DRIVEN TO ABSTRACTION
MARCH 4 TH – MARCH 26TH
ARTISTS RECEPTION / OPENING RECEPTION
SATURDAY, Mar 4th 4–7PM
GALLERY DAYS & HOURS:
SATURDAYS & SUNDAYS 11AM - 6PM
THURSDAYS & FRIDAYS BY APPOINTMENT
TEL: 845-663-2138
747 ROUTE 28
KINGSTON, NY 12401
Carol Diamond
ARTIST STATEMENT
Carol Diamond's newest work is predominately multimedia, encompassing found materials assemblage sculpture, abstract painting and Plein Air drawing of architectural sites in New York City. Often executed concurrently, her artworks in various media are driven by the tension and tumult of urban life.
Diamond's engagement, and entanglement - with the urban landscape has traveled with her through the various neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Manhattan, developing a lifelong passion for urban forms, spaces, and architecture. Mining of the metaphoric potential of materials, whether brick, stone, or detritus found on the streets and sidewalks where she walks, has continued ever since. The new assemblage sculptures reconfigure and transform repurposed, upcycled materials: flattened cans, broken glass, concrete chunks, wire mesh, twisted fabric scraps, cables and wires, and are both playful and dark.
Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio Diamond received a B.F.A. in Painting from Cornell University and studied at the New York Studio School. She is a tenured adjunct professor at Pratt Institute and teaches Graphic Design at CUNY’s City College of Technology. In 2022, her was included in New York City exhibitions at Equity Gallery, Zurcher Salon, and Incubator Studio Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn. In March of 2023 Diamond’s work will be included in Driven to Abstraction, at Lockwood Gallery in Kingston, NY.
Diamond was awarded a Purchase Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Invitational Exhibition, a Pratt Institute Professional Development Grant, and the National Academy Museum’s Edwin Palmer Prize. Her work has been featured in Hyperallergic, Too Much Art, the Manhattan Times, Painting Perceptions, and the Pelham Art Center. Her art writing and reviews are published in Art Critical, Painters on Painting, Two Coats of Paint, and Delicious Line. Her artwork is included in public and private collections, including the Portland, Oregon Museum of Art.
Heid Lanino
ARTIST STATEMENT
Bio
Heidi Lanino is a figurative abstract painter with a strong base in gestural drawing influenced by the transformative nature of movement. Lanino was born in New York and raised on the south shore of Long Island. As one of four recipients of a full-tuition merit scholarship, Lanino studied drawing and painting at Pratt Institute. For several years she worked as an art director for L’Oréal. She is also a passionate educator of the arts, who understands the importance of bringing art and the creative process to young people and the community at large.
Statement
Movement is both part of my process and my product, composing compositions from figurative abstract forms. Improvisation, intuition, and impulse are essential. My work invokes emotion, thought, and memory of looking within to project out.
Recurring themes include beauty, movement, environment, and purpose. Rhythm is my visual language. My movements are mirrored in the work’s gestural qualities traveling beyond the canvas borders. I create figural abstraction and visual sensory experiences to reveal space between the viewer and the work. Gestures express time, always in flux - never static.
I fold numerous materials, giving a voice to the intimate nature of the subject’s narrative as she reconciles the external world. Folded, the materials are stronger with new presence, portraying emotional stories at different angles, offering a 3-dimensional perspective of negative space. The process entails excavation, both literally and figuratively.
Marieken Cochius
ARTIST STATEMENT
Bio
Marieken Cochius is a Dutch-born artist who is drawn to remote places where she studies nature and makes art inspired by it. Her work encompasses drawing, painting and sculpture.
In 2021 Cochius received an NYSCA Decentralization Grant for an Individual Artist Commission. She is a 2020 recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA), Emergency Grants COVID-19 Fund grant.
In 2017 Cochius completed a public sculpture commission for the Village of Wappingers Falls, NY made possible by a grant from the Hudson River Foundation.
Recent Solo shows were at Vassar College,NY and SUNY Ulster, NY. She has participated in residencies including the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT.
Cochius' work has been shown in group exhibitions at the Lockwood Gallery, Kingston, NY, 6th International Drawing Triennial in Tallinn, Estonia; Ely Center, New Haven, CT; Holland Tunnel Gallery, Newburgh, NY and many more. Her work has been featured in Elle Decor, Columbia Journal, the New York Times, and in over 40 art, literary, poetry and university publications in the USA and abroad. Cochius studied photography at the Art Academy St Joost in Breda, the Netherlands and is self taught in drawing, sculpture and painting. She currently lives in the Hudson Valley, New York.
Statement
I am fascinated by growth-forms, root systems of plants, movements of microscopic organisms, seedpods, and animal architecture. In these I see a sensitive unpredictability that both contains and propels the origins and energies of life.
My sculpture, drawings, and paintings capture such fleeting moments in an organic world dominated by chaos and change. The energy that natural forms temporarily contain yet inevitably transform particularly inspires me. Evoking the mystery and power of nature through intensely materialist and tactile forms and imagery, my work explores the porous boundary between what is seen and felt, where perception and experience merge.
I aim to create a mesmerizing effect of movement; something that looks familiar, but that you cannot exactly define. Every inch of my work is as important as the whole, like fractal dimensions, seen through a microscope or a telescope.
