Press

In Randal Thurston's cutouts and Shelley Reed's paintings, a viewer can appreciate both striking beauty and something much deeper. Thurston creates "imagery associated with the idea of mortality as a way of exploring what it means to be alive," according to his artist statement. Reed writes that she is addressing "how our animal natures have or haven't changed, and what that signifies for our collective future."

 The Gravity of Beauty, a group show at the Zuckerman Museum of Art in Kennesaw, Georgia, featuring artist Shelley Reed

Review of Fran O'Neill's solo exhibition, Left Turn, featured in Two Coats of Paint

We explore the life, work and Massachusetts studio of American artist Karin Schaefer, ahead of her solo show 'Continuum' at Sears Peyton Gallery, New York.  

Catalogue Essay for Andrea Hornick: New Work 1435-1783

"A thing caught my eye—it was a swan and a white woman’s arm in the shining silver depths of a most professional photograph—and I thought: I wish it wasn’t always women with animals. It was this grumpy thought that led me toward an investigation; in time, it was also what led me to the painter Andrea Hornick, and, ultimately, this conversation."

"Taking long walks give me all the subject matter I need for my paintings. They are a combination of remembering, forgetting, seeing and inventing. Growing up we were the only family without a car, wlaking is how we got around and since then I have always preferred walking to all other means of transportation. The speed of walk is conducive to thinking and dreaming. I catch plimpses of all my next paintings on each walk I take. One always gets somewhere when they put one food in front of the other with determination."

–Kathryn Lynch

Salon Zürcher, a small fair organized by and held at Zürcher Gallery in Manhattan’s East Village, presents itself as an intimate alternative to large-scale, superstore-style art fairs. Inspired by artistic salons, it offers its visitors the opportunity to mingle among the artists and engage in direct discussions with them. For its 25th edition, the fair will present the fourth edition of a group show of 11 women artists titled Women of Spirit. The exhibition takes its title from the 18th-century French term “femmes d’esprit,” referring to independently-minded female painters, writers, and intellectuals who were routinely overlooked by the male-dominated art scene of their time. Hailing mostly from the United States and France, the 11 participating artists are Rosaire Appel, Jeri Coppola, Brigitte Engler, Laurel Marx, Donna Moylan, Fran O’Neill, Janet Passeh, Marcy Rosenblat, Fran Shalom, Jackie Shatz, and Rebecca Smith.

"Famous for beaches and boardwalks thronged with summer renters and day-trippers, the Jersey shore is an unlikely place in which to depict landscapes that are still, quiet, unpopulated. Winter is coming, and the fake palms are wrapped in plastic."

"Sometimes we see something better when we don’t look directly at it. This thought permeated my viewing of Kathryn Lynch’s impressive paintings at Turn Gallery on the Upper East Side. Her current exhibition, fittingly titled “Between the Streets,” showcases her crowning achievement as a painter: capturing the liminal spaces that define the essence of a given place.

"The show consists of city scenes painted simply – innocent, almost childlike renderings of buildings with towers or steeples, a monument, cars on streets, trains on elevated tracks, a boat on the water, a few trees here and there. The compositions are loose and gestural without detail or fuss, but still manage to suggest different seasons, weather, times of day, and places. Undistracted by minutiae, the viewer is free to enjoy terse paint handling that represents scenes while distilling mood, transience, and history onto one plane, like dreams rendering reality as a patchwork. The subjects have just enough specificity to allow familiarity, and the paint delivers emotive power. Many of the paintings resolve around one dominant and evocative color that suffuses the field of the canvas or panel."

"My intention is not to overwhelm the audience by dominating the space; I want to invite them in and envelop them. Larger works allow me to expand my creative thinking into areas of theatre and architecture, as well as create opportunities for collaborations with other artists involved in film, music, and movement. My initial vision for these collaborative works typically remains pretty constant. Their execution can be very involved and labour intensive, however my objective is to make them appear to be very easy - like watching a cloud go by."

"Art advisor Kipton Cronkite launched the Instagram Live series Thinking of Art on March 27, 2020, during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, as a way to share his conversations with artists, designers, real estate advisors, fashion experts and many others for whom art plays a central role in their work and lives. Kipton interviewed Bo Joseph on April 20."

In the final or four articles on the concept of "uncollage," Todd Bartel further explains its meaning and recounts when he first coined the term during a studio visit with Bo Joseph.

If you have a love for midcentury design, then you might want to consider a road trip along the southern New Jersey coastline in America where some of the most significant examples of motels from that time still exist, many of which remain unchanged.

Situated in The Wildwoods, a group of small shore towns on a five-mile-long barrier island, the postwar resorts have been captured by photographer Tyler Haughey in his series, Ebb Tide.

The Wildwoods is the collective name for a cluster of small shore towns spread across a five-mile-long barrier island in southern New Jersey. The area first developed into a major summer tourism destination in the 1950s when brothers Lou and Will Morey, inspired by a visit to Miami’s South Beach, started building motels on the island. The Jersey Shore destination got another big bump in 1957 with the completion of the Garden State Parkway, which channeled an estimated 350,000 additional cars to the region every year. By 1970, more than 300 new motels had been built in The Wildwoods, many of them owned by the Moreys.

"“My studio is open and flexible, which works really well for my process,” says Philadelphia-based artist Jen Wink Hays, whose paintings and sculptures feature a compelling interplay of forms and colorways (think: sage, burnt sienna, and ochre with a shot of Schiaparelli pink). Her airy space, a series of conjoined classrooms within a sprawling old schoolhouse, is set up with various zones so Hays can juggle a few projects at once—of which there are many."

