katy schneider recently completed a portrait of New York times editor Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, jr
gallery artist katy schneider was chosen by a committee at the new york times to paint a portrait of arthur ochs sulzberger, jr. who was the publisher from 1992-2017. david w. dunlap wrote a wonderful article in the sunday times a portrait fit for a publisher detailing the process and the unveiling. katy schneider was educated at yale university and indiana university. she has taught painting + drawing at smith collage since 1990. her next exhibition at hidell brooks is scheduled for fall 2025. the portrait will hang on the 14th floor at the times headquarters.
work by gallery artist John folsom included in southland a new exhibition opening at the ogden museum of southern art in new orleans
SOUTHLAND
APRIL 20 – SEPTEMBER 22, 2024
Southland examines the role photographs have played in the visualization of the natural landscape of the American South. The exhibition explores the many technical and aesthetic methods photographers have employed in approaching the subject of the Southern Landscape. Highlighting the marshlands in Louisiana, the beaches of Florida, the flatlands of the Mississippi Delta and the mountains of North Carolina and Virginia, the exhibition shows the landscape of the American South is as diverse as the people and culture of the region. Southland not only investigates the topographical physical characteristics of the land of the American South, but the metaphysical and emotional role romanticism plays in the understanding of landscape photographs made of and about the American South.
When one thinks of American landscape photography, the first region of the country that comes to mind is usually the West. The iconic photographs made in the late 19th century by Timothy O’Sullivan and Carleton Watkins, captured the majestic views of the West’s endless wide-open expanses and formed the visualization of manifest destiny. In the 20th century, America’s most important and famous landscape photographer, Ansel Adams, visually defined the dramatic scenery of Western landscape in art and popular culture through the Half Dome in California’s Yosemite National Park and the moon rise over Hernandez, New Mexico.
Unlike the West, the American South is not well known as a subject of landscape photography. Perhaps, this is due to the Southern landscape not being as visually dramatic or as photogenic as the West. The Appalachian and Ozark mountains of the South are beautiful, but cannot compete visually with the much more rugged and higher peaks of the West’s Rockies, Tetons and Sierra-Nevada mountains. The sandy dunes of the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico beaches that ring the South are much more sublime when compared to the roaring waves, rocky beaches and jagged cliffs of the Pacific Ocean.
The landscape in Southern art is much more about the romantic idealization of a place. Place along with time, are the central components of Southern art, music and literature. Within Southern art, place can be actual, imaged or metaphysical. When O’Sullivan and Watkins were documenting the virgin Western landscape, the lands of the American South (east of the Mississippi River) had been almost entirely tamed for hundreds of years through European settlement. The settlement came with European romantic ideas of art and literature. The 18th century European concept of Romanticism in art and literature (which had an emphasis on imagination, idealization and emotion) were first infused into Southern landscape painting and later into photography.
john folsom is a mixed media artist who received his bachelor of fine arts in cinema and photography from southern illinois university. his work demonstrates the narrative potential of images through the intersection of painting and photography. the process involved with creating john folsom's work has many stages. he first travels and documents the landscape with his digital camera and works with the image utilizing photographic software. then the image is broken into a grid and each tile is printed individually being assembled like a giant jigsaw puzzle adhered to a wooden support. folsom then paints on the surface of the photographic paper using traditional oils and seals the piece with a wax medium.
r & f homemade paints blog features artist spotlight: jenny nelson
Jenny Nelson is a painter and arts educator. She attended Maine College of Art, Bard College, and the Lacoste School of the Arts in France. Jenny has been living in the Hudson Valley for over two decades, including a Residency at the Byrdcliffe Art Colony from 2004 - 2008. She has taught classes and workshops at Truro Center for the Arts, Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Woodstock School of Art, and the Nantucket Artists Association, among others.
Jenny’s work has been shown at Tria Gallery, Hidell Brooks Gallery, and Carrie Haddad Gallery. She has guided hundreds of students to expand their skills in abstract painting through her in-person workshops and online courses.
