John Davis Gallery: Saturday, August 22nd the gallery will have five solo shows (sculpture, installation and paintings).

John Davis Gallery

On Saturday, August 22nd the gallery will have five solo shows (sculpture, installation and paintings). The work will be on display through September 13th with a reception for the artists on Saturday, August 22nd from6:00 until 8:00 p.m.

Main Galleries
William Ransom
Sculpture

"Life is flux. Life is complicated and full of choices. When standing at crossroads we deflect, reflect, procrastinate, rationalize and hem and haw. Sometimes these moments of decision happen while soaking in a sunset, sometimes stuck on the freeway, sometimes hungry in the kitchen. Some folks just turn it over to a higher power or rely on supernatural influence, letting faith tell them they are on the right path. Some make lists and apply reason to the pros and cons and cut the knot only once everything is measured and collated.

The teeth grinding and soul searching must yield something and I find that something in the studio. For me decisions are best made with my hands in material. Larger life questions can wait; right now I create something tangible and real."

William Ransom

Sculpture Garden
Bruce Gagnier
Sculpture

"The clay records nearly all the thoughts and efforts of the Sculptor although some feelings are buried within, beneath the surface which remains agitated, partly due to the effort."

Bruce Gagnier, 2015

Carriage House, Ground Floor
Laetitia Hussain
Murmuration

"Starlings form murmurations as a defensive response to sensing the presence of a predator, such as a hawk, falcon, or other raptor. With perfect synchronization, they create an obscure cloud which both frightens and captivates the viewer. Composed of many unique elements, the murmuration becomes a unified entity which nevertheless has many faces and facets."

Laetitia Hussain, 2015

Carriage House, 2nd Floor
Benjamin Pritchard
Go West East In.
Painting by Benjamin Pritchard 

Friends, grounding. The self in the world, different times of day. The psychic reality manifest. Friends, conversation, connections over time and space. Food. Love, Beauty, the Gods and soul and souls. Undercurrent manifest through devotion to looking, working, looking, working. Turning your back and seeing what is.
Not taking any shit.

Ben Pritchard, 2015

Carriage House, Third Floor
Peter Bonner
Paintings

"On my Painting:

I make work with primordial intentions, working instinctively at each stage with the goal of knowing experience. I use a process that leaves the possibility of achieving an image open and uncertain. I rely on my body and its wisdom. In this regard I have been influenced by the contemporary Australian Aboriginals and their processes; for example, I lay my surfaces flat when I work, often sitting with the work on the floor. I listen to what comes by attempting to discipline myself to remain in the moment, attentive to what is happening on the surface.

What comes takes many forms, from remembered moments experienced to particular light conditions, familiar shapes or a spatial feeling that I know. These disparate elements may come from different points in time or different events; yet in the studio relate. I have a need for resolution, and I’ve discovered that through working in the studio with materials I am able to find this resolution anew with each new work. I go through a process of re-determining my beliefs and rediscovering what it is that I hold to be true concerning a constantly changing and expanding number of qualities; like color, mark making, structural organization and the space that is evolving within the painting. I get a fleeting sense of what I believe each time I am fully engaged with the materials of paint and charcoal, however I must do it again or that sense that I had passes and feels lost to me.

What happens within this space is something that I get to know more about as the painting progresses, and get to know again and again with each new work. Characters form relationships and narratives between these develop. Language evolves out of the process of clarifying these relationships and narratives, codifying these experiences; these memories and how they relate. Specificity is the degree of intimacy I am able to achieve with the remembered experience, whether I am able to be at one with it, knowing it and make it live as an experience again through paint."

Peter Bonner , 2015

Carriage House, Fourth Floor
Farrell Brickhouse
Paintings

"As a mature artist now 66 years old, I find I have this large vocabulary to draw from. Imagery that has woven its way thru my entire career is available and malleable. I have access to this personal history with a renewed understanding of its original intent and a deepening understanding of how these “forms” can continue to speak for me in paint. I also seek to explore the range of subject matter my paintings can encompass as I look to everyday experiences, tell stories and paint about current events in an expanding as well as deepening vocabulary. There is in Art History an excitement as I see my concerns expressed in new artists and old ‘friends’ offer continued gifts. At its best, making art is a revelatory experience, a conduit to the beauty and mystery in the miracle of simply being here. As I wrote earlier- Painting is the wish and the prayer and the offering all in one. It is an act of faith just to pick up the brush."