"Gerard’s fierce, crumpled ceramics reflect the hijacked geometry of their making; tears, indents, drips, and folds freeze in time to create each piece’s soft, seamful scaffolding, a kind of intuitive architecture that extends the careful linework of her paintings into three dimensions. There’s a corporeal quality to her work in porcelain, which doesn’t so much evoke the body as recall it through touch, simultaneously deconstructing and reconstructing the complicated longing inherent to intimacy. Latent violence also bubbles under the surface of these sculptures—Gerard’s interventions sizzle in their stillness. A graduate of the New York Studio School and Harvard University, Gerard has exhibited widely and taught at Bard, Swarthmore, Pratte, Columbia and SVA."

The saturated hues in Garden State–born Tyler Haughey’s photographs of off-season Jersey Shore motels infuse these desolate venues with warmth and humor. The pictures look as though they could be frames from a Wes Anderson film: Haughey finds visual magic in a prosaic locale, capturing the beauty of the shore’s Art Deco structures in both the sun and snow. One stunning example, Gold Crest Resort Motel (2016), shows a vivid lodging façade with cherry-red doors, turquoise drapes, blindingly white railings, and a vivid green putt-putt yard demarcated by a yellow curb. Gallerist Gaines Peyton described the “box-like effect” of Haughey’s images: From her perspective,they become an “extension of the architecture,” as the pictures evoke both painterly geometric abstraction and Joseph Cornell’s famous boxes.

"With a pair of monumental heads of female equestrians (each 9 by 12 feet) Suzy Spence extends her explorations of drag hunting into new formal and emotional terrain. Gender, class, sexuality and other existential concerns still permeate the  imagery, but the shift in scale catapults her concerns to a new level. Retaining the dashed off bravura of her small studies in Flashe, these billboard-scaled faces engender a sense of cognitive dissonance: at once cool titans and vulnerable mortals, these hunters ride a narrow path between the intimate and the hieratic."

I have known artist Patricia “Pato” Iglesias and followed her work for over a decade, and have come to view spending time with her as something of a master class in beauty. She greets her guests with tea and sweets served on patterned china. Her spaces are layered with furniture and objects she has collected over the years that trace the path from her upbringing in Buenos Aires, to Savannah, where she attended school, to Brooklyn, where she has lived for over two decades. Each piece is placed with a nonchalance that keeps the overall vibe relaxed and inviting, and her warmth and genuine enthusiasm encourage long, laid-back visits.

"Shaefer, a Fairfield resident, draws with charcoal — using a language of mark-making that is defined, gestural and rhythmic — to create life-sized images on vellum paper.

"The richness of detail, reminiscent of Rembrandt’s etchings or Durer’s woodcuts, imbues the work with a resonant stillness and dignity, Silvermine said."

The title, taken from a poem by former US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky about the area of New Jersey where both he and Haughey grew up, speaks to the vernacular interest and deep connection to place that the subject matter holds. The son of a union sign painter, Haughey’s interest in roadside architecture and signage began at an early age, and as a native of the Jersey Shore, he is greatly influenced by the seasonal economy and off-season vacancy of a tourist destination.

Photographer Tyler Haughey grew up less than a mile from the beach just outside of Asbury Park, in New Jersey. On weekends, he used to spend time at his grandparents’ beach house in Barnegat Light where started a true fascination for coastal towns and regions.

Earlier this year, New York-based photographer released his new photobook entitled Everything is Regional, a print project described as a monograph that examines the built environment of northeastern coastal towns and explores how we use, interact with, and remember places designed and known for summer recreation.

"As we declared last year, just as our open calls aren’t “photo contests,” this is not a “Best Photobooks" list. It’s not a competition, and with just a few editors running the Humble show, feels disingenuous and unrealistic to declare it as such. Instead, this is simply a collection of photobooks that made an impact on us in 2018.

"As editors and curators with a broad spectrum of tastes, we responded to critical socio-political discussions, adventurous technical or conceptual potential, new takes on photo historical icons, or just damn beautiful image collections. As you move through this list, we encourage you to dig deeper into these photographers’ work and show your support for their careers and practice by buying a few, preferably directly from the publishers or photographers themselves."

"Last winter on a trip to Brooklyn I visited Suzy Spence who is a painter, curator, and writer who grew up in Maine. We enjoyed connecting around our shared Maine experiences while she gave me a tour of her live/work studio. Suzy has been active in the New York art world since the 1990s when she worked at the New Museum and exhibited her own work with downtown gallery American Fine Arts. In addition to painting and a variety of curatorial projects she is the Executive Publisher of Artcritical Magazine. When I entered Suzy's stunning, modern home I was taken by the large equestrian portraits on the walls of her studio, and the way her work space was so much a part of her living space. It's the first room you walk into, just off the kitchen and facing the street, with gorgeous floor to ceiling windows (light envy!) and is draped with drop cloths."

"The photos in Tyler Haughey’s series Ebb Tide capture the classic motels of the New Jersey shore in their 1950s candy-colored glory. His crisp formalism melds perfectly with the “modern” style of the structures and captures their spare winter dormancy. The series also includes close ups of old postcards depicting tourists enjoying the pleasures of the shore. The contrast between these two sets of images conjures thoughts of the slow demise of such quaint seaside retreats. A monograph of this work, Everything Is Regional, was published by Aint-Bad this Summer."