We spoke with Jenny recently about finding shapes, the role intuition plays in her work, and how she navigates challenges in the studio. Enjoy the conversation. And Keep Painting.
Please tell us a little about yourself. How did you get your start as an artist?
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t making things. It has always been my natural inclination to communicate visually. I knew at a young age that I wanted to go to art school. I was lucky enough to finagle an enormous amount of time in art rooms throughout my school years. Classrooms felt claustrophobic, and the art room was the only place I felt I could thrive. I worked hard and received a scholarship to Maine College of Art and then attended Bard College.
Once out of school, I glued myself to a studio practice. I was painting from life and then the work organically shifted towards abstraction. Twenty-five years later, I have a solid yet ever evolving visual language that always offers me something new to think about.
Can you speak to the roles of addition and subtraction in your work? What about intuition?
There are several ways in which I begin a painting. One way is to activate the white canvas with an array of marks, lines, and areas of disparate colors. I work with oil paint and R&F Pigment Sticks®. The drying time differs depending on the pigment and application, which allows me to work in layers and sometimes wet on wet. This process lends itself to seeking and finding. I can pull back layers and uncover hidden lines or the ghost of a form.
Pigment Sticks® are a great drawing tool and mix seamlessly with my paint. I often go over sections with Neutral White, which creates infinite variations of off-whites and can also pull marks into a beautiful blur.
My paintings begin in a chaotic way, then I begin to organize that chaos through a series of subtractions and additions. This conscious and unconscious decision-making process becomes more refined as the painting develops. Shapes come and go, make friends, and enemies, and form relationships.
I would define my intuition as an intimate knowledge about the behavior of my materials combined with the willingness to respond to the unexpected as the painting unfolds. A kind of deep listening, deep looking, that allows the painting to be an equal participant in its own making.
What are you currently working on in the studio? How has your work evolved over the years?
Recently I’ve been challenging myself with some horizontal orientations. I prefer working on a square format, but I’ve had some requests, so I’m exploring the idea of elongating my compositions, without having them become overtly abstract landscapes.
This is sometimes successful and other times not. I’m not totally opposed to the suggestion or simplification of the horizon line; I find it satisfying in one way, but too predictable in another. It’s a fine balance that I am very aware of.
My work is always evolving. My interests shift compositionally, spatially, and with color and form as well. I may evolve a shape that seems to turn up again and again, and then it naturally morphs into something else, and I pick it up from there. I have a kind of studio mantra about infinity.
I’m motivated by the thought of infinite possibilities. The idea that there are endless paintings and other possible ways to express myself through forms, with drawings or even sculptural objects, keeps me open minded in the studio.
As painters, we often move through prolonged periods where things are not working. Can you speak to the role of frustration or feeling lost as an artist? How have you come to navigate this experience?
My motto has always been to show up in the studio no matter what. I find that if I am in proximity to my materials and my work, something will pull me into the process, no matter my mood or the trajectory of the day. I include sweeping the floor, organizing, staring into space, napping, taking notes, or painting, all part of making the work.
Painting abstractly, I often feel lost. There is no roadmap, but over time, I’ve become more accustomed to this feeling. It no longer throws me off. I more easily ride the ups and downs of the creative process these days. I can step outside of myself and recognize the insecurity, and the doubting self, as part of the ritual. Procrastination is a necessary part of preparation, mentally and spiritually. I know I am entering into the unknown, and I must get up my gumption over and over again.
What is a typical studio day like for you? What keeps you motivated?
I get into my studio early afternoon and ideally work for around 4-6 hours. I actually rev up in the evening and can work into the night if my schedule allows. The first thing I do when I arrive is to write down my household to-do list on my old clip board. That clears my mind for the day. Paintings will be in various stages of development. Sometimes I spend the afternoon mixing a palette and making decisions on what to work on next. Other times I’m in the middle of a piece and I can jump right in.