Farrell Brickhouse, 2015

Gallery hours are Thursday through Monday, 11:00 till 5:00 p.m. For further information about the gallery, the artists and upcoming exhibitions, visit

www.johndavisgallery.com

or contact John Davis directly at 518.828.5907 or via e-mail:

art@johndavisgallery.com.
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Fran Shalom Paintings - John Davis Gallery

Fran Shalom
Paintings

On Thursday, October 11th, there will be a group of exhibitions for the Main Galleries, Sculpture Garden and Carriage House.  The gallery will have eight solo exhibitions of painting, sculpture and Installation. The work will be on display through November 4th with a reception for the artists on Saturday, October 13th from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m. 

Main Galleries:
Fran Shalom
Paintings
         

         

"Abstract Paintings
Oil on Wood
Color and Form
Playfully Modern"

Fran Shalom
2012

Sculpture Garden
Andrew Dunnill

Andrew Dunnill's exhibition has been extended for another month.

"Essentially abstract my sculptures employ metaphor to evoke the poetry of an object with many associations. They grow out of drawing and an intuitive response to material, form and space. I imbue the sculptures with an intimate, human and monumental scale in an attempt to emphasize the subject matter and heighten spatial awareness. In this body of work I am exploring the inherent qualities that wood has to offer as a material to influence my sculptural language and sensibility."

Andrew Dunnill
            2012

Project Space
Dionisio Cortes and Letitia Ortega Cortes
The Swing, 2012
A two-person in-situ installation by Leticia Ortega and Dionisio Cortes for John Davis Gallery
Rope, wood plank, dry trees, video projection, screen, speakers
Dimensions variable

 "The pumping of a swing is almost a magical process. There is no external agent driving it higher; the driving is entirely internal. It seems to defy the laws of physics. Of course it is also magical as an experience as pointed out by Robert Louis Stevenson in his Child's Garden of Verses:

The Swing
How do you like to go up in a swing
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!
Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide,
Rivers and trees and cattle
and all Over the countryside
Till I look down on the garden green
Down on the roof so brown
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!

While there is not much information as to determine when the first person tied a seat to a rope and swung back and forth like a pendulum (there are images of swings and riders on pottery from Ancient Greece), we know the swing is one of the world’s most recognized recreational contraptions.

It seems that by the late 1700s, children in the United States had developed the art of hanging rope and wood plank swings from trees to get their daily dose of adrenaline. Most agree that the concept of swinging is the natural byproduct of youngsters having fun on barn ropes and pulleys. These moved out to the swimming hole where a well-placed rope in an overhanging tree was enough to keep the kids busy for hours.

As the digital world continues to expand into more and more areas of our lives, a profound human need to experience and/or re-experience the real and physical has also arisen. Our current installation is presented as a sort of livable diorama, a hand-built construction depicting a made-up environment. This proposed alternative vision of landscape invites and tempts the visitor to create and/or re-create the magical process of swinging within a re-imagined reality."

            Dionisio Cortes & Leticia Ortega Cortes
            2012

First Floor Carriage House
Bruce Gagnier

Bruce Gagnier's exhibition is extended for a second month.

"Working from the inside out, as a modeler, I have tested the image of the figure, sometimes too severely, relying on the method of the sketch, while also being very aware that the norms of the past criticize me. Made up of many parts recovered from memory, my image of the figure comes from other times and places but which single time or place exactly I don’t know. I would like to think that, as they emerge and meet with the terms of the space around them, they express their own inner life on the surface of their bodies and that this is the meaning of what might appear to some as distortion. It is important to point out that distortions in the figure can lead one to legitimate, real definitions of experience such as will, faith, and desire.

        The turmoil of modeling in clay leaves its own record of itself behind, and this determines much of the final look and feel of the figures as people in the flesh.  One hopes that the turmoil is dedicated to the equation of deciphering the relation between the inner life and its relation to the world and that it does not stray into aesthetics, particularly those bound to the surface.  I feel that, as the figures emerge from the clay they become involved with their own ideas about themselves. Their image and its potential for solidification come into conflict with my own desire for revelation.    I think most of my figures, as I imagine they would want to be, would prefer to be classical in every way but they know themselves, as I get to know them, and our situation does not allow this as a legitimate solution.  While acknowledging their imperfections, they also must fend off the pressures of the world to conform to readymade identities.  As for anatomy I learn it over again for each figure and must remember the parts as necessary to the action and adapted to the character performance of each actor.  Any thoughts I might have had at the beginning disappear as they find themselves as a personage and push me aside. I have always thought that if I make a good figure, then I will have made a sculpture. The figure is the first and the important thing.

