Gallery Artists Exhibit | MassoniArt
This Fall we have been featuring the work of Marcy Dunn Ramsey and Marc Castelli in their annual one-person exhibitions. But our other gallery artists have been actively creating new work for our 2021 schedule. We thought we would give you a sneak-peek of the work of a few of our favorites and encourage you to give yourselves the gift of art for the holidays. All work featured in these virtual presentations will be available in the gallery for private preview and ready for you to take home.
The first in our series is artist Kathryn O’Grady. Kathryn joined the gallery last year and immediately sold out all of her oil paintings. I was not surprised. There is a magic to her work that is both sacred and mysterious.
Although her paintings are inspired by the landscape of rural Maryland, they are transportive. For me they find a home in the oft used term – Liminal Space. When I was researching the term last year, I found this definition most helpful.
“A liminal space is the time between the ‘what was’ and the ‘next.’
It is a place of transition, a season of waiting, and not knowing.”
The Gallery will be closing our public exhibition hours on December 13th.
Private arrangements for purchase and retrieval may be scheduled by contacting Carla directly. Please email info@MASSONIART.com or call Carla Massoni at 410-778-7330 or text 410-708-4512 to schedule.
We look forward to seeing you in 2021!
All artwork available through MassoniArt online shop – click here to go to the shop.
Exhibit By Artist
Click on image to enlarge.
Kathryn O’Grady
30” x 30”, oil on canvas
These skinny saplings grew up on land that was clear cut for a subdivision that never happened, just by Beverly Beach where I like to take my dog. I believe they have been marked to be thinned and cut back from the road, but they have been tagged for some time and not cut down. I love the way the fuchsia ribbons look wiggling in the breeze. Picked out from the multitude to disappear.
30” x 30”, oil on canvas
The County plunked one of their reforestation saplings down right in a cornfield. What are they thinking? I loved the light catching in the last few leaves on the tree and the few valiant remnants of the corn crop reaching straight up. All against the formidable wall of woods that had been there for many years. Funny, fragile things.
30” x 30”, oil on canvas
Anne Arundel County has been planting all sorts of saplings along roads as part of a reforestation project. The results are beautiful and strange. There is an odd interleaving of time frames, scale, and purpose. I love the parallel lines in crops, and the way they have to bend to fit into quirks of the land they are planted on. I think the shining tops of corn plants are gorgeous.
30” x 30”, oil on canvas
Many of the road names near where I live describe the swampy nature of the place. I think it’s so interesting what people do to the wild – the smooth blue road, the tidy crop of hay, and now the row of hopeful saplings with their hand sized colorful leaves. Tied to their places by funny sticks and strings. The darker woods watching.
30” x 30”, oil on canvas
Light cutting into thin woods near Beverly Beach. Wind knocked down some of the saplings. The crossing seems like writing and I think about it being a spoken word, like a human mark but it happened by itself. I’ve always loved straight lines mixed up with twisty, tangly, live things.
Mailbox
30” x 30”, oil on canvas
Not so much about the mailbox as the almost gone house behind it. The road is clean and clear but the tangle of life is eating what’s left of the building Sleeping Beauty style. It is late in the evening, almost dark. I am interested in the way places remain when the people they were important to move on.
Kenneth Schiano
The Birds of Paradise series began after watching numerous videos depicting the flamboyant courtship dances of the male of this species, how the 3 primary (visual) elements of the dance, color, movement and shape, synthesize into a provocative form. Are there avenues in creating a work of art where, as in these courtship dances, minimal effort achieves maximal effect?
This series is, in part, an exploration of that. I set a minimal structure—4 square format, one 3” brush, both pigment and paper are allowed an equal voice to mine in the creation of texture, figuration and light, the paper responding to its wetting and the pigment dispersion, depending on its viscosity, responding to the paper’s movements.
It’s a delicate balancing act between instinct and fortuitousness.
Tell all the truth but tell it slant *
I’ve been studying Cezanne’s landscapes for many years. In many ways his landscapes always seem fresh, particularly those of Mont Sainte-Victoire, which he painted over 130 times. To say he was obsessed would be an understatement, yet I am indebted. I see in his landscapes the extraordinary forces of nature and of geologic time, where his treatment of sky is as solid and opaque as the trees and rocks beneath it. My Nuovi Paesaggi series is in response to his perceptions. There is in Cezanne’s landscapes an intimation that all the elements—rocks, trees, sky, even the random traces of human activity–have been placed in a blender, then troweled back up in a scene that is primarily about color and the viscosity of paint. And one cannot escape the urgency of his attempts to describe a “sense of place” that is as unsettled as it appears immutable.
I don’t wish to memorialize, in paint, where I am. Thus the Nuovi Paesaggi are an attempt to compress the shifting landscape and its basic elements into a coherent form without relying on traditional models.
*Emily Dickinson
Deborah T. Colter
Katherine Cox
Elizabeth DaCosta Ahern
Takashi Ichihara
Michael Kahn
Catherine Kernan
Shelley Robzen
James Tatum
Additional work by Grace Mitchell, Deborah Weiss & Zemma Mastin White
Acknowledgements
Justinian Dispenza – Andover Media
Gallery Hours
The Gallery will be closing our public exhibition hours on December 13th.
Private arrangements for purchase and retrieval may be scheduled by contacting Carla directly. Please email info@MASSONIART.com or call Carla Massoni at 410-778-7330 or text 410-708-4512 to schedule.
We look forward to seeing you in 2021!
All artwork available through MassoniArt online shop – click here to go to the shop.