Hope Gangloff takes off

The show I liked best during Gallery Quest 4 was Hope Gangloff's at the Susan Inglett gallery at 522 West 24th Street.

In a slow art market her  cool, classy acrylic paintings have all been sold.

The New Yorker on November 9 said, "This young drawing whiz shows large paintings of pretty, languid friends that are mannered and feel trendy, pleasantly." Seems pretty apt.

The large paintings are pale with splashes of color like the dog and the window scene in the one at the top. I like the way she nails expressions and find the subtle way she paints skin fascinating. Here's a closeup.

 

The New Yorker described the young woman below as "a plainly overqualified waitress lurching to grab a bottle of Tabasco sauce."  

 

The young woman in the painting in the gallery window, is almost overpowered by the red dress she has stripped off and hung on a corner post of the dock, next to her beer. She is clearly annoyed as she looks at her cellphone. At what? A text message. The number of her missing boyfriend?

The show is at Inglett through November 25.

Click on the paintings to see blowups. Photos by Grier Horner.

Drawn Together

The art critics, Charles Giuliano, in the beret, 

and Keith Shaw, hands linked behind his back. 

Drawn Together opened at the Lichtenstein last night and was jammed. Despite the date - it was Friday the 13th - everything went well. (The shot above was taken at the end stage after many had left.)

I had a wonderful time. And I think a lot of other's did, too. Many stayed for a long time.

Unless otherwise noted all the photos in this post were taken by my 10-year-old granddaughter, Riley Nichols, the official photographer of all my shows.

This is Matilda, Gae's granddaughter,

with a fashionable friend.

And this is the photographer, flash ablaze.

Tonight, Tonight

It's finished. I've worked a long time on this painting, Runway (Number 7). The piece is 6' x 4', acrylic on canvas.

This is one of two from the Runway series that I hung in the Lichtenstein Center for the Arts yesterday for Drawn Together.

That's the name of the show featuring the seven members of our art group, which has been meeting for eight to 10 years.

The reception is tonight from 5 to 7. You're invited. The Lichtenstein is located at 28 Renne Avenue, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

The other members of the group, all accomplished artists, are Linda Baker-Cimini, Betsy Dovydenas, Barbieo Barros Gizzi, Julie Love Edmonds, Paul Graubard and Susan Hartung.

Drawn Together runs through January 9. The gallery is open Wednesdays through Saturdays from noon to 5.

The other painting I'm showing is the woman with the horse with a flaming mane. You can see that one in my November 1 post.

Crashing through

Into the Crosscurrents, Christine Heller's 25th solo show, is a powerful return to abstract expressionism.

Before this new series, she had been working for about four years on paintings about the Iraq War, paintings that were often devastating and started leaning toward abstraction, a style she often used in the past.

The current paintings were done during "a year in which tumultuous shocks have thrown me into a new stage of life," Christine says. Those shocks included the death of her mother.

During this period she found her studio in Hudson was a sanctuary.

"I didn't feel afraid in the studio," she said. "I was trying to work from my feeling of freedom there, going where ever the paint took me. It felt like I was working up to a fever pitch and I just didn’t want to stop."

You can still see figurative traces in some of the new paintings. Look at the one above.

You can see the turmoil in her life during this period pouring out in the forceful images.

"I kept crashing through to new ground," she said.

This is Christine in one of two rooms filled with her paintings in the show that just ended at the John Davis Gallery on Warren Street in Hudson. Davis has a strong stable of artists and sculptors and shows them to advantage in his storefront gallery space that leads out to a sculpture court and then into a four-story mill building.

The painting below is one of Christine's smaller works in the show. She says that some of her next abstracts will be much larger.

A golden grunge

Underground in the subway stations and subways in New York there is a golden cast to the light. Not quite celestial. More like a golden grunge.

To see blowups of these shots, click on them. Photos by Grier Horner/Protected by copyright.

Beauty and the Beast

I think the girl on the train yesterday morning was a fashion model. She was tall, thin and beautiful. This is not a direct shot of her, but of her reflection in the window.

By luck you can see the foliage of the trees along the tracks in her face.

I couldn't see her. But I could see her reflection in the narrow space between the seat back in front of me and the window. Here's another shot.


While I was very happy with what I got on the way to Grand Central, I was unhappy about a shot I missed in New York.

A tall, attractive woman was on 10th Avenue at the corner of West 24th talking with a young man. She was pregnant and this was emphasized by the blue and white striped sweater she was wearing.

Suddenly she yanked the sweater up so he could see.

I was watching this through the window of Trestle on Tenth, one of my favorite bistros. But I couldn't get to my camera in time. For consolation I had a duck tenderloin sandwich and a glass of pinot noir.

One more shot, to add a beauty and the beast twist to this post. A picture of my reflection returning on the train last night.

Click on the pictures to get blowups. Photos by Grier Horner. All rights reserved.

Desolate days

There are days in late October and in November when the landscapes you see while driving on country roads are stark and bleak.

Days when the sky is heavy with gray clouds, when most of the trees are bare and leaves sail as they detach from the few that are not. There is a sadness to these landscapes and a raw beauty.

It was one of that kind of day when we were driving home from Hudson, New York, last Saturday.

Babbie drove and I shot. Normally I aim through the windshield by this time I also tried some side window shots. Which these are. I think they capture the mood.

Click on these pictures to get blow ups. Photos by Grier Horner and protected by copyright.

Getting ready

My art group is going to have a show at the Lichtenstein Center in Pittsfield this month and I'm going to put up two or three of my Runway paintings.

The opening is November 13, a Friday naturally. There will be a party from 5 to 8 that evening. Hope you can make it.

So I've been building 6 foot x 4 foot stretchers for them and stapling the canvases on.

In the process I've found that I want to work on some of them some more. That's what I've been doing on the woman in the Gareth Pugh outfit with the horse of fire above.

I made her face very pale and added reds, oranges and yellows to the tale and mane to make them suggest fire more than they had.

Next I'm going to tackle the woman in the Alexander Wang mini dress with Baghdad burning in the background. For one thing the clouds of smoke have to be toned down a little.

Here's one I didn't put in the show, although now I sort of had. It's better than I had remembered it. I like the armor plate that Alexander McQueen used in the outfit.

Also showing will be Linda Baker-Cimini, Betsy Dovydenas, Barbieo Barris, Julie Edmonds, Paul Graubard and Susan Hartung.

Click on the top two paintings to enlarge them. Paintings protected by copyright.