New Work, New Directions
July 27 - December 1, 2022
Sometimes we go on search of the new. Other times, the new surprises us. We often connect what is new with something fresh and novel, a discovery or invention-- maybe of significance, an insight, a step forward in a process, perhaps a revelation to us. Many welcome the new.
Although the new is generally valued, on occasions we wonder if newness is inherently a good thing. For artists, new work means a chance to explore and recreate, a way to reinvent the saga of the art being pursued. For collectors and art critics, new work reveals what moves or preoccupies artists who are known, perhaps admired. By all accounts, new work brings about different perspectives on artists and their works.
This online exhibition presents 19 artists. It brings together those who have shown at Martinez Gallery and some first-timers. This group comes from around the nation, giving us a glimpse of what is new for them. Take this venture to the new.
Introduction by Laudelina Martinez, Curator
Hannah Davis, Curatorial Assistant
Mary Wheeler
I decided after sitting so long through Covid to work on some very dramatic pieces with some social comments. I also wanted to experiment with shapes and empty space. This is some of my new work.
"The principles of true art is not to portray…..but to evoke"
-Jerzy Kosinski
Jill Skupin Burkholder
My new direction combines cold wax medium and oil painting with photography, transcending the literal image and revealing a contemporary impressionism rich with color and emotion.
Jill Skupin Burkholder
Fruit Vendor, Havana, 2020
16" x 13," Unframed, Matted
Pigmented Ink Photography, Cold Wax and Oil on Arches Oil Paper
$900
Jill Skupin Burkholder
Woman with Dog, Cuba, 2020
16" x 13," Unframed, Matted
Pigmented Ink Photography, Cold Wax and Oil on Arches Oil Paper
$900
Conard Holton
My current work explores memory as evoked through the illusion of space in a landscape painting. A painting could be well advanced before I discover the sometimes-buried memory that is inspiring me.
The welcome challenge is then to probe deeper into the space with shapes and values, and the lush colors of oil paint.
"We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory."
From Nostos, by Louise Glück
Anne Ackerson
With landscape as my starting point, I am pursuing new directions in abstraction and mark-making to capture the drama and energy of the environment.
Anne Ackerson
Whispers and Echoes, 2022
12" x 18," Unframed
Acrylic/Mixed Media on Gessoed Watercolor Paper
$400
Anne Ackerson
Needed Oxygen, 2022
18" x 24," Unframed
Acrylic/Mixed Media on Gessoed Watercolor Paper
$500
Melvin Toledo
Most of the work I did early in my career as an artist were still life paintings, a subject that was
great for developing my craft. In the last few years, I have changed my focus to portraiture and more
recently to work that is strongly related to my heritage as a Latino and as an immigrant in the
United States.
Tina Lincer
Girl with A Big Skirt brings together my use of floral motifs and a tilt toward abstraction within the context of portraiture. In keeping with my continued experimentation with color, the palette is moody yet harmonious. Black Vase with Lemons represents a turn toward simplicity through a balanced composition of broad color and pared down form. The interplay between the vessels, dark backgrounds, and little cups of fruit arranged carefully on playful yellow tablecloth brings quiet energy to the pictorial space.
Jacqueline Watsky
After using recycled and found objects for some time, I am working on incorporating man-made objects into my pieces, so they take on a more organic feel and flow, becoming a natural part of the whole piece.
Jacqueline Watsky
My Pod, 2021
18" x 14" x 5," Unframed
Acrylic paint, Cardboard packing material, and Linen canvas
$300
Jacqueline Watsky
Soaring, 2021
21" x 17," Framed
Acrylic paint, Torn canvas cut paper, Push pins, Glass beads, and Cardboard
$350
Puente Puente
I am a surrealistic painter educated in Mexico City in the '60s, now residing in Brownsville, Texas. My personal studio is also used as a venue to display exhibitions from fellow art teachers and students of the Rio Grande Valley.
After the pandemic isolation, we experienced a depressed art market in the region. I am working on small art pieces to reactivate collecting.