I met Jane Rosen not long after I’d begun publishing an art magazine. She was living in a rented house on a horse ranch near San Gregorio Beach forty miles south of San Francisco, and was unmistakably, a New Yorker. In fact, she was having a hard time making a decision. Would she make her career in New York, where she already had a great start, or trust her chances in northern California in the Bay Area? She’d gone back and forth, literally, over a period of some years from East Coast to West Coast and back. She’d taught at the School of Visual Arts in NYC and at Stanford in Palo Alto. And at one point, she was offered a tenured position at Bard, where she’d be teaching with a close friend, Judy Pfaff.  

To read the whole article click here.

"Hailing from New Jersey, Tyler Haughey has already received much critical acclaim for his explorative works, including being published in Slate, PDN, Lonely Planet and Wired, and represented by Sears-Peyton Gallery in New York and Los Angeles."

"Artist Kathryn Lynch does not take it as an insult if you call her work “primitive.” Far from it. Though she prefers to call herself a “simplist” – more specifically a “representational simplist,” she is quick to point out that it is “very hard to be simple.”

"Her paintings, she says, look so easy they inspire others to pick up a brush. Then they discover: “‘Damn, that’s hard.’ They don’t understand why it doesn’t work.”"

"I don’t know much about New Jersey. I’ve driven around, past, and through it. Like most, my understanding of the state is clouded by pop culture and over generalization. The Boss, the mob, Trenton makes the world takes, Jersey Shore. I know as a state it’s green and often treated like the ugly sibling of New York. It’s probably safe to say that the state of New Jersey has a vulnerable identity often misinterpreted by outsiders. In “Everything is Regional” by Tyler Haughey we explore motels, coastal enclaves, and parts of New Jersey that have not been frequented in mass for a long time. We see the decadence of American tourism and the subsequent abandonment of a once fantasized locale for more idyllic destinations."

"Sears Peyton Gallery has only three works in their booth. When they are as large and luminous as Jason Frank Rothenberg’s images of the natural world, three is all you need. Pushing the limits of his medium format negatives, the image quality falls apart in places, allowing the film grain to mix with the dirt streaked windows of the greenhouse. Rothenberg strikes a balance between inviting and ominous."

"The paintings in “Playing Field” have a spread, out, dynamic quality that makes me think of a freeze frame at a sporting event, as if the figures are engaged in some sort of physical interplay with a set of rules and a clear boundary line. I have always explored various groupings and densities of forms as a way of creating a visual story and dynamic tension in my paintings. In this body of work, I have moved away from more complex, interlocking color zones to more solid, simple backgrounds. With a simplified color “field,” I have been able to highlight the drama, movement and interrelatedness between forms."

"A major element of early feminist art criticism came down to detective work. Outing the male gaze in paintings of female subjects was akin to using black light to reveal traces of blood at a crime scene. Form, facture and viewpoint served as evidence in a forensic process – manifestations of objectification, voyeurism and idealization were exposed.

"Nowadays, the crime scene is complicated, especially where female authorship is concerned. In paintings of women by women, thanks to a sense of intimate self-knowledge, what has begun to emerge are emphatic – indeed, empathetic – attempts to maneuver the inherent theatricality of being subjected to the gazed. The subject can become complicit and resigned to being a displayed object, or lay out an elaborate performative trap in which the unaware spectator devours the bait. Two current shows present different but equally intriguing examples of such maneuvering: Suzy Spence’s A Night Among the Horses, ongoing at Sears Peyton Gallery in Chelsea, and Heather Morgan’s Heavenly Creatures, at David Schweitzer Gallery, last month, in Bushwick."

"Suzy Spence is not afraid to go where our darker thoughts wander when we think of the regalia and and ritual of the hunt. Amidst the overt presence of violent death, the gnashing of the hounds' teeth, and the sweaty flanks of the steeds is the other primal urge of sex.

"Both males and females don the plumage of pink coats and top hats in an aristocratic dance of seduction, but in this case the artist has chosen to lampoon the male gaze by pushing the fetishization of the woman hunter into the wider zone of sexualized object. The Optimist (2017) and Untitled Riders (2017) present huntresses in various states of dishabille, while Death by Black Horse II (2017) doubles as both a bloody trampling of a rider and a retelling of Pasiphae and the bull. The loose and fluid brushstrokes of the monochromatic flashe works lend a witty spontaneity reminiscent of Thomas Rowlandson's pithy caricatures, while the polychrome pieces are darker and a bit more stiff-upper-lip."

https://www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/fall-2018-menswear/comme-des-garcons-homme-plus/slideshow/collection#21

"Luxuriance is more than a painterly quality in the work of Suzy Spence. It is a symbolic form. Bravura paint handling conveys the very sense of sport that is her motif in images of the hunt. Riders throw themselves with panache into the chase without attendant loss of elegance or control. Their very sweat is decorous in an almost heraldic balance of vitality and poise. There is a corresponding dialectic in Spence’s attitude towards her subject matter. Her catalogue essayist, Amy Rahn, deftly describes the feminist and class critique at the heart of her gender-bending approach while equally acknowledging her personal investment in riding, her participation in the culture that she observes. “The way these paintings slip—between genre and critique of genre, between a love of the sartorial poses of foxhunting and a critique of their masculine power, and between portraiture and figurative painting—give us a glimpse of something dark and rich that hammers the ground between critical thought and sensuous painting.” The full throttle romance of “the drag” (the term for hunting with a substitute fox segues sexily into the fey innocence of Spence’s idealized sorority of latter-day Artemises) speaks to an artist who hunts with the hounds and runs with the hares." 

