd"
2013-14 graphite on paper, 8 x 15 inches
I have always painted from observation. I loved Bonnard’s dinner tables and the clutter of Fairfield Porter’s breakfast, but I wasn’t attracted to found arrangements as a subject for my own work. There’s something in the act of choosing and arranging that compels me.
I start with an object or a small group of objects whose color and shape engage me. I put them on a tabletop and then move them around. I’m exploring ways to make them relate to one another, to belong together. I am looking for an arrangement that feels necessary.
I do some quick drawings. The drawing helps me to identify trouble areas in the setup. I change things.
Of course, moving things around introduces new relationships and problems. Often I decide to go ahead anyway. Those areas that I couldn’t figure out in the drawing are always trouble in the painting.
It’s okay; I like a certain amount of trouble.
Mark Lewis
Self-Portrait 2022
graphite and paper collage, 14 x 16 inches
I’m visually interested in the landscape, particularly the urban landscape and specifically Tulsa city streets. It’s a stage that’s familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. I love perceptual observation, experiencing light, the urban geometry (e.g. street signs, high wires, etc.), the sense of scale, the expansive Oklahoma skies, and simply observing people in their daily routines. The work is about discovering and visually translating my experiences in the landscape and the material rather than knowing what will occur on any given day. I enjoy observing, experiencing our environment, building an image in time piece by piece, and constructing and compressing daily experiences into the work. The ordinary experience of daily life is extraordinary.
The “Self-Portrait” was made in the studio sitting in front of “Peoria Avenue” one my street scenes. The size and format develop as the work evolves. My collages continue to be informed by my experiences as a painter.
Lynette Lombard
Storm from Africa over the Mediterranean
2018 acrylic on paper, 15 x 22 inches
I am a perceptual painter whose work embodies a visceral, physical and poetic experience of place. Painting from life is a shock to my system, a jolt on the nerves, at once an awakening and an engulfment by the natural world, in which terror arises even as the deep desire for connection is satisfied. The places I paint have a presence, a wildness, a desolation, even a monstrousness: nature holding on, expressing itself, for dear life. My most recent body of work comes from two places: the view outside my studio window in an urban midwestern town during lockdown, and Green Oaks, the third-oldest restored American prairie. Each place has sustained me through the pandemic. The prairie energized my engagement with life in all of its diversity and was a respite from the daily horrors of Covid, environmental and civil rights injustices and loss during 2020-22. When I paint, I become consumed not just by the intervals, spatial fluxes, slipping forms and the dynamism of sky, but by an effort to comprehend the larger-than-human world: that world in which we live as though apart, but of which we are always, profoundly, part.
Jeremy Long
Painting Lesson
2009
multicolored aquatint etching, 12 x 14 inches
The static or unreal quality is an attempt to describe an ideal world, an order sufficient unto itself. The act of putting together a world made out of naturalistic elements is not so much being perceived as reconstructed, it’s the same old world renewed. Mondrian explained that there are two kinds of expression in art—a specific personal one (the expression on the faces, etc.) and the universal one (the expressive power of forms).
Younghee
Choi
Martin
Orestes’ Trial
2021
pencil on paper, 7 7⁄8 x 10 3⁄8 inches
This small pencil drawing is of a larger painting entitled Orestes’ Trial. It is from Eumenides, the third book of Oresteia by Aeschylus. The scene: a crowd is leaning in to witness the fate of Orestes as Athene casts her vote which weighs the verdict to not guilty. It is twilight.
The sketch was made in the midway of the painting to re-establish the group with varying attitudes surrounding Orestes. Simple hatched markings create dark and light shapes moving across the page laterally suggesting relief-like space.
The dark forms are punctuated by sharp, short lines defining foot here and boot there. Gentle arcs suggest arms, elbows, or tree branches opening up to the sky above.
Gael Mooney
After 1st Century CE
Fresco
"Achilles on the Island of Skyros"
graphite on paper, 17 x 16 inches
Drawing from the Masters is an integral part of my artistic process. It extends the process of looking and learning from master works so as to help me unlock their essence and mystery.
This 1st century fresco of Achilles on the Island of Skyros depicts the dramatic moment foretold by prophecy when Achilles is recognized by his pursuers, setting in motion his heroic and fateful role in the Trojan War. What interested me is the how the artist used geometry to heighten the drama of the scene depicted. The composition is spatially compressed. The figures postures, gestures, movements and circular shields together form a spiral that moves out from the figure of Achilles like a coil about to spring. In so doing, the works' geometry and composition heighten the dramatic tension of the story, prompting the viewer to reflect upon it's greater significance and the themes of heroism, fate, wrath and glory that characterize not only a particular moment in time but our human condition.
Nagib Nahas
Sabine and Christopher—Columbus, Ohio
ca. 2003
pencil on paper, 8 x 10 inches
The protagonist of this drawing is the line. The antagonist is the space that it cuts and divides. The resolution is the image that together they define. All my drawings follow the same formal narrative, or structure, although the details vary.