Gary Shankman
Every morning, I trooped out with my French easel, canvas, and paints. As long as the day was sunny, I would work for at least 3 hours. When I began this task, little did I know the amount of time I would spend on this landscape. The painting took me almost 3 months to complete. The painting, Morning Shadows, proved successful. As I investigate the world around me, I plan to pursue this new direction and hope to achieve many more strong paintings.
Grace Tatara
I have an abstract eye that I use with various mediums. I focused on painting through college and a few years after; then, metal and rust became inspirations. I used inks and chemicals over the sheet metal. The remnants of rust I found became sculptures, pieced together in new ways other than their original purpose. Most recently, I have turned to photography. Still inspired by rust, decayed objects in their new settings are what I capture.
Virginia Bryant
I use musical structures as references while painting. There are infinite ways to do this, and now I am pushing to combine elements as disparate as possible to heighten elements of surprise and heighten the life of the paintings while still focused on the themes of balance & wholeness.
Luis Arias
Es un proceso de etapas, se van preparando las bases de colores; pintura blanca fondo (base paint) acrilicosesmaltes (son como liquid pour tint) toques de guesso (aditivo) y tirada final.
Mira Hnatyshyn
These small-scale works are part of a room size installation exhibition titled Every Girl Wants to be Queen. Within these small works, I created abstract images of women's faces with symbols referencing the 4 suit marks in a deck of cards. Using glitter on my paintings of these women's faces, I hope to convey a meaning of a shiny treasure, or a symbol of greed or conflict and war. Does every girl want to be queen and what kind of queen would she be?
Gay Malin
I continue in my pursuit to understand the world, how we perceive reality and our existence.
Altin Stoja
Bob Blackmon
My work has taken on three "new" directions. I have experimented with being a bit more "loose." I am also doing more Irish landscapes, having been influenced by the seven trips we've made to that wonderful land. Finally, I'm doing sunsets, several of which are of Ireland. Most of my sunsets are acrylics, also a new adventure for me.
Deborah Bayly
During COVID, being able to paint Plein Air, or on site outdoors was a practice that sustained me. In the last few months it seems the panic of the whole pandemic is lifting and I feel a certain life force and energy returning to my practice of painting on canvas. The brushwork is more energetic and free and the images are rendered in a more experimental behavior, taking more risks, saying more about each image.
Jeanne Finley
When the pandemic hit I had to give up street photography, because who wants to see faces covered by masks? I had lost my favorite subject: people. There were hints of this old/new direction in some of that earlier work, but now I’ve found a way of seeing and rendering that is a viable creative route from past to present to future: I took what I’d left behind, and what I loved, and pulled it into now. Because right now, the here and now, is all there is, all we have.
Kay Reese
Since discovering that I am the great, great-granddaughter of a formerly enslaved Black woman, freed in Lincoln’s Great Emancipation, I feel duty bound to chronicle the lives of Black men and women on our life’s journey.
My new works use an abstract narrative to tell this journey because for me it is personally more expressive, while offering others the possibility for identification viscerally and emotionally.
Kay Reese
Our Souls were Stolen..., 2021 (Witness to Captivity Series)
39" x 52," Unframed
Photo-Based Digital Collage Printed with Archival Ink on Canvas
$4,050 Limited Edition of 4
Kay Reese
The Planter's Apron..., 2022 (50Million Trees Series: Tribute to Wangari Maathai)
36" x 54," Unframed
Photo-Based Digital Collage Printed with Archival Ink on Lustre Photo Paper
$550/print
Mary Wheeler is an artist who works in a variety of mediums, such as metals, fine stones, photography, and painting. She lives in upstate New York where she has been a gallerist with a record of exhibitions. Wheeler has taught art and jewelry design. She designs and creates jewelry of outstanding quality.
Jill Skupin Burkholder is a photographer/artist whose work includes handcrafted techniques such as bromoil printing, an alternative photography process using brushes and lithography ink to create an image, and encaustic techniques using beeswax and resin.