"As politicians and pundits debate the virtues and vices of securing national borders, the works in Maysey Craddock’s fourth New York solo exhibition consider instead the fragility of less contrived boundaries—the wild natural shores between land and sea. Coastlines, rivers, and deltas, shaped and reshaped by the sea, by storms, and by humankind, are the abstracted subject and conceptual ballast of Craddock’s recent works. In these paintings, delicately traced tree limbs and ragged alluvial trailings overspread pieced paper surfaces stitched together with silk thread. As the national conversation on border security devolves into the simplistic rigidity epitomized by “the wall,” Craddock offers instead a view of natural borders as radically provisional and delicate—spaces alive with ceaseless adaptation and regeneration."

"First, it’s the capture of light that draws your attention, refracted across the canvas like rippled water in a creek. Then it’s the way colour and movement wrestle in undulating lines, dragging and splitting pigment into huge writhing forms. Physical and full of life, Fran O’Neill’s paintings captivate from the minute you walk in the gallery door."

‘I have always been fascinated by colour. I need it around me and on me’.

Patricia Iglesias. Artist. New York City.

‘There were several things that motivated this last body of work, but two of them were the death of a close friend and the other was the birth of a baby. Flowers were something that both these events shared.

In these important rituals of life like weddings, funerals and celebrations, flowers are ever present, announcing beginnings and endings, so they became a good starting point for my work.  Flowers have been used in decoration from textiles to wallpapers and silverware and are often associated with the idea of making things more beautiful. In my opinion, flowers are also used as a way of concealing, hiding the ugliness and the pain and the rotten.

"Digesting Shelley Reed’s paintings felt a lot like discovering that tick on the back of your leg hours after a jaunt through the woods. With the utmost conviction, the tick quietly clung to its chosen host, fastened itself within the layers of fleshy epidermis, and fed until its swollen body pulsed with excess. Fortunately, Reed’s paintings do not carry Lyme disease or Rocky Mountain spotted fever. However, they infect the viewer with something much more revealing of its source and equally uncomfortable to contract. Contextualized by the looming crescendo of the information age, Reed’s exhibited work at the Fitchburg Art Museum begged the question: are curiosity and paranoia two sides of the same coin?"

"I’ve spent the last two years documenting the Mid-century Modern motels of the Wildwoods, a group of shore towns on a five-mile island in southern New Jersey. Built in the ’50s and ’60s and virtually unchanged, they form the largest concentration of postwar resort architecture in the US. As a native of the Jersey Shore, I’ve always been interested in the coast’s history and buildings, and when I happened upon the Wildwoods one winter, I felt like I’d travelled back in time."

"The shape of Celia Gerard’s studio is akin to an isosceles triangle whose apex has been leveled. It is a slightly irregular shape, but with a door on one end, a window at the other and a set of walls connecting base to foregone-tip, its geometric irregularity recedes beneath the structural logic of a building within which this little polygon fits neatly. When I imagine an image generated by changes in the layout of this building—small studios merging; larger ones being subdivided—I see fluctuating spatial relationships defined within a set of unchanging parameters. Older forms become ghosted beneath newly constructed arrangements that arise as they are needed. There is a natural order that underlies this apparent chaos; the question is how does one find that natural order? How does a person cultivate the ability to see the logical operations that give shade and shape to what may otherwise appear tangled and arbitrary?"

"Two gallery shows of contemporary art in Manhattan bring geometry and tactility together with vibrant results. New York–based artist Celia Gerard is exhibiting her signature large-scale mixed media drawings alongside relief sculptures in ceramic and bronze at Sears Peyton Gallery in Chelsea. At Fox Gallery on the Upper West Side, Greek artist Eozen Agopian adds thread and fabric to her abstract paintings. Large and small-scale works by Ms. Agopian fill two rooms of the salon-style gallery. Both artists use the pictorial language of geometric abstraction to take on the mantle of Cubism.

In Ms. Gerard’s drawings, triangles appear and disappear in transparent veils of muted hues that press toward and away from the picture plane. Black lines zigzag playfully across the page, creating scalene triangles in “Ghost Bird,” 2016. Translucent layers of aqueous blues cover large areas of the composition, delineating white and pale-yellow birdlike forms. Ms. Gerard achieves formal tension here by combining soft, barely-there atmospheric color with resolute, geometric clarity. Her abstracted birds in flight recall Georges Braque’s iconic “oiseaux,” a recurring symbol in the Cubist master’s late work."

Charcoal is the medium of choice for Rick Shaefer, whose powerful drawings reflect his fascination with, and mastery of, the "integrity of the line."

Bent over a waist-high, eight-foot-square table in his airy, light-filled studio, Fairfield-based artist Rick Shaefer seems lost in thought as he feverishly draws with charcoal on a massive sheet of white vellum. He works quickly but precisely, scratching out crisp black lines.

Pausing and standing back to inspect his progress, he explains why he prefers to create works in charcoal rather than paint, pencil, or some other medium. "It's so primitive," he says. "Our Paleolithic ancestors were scratching with burnt wood on the walls of caves, and I like to think - at the risk of sounding too romantic - that using charcoal somehow links me to what artists have been doing for thousands of years. I also like the tonality, the rich, crisp blacks on white that I get with charcoal."

"Jen Wink Hays paints with the canvas flat on her studio table, peering down into its emergent world like a bird in the sky. Playful and beguiling, her paintings and works on paper induce a sense of wonder, curiosity and even elation. It is a feeling akin to looking out of the airplane window flying high above the clouds, perhaps en route to a favourite place. The eye searching, the mind wandering and the heart dreaming, hence the title to her first show opening in Miami at Art Bastion on the 22nd of April: Vacationland."

"It’s hard to imagine a series of minimalist, monochrome geometric reliefs as “soft”, and yet in Agnes Barley’s hands, they are.

