Press

"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."