Sometimes I go back through old files of unused pictures and see something new, and that’s pretty much what happened here. I was working on something else entirely and this one just happened to be mixed in, this little landscape was just a small section of a much larger all and it almost slipped past my eye. I’m glad it didn’t because I kind of like this one.
This started out with an intention of abstracted landscape and something else happened. Metamorphosis. This is indeed the nature of art making. This is the monotype. This is melodramatic, isn’t it? I’m on a weird schedule, little sleep. That’s my excuse.
Tom Bennett
Hollow Mantle, 2009, monotype, 18″ x 12″
The monotype truly has become my main medium lately for its immediacy and its capacity for fluid manipulation that removes any stultifying preciousness. Its a true marriage of intuitive study and finished work. Here are some more from a series of abstracted ‘cave’ images.
Dripping Cave, 2009, monotype, 18″ x 12″
Somnambulist Cave, 2009, monotype, 18″ x 12″
I decided to put my little internal art crisis to the side and go outside and play. I had a yard full of sticks that needed picking up and neighbors that I don’t much care for, so I put the two together and started building things that will provide screening from them as well as add natural structural elements for my chaotic garden. In this instance I opted to leave a “window” on to one of the nicer views, a field of wild flowers. It looks a bit diminutive in the photo, but the top bar stands at about 8-9 feet high and about as wide. I used some of the vines that were laying around to create the arch and I am probably going to continue to add to this as I find the right pieces.
“No. I don’t paint landscapes.”
“But you can. Remember that time when you did that landscape at the beach?”
“Mom, I was 13 years old. I don’t paint landscapes.”
The above is one of many permutations of what I thought would be a forever recurring conversation between me and my mom. I love my mom, but I’d rather contract swine flu than paint a landscape. That said, I presented her with the following encaustic paintings for Christmas about two years ago which proves just how much I love her. I’m pretty sure these were not what she’d had in mind, but she gracefully accepted the gift nonetheless.
“Landscape For Mom”
encaustic on ragboard
something like 5 x 5 inches
“Landscape triptych for Mom”
encaustic on ragboard
each roughly about 3 x 3 inches
-Steph Gerolimatos
The gallery reception on Saturday night was lots of fun! The art, which was even more exciting than I’d expected, found a perfect setting in the refined but not overly slick space that is Wunderarts. The gallery, a beautifully transformed former auto parts shop, has a high-ceilinged, wide open interior that is partitioned by a simple configuration of low movable walls. The overall effect is neutral and elegant with definite spatial character–the sort of place you walk into and say, “What a great space!”. In Tulay’s series of charcoal, pastel and ink abstracted drawings he uses geometric forms suggestive of architectural elements against renderings of sky to define ambiguous moody spaces where form and formlessness shift seamlessly. The drawings, which were all cleanly floated on white mat backgrounds within narrow white shadowbox frames, manage to suggest both interior and exterior space within a single composition. Tulay stuck to a limited palette of black, grey, white and either warm or cool blue for every work. As I’m a sucker both for art that finds that sort of wonderfully tense balance between representation and abstraction and art that successfully uses a minimal color scheme, I found myself contemplating whether the soon to be new half a roof for my little old house could wait another few months so that I could hang this diptych in my living room:
charcoal/pastel diptych 22″ x 60″
Reality won so as of 9:00 Saturday night this gem was still available at a very reasonable price.
I didn’t manage to get many decent photos as my camera blows in anything but perfect light conditions. So in lieu of posting a bunch of dark, blurry pictures, I’m going to point you all to the artist’s site where you can see his work in as full glory as pixels on a monitor Read more »
Agora Gallery - the proud sponsor of the Chelsea International Fine Art Competition, which offers contemporary artists the opportunity to show their original art at one the most acclaimed juried art shows in Chelsea, New York’s art galleries district.
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Tom Bennett
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