The Small Pop Up Gallery Presents David T Miller!

David T Miller

The Small Pop Up Gallery is proud to present the work of Ambler, Pennsylvania artist David T Miller. The Small Pop Up Gallery featuring David’s work can be found at The Bookman, the coolest used bookstore in Eastern Canada. The Bookman is located at 177 Queen Street, Charlottetown PEI, Canada

David T Miller 4×5 inches on canvas

Artist Reflection

“My current work is not about anything. It is simply a call and response practice of placing marks and color on a surface. I essentially collaborate with myself. I begin a number of pieces and set them aside to dry. l pick one up and add some sort of embellishment and put it back down. I pick up another and do the same thing until I get to a point where I don’t feel compelled to add further embellishment. Eventually the whole group reaches a state of “completion” in my mind. I tend to view the groups as representing a month’s work of activity.”

 

David T Miller 4×5 inches on canvas

“I enjoy looking at the groupings after they have been made trying to learn more about myself, my process and my practice. I’m often surprised by the habits and characteristics I see. I never intended to make so many dots and don’t think of myself as painting dots when I’m doing them. Dots, stripes, triangles, circles, saw teeth and edges are not things I intended to use and they are not things I think about as I paint, but they have become integral to my current vocabulary. I recently noticed the Oaxacan wood carvings I have in my house that I take for granted and realized the apparent influence I had overlooked.”

 

David T Miller 4×5 inches on canvas

“The grid display is another accidental, but characteristic I’ve observed. That is how I arrange things that I am working on and that is how things are displayed on the gallery page of my website. In 2012 I participated in the All Together Now collaboration exhibit in Bushwick organized and curated by Julie Torres. I spread my work out on the floor of the gallery in the same grid relationship I had originally organized at home. Julie didn’t edit or change a thing. She wanted the same grid on the wall. At the time I wasn’t cognizant of what was going on in my own practice. Julie inadvertently helped me learn something about myself.

The same can be said about the collaboration idea. When I participated in the group collaboration process in Bushwick I realized my personal process was identical to that outlined by Julie for the group.”

David T Miller 4×5 inches on canvas

Other material relating to David T Miller.

Artist Blog: David T Miller’s Musing

The Small Pop Up Gallery Presents. Diane Englander!

The Small Pop Up Gallery. Diane Englander.

The Small Pop Up Gallery is proud to present the work of New York artist Diane Englander! The Small Pop Up Gallery featuring Diane’s work can be found at Beanz Espresso Bar at 38 University Ave, Charlottetown, P.E.I .

Diane Englander. Red on Buff. Mixed media on paper. 6×6 inches.

Diane Englander. Lines in Red. Mixed media on paper 6×6 inches.

A native New Yorker who works in NYC and Southampton, NY, Diane Englander had an earlier career including 17 years as a management consultant to local nonprofits concerned with poverty or disenfranchisement; work in NYC government; and several years as a lawyer at a large NYC law firm.

“I was brought up going to galleries and museums, a sometimes reluctant attendant to my parents’ passion for looking and for collecting. My own expressive energy must have simmered internally for years, occasionally emerging in photography, in quilt-making, in other tentative explorations, and certainly in providing opportunity and materials for my children to create. Not until those children were nearly grown did I come unequivocally to the need to make art myself.”

In late 2006 Diane began making collages that started her on her current path; in late 2007 she left her consulting job to focus on her artwork full-time. She has studied with Bruce Dorfman at the Art Students League in New York, and has had solo exhibits including those at the Hampden Gallery Incubator Project Space at U Mass Amherst in 2015, Cambridge Health Associates in Cambridge, MA in 2012, and at the Living Room Gallery at Saint Peter’s Church in Manhattan in 2010, as well as pieces in group exhibits in New York City and elsewhere in the United States. One of her drawings is included in The Visual Language of Drawing (McElhinney, J. ed., Sterling Publishing 2012). In 2013 she won the Allied Artists of America award at the Butler Institute of American Art.

Diane Englander. Orange on Red With Line. Mixed media on paper 6×6 inches.

