R E YN O L D S F I N E A RT presents
Vista: A Study of the Land
For inquiries please contact:
Reynolds Fine Art 96 Orange Street New Haven, CT 06510 203.498.2200 info@reynoldsfineart.com
www.reynoldsfineart.com
Scott Duce Bronxville, NY
The Marker Series has been one of my signature series for several years. These paintings are both abstract and representational in style. I set out to establish a simulated memory of place by combining recognizable images in an inner panel, surrounded by an abstract enclosure that is generally produced from the observation of actual fragments of surface texture. They may be based on wall surfaces, tile patterns, or less specific visual memories. The inner and outer images of the paintings represent very different types of visual space, however I retain a close relationship between them through the use of similarly referential color or texture, or through the emotion engendered by color combinations. For me the energy of the painting is generated by the contrast between the tranquility and deep illusionistic space of the inner image and the expressionistic, though more flat vigor of the outer image.
Scott Duce, Fondescence, Oil on canvas, 24” x 24”, Courtesy of Cavalier Galleries, $5000
Scott Duce, Illumine, Oil on canvas, 24” x 24”, Courtesy of Cavalier Galleries, $5000
Bradford Johnson Somerville, MA
My work of the last twenty-five years has explored the boundaries between photography and painting. Photographs are clear windows invisibly framing specific times and places. By contrast, a painting is a material record tracking intuition by hand. Unlike a photograph a painting is the window. My painting process slowly builds upon thin layers of clear acrylic and paint. Surfaces are painted upon, scraped off and reconstituted. The result is a hybrid image of paint and its suggested photographic source. By playing painting off photography, deeper and more personal questions are thrown into relief. Memory lost and recreated are raised and submerged through paint. Many of my landscapes come from a trip I took to Loch Ness in the 1993. That evocative lake and it’s surrounding landscape hold an unlikely though persistent legend. For me it’s an irresistible place that cradles a fabled mystery at odds with our shrinking modern world.
Bradford Johnson, Dark Highlands, Acrylic paint and medium on panel, 11.5” x 17”, $1300
Bradford Johnson, Otherside, Acrylic paint and medium on panel, 13” x 19”, $1300
Bradford Johnson, Widening Bay, Acrylic paint and medium on panel, 13” x 38”, $2100
Gregory Kammerer Perryville, RI
Believing that less is always more, that what isn’t shown can be more compelling and mysterious than what is; continually striving to distill a thought or image into greater simplicity, to follow E.B. White’s dictum that “a drawing should have no unnecessary lines.” Almost from the very start I have used color fields as the basic structure of my paintings – simply meaning that the space of most of my work is divided into broad fields of horizontal color. It’s never fully intentional to construct my compositions this way; it is essentially how my eye interprets the world around me. I first started painting in watercolor, then proceeded to work in acrylic, egg tempera, and oil. Inevitably, a restlessness inspires me to turn everything I know upside down and begin again. For years I was fascinated by mastering the skills particular to egg tempera, a technique requiring deep concentration because you have to paint thinly—otherwise the paint forms cracks and resists adhering to the panel. When all the mixing of egg yolks and pigments began to get in the way and obstruct a certain creative freedom, I started to work from scratch with oils. In making this leap, I decided that the best place to start was from the very bottom. I vowed for the most part to stop working from photographs, to see what would come if I tried to resurrect images of landscape from both memory and imagination. I began each new work with a panel or surface that had nothing on it. Without the guidelines of a carefully rendered sketch to adhere to, the process of painting becomes more intuitive. I was thoroughly dismantling twenty years of habit and preconceptions. Never before had I felt the freedom to be spontaneous and playful with paint. To my surprise, I recognized a directness and honesty that came through in my earliest, looser watercolors. In recent years I have begun experimenting with a range of work surfaces: panel, canvas, plaster, paper, bird’s-eye maple, curved steel and even old books. I have always been drawn to books—the words on the page, the stories, the worlds and mysteries contained within their covers, their touch. Using books as a support for my paintings gives my work a sculptural dimension—a piece that may be found sitting on a shelf, a mantle or a desk; meant to be picked up and touched - an image and a book celebrating their having found one another. The longer I paint the more I’m drawn to abstraction and bridging the gap between both painting and sculpture. My hope is to keep the boundaries of painting more fluid and the possibilities wide open.
