What I Saw This Summer, Part 1: Studio Visits with Grace DeGennaro, Richard Bottwin, Sharon Butler

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Three recent paintings and a wall of paper templates in Grace De Gennaro's studio, Brunswick, Maine

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One of the pleasures of being an artist is looking, constantly looking, at art. One of the frustrations of being an artist who blogs is that there's never enough time and space to blog about everything I've seen.

But I do want to show you as much as possible of what I've been seeing this summer, so I'm putting together a few roundup posts under the rubric of "What I Saw This Summer." It's an ongoing project that will encompass studios as far southwest as Dalton, Pennsylvania; as far northeast as Brunswick, Maine; and straight up the Northway all the way to Montreal.

In Part One: Studio Visits we stop in to see Richard Bottwin, Sharon Butler and Grace DeGennaro.
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Richard Bottwin's Studio, Dumbo

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Is Richard Bottwin a painter who works dimensionally, or a sculptor whose planar work is anchored to the wall? Either way, he's doing beautiful and impeccably crafted work that resolves issues of angles and edges, color and form, dimension and surface, solidity and shadow.

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Bottwin's studio is on the fifth floor of an old industrial building in Dumbo. The cramped workspace, filled with a bandsaw and other woodworking equipment, as well as maquettes, sketches and a fully loaded work table, nevertheless makes room for a generous and well-lit viewing wall.

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This is the view of the viewing wall from the entrance to the studio

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Once inside I shot his scuptures from the opposite angle. For instance, the triangular wood-grain shape you see in the foreground, above, reveals itself as the brilliant cadmium-painted sculpture you see below:

Lush and edgy

The woodgrain is a veneer on birch ply. I love the interaction of the laminate grain, like the curly pattern above, against the laminate lines of the plywood, and the smooth lushness of the paint. By the way, see those angles? I don't have the right words, but they're angled and beveled. And they're perfectly joined. Even as someone who has no math or carpentry skills, I can see what a conceptual and constructional feat that is.

Wikipedia, is Dutch for little town in the woods. Things sure have changed since the 17th Century. Over the past few years without anyone (well, OK, me) realizing it, this gritty area of Brooklyn has become the new location for artists, what Williamsburg used to be. Farther out on the L-train line, it's still raggedly urban, a far cry from that bosky Dutch description, but the real estate prices have allowed artists to rent studios and even buy lofts.

Below: You're seeing it here first--planar and fully freestanding

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Sharon Butler's Studio Residency at Pocket Utopia, Bushwick
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Bushwick, according to

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This is where Pocket Utopia lived for a few years. On the last month of its existence in July, Sharon Butler settled in for a studio residency. Butler is a painter, art professor, and author of the blog, Two Coats of Paint. When I arrived she had been filling a series of sketchbooks with collages and graphite drawings. It was all very low tech and hands on, but an effective means of visual thinking. I'm eager to see how this month's work will affect her painting.

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I stood over her shoulder and photographed as she showed me what she'd been up to:

Above: Butler paging through one of her notebooks

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In the four images below: more pages

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Below: You can see some of her raw materials: magazine pages and a copy of The New York Times. I'm hoping she'll post pages from these new sketchbooks as she has done with some others.

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Grace De Gennaro's Studio, Brunswick, Maine

About 20 miles north of Portland you come to Brunswick and what is probably its largest complex, the Fort Andross industrial building. It's an old mill that has evolved into one of those great mixed-use buldings: warehouse, light manufacturing, small businesses, a few medical offices, a restaurant--and artists' studios. Grace DeGennaro's studio is on the second floor, a generously proportioned rectangular space whose far end overlooks the rushing Androscoggin River.
The day I arrived DeGennaro was in the middle of a major work-on-paper project. (I wrote about an earlier body of work, Wellspring.) The series I was seeing in the studio consists of collaged and painted elements on a black ground. DeGennaro works with sacred geometry and elements that tap into the collective unconscious; that black ground creates a kind of mystical space in which the images float.

Two views of DeGennaro's large studio, illuminated this day entirely by the daylight flooding through a wall of windows overlooking the river. I love the simplicity of her plywood-on-sawhorses working setup, though there's a lovely old dining room table, below, which holds her oil paints. The dining table, set along the long axis of the space, has roughly the same proportions, a formal arrangement not unlike DeGennaro's own work

That's DeGennaro contemplating her work, above. Cut paper provides some of the compositional elements

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Above: Bottwin in the hallway that's so ample, he can show his new work.