"NEW VIRIDIAN ARTISTS"
Elizabeth Featherstone Hoff + Stacey Clarfield Newman + David Dorsey + Darryl Moody + Kiyoshi Kawaguchi + Valerii Klymchuk
January 3 to January 28, 2012
Reception : January 5, 6-8 pm
Chelsea NY: Viridian Artists is pleased to present "NEW VIRIDIAN ARTISTS" an exhibition of outstanding art by six of the newest artists to join the gallery's ranks. The exhibit will continue from January 3 to January 28, 2012, at our new location at 548 West 28th Street, also accessible from 547 W 27th Street on the 6th floor. There will be an opening reception Thursday, January 5, 5-8PM. These 6 artists each have unique and fresh ways of looking at the world and translating their revelation onto paper, canvas, clay and whatever other materials they find necessary to elucidate and illuminate their interpretation of reality.
Elizabeth Featherstone Hoff works in multi media, sculpture, painting, (both oil and acrylic), printmaking, and occasionally, writing. She feels she is continually learning and for her, it is all about the journey and the road remains unending. The artist quotes Edvard Grieg, the composer, who said that, "Art is really the surplus of longing that cannot find expression in life or in other ways." This, for Hoff, is a succinct description of why she makes art.
A collagist and painter, Stacey Clarfield Newman has developed a unique method of recycling ephemera to create striking hand-painted papers. She then uses them as painterly “brushstrokes of paper” to produce lyrical collages containing abstracted “mindscapes” and whimsical social commentary. Most recently, Ms. Clarfield Newman spent two months living and working in Kolkata, India at the Udayan School, a welfare and rehabilitation school for children of leprosy patients.
In David Dorsey's paintings one sees objects as they really are. The artist has a dual purpose as he paints—to show objects, figures or scenes in a way that’s faithful to how they look in the world, but also with an emphasis on achieving certain color harmonies. Dorsey is an award-winning painter who has exhibited internationally. He works in a tradition that began with the Impressionists and continues in work by artists as diverse as Thiebaud, Dine, Porter, Fish, and Mattiasdottir, as well as many currently emerging painters.
Darryl Moody's digital images capture the visual remnants and torn fragments of found street posters that reveal current history worn by weather and random disfigurement. New Yorker magazine art critic Peter Schjeldahl once wrote: Moody's images are "visual paintings . . . photographically akin to the work of Aaron Siskind." The artist goes on to say "as the residue of life has continued to collect upon my creative vision, I have found the camera to be the most reliable tool in the revelatory process of meaning making. Revisiting urban settings to study public surfaces I focus on markings left behind by the ebb and flow of humanity."
Kiyoshi Kawaguchi's paintings of urban life synthesize with irony and humor the exuberance and rhythms of city life in paintings that are a perfect blend of his native Japan's love of Jazz improvisation and the classical sophistication of early modernist painters of the 30's. He returns to Viridian, showing here last in 1978, with paintings that are stronger and more enigmatically telling than before- the craziness of today's world.
Born in the Ukraine on the anniversary of the October Revolution, Valerii Klymchuk was the first in his family to earn a college degree and went on to earn a Masters in Systems Analysis. He is very ambitious and has decided to save the world with art, both a high and a noble calling. He says that his paintings are a result of subconscious transformations of thought and when he is painting, feels he can see beyond appearances of physical reality, a goal that all artists may seek unconsciously. His work was among those selected by Elizabeth Sussman for our 2010 Juried Competition.