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Fred Duignan
ARTIST STATEMENT
After many years of harnessing technique, pursuing picturing, following trends and restating history, I now acquiesce in a collaborative role in order to allow the painting to become what it wishes to be in cooperation with my conscious intent. The resulting image is unleashed by the painting itself in alignment with my life’s deep psychological underpinnings. The uniqueness of the resulting object as itself fully revealed presents the viewer with a complex visual experience resulting in direct personal recognition. Not wishing to break paint’s spirit or subjugate it to my will, I collaborate with the nature of the materials in an automatic approach (real, not surreal) to find our voice. I avoid making art that is burdened by technique, overwhelmed by thought, or crushed by style.
Fred Duignan graduated from the University of California Santa Cruz and is a past Curator of Contemporary Art at the Paterson Museum in New Jersey as well a former art critic for COVER, a downtown NYC Arts & Entertainment Magazine.
Charles Purvis
ARTIST STATEMENT
From 1985 through 2006, Charles was one the top commercial still life photographers in New York City creating groundbreaking imagery for a wide variety of internationally known clients. In addition to commercial assignments, Charles has created a large body of innovative art inspired by a relentless curiosity and desire to uncover the creative potential of camera, light, and film to challenge our experience of visual perception. Although considered still life, Charles’ images are not primarily concerned with a literal or symbolic reading of the object. Paradoxically, meaning is enhanced by the ways the object is defamiliarized through formal means. Much of the work references the materiality of the traditional medium and the plasticity of the digital as performative objects integrated into the structure and meaning of the image. The intent is to evolve the image away from literal representation and evolve the viewers’ relationship with the image beyond one of accepting what is offered as a representation of reality.
Douglas Sheer
ARTIST STATEMENT
Doug Sheer is the child of two painters who were WPA artists, Artist Union Members and Hans Hofmann students in NYC and Provincetown and grew up in Greenwich Village. He was educated in NYC including Rhodes School where Pop artist Jim Dine was his art teacher and at Rhode Island School of Design. A painter, he was a pioneering video artist who ran the Egg Store video facility in Tribeca in the 1970s and served fellow artists Nam-June Paik, Bill Viola, Twyla Tharp, Merce Cunningham and Yoko Ono. Some of his recent art can be seen at www.douglasisheer.com and a background on his art life and the history of Artists Talk on Art can be viewed on the Woodstock Library YouTube channel from a talk delivered on October 29th, 2022.
In 1974 he was a co-founder of Artists Talk on Art, the art world's preeminent forum which has featured 8,500 artists in over 1,000 recorded panels and dialogues ... see www.atoanyc.org ... and he currently serves as its president. The ATOA archive resides at Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian.
He has shown his abstract paintings widely and maintains a website at www.douglasisheer.com to look at samples of his work. He has also served as a board member of the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild and serves on its exhibition committee. He is also a member of the education committee of the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz
Kathy Goodell
ARTIST STATEMENT
Kathy Goodell was born in San Francisco and attended the San Francisco Art Institute, where she received both her BFA and MFA in sculpture. Her professors included Jay Defeo, and Jim Nutt. Goodell has been the recipient of grants and awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, (2021 emergency grant for Infra-loop), a retrospective exhibition at the Samuel Dorsky Museum, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 2013, the BAU Institute, the Camargo Foundation (2014), The David and Julia White Artist’s Colony, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, as well as receiving a Fulbright Fellowship to Romania.
She has exhibited extensively, both nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New York Public Library, The Queens Arts Center, the Berkeley Museum, the Paul Anglim Gallery and has been included in major group exhibitions at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, the Boise Art Museum, the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Mendel Art Museum, and the Drawing Center, NY. She exhibited with Willoughby Sharp Gallery, a gallery located at 8 Spring Street in The Bowery, that ran from 1988-1991, and was part of a scene of artists that included the likes of Hannah Wilke, Judith Linhares, Elizabeth King, and Robert Crumb.
Goodell’s work has been reviewed in the Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, White Hot Magazine, Juxtapoz Magazine, the New York Times, Arts Magazine, artforum.com, Kathy Goodell: Infra-Loop and Avalanche Magazine, an epochal artist journal published from 1970-1976 that included the work of Joseph Beuys, Vito Acconci, and many of the artists we now consider to be historical figures. Her work is represented in several books, including International Glass Art (Schiffer Press), Art in the San Francisco Bay Area (University of California Press), and Bay Area Painting and Sculpture (Squeezer Press). She was also included in the award-winning documentary film “Crumb” directed by Terry Zwigoff, 1995.
Goodell is also an educator, having taught at the University of California, Davis; San Francisco State University; the San Francisco Art Institute; Moore College of Art; and the School of Visual Arts. She is presently a Professor at the State University of New York, in New Paltz, where she lives and works.
Jim Napierala
ARTIST STATEMENT
I was born in Buffalo, NY where I studied Art History and sculpture at SUNY Buffalo. Moving to New York, I began painting. I maintained a studio in East Harlem for 30 years during which time, I showed in numerous galleries and institutions in New York and throughout the country. I currently work out of my studio I the Western Catskills.
