What I Saw This Summer, Part 4: Studio Visits with Pam Farrell and Steven Alexander

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I'm cheating with this post. I actually visited these studios in the spring. But both artists, Pam Farrell and Steven Alexander, are doing such interesting work and I'm not sure when I'll get back their way again--west of Manhattan in New Jersey and Pennsylvania-- that I decided to include them in this summer series. Besides, spring stretched all the way into July this year. .

Pam Farrell teeters between landscape and abstraction, a ground that's rich with visual expression

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We start in Flemington, New Jersey, at the studio of Pam Farrell. One of the things about studios outside the City is that artists tend to own rather than rent. Farrell recently built a shedlike structure behind her house. It looks small from the outside, but it's surprisingly capacious within. Farrell has been painting nonstop since she moved in--perhaps in response to the freedom this new space offers after having worked in what she referred to as a "nun's cell" in the attic of her home.
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That might account for the glorious palette, too. Normally she works in darker hues (indeed, she's in a group exhibition, The Dark Show, that just opened in Philly). There's a landscape quality to her work--sometimes more, sometimes less--with a tangible surface that comes courtesy of encaustic. You can see more at the Ruth Morpeth Gallery where she is represented, and on her P Farrell Art Blog.
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Another view of Pam's painting wall with a different work
A detail of The painting wall, below

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The worktable with heating devices to keep Farrell's wax paints molten

The studio, below, with the artist in motion on the little deck

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Now we drive about 100 miles north and slightly west of Pam Farrell's studio to visit Steven Alexander in Dalton, Pennsylvania, just outside of Scranton. Alexander lives with his family in the country in a contemporary home that he and his wife, Laura, designed and built. The ground floor, which opens to the back yard, is his studio. It's a large, well-lighted and column-free space that offers plenty of room to work.

Despite the demands of full-time teaching and family responsibilities, Alexander is amazingly prolific. His paintings are geometrically composed and chromatically dramatic. The formal compositions of rectangular shapes allow the color to carry the work. Whether he paints in series (as with the small square paintings shown below) or in a larger format where each painting has its own compositional identity, shifts in hue and in color relationships are the heart of the work. Alexander works in acrylic in a way that looks like encaustic--optically and physically substantial, with a luminosity that comes from the refraction of color through layers of medium (all those gallon containers surrounding his worktable, below).
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And did I mention he blogs, too? His Steven Alexander Journal offers thoughtful and insightful comments about what he sees on his regular visits into New York.
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. We start with the far wall of the studio and pan the wall, below, where we find the artist (well, I asked him to pose with his work)
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The small paintings you begin to see on the right wall are better viewed below:
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Continuing along the wall above, we come to the corner, below. Here, two new works propped against the wall show you the new direction in Alexander's work: a large central field that has pushed the other compositional elements to the edges

 

See that bit of color on the floor? There's a larger area of it just out of view. Alexander works flat for much of his process, and the floor receives all the paint that's squeegee-d and dripped off the canvas
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Next "What I Saw" installment: Art and Life in Washington County, New York

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.