"Her latest show, “Agnes Barley: Shadow Structures” at Sears Peyton Gallery in New York’s Chelsea, is dedicated mostly to an untitled series of medium- and large-scale relief panels and sculptures, all involving stacked geometric arrangements in meditative white. Her series (Untitled Collage) Late Grid Waves is also on display, but the main focus lies on those mesmerizing, graphic reliefs that play with space, light, and line through variations in height and the occasional shadow thrown here and there."

"Manhattan’s Sears-Peyton Gallery exhibits several artists who could be said to focus on the mane event, including Jane Rosen and Thomas Hager. The California-based Rosen paints and sculpts horses and other wildlife on her ranch, working with equal virtuosity across a variety of media, from hard Provençal limestone to soft charcoal on paper. Hager, for his part, does cyanotypes and pigment prints of horses, giving an elegiac and timeless quality to his subjects.

"Another Sears Peyton artist, Brooklyn- and Vermont-based Suzy Spence puts her own modern-day spin on English sporting art. “I love these paintings, with all their tension and complexity, and I return to them again and again,” says Spence, who makes loosely painted, charmingly gestural scenes. “They’ve come to represent refinement, but what many people don’t know is that this manly sporting life was actually quite debauched.” Spence cites both the Lascaux cave paintings and painter Susan Rothenberg’s well-known contemporary series of abstracted horses as secondary inspirations."

"Photographer Tyler Haughey compares visiting the motels of Wildwood, New Jersey on the off-season to wandering onto a film set after the cast and crew has departed. For nine months of the year, the lights are switched off, the windows are shuttered, and the doors are locked.

"The now-iconic doo-wop motels of Wildwood, North Wildwood, and Wildwood Crest popped up along the New Jersey coast in the mid-20th century, when post-war American families could hop in their cars and escape to someplace magical."

In works with a visceral, spontaneous feel, Deborah Dancy explores the amorphous zone between abstraction and representation.

With Miles Davis’s moody, improvisational Stairway to the Gallows blasting away in the background, Deborah Dancy layers thick gobs of blue oil paint onto a just-begun abstract painting in her spacious, light-filled Storrs studio. She uses a brush to add a sinuous green line, then coats on yellow paint with a plastic spatula. Pausing, she stands back and inspects her work before hurriedly scraping off much of the paint she’s just added.

Oblivious to a friend who has quietly walked into her studio, she’s lost in the moment, caught up in what she has called the “conversation” or “orchestration” she has with every painting and drawing she creates. Dancy, a much-lauded painter who lists a Guggenheim Fellowship among her many awards and grants, stands back and considers her painting.

"Maybe it helps to know that Fran O’Neill has a deep past in figurative painting rooted in perception and drawing from life: that would make sense of the compositional acuity, vivacious economy and voluptuous sense of bodily connection in her beefy, boisterous forms. It might also explain why they sometimes recall Howard Hodgkin though they are far less polite in dispatch. Or why the brushstrokes remind us of Juan Uslé but with more generational purpose. But the highest compliment one can pay to these audacious paintings is that the artist’s formal groundings aren’t beaten into them. They are abstract, hard and fast."

"Worldwide, the words Jersey Shore have become synonymous with bulky guys and busty girls partying hard and shaming themselves in so many different ways (thank you, MTV). For the non-American, Jersey Shore is actually the common name used for the coast of the US State of New Jersey, a popular summer destination since the 1950s, when many new resorts were constructed to host the influx of tourists. American photographer Tyler Haughey’s beautiful series Ebb Tide captures the unique architecture and mood of these resorts during the off season, when the tourists are gone and the motels sprinkled with snow."

"The Wildwoods, a group of small shore towns situated on a five-mile-long barrier island along the southern New Jersey coastline, are home to one of the most important architectural collections of the 20th century. They contain a trove of midcentury modern motels that make up the largest concentration of postwar resort architecture in the United States. These motels remain fully functioning and virtually unchanged since their original construction, in many cases over fifty years ago."

"Jen Wink Hays is from Maine and now lives and works in the relative calm of Philadelphia with her husband, fellow painter and designer Tyler Hays. The American artist uses opaque oil paint to obscure earlier layers of colour and form, creating what she calls “a-story-within-a-story” experience. The layers allow her to explore the idea of concealing and revealing, both adding and taking away to reveal a story behind the piece.

"Although the works are abstract they’re not conventional by any means, this method of obscuring gives them a unique twist that I’ve not seen before. Some even come across as pixelated because of the small bite-sized coloured squares."

Simone Solodnz posted this article about Bo Joseph's solo exhibition A Season of Psychic Noise, Sears-Peyton Gallery, New York, October 27-December 10, 2016.

"Malibu, Sahara, Monaco—it sounds like an exotic world tour, but you can go to all three in New Jersey! These mid-century modern motels named for sunny locales pepper a five-mile stretch of the Jersey shore, just north of Cape May, known as Wildwood. Tyler Haughey first visited the area one January, after the throngs of people had packed up their beach towels and dusted the sand off their feet, leaving these architectural gems to sit lonely and shuttered."

"On the first day of his exhibition A Season of Psychic Noise, I had the pleasure of speaking with fellow painter Bo Joseph. Bo and I were born the same year and attended New England colleges where our initiation to art history in the late 80s was through Louise Gardner’s encyclopedic tome Art Through the Ages. We were in agreement that the book had been useful (we still own our copies), and that it was regrettable to have professors skip entire chapters on Africa or Asia in the service of presenting a linear Western leaning history. I was fascinated to learn that he’d remedied this with extensive travel and research, a journey that has enabled him to define art on his own terms."

