Artist Statement

The landscape has always been important to me. In my childhood, I spent all summer, every summer, as well as almost every weekend throughout the year, at several different family homes in rural Nova Scotia. I spent days alone wandering the fields, woods and shorelines of those places, developing a very strong attachment to them. The landscapes became almost like people, who I got to know better and better as each year passed. I still feel that same connection to the landscape, and although those particular places are all gone now, I spend much time exploring, and trying to find new ones. I am always searching for that same feeling of connection and belonging, of places that somehow feel familiar to the ones from my childhood- whether they look the same or not. It is to capture that feeling, when it happens, that I am drawn to paint the landscape. I want to make permanent and solid that fleeting feeling of connection, I have in a moment in one particular place. The challenge for me is not only to capture what a place looks like but also to have a relationship with the painting as I am making it. I don’t start with an exact idea of what the painting will be when I am finished. All I know is what I want it to feel like- and I never really know how that will come about. I almost always do my paintings in one go- one session in the studio. This is to allow for clarity in purpose, but also to give the work a sense of immediacy. I want the paintings to be direct and fluid. There is a fine line between overworked, unfinished, and resolved paintings, and I am always trying to find that balance.

This body of work spans over 2 years and is constructed entirely from sewn fabric and acrylic paint. There is no wooden armature and they are very flat. Small dress pins hold the work to the wall via eye hooks which are sewn into the topstitch on the reverse side. To accommodate for the artist's studio environment the works are engineered to fold-up for storage, each iteration carefully planned to fit inside a box which holds about a year's worth of finished pieces. They are designed to give a maximum amount of wallspace with a minimum amount of storage.
Each piece is created one-after-the-other, never simultaneously, in an iterative process which retains traces of time of year as well as the artist’s temporal psychological condition. Because they are so rooted in seasonality they can be thought of as a form of fashion design, trawling the artist's neighborhood for color information from daily walks. In this way the work also participates in a constructivist reduction of the urban environment, a kind of futurist landscape painting.

Artist Statement

The landscape has always been important to me. In my childhood, I spent all summer, every summer, as well as almost every weekend throughout the year, at several different family homes in rural Nova Scotia. I spent days alone wandering the fields, woods and shorelines of those places, developing a very strong attachment to them. The landscapes became almost like people, who I got to know better and better as each year passed. I still feel that same connection to the landscape, and although those particular places are all gone now, I spend much time exploring, and trying to find new ones. I am always searching for that same feeling of connection and belonging, of places that somehow feel familiar to the ones from my childhood- whether they look the same or not. It is to capture that feeling, when it happens, that I am drawn to paint the landscape. I want to make permanent and solid that fleeting feeling of connection, I have in a moment in one particular place. The challenge for me is not only to capture what a place looks like but also to have a relationship with the painting as I am making it. I don’t start with an exact idea of what the painting will be when I am finished. All I know is what I want it to feel like- and I never really know how that will come about. I almost always do my paintings in one go- one session in the studio. This is to allow for clarity in purpose, but also to give the work a sense of immediacy. I want the paintings to be direct and fluid. There is a fine line between overworked, unfinished, and resolved paintings, and I am always trying to find that balance.

What has long inspired me is the interplay between color and form. The exploration of chromatic relationships merged with form is endless. My painterly space adheres to the picture plane but has intimations of atmosphere and depth. Each work starts from a neutral beginning, developing a deeper particularity that evokes a resonance of place, feeling and memory.

Irregular polygons, slotted together imperfectly, are my building blocks, which result in slivers of white ground, suggesting movement and mutability. The surface is scraped, dragged, rubbed and layered, leaving the painting process visible.

The colors are compound layers of different pigments and hues. I combine the colors into arrangements and combinations, akin to musical chords. My process begins analytically and ends intuitively as color and its effects are not reducible to logic.

Abstraction is like an open-ended question that can never be answered definitively. I honor these possibilities and invite the viewer to complete the work with their response.

This original artwork by Debra Smith consists of black and cream-colored pieces of cut vintage silk, sewn together to form abstract, geometric shapes.

Smith’s work is the result of both an intuitive process, formed from years of working with historic textiles, and a mindful practice. Each work is an open expression, constructed in an extraordinary way - with hours of stitching, embedding layer upon layer of material. With the visual sensibilities of a painter, Smith manipulates stripes and forms shapes with a gestural, geometric abstraction. She intuitively pieces found silk fabrics from vintage kimonos and men’s suit linings into a specific and well-developed visual language that relates more fully to drawing and painting than to the nature of textiles.

This original oil painting on panel by Stephen Pentak depicts a serene and beautiful lake waterscape in shades of brown, blue and white.

