July 10 - July 29, 2020
DIANE AYOTT | MIDGE BATTELLE | BARBARA E. COHEN | ANNE CORRSIN | PHYLLIS EWEN | KATHI ROBINSON FRANK | NANCY RUBENS | JUDITH TREPP
Opening Reception: Friday, July 10, 6-8 pm (only 4 to 6 masked people at a time)
Diane Ayott
New Paintings
"Engaged in the complexity of art and life, I make paintings and works on paper. They are composed and informed by the influence of the contemporary language of abstraction as well as in a lived life. Layered combinations of markings - dots, dashes, lines, slashes, circles, ovals and loops – contribute to the overall spatial patterns and color shifts. I tune into them as I work in my studio. Sometimes, and in different ways, I include bits and pieces of collage materials.
A dedicated and on-going studio practice is what fuels my desire to make what many of us call art. When I enter my studio, I say hello and when I turn off the lights, and just before I shut the door, I say good-bye.
The paintings, Liebe Gunilla and May, December have been completed only recently. I began them quite a while ago, but it was not until this year of 2020, that they arrived in a finished state. Each one of these paintings expresses feelings of desire and love, and more specifically, my love for individual women. These powerful feelings honor love, a queer love, a cherished love. Both, And, And…"
Diane Ayott received her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and is currently a professor of art at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, MA. She lives and maintains a studio practice in Salem, MA.
Ayott’s work has been shown at many venues over her career to date. Among those are: Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, NYC and Bridgehampton, NY, Art Market Provincetown, Provincetown, MA, Bernay Fine Art, Great Barrington, MA, Matthew Swift Gallery, Gloucester, MA, OK Harris, NYC, Washington Square East Galleries, NYC, Woman Made, Chicago, IL, Danforth Museum, Framingham, MA, Fitchburg Art Museum, Fitchburg, MA, Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, MA, Clark Gallery, Lincoln, MA, HallSpace, Boston, MA, Merrimack College, North Andover, MA, Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA, Art Museum, University of Durham, NH, McIninch Gallery, Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH, Warm Springs Gallery, Charlottesville, VA, and the US Department of State Art Bank Program, Art Bank Gallery, Harry S Truman Building, Washington, DC.
Midge Battelle
New Paintings
Midge Battelle is a photographer, painter , curator, and teacher living and working year round in Provincetown,Ma.
In 2019, Battelle is dividing her focus between painting, mainly during the winter months, as well as working this summer on a body of Cyanotype photographic work to be exhibited at The Provincetown Art Association and Museum(PAAM) in 2020. Her work in both painting, photography, and Cyanotypes is connected by a similar visual aesthetic and poetic subtext. Expressing beauty and emotion through the simplicity of form and the subtle play of light and color , Battelle is possessed of a uniquely romantic minimalist vision.
Battelle is a graduate of Greenfield Community College with a concentration on photography with directed studies under the mentorship of photographer Tom Young, and strong focus on graphic arts, studying color theory, design, and printmaking with Margaret Stein. Midge is also a graduate of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, Ma. continuing in photography with Laura McPhee and Abelardo Morrell, while also working in mixed media and maintaining critical studies in art history.
Battelle’s paintings and photographs are in both private and museum collections. Her work is currently exhibited at The AMP Gallery, and has been in various gallery exhibits over the past 30 plus years, as well as in many group exhibits at PAAM, where she also served on the Exhibition Committee.
Barbara E. Cohen
Farm Stand and New Paintings
"It is always about the paint and the strokes: Thick muted colors of oil on pure linen, fast florescent gouache washes on Fabriano paper, quick small detailed oil strokes on instant Polaroid film. The touch and sensation of the stroke and paint come together with the emotionally-based content which takes me inside the edges of my work.
I once painted portraits of the elderly women chatting away in Yiddish, relics of a dying culture, who sat on the beaches of Venice, California. Seeing and hearing them there every day evoked the tortured figures of people, my people, minutes before their extermination in the Nazi camps. My work continued with the imaged memories of the row after row of boxes rising up to the ceiling in my grandfather’s century-old wholesale dry goods store. Many years later, in a new period of my work, those tall boxy images returned in paintings which focused on dwellings, dumpsters and displacements camps.
The repetitive use of circles and squares dominates much of my painting and sculpture in, what may be, an unconscious effort to create a calming balance. For several years, white, soft cork imported from Asian wetlands provided me with the material for a relentless drive to cut and build sculptures. Then, it was ping pong balls which I covered with graphite drawings and assembled on a moveable conveyor belt which helped buffer my grief after a death and to move forward. While I was at a residency in Venice, Italy, a boat sling hanging gracefully above the waters of the Grand Canal became the inspiration for a series of flow images devoted to examining continuous, elegant motion.