         The figure in contrapposto can assume many positions. The difficulty is finding a pose that does not repeat or form a quote around the content of another time, particularly that of beauty or idealism. It is important that they are experiential. There is not much space to park oneself in the subject of the single figure. One feels surrounded by great solutions. There is no escape through exaggeration and caricature because it too is cliché. Irony in relation to one’s own seriousness is useful.  The most important aspect of the human figure is that it can move and specifically that in the process of finding itself, it does move and more to the point, in and out of meanings. My forms employ the rather de-accessioned method of hill and valleys. The valleys are especially important because, although they interrupt the solidity,   they bring space into play across the surface of the form and help put the people as sculpture at a distance from us. . These are provisional people, each one trying to arrest the process as I have described it at a moment which will help the next figure better engage the problems I have tried to outline."

Bruce Gagnier
            2012

Second Floor Carriage House
Cynthia Carlson
Portraits

"This exhibit has selections from two different bodies of work twenty years apart.  Both are portraits.  Both have a starting point with an obvious personal attachment to subject matter, as well as a more naturalistic approach than most other previous works. Within a fifty year period of making art, my evolution has often been non-linear stylistically. A retrospective might resemble a large group show."

            Cynthia Carlson
            2012

Second Floor Carriage House
Carrie Waldman
The Idea of Sight

"These paintings are inspired by the idea that images are products of the mind.  Looking is practice for seeing. The brain creates the image, weaving together optical signals and a wealth of stored information and experience.       Attention builds beauty."

Carrie Waldman
2012

Third Floor Carriage House
Lois Dickson
Deconstruct

"I am interested in the flow of the organic forms juxtaposed against the underpinned
geometry of the picture plane, the interplay of the curve against the straight.

Engaged with an unusual landscape or an unexpected image from the natural world, I
explore the possibilities generated for my work. The resulting paintings and drawings
have been deconstructed and reconstructed over days or years.”

Lois Dickson
2012

Fourth Floor Carriage House:
McWillie Chambers

“I have no obvious explanation for my life-long fascination with ships.  I did not grow up around a port, no one in my family was associated with shipping or the sea, nor have I ever traveled on an ocean-going ship.   None of these facts have prevented me from avidly studying the passenger ships of the last century and the people brought together by this kind of travel.   The present group of paintings of famous ships is recent evidence of my curiosity."  

McWillie Chambers
2012

“Today a rude brief recitative,
Of ships sailing the seas, each with
Its special flag or ship-signal,
Of unnamed heroes in the ships- of
Waves spreading and spreading
Far as the eye can reach,
Of dashing spray, and the winds
Piping and blowing,
And out of these a chant for the
Sailors of all nations,
Fitful, like a surge.

“Song for All Seas, All Ships”,  Walt Whitman

Gallery hours are Thursday through Monday, 10:00 till 5:00 p.m.  For further information about the gallery, the artists and upcoming exhibition, visit

    362 1/2 Warren Street  Hudson, NY 12534

www.johndavisgallery.com

or contact John Davis directly at 518.828.5907 or via e-mail:  art@johndavisgallery.com.

John Davis Gallery

Peter McCaffrey
m a r k i n g s

On Thursday, August 18th, there will be a group of artists with individual exhibitions for the Main Galleries, Sculpture Garden and Carriage House. The work will be on display through September 11th with a reception for the artists on Saturday, August 20th from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m.

Main Galleries:
Peter McCaffrey
m a r k i n g s

"A picture of the soul was a crudely drawn circle of chalk on the blackboard in my first year of parochial school. Any transgressions against God were depicted as small strokes marking the surface. A venial sin, like fibbing, was a small peck. Something more serious like murder, a mortal sin, would fill in the circle with a swirl of lines that would completely blacken the surface. I found the little cartoons of animals that my Father drew were much more interesting. They were something to keep, and I longed to imitate the way they were made. My crayon drawings of circus animals had more soul than that chalk circle.

Animals and nature have been the focus of my work. Animals seem gifted with senses that have never been lost, or guided by voices we will never hear. One drifts along with the noise of the herd unconsciously keeping up and not bumping into things. Painting pulls me out of the lockstep by concentrating my attention on the things I would pass blindly by. Spending some time in the country has brought me in closer contact with the subjects I find most interesting. Teaching an undergraduate class of painting animals at the zoo has helped me articulate the groundwork with which I need to start. The drawing is an integral part of the work. Gold leaf has the effect of "canonizing" the subject.