Diane Englander. Almost Circle on Red. Mixed media on paper. 6×6 inches.

“My work searches for the place between discord and tranquility, for the spot with a charged harmony that energizes as it also provides refuge. That search means I have to attack the prettiness of the initial painted surface, avoid balance, court darkness or stridency, invest a piece with conflict. Most recently my efforts, which began with collaged surfaces only subtly alluding to three dimensions, have begun to move more firmly into space. Both with knife slashes to the surface and with more prominent attached layers or folds projecting forward, as well as with unambiguously three-dimensional materials, I am reaching into your space as another way to create movement and energy. As for the largely intuitive process, the material in front of me—papers, cloth, pieces of wood–influences my direction, as does inspiration from the world that we don’t call art: a wall, a landscape, a window shade transfused with light, a stretch of sand and shadow. (And of course echoes from other artists, Burri, Vicente, Tapies, Motherwell, Rauschenberg, medieval cloisonné, Cycladic figures, Vermeer, Manet, Breughel, Nicholson, Scott, Blow, and many, many more.)After the crude line or slash or ripping that militates against utter tranquility, the piece is done, occasionally the same day, sometimes weeks later, sometimes never (and then maybe its remnants become a new jumping off place) when there’s harmony despite friction, a calm energized by tension.” DE

Diane Englander. Orange With Circles. Mixed media on paper. 6×6 inches.

Diane Englander. Untitled. Mixed media on paper. 6×6 inches.

Other material relating to Diane Englander.

Artist website: dianeenglander.net/

Moma P.S.1 Studio visit: Diane Englander

UMassAmherst: Diane Englander-Making The Next Thing

Have You Met?: Diane Englander

Lisa Pressman Art Blog: Diane Englander

Art Orbiter Artists Curate: Diane Englander

For more information concerning The Small Pop Up Gallery contact Stephen B MacInnis at, sbmacinnis@eastlink.ca

 

Have you met…Eliot Markell?

Spin Cycle
Salvaged beach rope, tissue paper, gauze mesh. 36″x42″x2″ Installation for Best Case Scenario, Brooklyn Fire Proof, 2014

An introduction can be a wonderful thing. You can meet interesting people, and make new friends. You can be introduced to your new favorite foods, books, music, or artist. I’d like to introduce you to some of my favorite artists. Some of whom I’ve been familiar with for years, and others I’ve only recently been introduced to. The person I’d like to introduce is the artist Eliot Markell.

Whirligig
2014, oil paint, tissue paper, beeswax, on extruded plaster, lobster trap brackets, and salvaged beach rope.

ART EDUCATION:

1979-80 Empire State College, SUNY., BPS. fine arts.

1973-74 Gandy Brodie School of Fine Arts, Newfane, VT.

1971-73 Mark Hopkins College, Brattleboro, VT.

Red Grid
2014, oil paint and beeswax on extruded plaster, with driftwood frame. 11″x8.5″

Artist Statement

“What differentiates painting and sculpture from décor, and how is it decided which takes precedence?Perhaps that distracting dichotomy lies in the nature of visual cognition; what you see is what you get, or if I may be so presumptuous; at least what the salon provides for perceptual priorities.You are what you’re used to eating.More adventurous artistic endeavors may seem anathema to the essentially ornamental purpose of pampered decoration meant to embellish an otherwise dreary environment.But then again unencumbered mark making was good enough for the cavemen at Lascaux. (talk about site specific!)

That the purely pretty alone should suffice for art collecting in the modern cave does not add up in my mind. Like the cavemen, I make art that might not be matchy matchy with the sofa, but will wreak its own elegantly iconoclastic version of interior design.

I hope this doesn’t sound like unmitigated hubris or egotistical posturing. I’m just going on my own sense of historical precedence. My work has always been about my own limitations.

I’ve never been a virtuoso; just a grind-it-out, seat-of-my-pants kind of artist. I prefer the hands-on ethic of vigorous, yet nuanced craft that proposes an interpretative aesthetic.

