Press

"For artist Fran O’Neill, her art is about subtraction, the act of wiping things away on the canvas with her arms as the brush. Looking at it, I felt as though I was viewing some next-level sophisticated, large-scale finger painting, with each abstraction touching on a series of different feelings and impressions almost unreachable. All of the artists in this show seem to have an innate understanding of layering and translucency, but hers is unique in the active process of taking away layers more often. The other artists in this show most actively layer one thing atop another—O’Neill’s tendency is to layer and strip away, perhaps layering again, which makes for some very intriguing canvases. She says that she works by going into her zone, starting with, she says, “Coffee and brain work.” The best work happens for her when she’s given up on a piece, because that’s when she starts taking the risks which pay off for her artistically. Those bits that are just on the edge of perception, color just peeking through behind a layer, are her “ghosts of memory,” a colorful shadow of what came before, which you can only see through her reduction of layers."

"Saccoccio creates “improvisational portraits” which consist of countless layers of oil, mica and varnish. Fran O’Neill uses as many as 50 layers of paint in her work. Hayuk allows her paint to drip down the canvas. Nathanson uses an involved process involving polymers to create her color field paintings. Ferris uses a spray gun in her work. Weyer is the most traditional abstract expressionist in the exhibit."

"Hailing from a small town in Maine, Jen Wink Hays barely touched a paintbrush before moving to New York City for college. She began painting while studying at Barnard College, where she completed a dual major in Visual Arts and Art History. Following graduation, Hays went on to establish Utility Design, a NYC-based design firm, and Blue School, a progressive, independent school in lower Manhattan.

"With a passion for exploring naturally occurring patterns, and finding the commonalities and contrasts between the natural and the man-made, Hays’ unique perspective is quite evident in her works. Today, the artist spends her days painting, full-time, and raising her three little ones (plus two dogs!) along with her husband, Tyler. Here, Hays, touches on her inspirations and the two things she simply can’t live without."

"Artist Shelley Reed excerpts small details from Old Master paintings, expanding and re-contextualizing them in her often large-scale black and white paintings. On a recent sunny morning in Brooklyn, Amy Rahn spoke with the artist about the origins and intentions behind her work, the time-traveling potential of representation, and her current exhibition at Sears-Peyton Gallery."

"Poogy Bjerklie’s debut exhibition at Sears-Peyton Gallery, Chelsea, titled “Inland,” reminded us of what happens when observation is internalized and used freely.  Bjerklie’s mysterious, intimate landscapes appear to be about places she knows well-probably in her native Maine-filtered through memory."

"The Bittersweet plant is paradoxically both poisonous and, in the Victorian language of flowers, symbolic of truthfulness and honesty. In this three-person exhibition Bittersweet, curated by participating artist Wendy Small, botanically-influenced works by Susan Graham, Wendy Small, and Simone Shubuck appropriate the complex intertwinings of foliate patterns to consider the fragile and fraught interconnections of relationships, technology, and the environment.

"Susan Graham works in media as diverse as ceramics, cut paper, woodblock prints, and sugary fondant icing. The latter she pipes into thready sculptures whose foliate understories transform into geometric manmade structures—power stations and construction scaffolding, for example—suggesting the often-uneasy co-habitation of technology and the natural environment."

Tucked away in the master bedroom of a classic six, city real estate parlance for a prewar apartment of as many rooms, Karin Schaefer sits in front of an easel making paintings that have earned her multiple residencies at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. Her pieces, made with minuscule paint strokes, are reflective of the rest of the space she shares with filmmaker Diane Crespo and their son Kaya. Atmospheric, serene, and meticulous, the couple's home, like Schaefer's art, is a series of color fields floating on a neutral canvas. 

"Over her more than 25 years painting and exhibiting her work in New York and elsewhere, Kathryn Lynch has established herself as a painter whose works harness the lush materiality of paint to gesture towards subjects seemingly beyond the frame—relationships, change, the passing of time. On the occasion of Kathryn Lynch’s two-part exhibition, A View of One’s Own at Sears-Peyton Gallery, I sat down with the painter to talk about her life, paintings, and the curiously dictatorial tendencies of her shapes."

Widewalls Magazine names Top 10 Contemporary Watercolor Artists to Follow including Lourdes Sanchez.

"A swarm of flowers, some looking like mere ink stains, others evoking retro designs of wallpapers; patterns of color, saturated stripes, drops, and circles, quite inspired by design. That’s how one would describe the art of Lourdes Sanchez, a Cuban-born artist currently residing in Brooklyn. According to her website, the artist is focusing on fine art painting, although her watercolors are the ones having everyone going nuts over her work, wanting it to hang on their walls so desperately. Lourdes Sanchez is beautifully poetic, serene and incredibly capable to transmit all that through sometimes a quite narrow palette."

Although her art is thoroughly abstract, Deborah Dancy’s paintings, drawings, and works in other mediums are intimately bound to the world of concrete objects and the ephemeral perceptions and feelings of everyday life. On her website (deborahdancy.com), she comments on her fascination with “the poetic terrain of the incomplete, the fragment, the ruin and residue of ‘almost was,’ and ‘might become’” that she’s encountered in the zone between abstraction and representation. In the following interview, Dancy talks about how this notion has influenced her artmaking; the wide and ever-expanding array of thoughts, impressions, and situations that have shaped her artistic practice over time; the interaction of different mediums in her creative process; and ways in which the commonplace and the near-at-hand have often had a profound influence on her most abstract work.