"Given To Abstraction"
at
The Mill Art Center
61 North Main Street, Honeoye Falls, NY 14472
If you have not gone over to The Mill Art Center in Honeoye Falls, the building has a smart new outdoor patio and upstairs a new show has opened including fourteen artists whose work is anchored in abstraction. Among the artists at the opening, I had a chance to talk with Paul Garland ( see image above ), who has had many shows and taught art - and we exchanged views about the use of digital tools in the creation of abstract art. Abstract art has been with us way before the digital age, but the computer has opened up new avenues for the generation of all forms of abstraction.
Zerbe Sodervick
at the Mill Art Center
Abstraction can be a gesture or mood as expressed very engagingly by Zerbe Sodervick, and she will have a chance to dig deeply into this vein of art now that she has decided to retire from teaching at R.I.T. Her work has landscape color and atmosphere but there are other traits that link her work to colorfield abstraction ( I think of a dark mood in Morris Louis ). Hard to define, but abstraction can be more formal and hard edged. We can see that in the paintings by Bill Keyser at the Mill Art Center - and here another factor in abstraction can be seen and felt - and that is reduction. Pare down painting to its common denominator of color and form, then simplify it further to one or two colors and one or two shapes and then see what happens when they interact.
Karen Sardisco
"Given To Abstraction"
When you come up the stairs at The Mill Art Center, you are taken right away by the big examples from Paula Crawford and Karen Sardisco. Karen and Paula have been working with a large format from time to time and they provide a real challenge to hang big works on the stone walls at The Mill.
Karen's work plumbs the depths of a molecular jungle - full of primeval stuff in a mix that reminds me of early paintings by Terry Winters. The whole area of biomorphic abstraction is present in this show in the paintings of Paula Crawford, Belinda Bryce, and James Thomas - whose shapes look like fields of boulders.
Alan Singer and Bill Keyser
"Given To Abstraction"
In my works in this show I strike out into new territory by creating the basis of my recent art on the use of mathematical visualization tools. My prints in this show are a hybrid, part watercolor and part pigment based ink layered on films and transferred onto paper under the pressure of my etching press.
My imagery is achieved through the use of computer programs designed to teach students geometry. Had I only known about this in my high school classes I might have done better in math. I am making up for that now.
St. Monci at Axom Gallery
"Universal Magnetic"
In Rochester, at the Axom Gallery, Margot Muto has welcomed the artwork of St. Monci for a stay.
Here, they have mounted a show of layered geometrical compositions along with vectors on the walls that extend the energy of the painted images.
When you look at some of the smaller paintings you see a love of design and a respect for the forms of letters. St. Monci has studied graphic design and employs this sensibility in his compositions which can also look like architectural plans seen from a bird's-eye view. He was recently interviewed on TV and St. Monci explained that you don't need to know what these works are supposed to mean, you can just be engaged by the colors and the implied movement. St. Monci is a brand new dad, and he had his baby boy with him at the opening. A charming youngster, and what a nice way to spend some time at the opening of a show, relaxed, and family friendly.
St. Monci at Axom Gallery, Rochester, New York
