Race, oil on canvas, 18 x 26 inches, copyright ©1998

It is with great pleasure that I announce the launch of  ”Sue Perry – Paintings”, the new website of Northwest Figurative Artists’ Alliance member Sue Perry. Sue has been painting for several decades, and has been quite prolific. Her painting subjects include street scenes from India, Seattle, New York, Paris and elsewhere. They are usually teeming with people engaged in everyday behaviors, like sipping coffee, playing bocce ball, working, bicycling, fretting on the subway, strolling on the Canal St. Martin, riding in a taxi, etc. They are also full of metaphysical riddles, visual puns and games, gaping holes in the space-time continuum and sudden spiritual transformations, because hey… that’s part of life too.

I’ve known Sue and her husband John Perry for nearly 20 years. I first met Sue as a student, when I was teaching at what is now The Gage Academy. She continued to study with me privately, after I had left The Gage. I have watched over the years as her dogged persistence and obsessive self-interrogation have nurtured this enormous body of work into existence. I was pleased when she asked me to design her website, as it would afford me an opportunity to bring the work to the wider public that it deserves.

There are many fresh ideas here, and I daresay that the casual observer will not be able to take it all in with just one visit. Also, Sue is a very articulate and thoughtful writer. Her homepage/blog’s inaugural post, RETRO/proSPECTIVE: TWENTY SOME YEARS PAINTING IN SEATTLE will provide you a clear statement of what motivates her as a painter and as a person. I recommend that you read it.

The launch of “Sue Perry – Paintings” was timed, at Sue’s insistence, to coincide with May 1st International Labor Day. Her website is a testament to and a celebration of her own labor of love. “Sue Perry – Paintings” can be seen at the following url: http://www.sueperry-paintings.com/ .

Canal Graffiti, oil on canvas, 30 x 32 inches, copyright ©2009

Oregon Jewish Museum
January 19 – May 20, 2012

Henk Pander, Haarlem Transport, watercolor, 40 x 60 inches, copyright ©2001

In Transport, artists Henk Pander and Esther Podemski use World War II as the backdrop to explore the remembered realities of wartime. Dutch-born Pander’s work delves into the world of his difficult and dangerous childhood. Podemski grew up in Portland listening to her parents’ tales of surviving ghettos, concentration camps, and a daring post-war escape. Both artists root their connection to the past in childhood memories and family connections. Pander and Podemski explore complex relationships–between time and memory and truth and the subjectivity of the mind–with intellectual rigor and brilliant rendering.

About the artists:

Henk Pander was born in 1937 in the Netherlands. His father was an artist who specialized in Bible illustrations. His childhood was deeply marked by the experience of growing up during the German occupation of the Netherlands. Dramatic memories of his family’s fear, deprivation, and the violence around them became the source for his highly personal style of history painting. Pander relocated to Portland in 1965 where his sense of dislocation gave his works their own psychic gravity.

Esther Podemski was born in Poland in 1946. Her father Max, and mother, Anna, survived the Lodz Ghetto and several concentration camps through the war. Max, with his wife and two small children, left Poland, eventually landing in a displaced persons camp before they made their way to America.  Podemski produced and directed the acclaimed documentary House of the World about the Holocaust’s aftermath in Poland. The film screened internationally.  Podemski is also a painter and recipient of a painting fellowship from the New York State Council on the Arts.

TRANSPORT: Works by Henk Pander & Esther Podemski

January 19 – May 20, 2012
Opening Reception: Wednesday, January 18, 2012    5:30-7:30pm

(text reprinted from Oregon Jewish Museum website)

Jeremy Mangan, Kurt Solmssen, Cynthia Krieble and Jim Phalen at Linda Hodges

The Linda Hodges Gallery presents a group exhibition of recent work by four gallery artists, all from Washington: Cynthia Krieble, Jeremy Mangan, Jim Phalen, and Kurt Solmssen. All four work from nature and carve out their own distinctive sense of place.

Calligraphic wildflowers dot the dry, rugged terrain of Central Washington’s shrub-steppe and the eastern slopes of the Cascades in Cynthia Krieble’s paintings. Krieble is a recently retired professor of painting from Central Washington University.

Jeremy Mangan, whose work can also be seen in the Tacoma Art Museum’s current Biennial, paints the unexpected within traditional Northwest landscapes.

Jim Phalen carefully observes ordinary things; a peeled orange, a Zip-Lock bag, a butterfly, but transforms them into something extraordinary.

Influenced by Fairfield Porter, Edward Hopper, and James Abbot McNeill Whistler, Kurt Solmssen’s painterly views of sunlit wood-framed houses and outdoor scenes in the Northwest hark back to lazy summer mornings.

