Stricoff Fine Art Ltd. Exhibition Listing

Jane LaFarge Hamill

November 5th, 2009 - November 17th, 2009

Reception: Thursday, November 5th, 6-8PM

To view more artwork from the exhibition, click on image.

I find people to be the most curious and demanding subjects. It can be very difficult,if not impossible, to represent someone completely to make a true portrait. In each painting I try to get down one thing about the models who sit for me; a glance, a mood, the conversation between us in the studio. It is an attempt to make
a visual record about the air of someone who is continuously changing. I paint figures in spatial voids so that they are not tied to any one place. But in my most recent paintings, I have been playing with the idea that when something is everywhere, it becomes nowhere in particular. A floor joining a wall, a highway, and a road in the woods are all stages of familiar yet anonymous landscapes. This series began with single-figure compositions. When I moved to multi-figure paintings it was purely for compositional reasons, but through that process I found a different way to deal with the same problem of representing an individual. By pulling that individual apart into 6 or 7 versions of themselves,
I could take all the information that had been going into
the single figure, and stretch it into a time lapse memoir of movement and mood. I am interested in people who I can never get right, who I can’t pin down. I paint them over and over again. This puzzle generates enough inspiration for an entire series. I continue to
try and figure them out.

Jane Lafarge Hamill

Catherine Mackey

Wharves and Warehouses

September, 10, 2009 - September 22, 2009

Thursday, September 10, 2009

To view more artwork from the exhibition, click on image.

Mackey’s work is primarily about the visual urban experience. She frequently wanders around the semi-industrial parts of her favorite cities – San Francisco, New York and London - sketching and photographing the buildings, piers and warehouses that have been the canvases of engineers, architects, graffiti artists and marketers.

She explores incidents of inadvertent beauty (those not planned by architects but created by time, decay and the intervention of individuals) as seen in the collisions of paint, sign writing, posters and graffiti on structures once intended for other uses. She sees the urban wall as an architectural palimpsest recording both the structural and social history of the building and the generations of people it has accommodated.

Mackey’s process parallels the visual fragmentation of the urban environment. She works on several wood panels concurrently, building up layers of paint, posters and stencils before combining the panels into a larger piece. Compositional consideration begins when several panels are placed together on the studio floor and the idea for a larger painting emerges. This process, with its fragmentation, spontaneity and acceptance of accident, becomes in itself an extension of the chaotic and colorful urban environment by which it is inspired.

Her current work explores old warehouses and pier buildings found at the waters edge around San Francisco and New York. Mackey uses the randomly developed under-paintings to lend an air of age and decay to these utilitarian structures which are rapidly disappearing under the wave of “urban renewal” rolling over both cities.

The multi-panel process is also being developed to describe journeys to and through the city. Here the arrangement of the panels, each one a fleeting glimpse, is pre-determined by the linear narrative of the journey. Walking from one end of the painting to the other will give the viewer a sense of passing through neighborhoods.

Architecture and Design

Four Artists

May 7 - May 20, 2009

To view more artwork from the exhibition, click on image.

PAUL BELIVEAU
JEFF COHEN
DEBRA GOERTZ
WILLIAM GOODMAN

Kevin Kearns

April 2, 2009 - April 15, 2009

Saturday, April 4th, 2009 4PM-7PM

To view more artwork from the exhibition, click on image.

Kearns’ abstract landscapes are inspired by the North American landscape. The mood of his paintings covers a range going from dark and stormy to colorful and airy.  The viewer is made to feel that the horizon is endless in most of his works, like the view from a mountain top. His dramatic landscapes are full of abstract shape and color, loosely representing clouds, trees, rivers and open grass land.

In some respects painted like old masters’ works, his paintings show, on closer inspection, organic and abstract qualities. You can imagine the artist throwing paint, sanding it, dripping it and scraping it with explosive energy.
   Glazing combined with intricate palette knife work and brush strokes creates sumptuous and complex surfaces. The final application of clear resin seals the paint, in an effect similar to water on a river rock.

Kevin Kearns was born in Boston in 1957. A Native New Englander he studied at the Art Institute of Boston. His works can be found in private collections in the US, Canada and Europe.  Previously an art and creative director, he won numerous awards, from Lions at the Cannes Film Festival to a nomination for an Emmy. He has also been published in many design publications including Graphis Poster for work done on behalf of prestigious clients, such as the Whitney Museum. Kevin began painting at the age of 14 and has been in many group and solo exhibitions.  He currently lives, teaches and works in the New York Hudson Valley.

Micheal Madigan

November 8, 2008 - November 22, 2008

Opening Reception: November 8, 4-7PM

To view more artwork from the exhibition, click on image.

Micheal Madigan was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania in 1957. He grew up in that part of America in the 1960’s and 70’s. Once a strong center for railroading and mining, the region was an early casualty of America’s industrial decline. The rapid social change in America and the uprooting of social traditions formed Madigan’s early artistic sensibilities.

Formal studies in Fine Art introduced European painters whose influence marked his early works. Artists from the COBRA movement and the Catalan master Antoni Tapies marked a transition in Madigan’s painting from formal realism to expressionism and a hybrid form of nonrepresentational mixed media painting. Through the 1980’s and 1990’s his work explored the power of dynamic color and emphasized the evocative potential of nonobjective painting.

Projects in Ireland in 1997 and numerous subsequent visits there and to Southern England, Italy, Spain and the American Southwest have influenced the nature of Madigan’s painting. Today his work explores the nature of memory, its structure and how it is modeled and changed by time. Although still quantified as “abstract” in an aesthetic sense, his work often escapes simple qualification. Madigan kindly dissuades viewers from such qualifications of his work; “It prejudices one to the narrowed view that the work is to be interpreted in some specific way, it limits the work’s evocative power.”

“….I’ve surrendered the illusion of controlling the evolution of my work. There are very specific sequences of process that are applied to the paintings to bring them into being, evolving color progressions and textural applications that build the physical presence of the piece. I find that through years of refining this process, if I invite surrender to the unknown early in the works evolution, then that surrender strengthens the final underpinnings of the piece. The evocative power of the work is somehow strengthened as my intent for the work is subsumed in its creation.”