How long have you been teaching for? Tell us about your classes at Woodstock. What can students expect to gain as a result?
I’ve been teaching for about 15 years, which is a great joy. There is such a symbiosis with the artists in my classes. I learn as much from them as they do from me. My weekly class at Woodstock School of Art - Abstraction, Color and Composition - starts up again Tuesday mornings beginning May 28th. Workshops are TBA.
The class is an overview of abstract foundations with an emphasis on learning to see. When I first started teaching, I began to recognize what the most common challenges were for students who wanted to paint abstractly. Some artists wanted to add just an element of abstraction into their work, some wanted to create completely non-objective work, and others just wanted to stretch the boundaries of their work. But everyone needed to learn or re-learn the foundations: to play, and incorporate shape making, mark making, color, value and compositional cues into their paintings.
Over time I designed specific lessons that help students’ problem solve and evolve their work in their own language. We draw, collage, mix a harmonious palette, learn different approaches to begin a painting, and focus on developing a critical eye for composition.
I think we all have an innate visual language that can be explored and developed. The lessons presented are lively and expansive. Artists of all levels can bring their sensibilities to the exercises and to the group think tank. There are always a-ha moments.
You gave an excellent virtual talk recently on shapes. If you had to summarize your thoughts on finding shapes in one or two sentences, what would you focus on?
When you spend a lot of time painting, you begin to see shapes everywhere. Your vision changes and you acquire a “painting brain” - the eye that sees. I would focus on flexibility, establishing a mindset for asking questions when you’re painting.
Simply beginning with “what if?” creates opportunity, and more interesting shapes are conjured. “What if I cut the shape in half?” “What if I made that shape twice as big?” “What if I white out the whole top of this painting?” And then do that.
Kiki Slaughter celebrates twenty years since her fist solo exhibition with a stunning show of new large-scale paintings at quirk gallery charlottesville
Twenty Years marks the 20th anniversary of my first solo show in 2004, held just across the street, and celebrates a full-circle moment in my career as a painter. Over the past two decades, I have dedicated my artistic practice to the act of painting. This collection tells the story of my deeply personal process, with every stroke, splatter, and stain of paint shaping the narrative of my days. My technique is a delicate balance of spontaneity and precision, both intuitive and intentional. Tapping into creative flow, I work in the moment, pouring, scraping, and layering paint to create meditative compositions that explore the relationship between color and time. For me, it has always been about painting–both the physicality of the mark, and the mental presence in the act of mark making. I am a process-based artist, intuitively building my canvases in reaction to the world around me. The simplicity of bold blocks of color belie many-layered, complex compositions built up over time, like living ecosystems. The resulting works are imbued with the essence of place, engaging the viewer in a collective feeling that is greater than ourselves. This body of work is a portrait of the process I have honed over 20 years of active painting.
KIKI SLAUGHTER is a painter best known for her expansive colorfield compositions that explore the fundamental process of painting. She studied at The University of Virginia and holds a BA in painting and in Art History and a MA in Contemporary Art History from The Sotheby’s Institute, London.Slaughter’s work hinges on the act of intuitive mark-making and draws on the rich dual-pronged visual history of color theory and action painting. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Quirk Gallery, Richmond, VA; Hidell Brooks Gallery, Charlotte, NC; and Renee George Gallery. A retrospective of her work will be exhibited this spring at Quirk Gallery. The work of Kiki Slaughter is included in many public and private collections, including Keswick Hall, The Quirk Hotel, Blackberry Farm, and Omni Hotels. She is represented by Anne Irwin Gallery, Atlanta, GA; Hidell Brooks Gallery, Charlotte, NC; and Quirk Gallery, Charlottesville, VA. Slaughter lives and works in Richmond, VA.
hbg is thrilled to having a solo exhibition of new paintings by kiki slaughter this fall.