Conard Holton grew up in rural Pennsylvania which encouraged his attachment to the outdoors. Painting in his studio or plein air has allowed his work to represent the fleeting beauty of nature. The Adirondacks in New York is often the subject of his work.
Anne Ackerson is a re-emerging artist, having returned to painting in January 2021 after decades of hiatus. Ackerson is exploring her relationship to the natural world – a world in peril due to climate change and one that will be forever changed before our lifetime is over.
Melvin Toledo, encouraged by family members, left his small hometown of Ciudad Antigua in northern Nicaragua to attend the School of Fine Arts in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Lately, he has shifted his attention to portrait painting, a subject that he have always found very fascinating. Toledo lives in Tucker, GA.
Tina Lincer, a New York City native, is an oil painter, collage artist and writer. An unabashed colorist with a love of impasto and sgrafitto, she shows in galleries throughout Upstate New York, where she lives. Many of her landscapes are inspired by travels in New England and Canada.
Jacqueline Watsky has formally studied and explored a variety of media from painting to print making and sculpture, as well as graphic and interior design. She is a member of The Firehouse Artists and The Schenectady Arts Society and has shown in both group and solo shows in the region.
Puente Puente is an artist and teacher who lives and has a studio in Brownsville, TX. Born in Mexico City, she adopted the name Puente Puente. She studied at Instituto Nacional de Bella Artes’ schools, Antigua Academia, and attended workshops with Mexican master artists Tamayo and Cuevas. Puente’s work is featured in collections globally, such as in Germany, Mexico, Canada, Bangladesh, and all over the United States.
Gary Shankman is a landscape and still life painter who has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, and has an award winning record. Most summers he teaches at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. He has held the rank of full professor in painting at the Sage Colleges, New York, where he has taught since 1986. Shankman earned an MFA at American University; he maintains a studio in Albany, NY.
Grace Tatara is a visual emerging artist in the Capital Region using paints, assemblage, and metal as preferred media. She has exhibited in a number of galleries for several years. Tatara was top of her class when she graduated with a baccalaureate degree from the Sage Colleges. She lives and works in Upstate New York.
Virginia Bryant is a lyric abstract artist painting in Troy, New York. She has foundational experiences as a performer, designer and curator. She has shown her paintings in over sixty exhibits. Her most recent award is a second painting grant from the Haven Foundation.
Luis Arias is an architect who graduated from Tulane University. He currently lives in Puerto Rico and teaches at MAPR Museo Arte Santuce and Instituto Cultura y Arte Viejo San Juan.
Mira Hnatyshyn is a full time artist living and working in San Antonio, Texas. Mira’s work consists of painting, collage, sculpture, digital and installation art. Her work reflects a passion for exploring patterns in socio-cultural development that define the female condition in contemporary, historical times and question the constraints of gender roles.
Gay Malin continues to show her work in many solo, group and invitational exhibition. She believes that art is a form of investigation and that it should challenge ideas and preconceptions.
Altin Stoja finds inspiration in nature and its rich color, in the beauty of the waters, the banks of rivers, lakes, and near the seas and oceans. The natural reflections, the ripples of the surrounding waters, where the colors, the nuances and the details flare in harmony, convey to the admirers the exquisite taste of his art.
Bob Blackmon has been painting since 1973, but retirement as a university dean has allowed him to work full time on painting, teaching art, and exhibiting. Bob’s landscapes and still lifes have been shown in galleries throughout the country. His work is represented by two Irish galleries, one in County Waterford, and the other in County Kerry; he lives and has a studio in Troy, NY.
Deborah Bayly is an artist who lives and works in upstate New York. She teaches drawing and painting privately and at the Arts Center of the Capital Region.
Jeanne Finley is a photographer and writer. She has exhibited her photographs in many galleries and venues in the Capital District and beyond since 2015.
Kay Reese is a multi-disciplinary, award-winning visual artist and photographer. A graduate of the College of New Rochelle, she lives and works in New Jersey.
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