Gregory Kammerer, Hundred Acre Wood, Oil on panel, 15” x 11”, $2400
Gregory Kammerer, Landscape in Blue and White, Oil on paper, 5” x 3.25”, $500
Gregory Kammerer, The Blue-Grey of Winter, Oil in book, 5.25” x 9”, $850
Gregory Kammerer, Page from the Journal of the Pequod - Off Brant Point, Oil in book, 4.25” x 6.5”, $600
Gregory Kammerer, The Hills of Jerusalem, Oil in book, 3” x 5”, $300
Gregory Kammerer, North Slope, Oil in book, 3.25” x 6”, $375
Gregory Kammerer, Toward Nauset, Oil in book, 2.5” x 9.5”, $425
Gregory Kammerer, Where Giraffes Hide in the Trees, Oil in book, 8.25” x 11.5”, $850
Margot Nimiroski Branford, CT
I am a painter and sculptor who has lived most of her adult life in Connecticut on or near Long Island Sound. A teacher by profession, I started painting after retiring in 1996. My style has evolved from constant experimentation with materials and techniques. I became known for my large collages of cardboard and now am known for painting large seascapes and landscapes by using multiple layers of acrylic house paint. My paintings have always created a calming and subtle feeling...no hard edges or vivid colors. The Harbor Series reflects the activities and changes observed throughout the year on Branford Harbor. “Lights on the Harbor” was completed after sleeping under the stars on the back of our boat while on our mooring in July, 2012. The lights gave off a beautiful amber glow in the early morning hours. It felt very much like a dream. “Wednesday Night Races” was completed in August, 2012. We often invite friends over on Wednesday nights in the summer to watch the sailboats coming in after racing. Every Wednesday from Memorial Day through Labor Day the races are exciting to watch - sometimes the boats motor in, but the best viewing is when they come in with their brightly colored spinnakers and let them out to float in the wind as the sailboats enter the harbor. My husband and I spend most of the summer on our boat with friends and family. The Harbor is the center of our life and I enjoy sharing my vision of it with others.
Margot Nimiroski, Lights on the Harbour, Acrylic on canvas, 10.5� x 56.5�, Please call gallery for pricing
Margot Nimiroski, Wednesday Night Races, Acrylic on canvas, 28.5” x 28.5”, Please call gallery for pricing
Kyle Andrew Phillips Brooklyn, NY
Lately I have been liberating myself from an overexposure to an overabundance of digital imagery because of an ever-increasing numbness to it all. Consider this for yourself as you browse through images on a website or watch TV. Everyday many of us see thousands of images on our phones, tablets, TVs, computers and in advertisements, looking at each for only a few seconds. They can become as throwaway as the mere seconds that it takes to view them. I have been diverting my attention and slowing down to study the physical world around me, remembering what I see as a means to synthesize my emotion and memory of a place somewhere in my past. It sounds simple, and it is satisfyingly so. Compositions are inspired by New England forests, middle-American farmland and the weathered sills and brickwork found in our cities. The body of work as a whole continues the traditions of the Tonalist movement that lasted in America from 1880 to 1920.
Kyle Andrew Phillips, Dark Field, Oil on canvas, 18” x 36”, $1800
Kyle Andrew Phillips, Down, Oil on canvas, 24” x 36”, $2400
Kyle Andrew Phillips, That Greener Pasture, Oil on canvas, 14” x 24”, $1000
Robert Reynolds Stony Creek, CT
I have been fascinated by the abstract quality or “secondary” image that emerges when I look beyond the surface of a “place;” that intangible quality we find ourselves attached to. For me, these deceptive formal elements of painting — form, shape, color, space, movement, and the medium — give the painting a meaning and evocation of that indescribable sense of place, not the land as we see. What intrigues me the most is the effect a set of components can have on the viewer who may never have stood and witnessed a spot on earth that I have painted on my canvas. The struggle of wanting to “be there” and then trying to remember “there” is a constant ingredient in my landscape work.