With my work, what you see depends on how thoroughly you look. Recognition of merit in the unfamiliar requires patience and perseverance.

I’ve built my oeuvre based on decades of cumulative momentum. The more I’ve stuck with it the more accomplished I’ve become at enveloping my art in a substantive mixture embodying textured layers of sensuous psyche and physical pulsation.

Chroma and atmosphere saturate my painting, imbuing compositions with an expansive spatial perspective. Loose pigment is coupled with tightly drafted, curvilinear edifices lending a formal element to the picture plane.

This painterly philosophy encompasses my neo representational “Mainescape” plein air works on paper to rough-hewn “Beach Rope” sculptures who’s principle ingredients are salvaged lobstering gear and driftwood from the shores of downeast Maine.

These multi-hued tangles of knotted beach rope are cleaned, sorted and applied to driftwood in a congruent manner. The laborious process of wrapping, gluing and stapling satisfy a fundamental urge to physically assemble a combination of man-made and natural detritus. The variety of beach rope’s weathered palette, layered onto lengths of driftwood compliment my painted images chromatically, and refer to African and outsider sources. These sculptures suggest an implicit virility rooted in figurative association.

With stenciling I’ve found there’s an “automatic” quality to painting in or around a physical boundary such as tape. When the intricate web of tape is removed it reveals unexpectedly energetic trails of pigment criss-crossing the surface. Such a process-oriented approach instigates a lively dialogue with my freehand marks, and corresponds metaphorically to my fascination with the micro/macro aspects of quantum and cosmological poetry.

The landscape in my art manifests largely through my “Mainescape”, watercolor and oil pastel works on paper and panel. Done mostly in and around Acadia National Park in Maine, these pieces are immersed in the immediacy of atmospheric effect, the oceanic tableau, and rugged rocky coastline.

This intimacy with nature has invigorated and informed my studio oil paintings. Although the plein air works tend to be more traditionally representational, the paintings more muscular gestures distill the representation of nature into an elemental yet ethereal montage.

So ultimately what should a discriminating eye be focusing on?

I enjoy eye candy on the 4th of July as much as the next kid, but when it comes to an enduring investment I go for a more in-depth sense of pictorial integrity and authentic artistic identity.

And I think that it looks good on the wall.” EM

Not The Foggiest
2013 Oil on panel 15″x12″

Conjured Fog
2013 Oil on panel 19.75″x33″

Other material relating to Eliot Markell.

Artist website: eliotmarkell.com

White Elephant On Wheels: Eliot Markell

P.S.1 Studio Visit: Eliot Markell

Art In New York City: Eliot Markell

ArtSlant: Eliot Markell

If you liked this introduction please check out the PREVIOUS and NEXT.

Have you met…Bonny Leibowitz?

Bonny Leibowitz, Precious 2014 variable 10x18x9 wire, plaster, Tyvek, silk and acrylic, photo credit Harold Samples

An introduction can be a wonderful thing. You can meet interesting people, and make new friends. You can be introduced to your new favorite foods, books, music, or artist. I’d like to introduce you to some of my favorite artists. Some of whom I’ve been familiar with for years, and others I’ve only recently been introduced to. The person I’d like to introduce is the artist  Bonny Leibowitz.

Bonny Leibowitz, All Things Considered 2014 46×30 tyvek, plaster, encaustic wax monotype, acrylic, mulberrry and stonehenge paper, photo credit Hal Samples

Bonny Leibowitz has been an influential participant of the Dallas art community since the late ’80s when she moved to Dallas. The artist studied at Temple University’s Tyler College of Art in Philadelphia then worked in the gallery business, representing artists and organizing shows. Eventually, she began exhibiting her work in the region and throughout the southwest. Her one person shows include those in Dallas, Palm Springs, Chicago, Hawaii and Santa Fe, to name a few.

Her series; “Plight of the Pleasure Pods” was exhibited in 2013 at Cohn Drennan Contemporary, Dallas, TX as well as her body of work; “Symbiosis”, in the Blurr exhibition there in 2012 with a subsequent solo exhibition at the Museum of Art at Midwestern State University, Wichita Falls, TX.