"Five years ago, Tyler Haughey, then a student at Drexel University, was driving along the coast when he happened to pass through the Wildwoods. A Jersey Shore native, he’d heard about the Wildwoods but had never been to any of them before. It was February, and the motels were deserted, but he found them captivating, and so he stopped to photograph some of them.

“'It felt like I’d happened upon an abandoned film set,' he said."

"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.

"'I’m very uninterested in subject matter,' Eugene Brodsky told a recent visitor to his East Hampton studio, although he has also said that 'the sources for my work start from images I come across.' In his artworks, things are what they seem, and yet there’s more than meets the eye."

If you still haven’t picked up your copy of Elizabeth Gilbert’s No. 1 New York Times best-seller Big Magic (or if your copy has gotten so dog-eared and loved that you need another), you’re in luck: Riverhead, Gilbert’s publisher, is teaming up with New York artist Lourdes Sanchez to create 250 one-of-a-kind, limited edition copies, EW can announce exclusively.

"There’s a quiet complexity to the art of New York painter and sculptor Celia Gerard, whose interdisciplinary work explores shape, line, and the blurring of color through abstractly geometric responses to surroundings; it’s a repackaging and reimagining of a landscape in puzzle piece format. Nine months out of the year, Gerard works from New York City, where she balances her own artwork and upcoming shows with teaching at Pratt, School of Visual Arts and Columbia University. For the remaining months, she retreats to quiet Wainscott, NY, in the farmhouse she shares with her partner Mark, where — in between walks around the neighborhood and to the nearby farm stand— she cranks out work from a backyard studio. Just as the seasons started to change (and on perhaps the only rainy day of the season), we visited Celia at home to discuss her art-driven upbringing, her upcoming projects, and the concepts that inform her ongoing work."

"Maysey Craddock took the title of her show, “Langsam Sea,” from a poem by Anne Michaels, which reads, in part: “In time, night after night, we’ll begin to dream of a langsam sea, waves in slow motion, thickening to sand.” A German term, often used in musical notation to direct the musicians to play slowly, “langsam” also describes the gradual but inexorable pace of change along the Gulf coastline."

In “entonces” at Sears-Peyton Gallery in Chelsea, Cuban-born and Brooklyn-based Lourdes Sanchez presents a vibrant grouping of formal explorations that hover between abstraction and representation. Working in ink on silk, the artist accesses a playful space between control and acquiescence, understanding her materials to the extent where she creates limits and then sets them free, allowing natural seepage and absorption to determine the form they take.

"It’s a good thing Kathryn Lynch is a committed walker, since she doesn’t like to drive, and the subway stop nearest her Red Hook studio is more than a mile away. But there is a more important reason for her perambulations. “I make sure that every day I have to walk everywhere,” she said recently at her studio, a relatively small but high-ceilinged space in an industrial building.

“'As I’m walking, it tells me what I’m painting next. I never look for it. But once it grabs you, you have to paint it. For me, the motion of walking leads to ideas.'"

"Bo Joseph's complex, patterned paintings are the result of a process of deconstructing and reconfiguring forms and materials, often leaving the results up to chance. He plucks images from auction catalogues and books, traces them, lathers them with paint, then peels off said layers of paint, and outlines the fragments that remain. Several of these works, currently on view at Sears-Peyton Gallery, explore what happens when objects are stripped of their cultural, religious, temporal, and geographical contexts and assigned new meanings."

Video studio visit 

"Drawing is essential to the training of an artist. It is the most direct medium between the artist and his observations, thoughts, feelings and experiences—serving both as a record and as a revealer of truth. Drawing is both a cognitive and manual process that provides the foundation for painting, sculpture and architecture. Fairfield artist Rick Shaefer’s monumental, breath-taking drawings offer viewers an adventure in looking with his technically precise and visually poetic drawings of animals and nature."

"For her big strokes, O’Neill uses nothing more than herself to push oils across canvas. It’s a uniquely physical process, one sized to the canvas and her own frame, and results in something I now see, in part, as a set of movements captured in one long exposure. This is not at all to suggest her work is merely the result of some actionist happening. Her paintings are nothing like Yves Klein’s raunchy “human paintbrush” performances, which would today certainly land him in the court of microaggressions.

"Rick Shaefer: Drawing the Line" at the Hausatonic Museum of Art, a solo exhibition through March 27th, featured in the New York Times on Saturday, February 28, 2015.

“Plans,” an exhibition of recent ink-on-silk works by Eugene Brodsky, an artist with studios in East Hampton and New York City, is on view at Sears-Peyton Gallery in Chelsea through Dec. 20.

The works reflect Mr. Brodsky’s fascination with the blueprints and sketches of significant 20th-century architecture, especially “the worked-on, tattered, erased, and notated records of how something came to be.” Each piece fuses his vision with that of an architect or planner, resulting in images that suggest, but do not replicate, their origins.

Mr. Brodsky has described these pieces as “essentially creating a jigsaw puzzle of silk,” a complicated process that includes drawing, collage, vector conversion, laser-cutting, inking, silk-stretching, pinning, and assembly, processes that, in the artist’s words, “remain mostly invisible to the viewer, who rightly just sees what’s there.”

Jane Rosen interviewed by Richard Whittaker

"Luxe L.A. bag and accessories brand Parabellum has opened its first permanent brick-and-mortar space — a flagship store on Melrose Avenue just west of Paul Smith’s pink pied-a-terre.

"The shop, which officially opened Aug. 23, has a western interior wall dominated by a 12-foot-by-9-foot three-panel charcoal drawing of an American bison created by artist Rick Shaefer opposite a custom-made, 8-foot-long, black bison leather Chesterfield sofa with claw feet. Other wall art includes mirror and metal pieces by L.A. brand Blackman Cruz."

