REVEL IN THE DETAILS

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SWEET DREAMSCAPES ARE MADE OF THESE

BY REBECCA RAFFERTY @RSRAFFERTY BECCA@ROCHESTER-CITYNEWS.COM

While taking in one of Andrea Durfee’s vibrant watercolor or acrylic paintings that seamlessly, almost imperceptibly, blend human forms with landscapes, it’s hard to believe she just wings it. No preliminary sketches. No color studies.

“If I have the impulse, then I’ll sit down and just sketch on the actual canvas or the paper and go from there,” Durfee says. “The first thing that’s laid out is the figure, and then I build the landscape around it. So it’s very much paying attention to the body positioning, and what emotion that is communicating.”

The human figures are subtly embedded into sweeping backdrops of nature. A reclining woman becomes a mountain range. A woman curled up resembles a boulder. A woman lounging dissolves into the dunes around her. They are sleeping giants, at one with the natural world. She has so skillfully placed the figures that, at a glance, it’s easy to miss them.

In some works, the figure is purposely prominent. She may be

a silhouette in the foreground, her frame functioning as a portal to another world filled with lush flora under a starry night sky. One woman stares into a cup she holds, as though reading tea leaves. Waterfalls cascade from the outstretched hands of a woman into a lake reflecting the moon. There’s something sacred and mystical about them.

“I create dreamscapes meshing figures with landscapes as expressions of the journey to wellness,” Durfee says in her artist statement. “My work focuses on themes of personal mythology, power, and dichotomous balance. Figures embody both strength and fragility, and geological processes often serve as metaphor for human experience.”

In March, she is planning to release a new series of paintings titled “Seers,” which she says explore connecting with unperceived energy and strength.

Durfee, 36, studied studio art and creative arts therapy at Nazareth College and works out of a home studio in the South Wedge. But her work has found an audience beyond Rochester.

Paige Stanley, of Washington, D.C., is a collector of Durfee’s art. She bought her first piece a year ago for a friend who was having a baby and says she was drawn to Durfee’s work because it conveyed beauty and strength. Since then, she has amassed originals and prints for herself, commissioned a lake scene, and gave works to friends as a gesture of solace during the pandemic.

One of her favorites is a painting called “Aries” that depicts a woman reclining over a mesa, a pastel sky reflected in a river that snakes toward giant crimson blooms in the foreground.

“It’s just a peaceful, very calming sort of focal point with some really beautiful colors, but also has a very interesting perspective,” Stanley says. “It’s kind of an escape, the depth lets you get lost in it.”

Often Durfee’s paintings are accompanied by little poems created “in conversation” with the finished piece, a practice that she credits, along with her intuitive process, to her training at Nazareth.

“I find that it’s a really therapeutic process pulling together your thoughts and paying attention to your own emotional experience, what’s going on internally, instead of trying to put your will out onto the paper,” she says.

Her intuitive approach shouldn’t suggest she isn’t drawing from a wellspring of developed skills. During her undergraduate years, Durfee focused mainly on printmaking, specifically reduction block prints — a technique of alternating carving layers of shapes from a single block of linoleum and printing a color for each layer, until the block is depleted and the print has layers of colors that form a picture.

“I loved seeing this piece of linoleum go from a full sheet to nothing,” Durfee says. “And the physical labor of working that out was really gratifying.”

Durfee only took one painting course, but says she rediscovered painting later on when she no longer had access to a printing press. Recently, she started experimenting with digital art. She uses Procreate to create digital paintings; some animated and bringing her beings to life. “I think that I needed to kind of unearth some different emotions while I was creating, and a medium switchup is sometimes a really great way to do that,” she says.

Her subject matter stems from mixed influences. Durfee says her mother was a ballet teacher, and that she was a dancer herself in her youth, practicing ballet, tap, and modern dance. She says dance has informed her body awareness and interest in figures. But the hints of the fantastical in her paintings come from growing up obsessed with fairies and mythology.

“I really gravitated towards that kind of internal fantasy or the potential for connecting with something that was not available to our eyes,” she says. “And that’s never really gone away.”

Durfee’s landscapes are dreamed up — except in the cases of commissioned paintings of specific places. But some of the blooms in her recent works are referenced from images posted by local flower company Pistil & Pollen. Durfee references her own form for most of the figures, but says she’s starting to ask friends to model for her.

“I think that my depictions of landscapes are really purely internal mode,” Durfee says. “Living in Rochester, we obviously don’t have access to a lot of these desertscapes or coastal imagery that I come up with.

“I think it’s probably a bit of escapism that allows me to work through real-life problems,” she goes on. “It’s almost like creating just a little manifestation piece that captures that power that I’m trying to tap into.”

Andrea Durfee. PHOTO BY RACHEL LIZ PHOTOGRAPHY

"Self-portrait 2020" by Avi Prynts-Nadworny who says the work was made during the hand sanitizer shortage and reflects what it felt like to be immunocompromised in 2020.