Bonny has been recognized for her art internationally through Israel bonds, traveling to Israel in 2002 to participate in a group multi media event /exhibition there and has pieces included in “Arte Internationale”, September 2013 in Matera, Italy.

Bonny Leibowitz, Portal 2 2014 9×12 graphite and photography on yupo, photo credit Harold Samples

“My current body of work; “Suspended Beliefs” started, in part with a desire to create a variety of rich inviting surfaces. Lately, I’ve been drawn to beauty of extravagance; the Baroque and Rococo periods with their “other worldly” pinks, blues and golds

I’m interested in expounding upon some symbolic attributes of “heavenly-ness” by over glorifying the forms I create; embellishing with putti and gold gilding. I then juxtapose those elements with the presence decaying vessels and imagery which speaks more to earthly struggles.

I’m using a variety of materials including wire, plaster, tyvek, mulberry bark, vinyl, graphite, yupo, salvaged architectural pieces and acrylic along with photography; details from masterworks of the 17th century.

I like looking at the process of how we question what we grew up “knowing”, what we stay attached to and how we come to unravel the validity of long held beliefs, tweaking our stance on personal truth, purpose and legacy as we move thorough life.

I’m using these concepts to create glorious facades with a nod to vanity, history, ritual, survival and transformation.

Right now I’m getting ready for my exhibition at Art Cube Gallery in Laguna Beach, California. My studio feels like a light airy piece of heaven, it’s a great feeling and I imagine I’ll miss the environment when it ships out this November.” BL

Bonny Leibowitz, Attributes and Prayer 2014 40×40 variable tyvek, cotton and acrylic photo credit Harold Samples

Other material relating to Bonny Leibowitz.

Artist website: bonnyleibowitz.com

The Bonny Studio: Bonny Leibowitz

The Encaustic Center: Bonny Leibowitz

Lynette Haggard Art Blog: Bonny Leibowitz

Modern Dallas: Bonny Leibowitz

If you liked this introduction check out the PREVIOUS and NEXT.

Have you met…Fran Shalom?

Fran Shalom, Horseplay
2014
oil on wood
16 x 16″

An introduction can be a wonderful thing. You can meet interesting people, and make new friends. You can be introduced to your new favorite foods, books, music, or artist. I’d like to introduce you to some of my favorite artists. Some of whom I’ve been familiar with for years, and others I’ve only recently been introduced to. The person I’d like to introduce is the artist Fran Shalom.

Fran Shalom, Scuttlebutt
2014
oil on wood
18 x 18″

EDUCATION
Montclair State University, M.F.A. – Painting
New York Studio School
San Francisco Art Institute, M.F.A. – Photography
University of California at Berkeley, B.A.
Bard College

Fran Shalom, Untitled
2013
oil on wood
12 x 12″

“I am a modernist abstract painter with a pop sensibility. My works balance the formal with the playful, paring down shapes and ideas into their most basic forms. It is a search for clarity and humor, as is evidenced by the shapes and colors in my paintings: cartoony, bright, blobby. But, like life itself, there is an undercurrent of conflict beneath the whimsy, as reflected in the tension and interaction between the shapes. Ultimately, it is important that the viewer becomes involved with the paintings, tempting them to stay long enough with the images to connect to a narrative that is at once ambiguous yet taps into the specifics and subtleties of their own lives.” FS

Fran Shalom is represented by the John Davis Gallery in Hudson NY? She will be showing work there in October 2014.

Fran Shalom, Go-Between
2012
Oil on Wood
11 x 14″

Other material relating to Fran Shalom.

Artist website: franshalom.com

John Davis Gallery: Fran Shalom

Youtube: Fran Shalom

Lisa Pressman Art Blog: Fran Shalom

ArtSlant: Fran Shalom

Art Blog Art Blog: Fran Shalom

A/Art: Fran Shalom

Joanne Mattera Art Blog: Fran Shalom

Gallery Travels: Fran Shalom

If you liked this introduction check out the PREVIOUS and NEXT.