It is now 2020 and the world is in the grips of a brutal pandemic. Living in New York City and homebound, I began exploring the painting of still lifes. This has evolved into my “farmer’s market” series featuring fruits and vegetables, painted in gouache on recycled brown paper bags."
Barbara E. Cohen received her B.F.A. from Tufts University and the School of Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with earlier studies in art history at Oxford University. She has received numerous grants including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Artists Foundation Mass Fellowship Program, Polaroid Artist Support Program, Blanche E. Colman Award and grants from the Cambridge and Massachusetts Arts Councils. She received an artist’s residency from the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Barbara has exhibited her paintings and sculptures in numerous galleries and museums across the country.
Anne Corrsin
New Work
“I work in a variety of materials, and currently I am constructing sculptures of wood (with color). It’s a return of sorts, having made some of my earliest pieces in this material. As I build these objects I use the addition of color as a layer and a dimensional marker. Architecture is a reference in my work: dwellings with their roofs, doorways and windows are an inspiration. The foremost idea is that a structure must be viewed from different vantage points to see its angles and details.”
Anne Corrsin is a visual artist based in Boston, Ma. She received a BFA in Sculpture from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts (Boston). Grants and Fellowships include an Artist Grant (Individual) from the Mass Cultural Council (Somerville Arts Council), and a Travel Grant (study of glassmaking/design in Copenhagen and Ebeltoft, Denmark) from the Boston Athenaeum. She was also awarded a Fellowship for a residency at the Vermont Studio Center.
Anne’s work is held in a number of private collections. She has exhibited at the Krakow/Witkin Gallery (Boston), BF Annex (Boston), Real Art Ways (Hartford, Ct.), Chandler Gallery (Cambridge, Ma.), Luhring/Augustine Gallery (NYC) and AMP Gallery.
Phyllis Ewen
Above and Below the Sea
"The movement of the earth’s surface has been a source of inspiration and imagery for more than a decade.
With Turbulent (e)motion I explore the effect of anthropogenic climate change on rising seas & melting glaciers. These pieces, with a palette of blues, greys white and black, show fragments of volatile oceans. I create 3-dimensional reliefs to invite us to imagine ourselves within the seascape above and below the surface of the water.
In the Deep, I find myself under the surface of the sea, where I wander among the mountains, valleys, and canyons of the ocean floor. Here, my palette has darkened, as has the mood reflecting the ecological dangers we face. Melting glaciers and warming seas have affected the sea floor itself. My imagery is drawn from maps of the ocean floor plotted in the 1950s and 1960s by geologist Marie Tharp. I scan sections, alter them in Photoshop, print them digitally, then cut and reassemble the fragments with added paint, to form an imagined dimensional underwater topography Layers are attached with magnets, reflecting the magnetic energy of the earth’s tectonic plates. The depth and texture in these works are both illusion and actual."
Phyllis Ewen lives in Massachusetts, with studios in Wellfleet and Somerville. Her art is in public collections, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, the Boston Public Library, Harvard University, MIT Sloan School of Business, the Reykjanes Museum of Art, and numerous corporate and private collections. Ewen’s work has been shown widely. In 2017, Ewen’s work was in a well-received 3-artist exhibit at the Reykjanes Museum of Art in Iceland, Við Sjónarrönd/Above And Below The Horizon, a two-person show, Imprint, in York Maine, and a solo, Land and Water, at the Lesley University Spotlight Gallery. In 2019, she had a solo show, Intertidal at Off Main Gallery, Wellfleet, and in 2018, Deep Time, at the Kingston Gallery in Boston. Her work was included in
Kathi Robinson Frank
New Paintings
"I am making paintings which are abstract images that overlap one another so that the layers of previous marks are present along with the later marks. I refer to this body of work as Pentimento. The meaning of which "is an alteration in a painting evidenced by traces of previous work, showing that the artist has changed her mind as to the composition during the process of painting."
I use spackling tools to lay the first surface, with the unstretched raw canvas laid out on the studio floor. I gesso the canvas adding glazes while still wet. When this dries I stretch the canvas and continue to work on it upright against the wall. I draw and paint using brushes, charcoal, pastels, rubbing, scraping, repainting, redrawing until I begin to find my voice. There is a lot of looking also.
I am exploring the relationship between connection and separation. My layering unblocks thoughts and opens up questions. The subject matter is expressionistic, the juxtaposition of light and dark, form and feeling."