ROCO’S LATEST EXHIBIT IS A REAL ARTPOCALYPSE

BY REBECCA RAFFERTY @RSRAFFERTY BECCA@ROCHESTER-CITYNEWS.COM

This month, Rochester Contemporary Art Center launches a group exhibition ominously but aptly titled “Last Year on Earth.”

The title might conjure images of the End Times, but the name actually refers to our collective experience over the past life-altering year, which for many people felt like the march to Judgement Day.

Rochester Contemporary invited artists in the region to submit work made after February 2020 that reflected on the bad and the good: traumas of the pandemic, political strife, racial injustice, as well as the human capacity for empathy, innovation, and hopefulness.

Call it an artpocalypse.

People had things to say. The gallery received so many submissions — around 475 — that it delayed the opening of the show by a month. Of those entries, more than 90 works by 60 artists were accepted. “Last Year on Earth” opens March 5, and viewing times can be reserved at rochestercontemporary.org.

Rochester Contemporary’s Executive Director Bleu Cease says the show was inspired by creative projects he saw emerging as the health crisis took hold locally around March and April of last year, such as the multitudes of people who crafted face masks and began documenting their home life in new and interesting ways.

“The central idea for the show was to try to be as representative as we could, including established and unknown artists,” Cease says.

Three jurors selected the artwork — Kelly Cheatle, Alexa Guzmán, and Tanvi Asher — each with reach beyond the fine arts realm, Cease says, and who have themselves in the past year responded to the needs of the community with creative, grassroots solutions.

Cheatle designed a version of face masks with see-through panels for reading lips. Guzmán founded Project AIR, an arts initiative that invited anyone and everyone to make protest posters and art in response to racial injustice at the

"By a Lot," part of a triptych by Lisa Nudo.

hands of police. Asher used her Market at the Armory Instagram account to promote the creations of local makers during the pandemic.

“It’s kind of strange in life, when you get a hard stop,” Cheatle says of the pandemic-induced freeze on life as we knew it. “It forces you to reevaluate. So often we’re on autopilot, and being shaken from that habit leads to opportunities for growth. This show was an opportunity to see how our artists and creators used this time, and how they responded to this time in their artwork.”

Carmen Cibella, an artist from Hamburg in Erie County, responded with a series of black-and-white photographs that documented the protests to Daniel Prude’s death that evoke sympathy for the demonstrators.

A sculpture titled “Life Net” by Cynthia Cratsley, of the Southern Tier village of Odessa, depicts the United States as a burning building. The people trapped within can save themselves and each other, if they’ll only leap into the face mask “net” below.

As a juror, Cheatle says she detected some common themes among the submissions. For one, many of the portraits had a similar look to them, an expression that she says is hard to put into words but completely relatable.

“Once you see it, you’re like, ‘Oh, I’ve seen that face in the mirror,’” she says. “I recognize that look, even though these are all individual portraits of completely different people. It’s just this sort of longing and sadness and ennui and you know, acceptance all at the same time, with a tiny sprinkle of hope in there. Very evocative of this time period.”

Cheatle says she also noted the impact our physical distancing had on photography. In many works there’s an evident space between the photographer and subject, simultaneously capturing our desire to connect and our collective isolation.

Ditto for Rochester artist Steven Piotrowski’s painting, “COVID Window Visit with Mom.” The piece shows an elderly woman behind a window lowering her mask to reveal an elated smile and the reflection in the window of the masked artist taking her photograph.

One piece that struck Guzmán is “Constant Disappointment,” a painting by another Rochester artist, Steven Peet. The image is a heap of beer cans in a trash can, paired with his bleak, brief artist statement: “For many the year has been one gut punch after another. How do you cope?”

Guzman says she related to the sentiment because the pandemic “presented a lot of obstacles and trials and tribulations in people’s lives that we were just expected to deal with, without much assistance from the government.”

But Guzmán, Cheatle, and Asher also selected several works that speak of, as Guzmán put it, the “hope that comes from being in a low point.”

For example, Rochester artist Roxanna Mendoza created “The World,” a sculpture of rings of paper cranes that reflected a vision of the world reconnected. Another instance was an abstract painting of shifting colors called “A New Day” by Barbara Mink, of Ithaca. She painted the piece a week after the November presidential election.

“Last Year on Earth” has three companion exhibitions: RCTV is curating “Through the Cracks,” the video art “Unjustness,” and “The Warp & Weft,” a multilingual archive of stories organized by Mara Ahmed. A set of three new stories and audio recordings will be released each week via RoCo and Mara Ahmed’s social media.

Carmen Cibella's photograph, "Militarized Police Oppression in War Memorial Square."

"Dueling Identity" by Kelly Hanning.