Listening
to Light and Color:
Water Works by Deborah Curtis and Sooky Maniquant
Artists'
Reception : Saturday, October 29, 2011, 2:00 to 4:00 PM
 The
New Haven Free Public Library Gallery
133 Elm Street (Lower Level) New Haven, CT 06510
Guest
Curator: Poet Richard Harteis
Sponsored by the William Meredith Foundation
Deborah Curtis: "Pathway to the Water - Harkness"
14” x 18” Pastel on Pastel board
The William Meredith
Foundation and the Azoth Gallery present a two-person exhibit
of artworks by Connecticut artist Deborah Curtis and French artist
Sooky Maniquant at the New Haven Public Library Gallery.
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Deborah
Curtis
Deborah
Curtis has combined her interests in science, technology and the
visual arts. She graduated from Northeastern University with a
Bachelor of Science in Fine Arts through a joint program at The
Art Institute of Boston. She was employed at Retina Associates
in Boston for more than eight years as an ophthalmic photographer
and associate media manager. "Being employed in medical and
defense media/photography has helped me create my fine art and
photographs. My Professional Medical Photography skills delegate
how I produce “art” to market."
"My
palette can be organic, using limited two/three primary/complimentary
color choices," writes Deborah. "I also explore the
primary hues and only blend its compliment for shadows and rendering
edges giving the art piece a dreamy like effect not normally found
in reality. In either depiction, I like to simplify my art to
its baseline and work outward.
Deborah Curtis: "Around the Misty Bend - Harkness" 32"
x 42" oil on linen canvas
"I love
using technology to capture what I find unusual and beautiful,
which expedites the exploratory process for my creative statements.
I enjoy nature as an infinite timeless array of light reflected
upon mass, air and liquid igniting emotion through ones mind,
body and spirit. Art to me is the sum expression of passion combining
all these things in harmony, a marriage between the study of life
and the media of technology. Most of her current works are in
series.
Since the
1980s, Deborah has exhibited her art work in Massachusetts, Rhode
Island, and Connecticut. She has painted en plein air, and has
often attracted media attention while rendering exteriors of Connecticut
resorts, inns and sunsets along the Connecticut and Rhode Island
shorelines. Deborah has taught a myriad of workshops: abstract,
figures, animal portraits in pastels and mixed media collage in
New London at Granite Street Gallery, Studio 33, and art classes
in Norwich at Art Works, which featured a retrospective of her
works in 2010. In 2009, she had a solo show of 18 portraits of
women. She also teaches in private homes/studios and is commissioned
for photography and art work.
Deborah Curtis: “Contiguous Wave” – Harkness 11”
x 14” Oil on linen canvas
Commentary
by Richard Harteis:
In a remarkable
series of dramatic monologs entitled HAZARD THE PAINTER, the poet
William Meredith traces the life of his "imaginary playmate,"
an artist saddled with all the accouterments of middle class life
in America: house, car, wife, in-laws, children, and cat. In one
poem, Hazard notes,
"The cat is taking notes against
his
own household. He watches.
Hazard
would like once to see
things
with the cat’s eyes, flat.
It seems
to me in Deborah Curtis’ paintings that she has mastered
the vision of Hazard’s cat. Like the canvases of Milton Avery,
they are stripped of all unnecessary detail, landscapes reduced
their purest essence, Platonic images if you wish, of ocean-ness,
of what it really means to walk the beach alone on a summer’s
day. While the work is clearly representational, it focuses on
color relations and is not overly concerned with creating the
illusion of depth as is most conventional painting. Like Avery
or Matisse, such stripping away takes courage for one living in
what is perhaps the country’s foremost bastion of landscape
painters. The Lyme tradition runs deep as a deer tick after gardening
in southeastern Connecticut. If you want photo realism or perfect
impressionist landscapes, this is the place to shop. Some may
find her work radical for being too abstract; some lovers of Abstract
Expressionism may find it too representational. What is clear
is that Curtis has developed her own unique voice which is always
the mark of a serious poet or artist. In another HAZARD poem,
the painter spends an afternoon skydiving and reflects:
The colors
of autumn
are becoming audible through the haze.