The source of this picture is a photograph I took in 2000 of a mother and her playful son. I wish I could have rendered the radiance of the situation more fully, but there are limits to what a diagrammatic drawing can do.
collage with mixed media, 11 x 14 inches
My work changed direction in 2020 with the onset of the pandemic and ensuing quarantine. After a lifetime of painting urban landscape outdoors from observation, I stayed home for months. Previously, I had depicted subject matter by attaching perceptual information, such as relationships of shape and color, to compositional “skeletons” rooted in abstract ways of thinking.
During quarantine and continuing, I find myself working with a different kind of process. It starts with selecting a palette from my large collection of painted paper: in this case a red, a blue, a dark green and black on a white ground. Parallel to the way I mixed colors when painting perceptually, I now seek color relationships in the painted paper that create light and energy. I then cut shapes and move those shapes around on the surface until the whole is activated. When the arrangement holds my interest, I glue it together. Because I like to work in series, I often make copies of the resulting composition so that I can draw differently on each. As the drawing marks accumulate, they may evolve to suggest narrative content. A personal iconography emerges. These images often take on a humorous quality which is never deliberate, but which I accept and enjoy.
Naomi Nemtzow
Iris Osterman
Sussex Cliff 2017 monotype, 9 x 12 inches
This print was done after a trip to Sussex, UK, where I spent a week walking along the South Downs Way, particularly the part of trail called the Seven Sisters. The striking view of the great chalk cliffs remained in my memory when I returned to the States and resulted in a series of prints, drawings and paintings recalling the experience.
2022 acrylic, 18 x 22 inches
My work has focused on the experience of landscape, which has involved painting on site as well as drawing from videos that record the overall space. Incorporating a grid that references the ground plan, a sequence of verticals that denote my own position in space, drawn details that record aspects of the site, and blocks of color that serve to indicate the spaces I don’t attend to in detail, I create compositions on the floor of the studio, which I see in terms of dance movements. This drawing is one frame in a sequence of such compositions. Set on the wall or on the floor, it’s meant to inspire a performative response, like a choreographic notation.
Hearne Pardee Frame
Radell
Three Figures on a Beach
2018 oil pastel, 9 x 12 inches
In my drawings, a narrative is evident, but never overt. A crown, a bow, a boat, a wheel. The environment is usually a non-descript landscape upon which the figures appear and act as upon a stage. Though the subject has recently coalesced around my reading of Dante and Homer, Shakespeare and Faulkner, the work is more often meditations on the relationships between the protagonists of these lost worlds or the inner depths of the solitary hero, than derived from actual scenes along the Acheron or the Field of Troy. Pathos, a sense of loss or redemption, reflections on oppression, and escape are implied and felt rather than actualized through specific content.
Thaddeus
Deborah Rosenthal
5 x 7 inches
In my work, whether in paintings or in prints, I attempt to create a world that probes beyond, while not dismissing, the depiction of things. I am interested in forces internal to, and acting upon, things, and so, recognizable objects do appear in my pictures. Such objects may be as pared-down as the “signs” (derived from architectural details) in the print “Graffiti.” Such signs or symbols exists at some remove from accidents of direct perception or indeed any naturalistic depiction. Direct perception with its changeable light, perspective systems with their regression through a visually logical space—I may use such means, but they are only possibilities, relative to each other within any picture. In this print, the black ground throughout the rectangle thwarts any suggestion of fore- and background, yet the “signs” themselves turn and dip in a space which may be seen as infinitely far or near, with no ground plane to assure us of our own location vis-à-vis these floating, pirouetting forms. Alongside the spectral, reduced forms, I have placed some recognizable details from Baroque architecture, their relatively elaborate outlines thus compared to the essential geometry from which they arise…like bodies and their skeletons set against one another.
I have always wanted my pictures to evoke states of mind and body in which time and space dance together, an art of precisely calibrated movements—of color, of line, of shape—that may whisper or may shout, but which make an utterance.
Dena Schutzer
Yonkers Barbershop
2015
aquatint and etching, 12 x 6 inches
I seek to be surprised by an observation and the painting or drawing of it.
I am not looking for anything specific, just whatever catches my eye naturally and pulls me in.
Such an image "happens" when the serendipity of a human gesture, an intriguing juxtaposition, or rhythm align in an unforced way. These moments tend to give me a focus that I can use to build a painting around.
In this image, as I was drawing in a barber shop, I responded to how the axis of the two heads and their gazes are urgently emphasized by the diagonal of the child’s arm demanding his mother’s attention to look at something.
Tony Serio Path Near the Tracks—Fall
2017
watercolor and gouache, 12 x 16 inches
My landscapes examine nature in the urban setting where the compositions grow and evolve spontaneously, taking cues from nature to reveal the character of the place. I like to paint onsite to study the landscape spaces, paths, and trees in our Hudson River Park. I use watercolor, gouache, and pencil to create source material for more complex works. These works on paper inform larger canvases where I work directly from observation. I can then further develop these works in the studio using these studies as a reference. I draw with the brush and palette knife where the mark of the tool is evident in articulating form and atmosphere. In painting from observation, my process is improvisational, always anticipating what comes next which keeps the painting process fresh and very much “in the moment.”