LINDA HODGES GALLERY
316 FIRST AVENUE SOUTH SEATTLE, WA 98104 (206) 624-3034
Spring Group Show
April 5 – April 28, 2012

Reception for the Artists: Thursday, April 5, 6-8 pm

Night City, 1985-87

It is with great sadness that I write this tribute to my friend, the late Paul Havas. Paul was one of those painters that early returned to the landscape for inspiration, against the prevailing  Abstract Expressionist aesthetic that dominated the cultural scene in the late 50s and early 60s in the United States. Although he made the Pacific Northwest his home, and the wet, salty landscapes of  the area his principal subject, he never forgot the strong structural underpinnings of abstraction that he absorbed during his formative years. It is this adherence to structural rigor, and his refined poetic sensibility, that make his paintings such a unique contribution to the art of the region. Paul was also one of the founding members of the Northwest Figurative Artists’ Alliance.

I first encountered Paul’s work, long before I had met him, at an exhibition entitled “Night City”, at Woodside / Braseth Gallery in 1987. It was a strong show, with starkly balanced compositions of vivid halogen and neon colors amidst deep ultramarine. I still love all of these paintings, which can be seen at his website, http://www.paulhavas.com/, in the ‘earlier work’ section. (more…)

Tom Hoffmann: New Work

Tom Hoffmann: New Work is at Fountainhead Gallery from November 3 through November 20, with an opening reception being held on Saturday, November 5th from 5-7 pm. Gallery hours are Thursday – Friday 11-6, Saturday and Sunday 12-5. Fountainhead Gallery is located at 625 W. McGraw St., Seattle WA 98119.

Tom Hoffmann: New Work

Keven Furiya, South Seattle, 11 x 14 inches, copyright ©2011

Keven Furiya will have work in a group exhibition entitled “Collective Reflections: Contemporary Asian Art” at C Art Gallery,  855 Hiawatha Place South, Seattle, WA  98144 (one block east of Rainier Ave S. at Dearborn,) from August 4 – August 14. An opening reception will be held on Friday, August 5, from 5:30 PM to 8 PM. Gallery hours are Sunday 12 – 5 and Wednesday 10 – 6, or call for an appointment. Gallery phone: 206.322.9374.

Fruits of the Farm Exhibit: A Juried Show of Regional Art & Jan Cook Mack

Fruits of the Farm, A Juried Show of Regional Art & Jan Cook Mack, will be up from August 5 – August 27. Hours are 10-5 Monday-Friday, 10-4 Saturday, and 12-4 Sunday May-December. An opening reception will be held from 5 PM to 7:30 pm. The Clymer Museum of Art is located at 416 North Pearl Street, Ellensburg, WA 98926, in historic downtown Ellensburg. Jan Cook Mack is a founding member of the Northwest Figurative Artists’ Alliance.

Lucian Freud, Self Portrait

Lucian Freud, one of the true giants of Contemporary Figurative painting, has passed away after a brief illness. He was born in Berlin to Ernst L. Freud, Sigmund Freud’s youngest son, and timber heiress Lucie Brasch. The Freud’s moved to London in 1933, after Hitler’s rise to power. More detail can be found about his life in the New York Times obituary, and his Wikipedia entry. (more…)

Claudio Bravo, drawing.

Chilean-born Realist painter Claudio Bravo has died from two massive heart attacks at his home in Taroudant, Morocco. Bravo was largely self-taught, and began his career painting portraits in his native Chile. He enjoyed great success, and was able to pick and choose from the many commissions that he was offered. He worked exclusively from life, and achieved a measure of contemporary fame in the New York of the 1970s with a series of paintings of wrapped packages, bound in twine and colored papers, in the manner of John Peto and other American trompe l’oil masters. An excellent representative collection of his work can be found here, and his obituary from Daily Art News can be found here. Many in the Northwest will remember a small exhibition of Claudio Bravo’s work from the Forty-Eighth Carnegie International Exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum in the early 1980s. Wikipedia link is here.

An exhibition and a coincident new book by David F. Martin, of Martin – Zambito Gallery, mark the career of Northwest artist Elizabeth Aline Colborne (1885 – 1948.)  Best known for her woodcuts that are reminiscent of Japanese ukiyo-e prints, and more specifically the heightened realism of shin hanga, Ms. Colborne divided her time between Bellingham, WA and New York. She studied with Rockwell Kent, Robert Henri and Allen Lewis. Her work flourished in the 1920s and 30s. She also worked in graphite, colored pencil and gouache.

The exhibition will be held at the Whatcom Museum, in the Lightcatcher 1st and 2nd floor galleries, from June 17 through September 25, 2011. Museum hours are Tuesday through Sunday, noon to 5pm. Lightcatcher is located at 250 Flora Street, Bellingham, WA 98225. We are planning a more thorough review of this exhibition and the book that accompanies it in the near future.

David F. Martin is an independent art historian, an art dealer, and one of the foremost authorities on the regional art of the period when Colborne was working.