Kathi Robinson Frank: Born in New York City, Kathi Robinson Frank studied at The Art Students League with Will Barnet while in high school and majored in art at Bard College. Her early influences were Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Rauchenberg, and Larry Rivers.
In the 1990s she began working in natural fiber and adobe weaving large hanging nest-like structures, which she referred to as habitats. Then after seeing an Anselm Keifer show she began her three-dimensional paintings using adobe, paint, and natural found vegetation from her property in the Hudson Valley. These paintings formed a body of work called The Yeats Series (2009-2011).
Her latest paintings on large canvases (72”x56”) incorporate oil, acrylic, charcoal, pastel, ink, fabric, and feathers. Graphic interconnecting lines suggest wires or strands symbolizing communication and the human struggle to stay connected.
She has shown at the Provincetown Art Association, Berta Walker Gallery, and AMP Gallery in Provincetown; Byrdcliffe Kleinert/James Center in Woodstock, New York; Summergroup Gallery and Barrett House in Poughkeepsie, New York; Tivoli Artists' Gallery in Tivoli, New York; The Bell Gallery in Rhinebeck and Woodstock. New York. She has also shown in two Invitationals at the Pocketbook Factory in Hudson, New York; The Firlefanz Gallery in Albany, New York; The Wired Gallery in High Falls, New York; Core Gallery in New Paltz, New York, and Casa Morada Galley in Bucerias Mexico. She had a solo show at P.S. 209 Gallery in Stone Ridge, New York; and The Wired Gallery in High Falls, New York. She is currently with Amy Zook at 1st Dibs in New York City.
She lives and works in Stone Ridge, New York and Bucerias Mexico.
Nancy Rubens
New Works
“Gathering lots of new materials a few years ago—all sorts of papers, wallpaper, old, new, patterned, textured—I set out to find a way to combine and pull together disparate and at times clashing elements into harmonious resolution. I sought out affinities, reverberations and resonance between seemingly incompatible elements and brought more life and nature into my work. Slowly, the pencil drawing I'd taken up again in 2010 after a long hiatus became incorporated into the work along with the glued paper and paint on canvas or old book covers.
Looking back, I believe the inspiration for this series came to me in India in 2012. The freshness and visual richness, complexity, patterns, and contradictions I encountered in Delhi in particular all had a powerful effect on me, and I was transfixed by the kaleidoscopic colors, rhythms, trees, birds and beauty moving around me every day. It was like walking into a living poem, and this striking experience became the catalyst for me to allow another layer to be folded into my thoughts about memory and the passage of time, renewal, and looking ahead to forming new experience.”
Nancy Rubens has lived and worked in New York City and Wellfleet for decades, focusing on abstract collages on panels and on the insides of vintage book covers, and multimedia works on canvas.
Rubens received a BA at Connecticut College and went on to study at the Art Students League of New York, where she began to focus on collage while studying with Leo Manso. Bruce Dorfman was an important mentor after she left the ASL, and years later, she was inspired by Mike Mazur while studying monotype with him at the Fine Arts Work Center and made a radical shift in her work. More recent exhibitions have been at The Painting Center, Kathryn Markel Fine Art, Lori Bookstein Fine Art, Susan Eley Fine Art, and Cheryl Pelavin Fine Art in NY, at Yale University, AMP Gallery, Cherry Stone Gallery, Schoolhouse Gallery, and the Cahoon Museum of American Art in Provincetown and Wellfleet, MA.
Judith Trepp
Engagement
“An artwork is undeniably the product of the creator and, at the same time, is most definitely an entity in its own right. The drawings that I make in ink, acrylic or egg tempera are the result of inner focusing – concentration and crystallization of thought, feeling, and idea that has been coursing, growing, and developing within me – and, in the motion of my hand come to fruition. This new entity is the finished work. It stands on its own, independent. The work which faces the viewer asks, suggests, or demands contact; which may occur or not. This drawing is now a separate and complete being: separate from its creator, separate from its viewers—and ready to engage.”
Judith Trepp a native New Yorker, has lived in Zurich, Switzerland, the major part of each year since 1970. From 1974-85 she also lived in Tuscany, Italy, and since 1990 has maintained an atelier in Provincetown, Massachusetts, USA, where she had a one-person show at the Provincetown Art Museum (PAAM) in 2011. In addition, Trepp has traveled extensively in various regions of India and Japan as well as in Europe. These diverse enlargements of vision — intellectually and culturally — resonate in her work. For further information regarding Trepp’s background, publications, and exhibitions please go to the website judithtrepp.net.
