Press

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