It does not matter that the great masters
could
see this without flight, while
dull
Hazard must be taken up and dropped.
He
see it.
Curtis sees
it too, and "hears" color like a master which is why
her work sings to us so beautifully.
For a painter,
I would image water would be one of the most difficult subjects
to capture, even more than light, or perhaps because of it. Light
captured in a drop of water, or an ice crystal, or a breaking
wave is as evanescent as a summer’s breeze. And natural light
is central to her painting, which is why Ms. Curtis works so often
en plein air. This harmony of light and color, particularly as
it applies to water and seascape marks her as one of the regions
finest new talents whose work we celebrate. If only Hazard and
William were here today to enjoy it with us.
Sooky
Maniquant
Sooky Maniquant
was born in Vietnam in 1934 and brought up in the South Pacific.
She studied in Paris, and traveled through the world, using every
occasion to deepen her knowledge of Océanian, European,
African, Asiatic, and most particularly of Japanese civilizations.
Very early, she makes the choice to live, more often as not, on
the Luberon, her “sacred mountain”, where she feels
nearer to the “vivid forces” of Nature.
Maniquant
first met William Meredith in Paris and Avignon when William was
invited to participate in the Avignon festival. In the piece "After
William Meredith," the Meredith poems are presented in both
his original English and a French translation, juxtaposing the
text with images rendered by Sooky Maniquant. "After William
Meredith" places artwork and poems side by side, allowing
the viewer to experience Meredith's work from two different perspectives:
Meredith's verses and Maniquant's striking visual interpretations:
In 2002: Exposition "round in water, magic Circles"
were variations on 20 poems of William Meredith and Richard Harteis
at the European Center of Poetry of Avignon. In 2006 at the Lyman
Allyn Museum in New London CT : "AFTER WILLIAM MEREDITH"
Spiral Forces were graphic connivances of Sooky Maniquant on poems
by W.Meredith and R.Harteis.
"It is the universe seized in its innermost transformation
which is revealed, but remains surprising, by static as these
chalk cliffs, boiling under the midday sun, terrorized by the
heat and silence, dully crackling on the limit of exploding, a
stilled furnace overflowing onto the whole space of canvas in
a thick wave…. World in distress, but held back by the artist’s
hand on the brim of emptiness…Solidified by the appearance,
sealed into its vibrations, calm and taut as a mummified monster
of a dormant weapon.” ~Paul-Louis Rossi
Sooky Maniquant "Air Heroes" 24" x 36" silkscreen
print on paper
“Sooky
Maniquant’s main preoccupation is to find in the mysterious
existence of each one’s interior life (thing or being), and
to translate this magic by her work, therefore suggesting, particularly
for the works of 1963-1969, incomparable energy of volcanoes,
beyond the “canvas” of the painted artwork. But reality
complicates itself with the parallax “time-space” thus
“perpetual movement” of which the artist will approach
the research of expression more precisely in her collages from
1969. 1974, first tapestry: this material, treated in a very personal
way, with its contours conceived in the mass of the work, enables
her to pursue further in her researches: the continuity of the
material, the heat and sphere of the surface, the vibrations of
colours where the blacks and whites quiver, continue to express
anxiety faced with the mystery of life. ~Henry Galy-Carles
Sooky Maniquant "In the Middle of a Long Friendship"
24" x 36" silkscreen print on paper
"But,"
Richard Harteis writes, "the mystery of life is also the
one of death, of suffering, of horror, and for Sooky is an obsession.
As from 1994 she often combines this with poetry, in opposition
to wars. She puts together stucco, which proclaims her despair,
in long kit form installations. In 2001, she returned to photography
as a means of expression."
Sooky Maniquant
"Tiger at the Water" 24" x 36" silkscreen
print on paper
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E xhibition: October 14 - November 30, 2011
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CLICK
HERE FOR DIRECTIONS
Gallery Hours:
Monday: 12 - 8 pm
Tuesday - Thursday: 10 am - 8 pm
Friday: 10 - 5 pm
Saturday: 10 am - 5 pm
Sunday: closed
For more
information, please contact:
Gallery Curator: Johnes Ruta (203) 387-4933 azothgallery@comcast.net
http://azothgallery.com/gallery.htm
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