Rachel Siporin
Murals in the Marketplace
2021 etching and aquatint, 12 x 12 inches
The negatives from my father, Mitchel Siporin’s trip to Mexico in 1939 survived his WWII service as a War Artist, my parents’ early married life in New York City, the move to Boston, and spent sixty-two years unnoticed in our family home in Newton, MA. My sister Judith, upon my questioning their whereabouts, discovered the negatives tucked away in a corner of the third floor in 2019. Once scanned, their clarity and content provided the inspiration for the paintings and intaglio prints in the series Murals in the Marketplace.
I grew up knowing the story of the trip, the two Chicagoans, Julio De Diego and my father set off for Mexico in an old jalopy, to join in a pilgrimage with Depression-era Federal Arts Project muralists, contemporary Mexican artists, and their companions, to witness the great 1920’s Mexican murals that inspired and informed their WPA murals.
Mitchell, behind the camera, does not appear in most of the images. I composed the paintings and etchings in Murals in the Marketplace imagining the world through my father’s eyes. My process begins with sketchbook ink drawings and multiple state etchings and aquatints. As I juxtapose figures, architecture, and landscape, the narrative emerges. Bystanders, incidental tiny actors in the distance, discovered through enlarging the photographs’ sections, shape the narrative.
2020 ink on paper, 9 x 12 inches
In March 1970, just four months after the Bowery Gallery first opened, I had a show there with Barbara Grossman and Bill Sullivan. In those first shows in the old Bowery space I showed paintings, some from life and some from imagination, sculpture, watercolors and drawings. These four strands in my artistic endeavor— working from life, working from imagination, working two dimensionally, working three dimensionally, have remained with me throughout my life. I seek to balance them. If I spend too much time on sculpture I feel it is time to get back to painting. If I spend too much time working imaginatively I feel it is time to work directly from life. And vice versa.
Sam Thurston Spruce Remains
2021
graphite on paper, 14 x 17 inches
In rural locations in Pennsylvania, Vermont and Maine, I draw and paint views that evoke a connection to nature. I capture the unique sense of place, in its intimacy or grandeur. My line work is loose and energetic, focused on weaving together distinct moments in changing light. Large, loosely defined areas lead to more detailed moments in a rhythmic build-up of lines. Brushstrokes follow nature’s shapes but are not held captive by them. Lines, planes, colors and hatched strokes flow into each other freely in the romantic tradition of Constable and Marquet.
Ian Tornay
Kutztown
charcoal, 13½ x 11 inches
My work explores the forms and forces of the natural world. I may be inspired by a piece of light in the landscape, a memory of a time of day, or the processes of growth and decay. I want people to have multiple associations when looking at my work–not the experience of naming objects or places, but of sensations, transitions, moments in nature. As an abstract painter, I don’t paint naturalistic spaces, but I may begin with a particular experience of something seen. Often images arise from experimentation. Something sparks an idea or a feeling, and I see where it leads.
Evelyn Twitchell
Bud
2009
Carolyn Virgil
Pianiste Parisienne (Stephanie)
2007 ink, 10½ x 8¼ inches
This drawing was made as a reference for two paintings I did. Stephanie was playing the piano as I drew so I had a concert at the same time.
I look for tension between lines, distances, planes.
In painting I probably think most about colors.
My aim is to use relations between colors to create light.
How they affect/relate to other colors.
How they create space.
How they move the eye around the page/canvas.
I can’t paint a shedding onion that’s as beautiful as the real thing. I have to make a painting that stands for itself.
It’s not something I think about consciously.
Bowery Artists, January 2023
Back row, left to right :
Tony Serio, Younghee Choi Martin, Evelyn Twitchell, Carolyn Virgil
Middle row:
Hearne Pardee, Gael Mooney, Audrey Cohn-Ganz, Iris Osterman, Anne Delaney, Monica Bernier, Temma Bell, Dena Schutzer, Naomi Nemtzow
Front row:
Kamini Avril, Robert Braczyk, Adrianne Lobel,* Martha Armstrong, John Goodrich, Rita Baragona, Janet Gorzegno
Not present:
Nancy Beal,† David Bradford,* Diana Cabouli, Simon Carr, Glen Cebulash, Colleen Franca, Stephanie Franks, Dorothy Frey, Barbara Grossman, Suzanne Guppy, Michael Louis Johnson, Deborah Kahn, Howard Kalish,† Richard LaPresti,* Tim King, Mark Lewis, Lynette Lombard, Lynn Kotula,‡ Jeremy Long, Nagib Nahas, Thaddeus Radell, Deborah Rosenthal, Marylou Schuck,* June Silverberg,* Rachel Siporin, Walter Strach,* Esmé Thompson,* Sam Thurston,† Ian Tornay
* Not participating in Portfolio † Founding member ‡ Estate