Stephen Pentak’s paintings are based on his maquettes; drawings inspired by nature but drafted with a conscious mind to the abstract. He is informed by his surroundings but holds fast to his freedom to create and invent space. The paintings have changed subtly over Pentak’s expansive career as he determinedly works in an extended series. This persistent image is a means to discovery, to exploring light and mastering the balance between representation and invention.

Pentak builds densely forested landscapes by dragging palette knives and large brushes across a wood panel surface. Surfaces are built up of many thin layers of oil paint, pulled and crosshatched, one over another. Brighter under-layers gleam through shadowy upper layers, acting as the sun on the horizon, gliding over the edges of trees, lakes and mountains. The backgrounds are panoramic, while the foregrounds are dotted by sparse collections of trees…often birches, with their white bark formed by the delicate lines of individual bristles.

Stephen Pentak received a BA from Union College in Schenectady, NY, and a MFA from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, PA. He is Professor Emeritus at Ohio State University and resides in upstate New York.

Josette Urso’s paintings are driven by a sense of urgency. Working from her observations of her surrounding environment, her inspiration is in a constant state of flux as the light, weather, and elements of any given scene changes as she works. Whether working in plein air during her travels or looking out over her sweeping view of Brooklyn from her studio, Urso responds to the shapes, forms, light, and experience of place and seeks to capture that in heavily worked, frenetic abstraction.

Urso begins with broad sweeps of color, paralleling the flow of energy throughout a space. Then she moves to more specific marks, often prompted by a detail from her surroundings that has grabbed hold of her in particular. This process is intuitive and exploratory. Urso turns the canvas as she works, always looking for surprising directions and unexpected juxtapositions. She thrives on the not knowing, and the journey of discovery within her own work.

In recent years, Urso has expanded her sense of space. She contends with both nearness and distance within the same plane, and regularly explores the middle ground between inside and outside. She draws from both organic materials as well as man made objects and structures, contrasting perhaps a natural form with a synthetic color.

This colorful abstract oil painting on panel features layered, painterly swathes of red and dark gray that blend together to create subtle color shifts and an atmospheric aura, anchored by matte blue rectangles on the edges of the composition.

"My process is leisurely and reflective, but I do not rely on a system or set of rules to develop each painting. Forms are loosely painted in, adjusted, perhaps eliminated, only to re-emerge in later stages of the painting. There is no pre-conceived endpoint in either composition or palette. In some paintings, the more tonal palette reflects a decision to develop a meditative space, while the more spirited palette in other paintings often mirrors my response to a piece of music. Areas are built up and sanded down — to lessen the finality of the paint layer, as well as to reveal what was hidden below the surface. Although the paintings are structured with defined blocks of color, it is my intention to diminish that sense of certainty and put the blocks in play. Ultimately, reaching the end point of each painting is about finding the just right balance between activity and calm, between reasoned decision making and intuition."
--Tamar Zinn

Four 26 x 24 in. panels installed with 2 inch space between panels

Featured in Tamar Zinn "Where I find myself," on view at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts January 7 - February 13, 2021. The show marks the artist’s seventh solo exhibition with the gallery.

In this latest series of paintings, the fragmented geometry of Zinn’s earlier work has been transmuted into the geometry of multi-panel paintings. Within this formal structure, the duality of atmospheric light and minimalist fields of color strike a dynamic balance.

Zinn works on multiple panels simultaneously, beginning with an amorphous exploration of color. As she works, the orientation and sequence of panels remain in a state of constant flux. Some panels may be moved from one sequence and added to another, constantly shifting and transforming in their conversations with each other as the paintings evolve over the course of many months. This process reflects Zinn’s embrace of the transitory nature of experiences. Her paintings offer meditations on the fleeting qualities of sense-impressions, and glimpses of perpetually shifting light and color. She describes them as “recollections of ephemeral visual sensations that appear behind closed eyes during meditation. Where I find myself is where I go to lose my self.”

Tamar Zinn has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States. Her work is in numerous public and private collections including the New-York Historical Society, McKinsey & Company, Pfizer Corporation, Time Warner, and Ernst and Young. She lives and works in New York City.

Artist Statement

The landscape has always been important to me. In my childhood, I spent all summer, every summer, as well as almost every weekend throughout the year, at several different family homes in rural Nova Scotia. I spent days alone wandering the fields, woods and shorelines of those places, developing a very strong attachment to them. The landscapes became almost like people, who I got to know better and better as each year passed. I still feel that same connection to the landscape, and although those particular places are all gone now, I spend much time exploring, and trying to find new ones. I am always searching for that same feeling of connection and belonging, of places that somehow feel familiar to the ones from my childhood- whether they look the same or not. It is to capture that feeling, when it happens, that I am drawn to paint the landscape. I want to make permanent and solid that fleeting feeling of connection, I have in a moment in one particular place. The challenge for me is not only to capture what a place looks like but also to have a relationship with the painting as I am making it. I don’t start with an exact idea of what the painting will be when I am finished. All I know is what I want it to feel like- and I never really know how that will come about. I almost always do my paintings in one go- one session in the studio. This is to allow for clarity in purpose, but also to give the work a sense of immediacy. I want the paintings to be direct and fluid. There is a fine line between overworked, unfinished, and resolved paintings, and I am always trying to find that balance.

