Cafe Gallery: Chinese Brush Painting, Students of Jane Chang

The Art School at Old Church in Demarest, NJ is pleased to present an exhibition of student work in the Café Gallery, on view through May 9^th 2014. Chinese Brush Painting: Students of Jane Chang is a group exhibition of Chinese brush paintings. Participating students have one semester of experience while others have studied this art for six years or more.  

Barbara Landberg, Blue Abstract , 2014

In this class, students are taught every aspect of Chinese brush painting from the techniques of smooth brush strokes and delicate movements to the history of this thousand year old tradition. While beginners start with brushwork in flowers, birds, and other animals, intermediate and advanced students explore their craft with landscape and abstraction. Capturing both the imagery and color is an important part of Chinese brush painting; learning the spirit and rhythm of the subject matter as well as finding your Chi is equally important. Artist Gisela Zerykier has been a student of Ms. Chang’s for six years and says that learning how to use the inks with their gradations of color and intensities was an important skill to master.  Beginner Maryanne Nealon has not taken a painting class before and says she enjoyed learning how to use the various unique brushes.

Gisela Zerykier, Water Horses, 2013

The artists in this exhibition include Amy Dudash Robinson,

Marge Kirschenbaum, Barbara Landberg, Maryanne Nealon,

Barbara Potack, Robin Robinson, Toni Semar, 

Sam Visvikis, and Gisela Zerykier. 

Chinese Brush Painting: Students of Jane Chang

is on view through May 9^th, 2014 Stop by the Cafe Gallery

to check it out!

Narrative Strain, on view through April 23, 2014

This essay was recently posted in the Mikhail Zakin Gallery:

Artwork often tells a story. It can pluck a story from external reality, render homage to a tale that is commonly known, or even give life to an internal reality, as yet unknown to anyone save the artist. Works in this show celebrate narrative of all kinds, from the timelessness of moral struggle in the works of Henry Diebel III to the story of an object passing through flame in the work of abstract photographer Mike DiFeo. Even the quiet story of a street in Rome can unfold as witnessed by a patient observer in the work of Allison Remy Hall.

Aliza Augustine presents her chimerical photographs from the series “Is it Safe?”, where personal, historical and invented narratives collide. Behind the dollhouse vignettes of her photographs loom a foreboding backdrop of images, some found, some from family history, of those who survived or were murdered in the Holocaust. The unclear line is highlighted between scenes of socio-political commentary, personal history and events staged to deal with the confluence of the two.

Vesper Stamper is perhaps most literally a story teller, with original illustrations on view from her upcoming book. While part of a composite text-illustration work, the images include a story of a mute mother who introduces the world to her daughter through sound, touch, and movement. Part of the message is that information comes to us through many senses. The unconscious mind experiences the world in secret, awakening to mysterious insights that are known deep down.

These insights are shared through many avenues, as in the video works of Saya Woolfalk. Woolfalk describes a world of intuitive aesthetic choices, in which a journey takes place that leads to a point of personal and communal understanding. Such is the goal of her ongoing Institute of the Empathics project. This endeavor is undertaken on another scale by presenting a collective visual experience of work by multiple contemporary artists in the Mikhail Zakin Gallery.

Works in this show push and pull on the narrative limits of image making, telling a more subtle and nuanced tale than text alone can convey. I challenge you to look at the images and devise your own story before reading the accompanying texts.

-      Mary Gagler, Curator

April, 2014

Stories we Tell: A Visual Narrative

An exhibition of narrative art curated by Marilyn Deitchman is now on view at the 73 See Gallery in Montclair, NJ. The exhibition explores narrative as a vehicle for reflection on the wider world of human behavior and individual expression. Read the curator's essay below!

The exhibit is a must see, featuring several current and former members of the Art School at Old Church's creative community. Stay tuned for Artist Talks on April 13 & 20 at 3:00 PM.