"They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth." (Henry Beston)"

         Peter McCaffrey
         2011


Sculpture Garden
Ben Butler
On Making

"Everything has a source. When the order of things eludes us, we often mistake complexity for chaos, and therefore miss the wonderful sources of things.

All things, under close enough observation, will reveal the complete stories of their making. My objects simply reveal themselves much more readily than most, and therefore hope to teach us something about looking.

The spirit of science, of discovery and illumination, is central to my art. Ultimately, everything made is first found.

Yet, for both art and science, successful work must allow others not to simply rediscover what you have discovered, but to make, through the work, their own discoveries. The work then remains alive."

         Ben Butler
         2011


Elevator Shaft Installation
Susan Chrysler White
Yin & Yang,
Kachina (detail) 2010, acrylic and enamel on plexiglass, 14' x 8'

"My Kachinas are two of the first sculptural hanging pieces I have completed that are not site-specific commissioned installations. In these three dimensional pieces I have been researching how my paintings, in my aesthetic vocabulary of excess, have a strong connection with historical and contemporary manifestations of the chandelier. The exploration of light, space, transparency and calligraphic drawing all find a home in these elongated quasi-figural forms. Flat painted plexiglass pieces hang radially, suspended from a central rod, forming dense dimensional environments in which the viewer is both allowed to move around and, in the case of the hanging in the John Davis Carriage House Gallery, will be allowed to view from above and below on different floor levels."

         Susan Chrysler White,
         2011


Second Floor Carriage House
Christopher Walsh
Paintings

"My oil paintings explore a territory that suggests fractal structures, circuit boards and urban landscape. The underlying theme in my art is an exploration of how consciousness and identity are shaped by the rhythms of our everyday experience. On a daily basis, the city is a vocabulary of source material: traffic lights, overpasses, billboards, spires, windows, facades and grids, combine to create a large collage. A collage that has contradictions to it. It has a structural, man-made element, but it's unplanned. There are layers of both growth and decay. For example, I might find myself at the same stoplight every day, at a certain time, with a certain light, and I can't help but compose a picture that's subconsciously stored in my memory of that.

At the same time, this process of identifying with my environment breaks down in the studio into a formal vocabulary that is intentionally ambiguous and fragmentary. There's something neurological about my response to this vocabulary during the process of painting. I search for triggers and synapses, as I struggle to define an image. My visual memory of the city is confronted by an approach to materials that is improvisational and painterly.

With line, fragments of form and blocks of color I build compositions that contain a precarious balance of light and dark, architecture and space, gesture and geometry. Improvising off a grid or axis, I see the painting surface as an arena for a dialogue between thought and action, impulse and intent.

The images that emerge are colorful, rhythmic, and tactile."

         Christopher Walsh,
         2011


Second Floor Carriage House
Fran O'Neill

"The de-stabilizing of symmetry, patterns and the expected within a simple or complex composition is what I strive to find and do. It is the 'rupture' within the presumed regularity of a repetitious field that I explore. I deliberately look for these moments to build upon through painting and drawing; layering and exploring color, through dramatic or subtle shifts."

         Fran O'Neill,
         2011


Third Floor Carriage House
Kristin Locashio
Paintings

"In these new paintings I utilize a range of tools and methods to broaden and vary the expressive possibilities of paint. Working intuitively I develop structure through the painting process, allowing the composition to materialize and dematerialize in an effort to achieve a wholeness in the painting. Improvisation with paint and its' liquid materiality is the driving force behind these works, the result being a lasting visual reminder of the experience of making."

         Kristin Locashio
         2011


Fourth Floor Carriage House
Jenny Snider

"I will be showing new vehicles, made expressly for the unusual interior space in the Carriage House at the John Davis Gallery. Made of tinted and painted paper mache, they will hang on walls and stand on the floor, like the wooden vehicles exhibited in 2002 at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. In both color and surface, paper mache echoes the concrete walls of the carriage house."

         Jenny Snider,
         2011

Gallery hours are Thursday through Monday, 11:00 till 5:00 p.m. For further information about the gallery, the artists and upcoming exhibition, visit

www.johndavisgallery.com

or contact John Davis directly at 518.828.5907 or via e-mail: art@johndavisgallery.com.