"“I spend a lot of time in libraries looking at old art books,” admits the artist. “Right now I’m looking at painters from the late 1600s, who are documenting life around them.” Reed takes inspiration from that time period by appropriating images from those paintings and recombining them in an effort to connect to a contemporary audience the way that artists like De Hondecoeter and Snyders spoke to theirs."

"The most enchanting pieces were the night scenes. They capture the intrigue of the seemingly expansive harbor. The large work Tug in Night, for instance, features a lone boat navigating dark waters in the dead of night. Shining lights from distant ships provide faint visibility, but nearby forms are indiscernible. Lynch’s thick application of paint on paper caused the work to buckle and form wavelike ripples. The glossy finish is reminiscent of the surface of the reflective waters. Though Lynch’s techniques are highly simplified, her visual effects are captivating."

"Celia Gerard is an artist for whom two sticks of charcoal, a bit of white paint, and a strong sheet of paper is plenty of material. "Line Quality" could be her mantra, and looking at her works one can see why. Gerard's abstract compositions are built on geometric foundations of linear marks that may be subtle or bold but are always decisive. While her solo exhibition, "Lost at Sea," was being hung, ArtSlant editor Charlie Schultz paid Gerard a visit to discuss her newest body of work."

"Celia Gerard's mixed-media works hang in a balance of solidity and transparency, sculpture and drawing, as she finds a way to dig deeper into space.

"The eight compositions on display at the Sears-Peyton Gallery are a continuation of a body of work. “The work started when I was studying at the [New York] Studio School,” Gerard told The Daily Beast Thursday night at the opening of her new show, Lost at Sea. “I was working in low relief… and I realized that I wasn’t able to go as deep [into the space] as I wanted to,” she said, mentioning her formal training as a sculptor. “So I moved to drawing out of necessity.”"

Essay by Jonathan Lee to coincide with Kathryn Lynch's exhibition, A Silent Language.

"Lynch is a self-described simplist. She seems more interested in light and dark than in a broad bustle of color, and she is drawn to unfussy subjects: flowers, the sea, the slur of Manhattan traffic; simple pleasures and textures. Her often-flat forms and rounded edges give much of her work a storybook quality."

Gallery artist Deborah Dancy reviewed on The Drawing Center's column, "Annotations."

"Though painted with incredible detail and realistic in approach to rendering the natural landscape, Wagstaff ’s untouched places are imbued with soft light and washes of color that create environments at once peaceful and otherworldly, somehow unreal."

"Armed with an antique camera, photographer John Huggins illustrates modern-day skiing— but with a historic and timeless touch."

Macie Sears featured in Westside Magazine.

"Macie Sears' passion for art infuses her family life with color, composition and inspiration.  Beauty is on the walls, in the garden and throughout their day-to-day lives."

Jane Rosen featured in 7x7 Magazine's The Artist's Stuido; Six world- class artists open their Bay Area studios.

"On a Tuesday morning in September, I met with sculptor and photographer Susan Graham at Lux Art Institute in Encinitas, California. Graham was more than halfway through her five-week artist residency and opened her studio to me, allowing an up-close view of her sugar and porcelain sculptures in the process of assembly. Graham shared stories from her childhood in Ohio, articulated her thoughts about working, and touched on how September 11 has altered the view of some of her earlier art."

"New York-based artist Susan Graham completed her residency at the Lux Art Institute on Saturday. In addition to a dozen works on display, she’s leaving behind an elegant, exquisite “Toile Landscape Wallpaper” that she created at Lux. Her work, including her undeniably fascinating “My Dad’s Gun Collection,” will be on view at Lux through Oct. 27."

"Fran O’Neill’s fine show at the Studio School demonstrates how the practice of gestural abstraction can remain very much alive in the hands of someone willing to explore and experiment. While Louise Fishman’s accomplished, historically aware exhibition at Cheim & Read shows us a mature artist committed to the lexicon of the New York School, in O’Neill’s paintings we see the pursuit of an originality that really pushes forward the vocabulary of abstract art. Her backwards glance toward the legacy of mid-20th century painting is transformed into a forward leap into the unknown—in the sense that the paintings do not appear to refer to actual things and that the artist is genuinely trying out a language of her own. Building a new vernacular in abstract art is a trying task, especially if the artist knows the history of the genre. In O’Neill there is both a sense of the past and an independence from that past."

“The question is always, Where?” says the painter Agnes Barley, “though it’s not always about proximity or place. Where is meaning, where is connection, where is life and time and stillness?” Barley’s idiosyncratic use of such a specific adverb seems curious at first, but it provides a critical clue to the dynamics of her work. An unorthodox understanding of place and spatial mechanics animates Barley’s tranquil, delicate abstractions, one that doesn’t always dovetail with the conventional methods of locating the objects of our everyday experience."

"Artist Kathryn Lynch feels right at home using the back area of this gigantic 4,000- square-foot floor of an old Tribeca recording studio as her art studio. But, to me, the winding trip between wooden crates to actually get to Kathryn's work felt a bit spooky, the only sound being the wind clanking the iron gate outside.

"Kathryn has claimed 2,500 square feet of the floor as her studio area. She brought all the furniture she uses here with her, including her painting table, which has traveled with her from one studio home to another since 1994."