Robert Reynolds, To California, Oil on linen, 32” x 35”, $2200
Peter Roux Pawtucket, RI
Although my work often employs landscape as its subject, I’m primarily interested in the dynamic of space and how we experience it- through distance, depth, edge, etc. I’m fascinated by the process of creating spaces to use as jumping points for personal reflection and consideration. Spatial experience connects us personally to sensory response, history and memory. Space is fluid and temporal… never static. Our perceptions of stillness are dishonest…nature moves, marches. Movement is an integral aspect of experience. In this sense, space and time are linked, if not ghosts of one another. Our experience of space is always an experience of time. In my work, subject plays an important role, but I search for content in the space between subject and viewer…the dense space. A single graphic tree, layered over so to take second stage to what exists forward of it...for me, this area is where the space/time blend is visually loudest, where the story is.
Peter Roux, The Mysteries no.26, Oil on canvas, 30” x 30”, $4500
Peter Roux, The Mysteries no.27, Oil on canvas, 30” x 30”, $4500
Peter Roux, An Audible Passing no.1, Charcoal on paper, 42” x 42”, $3700
Christie Scheele Chichester, NY
The single most distinctive aspect to what I do as a landscape painter lies in my ability to reduce a scene to its essentials. This gives the viewer what is important, without the distraction, or visual clutter, of too much detail. Both by providing this overview and by using soft, scumbled edges, these paintings can quiet a viewer’s mind and evoke a more direct response. My version of minimalism is about shape and atmospherics. I paint not just the light, but the air itself, and how these affect the edges and colors of the scenes depicted. As a non-regional landscape painter, I use images from all over the world, the many places I have been. Nearly everything I paint could exist in nature, yet most often it does not. Some of my pieces are very much about a sense of place and weather, while others speak more to formal or conceptual art making issues. There is also a process of continually evaluating and editing the image—what is essential? What is superfluous? The painting as a whole is what this is all about, rather than precisely and exactly capturing a given landscape. My recent bodies of work deal with not only my different perspectives on what defines beauty and power in the landscape, but also with alternative viewpoints on process and presentation. My most recent exploration, the Affinity series, with the frayed edges of the linen and graphite gridding, bring the viewer deeper into the inventions of art-making by the creation of a support that has surface interest that is not a literal part of the scene depicted. Elements, chosen by a logic intrinsic to the piece as it progresses, are emphasized by greater or lesser blurring, by heightening contrast, and by selective replacement of the gridding that I began with and painted over. All of my work has a sense of being suspended between two breaths. Often, that feeling is palpable during the process of creation. Time is slowed, perhaps even halts for a moment, allowing us to see the world in all of its fullness.
Christie Scheele, Changed Integrity, Oil on linen, 40” x 20”, $3800
Christie Scheele, Affinity/Seagleams, Oil on linen on board with graphite overlay, 12” x 48”, $3800
Christie Scheele, Light to Dark, Oil on linen, 12” x 24”, $2000
Sean Thomas Pawtucket, RI
Elements of the modern landscape have evolved into a sort of paradox. Industry has developed to sustain our lifestyles of necessity, comfort and convenience yet the actual means by which our goods and services are provided often become a sort of background noise or even an intrusive nuisance/ eyesore. I revel in such feats of engineering- looking at architecture and the modern industrialized landscape with interest and wonder. My work represents those objects as man-made “fingerprints� integrated into the natural environment with varying degrees of harmony, tension and abstraction. Working with traditional materials and techniques (oil, watercolor, drawing) layers are created to evoke emotion, atmosphere, decay, etc. Careful consideration to find the cast of characters for each piece is usually the first step as the places I choose to paint can be quite busy and cluttered. The placement of objects in the space is a priority and I will often treat a source photo or sketch as a still-life. The design is realized through reorganization and simplification of subject matter while I incorporate deliberate mark-making and editing to suit a desired aesthetic. My goal is to make images that trigger something within the viewer- perhaps a memory of a time or place which may or may not have anything to do with the subject they are looking at. The work must speak to the viewer and it will communicate with each in a different voice, maybe it whispers, maybe it shouts.
Sean Thomas, Ocean State IV, Oil on canvas, 20” x 24”, $1600