Artist Statement

The landscape has always been important to me. In my childhood, I spent all summer, every summer, as well as almost every weekend throughout the year, at several different family homes in rural Nova Scotia. I spent days alone wandering the fields, woods and shorelines of those places, developing a very strong attachment to them. The landscapes became almost like people, who I got to know better and better as each year passed. I still feel that same connection to the landscape, and although those particular places are all gone now, I spend much time exploring, and trying to find new ones. I am always searching for that same feeling of connection and belonging, of places that somehow feel familiar to the ones from my childhood- whether they look the same or not. It is to capture that feeling, when it happens, that I am drawn to paint the landscape. I want to make permanent and solid that fleeting feeling of connection, I have in a moment in one particular place. The challenge for me is not only to capture what a place looks like but also to have a relationship with the painting as I am making it. I don’t start with an exact idea of what the painting will be when I am finished. All I know is what I want it to feel like- and I never really know how that will come about. I almost always do my paintings in one go- one session in the studio. This is to allow for clarity in purpose, but also to give the work a sense of immediacy. I want the paintings to be direct and fluid. There is a fine line between overworked, unfinished, and resolved paintings, and I am always trying to find that balance.

This small abstract oil painting on wood by Mary Didoardo features her signature layering technique and looping lines in shades of purple and white on a maroon background.

In her most recent body of work, Didoardo continues her exploration of dynamic line and color. Scrutiny of her paintings reveals the marks of facture and surfaces worked. She begins her paintings by adding layer upon layer of paint to wood panels. The surface is then covered in tape, upon which Didoardo draws her signature expressive lines. In contrast to the freedom of this gesture, she then painstakingly cuts along these markings with an exacto-knife, and applies yet another layer of paint to the revealed surface. Finally, she removes the remaining packaging tape, which causes flakes of paint to peel off and reveal hidden colors. This process of building and revealing is captured in layers of paint and looping, swirling compositions. The manic dance of line across the canvas is chaos made visible, reaching sudden resolution. In their gestural eloquence, the paintings are simultaneously serious and celebratory.

Of her own work, Didoardo says: “There is a visceral connection between viewer and painter through the surface reading of a painting. All of my research is made visible in the sensuality of oil paint, it’s luminosity and chameleonic shifts of color. Sometimes through the cumulative experience it resolves with ease. Other times the tortured surface demonstrates the struggle.”

Mary Didoardo has been featured in two solo shows at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts. She has also exhibited in group shows in the New York area, including at The Strohl Art Gallery at the Chautauqua Institution, White Columns, C.G.Jung Foundation and The Painting Center. She has been the recipient of the Enrico Donati Foundation Grant, was a resident at the Millay Colony, and she studied at Washington University and received her B.F.A from Pratt Institute.

"My paintings take landscape and nature as their subject and as a point of departure. I embrace the imperfections and the accidental relationships that evolve among multiple layers of paint and graphic marks. I start with pools of color that blend and disperse into the canvas. These large areas are then layered with collaged printed marks from a vocabulary of hand-made printmaking tools I developed from my impressions of ordinary objects and experiences, such as a pattern formed on a sidewalk from an afternoon shadow, swaying branches or rippling on the surface of a lake.

As I work and allow the brush strokes, pools of color and printed marks to combine, the parts form into an entity that is neither restrained nor governed by an overriding goal or pre-determined resolution. My work is influenced by living in Japan as a small child and experiencing the Japanese tradition of wabi-sabi, which is defined by impermanence, imperfection, visual economy and intimacy. As a painter, I participate in a delicate balancing act between creating something complete and ordered, with leaving just enough imbalance and disorder to allow for movement, rhythm and ambiguous transitions as the painting comes to completion." - Laura Fayer

This contemporary abstract work on paper features intricate mark-making formations in black and white. D'Arcy’s train of thought is impulsive and random, the marks are intense and meditative and the shapes and colors they give form to are arbitrary and unexpected. The result is playful and intuitive, as D’Arcy’s imagery seems to grow inevitably out of the energy of her process, to express the passage of time and the individuality of one’s own thoughts.

"Borders, boundaries, and language, exist throughout my work and have manifested themselves in my sensibilities as an artist. The repetitive mark-making within my practice explores the relationship between chaos and order, and the ways in which it is possible to manipulate or exaggerate time. I'm interested in creating spaces that translate the micro and macro perspectives within urban and rural environments, and introducing a new possibility for the viewer of abstract navigation through real and imagined terrains." - Maeve D'Arcy