Jane Rosen interviewed in Parabola Magazine

"Gerard’s abstract, geometical works in black and white have the power of making a viewer stay. “It’s amazing how they unfold,” said my friend, and I agreed. The triangles, spheres, and cones open into landscapes and unknown worlds in deep space. What is really uncanny about the works is that they unfold the viewer, waking up the energies in the body and opening the mind and heart. I felt like I could see and feel the ongoing search in the work, and it had the effect of calling to search along with the artist. Gerard’s work woke me up, yet made me feel very concentrated and still, like looking inside a vast crystal or up at a mountain, or inside myself. It gave me a feeling of nostalgia for places I have never travelled, a longing for a quality or state that is still unknown yet essential…home."

"In his seminal essay “Cezanne’s Doubt,” philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote of the French artist’s painterly process, of how vacillating fields of chiseled brushstrokes simultaneously defined and questioned the objects at hand. Merleau-Ponty concluded that for Cezanne “‘conception’ [could not] precede ‘execution.’” The results, rigorously analytical and forever skeptical, set into motion the idea of the canvas as a public accounting of an artist’s tussle with uncertainty.

"Having filtered its way through Modernism—roughly speaking, from Cubism to Giacometti to Action Painting to any number of artists eager to flaunt their egos and erasers—“Cezanne’s Doubt” has become as much a cliché as any other approach to art-making. That is, until someone comes along and demonstrates why it is, in fact, viable and vital. Celia Gerard’s black-and-white mixed media drawings, at Sears-Peyton Gallery, remind us that tradition is for the taking should an artist have the gumption to follow through on it."

Jane Rosen reviewed in Parabola Magazine, Editors's blog

"Kathryn Lynch wrinkles her nose when people refer to her work as landscape painting. "That's like something you get at a tag sale," says the New York City-based artist, who is more likely to align herself with tortured Expressionistic painters like Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach than masters of the pastoral Hudson River School. Though her large, moody canvases show the beach outside her Long Island summer house on Shelter Island and the skyline viewed from her SoHo studio. Lynch regards her images as abstract rather than realistic. In a process she calls "a combination of remembering and forgetting," she collects visual data from her daily surroundings, then transforms it into dreamlike depictions."

MaryBeth Thielhelm highlighted in Coast Living, Editor's Letter

"Fran O’Neill, subject of her second solo show at the John Davis Gallery in Hudson, New York, was a recent recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant.  Her latest series is a breakthrough: these sumptuous, all-over abstractions built of mind-bogglingly intricate details are oceanic in their fusion of decorative and labor intensity.  Like the ocean, there is slow evolution and constant undulation.  The little teeth-like tessarae in Reel are negative shapes, revealing the white ground of the canvas exposed from the painstakingly filled-in spaces between.  The impact is somewhere between the aboriginal painting of O’Neill’s native Australia and Gustav Klimt.  Mitchell, one feels, would have approved."

Celia Gerard featured in Works & Conversations, The Precision of the Artist, No. 17

"It was through contributing editor Jane Rosen that the work of Celia Gerard came to my attention. Gerard’s abstract, geometrical works immediately struck a chord with me in a way that remains mysterious. If asked to describe what that is, I can only fall back on the word poetic, a quality with no fixed rules. The sculpture of David Nash comes to mind as having this elusive quality, or the work of Martin Puryear. Somehow, one’s feeling is engaged. It’s interesting that it’s the work of two sculptors that comes to mind first."

Sara Eichner featured in Metropolis Magazine

Sara Eichner featured in Wallpaper Magazine

Sara Eichner featured in I.D. Magazine Online

Jane Rosen reviewed in Sculpture Magazine

"Ms. Lynch paints in Mr. Mooreís buildings, on whatever floor is empty, sharing space with the construction workers, who use a corner to have their lunch and smoke their cigarettes. (Itís an amicable arrangement, only once disturbed by an asbestos removal company worker who removed a canvas from its stretcher and tried to make away with it. Ms. Lynch intercepted him downstairs. ìOh,î he said, flummoxed. ìThe place didnít look, uh, private.î) But the construction crew is always supportive, she said, providing kindly criticism and help when she moves, which is, of course, often. Still, moving a studio is harder even than moving with young children, Ms. Lynch said. And she reckons she has moved her studio more times than she has moved her family."

Introducing Andrew Zimmerman who draws with scissors (above) and a saw. Yep, a saw! He is working in that sweet spot between painting and sculpture. Check 'em out below.

He cuts strips from wood panels – freehand (i.e. drawing with a saw) which gives them an irresistible irregularity – then reassembles these with a little breathing room between the strips and glues them down to a new panel.

Clay Wagstaff

May 31- June 30, 2007

Dynamic Symmetry

Sears-Peyton Gallery is pleased to announce our first solo exhibition of works by Utah based artist Clay Wagstaff.

"The Mohonk wilderness in upstate New York has remained untouched since 1869. Nestled between the Catskills and the Hudson River, its lush hills roll undisturbed by over a century of history. It is within such time capsules of nature that Michael Abrams’ paintings find their place and time."

"The more one studies the paintings of Clay Wagstaff, the more it becomes clear that not only are they working on a multitude of levels and meaning, but that they can all be traced back to a complex system of layers, both physically and mentally."

Sears-Peyton Gallery is pleased to present the second solo exhibition of works by MaryBeth Thielhelm, opening March 23^rd and continuing through May 26^th , 2005.  There will be an opening reception for the artist on Thursday, March 23^rd, from 5-7pm.

When the sun rises in Abqaiq, a town near the Persian Gulf, the sand dunes turn a magical purplish blue.  The horizon is low and flat and the wind-etched dunes roll endlessly into the distance.  A gaseous sort of heat resonates from the sand, creating a shimmering mirage of color particles.  MaryBeth Thielhelm’s earliest visual memories revolve around these shifting hues of warm, dusty light which saturated her childhood in Saudi Arabia.