LIGHT OF DAY
The Language of Landscape: Group Show plus Video Talk with Karen Wilkin

Video Talk with curator Karen Wilkin, taped on March 14, 2022

Show Dates: MARCH 4-APRIL 1, 2022

Westbeth Gallery, 55 Bethune St,
New York NY 10014

Light of Day: The Language of Landscape is an exhibition of twelve contemporary artists exploring the possibilities of landscape painting today.

Curated by the distinguished writer and curator Karen Wilkin, Light of Day originated in brainstorming sessions among several NYC-based painters in 2017.

ARTISTS
Lois Dodd, Albert Kresch and Stanley Lewis. Light of Day artists include Temma Bell, William Christine, Diane Drescher, Howard Gladstone, John Goodrich, Elizabeth Higgins, Elizabeth O’Reilly, Tony Serio and Kamilla Talbot.

The Light of Day artists seek to re-engage our visual environment and the contradictory forces that have historically animated painting: the vital gestures of the observed world, and the innate energies of lines on a surface and colors on a palette.

The twelve artists have divergent backgrounds and pursue various styles, from brushy expressionism to resolute, geometric realism. But they share the goal of confirming how, even in the twenty-first century, landscape painting remains vital, just as long as land can be made to press up towards sky—and trees to rise, and clouds to loom— with the eloquent powers unique to painting. The challenges daunt, but the love of nature compels, and traditions of painting inspire.

ARTISTS ‘BIOS

Temma Bell
Temma Bell (born 1945) is a painter who paints her surroundings both interior and exterior. Bell studied at Boston University, Indiana University and received B.F.A from the Philadelphia College of Art. Bell is a Native New Yorker who has also lived in Iceland and France. She currently lives on a farm in Delhi, NY with her husband and the youngest of her four daughters. She travels frequently to Manhattan and Iceland to paint and exhibit.

http://www.temmabell.com/

William Christine
William Christine received his master of fine arts degree from Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Christine has been an exhibiting painter for over 30 years. In 2003 he had a solo exhibition of his Grand Canyon paintings at the Allentown Art Museum. He has had 3 solo exhibitions at Prince Street Gallery, New York City. Currently he is Artist in Residence at the Reibman Hall Children’s Center, Northampton Community College, where he supports the implementation of the Center’s Arts-based curriculum.

http://william-christine.squarespace.com/

Lois Dodd
Lois Dodd was born in Montclair, New Jersey in 1927. From 1945-1948 she attended The Cooper Union in New York. In 1952 she was one of five artists to establish the Tanager Gallery, where she exhibited until 1962. From 1971 to 1992, Dodd taught at Brooklyn College, and has, since 1980, served on the Board of Governors of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She is an elected member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and National Academy of Design.

In 2012 – 2013 the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art organized a traveling retrospective of Dodd’s paintings. The exhibition was accompanied by the book Catching the Light (Barbara O’Brien, lead author). This year Lund Humphries published a monograph (Faye Hirsh, author) titled Lois Dodd, which launches the British publisher’s “Contemporary Artists Series” and is available from the gallery.

https://www.alexandregallery.com/lois-dodd

Diane Drescher
Born in Wisconsin, Diane Drescher is a New York City-based artist who finds inspiration in the parks of Northern Manhattan, and in the diverse landscapes of Cape Cod, Florida, and New Mexico. Austere and direct in composition, her paintings rely on the expressive power of color and vigorous brush work.

Drescher was a member of Bowery Gallery 2009-2019. During that time she mounted two solo shows, a two-person show, and participated in several group shows. Additionally, her work has been exhibited at the Manhattan Borough President’s Office, Westbeth Gallery, Space for Public Art- BID, Green Door Gallery in Brooklyn, Columbia University, Woodstock Artists Association & Museum, Long Island Museum, Edward Hopper House, Garner Arts Center, Boricua College, and NOMAA Gallery. Her painting, “The Bride Wore Black” was featured as an MTA subway poster (2017-2019). Her work is in many private collections. She studied at the Art Students League, the National Academy of Fine Art, School of the Art Institute in Chicago, and earned a B.S. from the University of Wisconsin.

https://dianedrescher.com/

Howard Gladstone
“As a visual artist, I negotiate the nominal and phenomenal: what I can name and what I cannot name.”
Howard Gladstone is a painter, sculptor, and filmmaker who was born, lives and works in New York City. He was selected for fellowships by the Illinois Arts Council, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Newington-Cropsey Foundation and the Abbey Mural Workshop. He received an MA from Governors State University; BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design; Certificate from the New York Studio School, and was awarded First Place in Painting at the National Academy. He is currently a Resident Artist with ChaShaMa, and the Founding Director of The Portrait Project, a collaborative of artists that portray one another.

http://www.howardgladstone.net/

John Goodrich
My goal is to capture visual aspects of the world in a language of forms unique to painting. I see this language as a play of colors and shapes that reveals the deeper character of objects: their stature, weight, and motion – in short their pictorial role – within a painting’s rectangle. Matisse’s words serve me as a touchstone: “Giotto is the summit of my desires, but the road leading to an equivalent, in our age, is too long for one lifetime.”
John Goodrich’s paintings have appeared in solo shows at Bowery Gallery in New York City and the Contemporary Realist Gallery in San Francisco and in group exhibitions at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, Kouros Gallery, Lori Bookstein Fine Art and other galleries in New York City. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The New York Sun, The New York Observer, The New Haven Register and other publications. A writer on art, he was a regular contributor to Review magazine, The New York Sun, and CityArts. He currently teaches studio classes at Haverford College and Borough of Manhattan Community College.

https://www.johngoodrich.net/

Elizabeth Higgins
Elizabeth Higgins was born in Toronto, Canada, in 1960. As a Helena Rubenstein Award recipient, Higgins earned her MFA from Parsons School of Design, where she studied with Leland Bell, Paul Resika, Albert Kresch and Robert deNiro, Sr. Prior to coming to New York in 1983, Higgins received her BFA from Queen’s University, Canada, where she studied painting and printmaking with JC Heywood, Ralph Allen and David Andrew.

Higgins’ solo shows include the Prince Street Gallery, New York, The Argazzi Gallery, Lakeville, CT and the Nancy Poole Studio, Toronto, Canada. She has also exhibited in group shows at the Ingber Gallery, New York, the Mangel Gallery, Philadelphia, the Addison/Ripley Fine Art gallery, Washington, DC, the ART/PLACE gallery, Fairfield CT, and the Carriage Barn Arts Center, New Canaan, CT.

She is now featured in two concurrent traveling exhibitions: Zeuxis –The Unstillife will be on display at the Delaware College of Art and Design, The Painting Center, New York, NY and the University of Arkansas Fort Smith. Also Zeuxis – Flowers as Metaphor will be shown at Hendrix College, Santa Rosa College and the Wiegand Gallery at Notre Dame de Namur University, Belmont, CA.

Her work is in corporate and private collections in the US and Canada.

https://elizabethhigginsartist.com/

Al Kresch
Albert Kresch (born July 4, 1922)[1] is a New York School painter who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. One of the original members of the Jane Street Gallery in the 1930s, he exhibited in later years at Tibor de Nagy Gallery and Salander-O’Reilly Galleries. He is best known for landscape and still life compositions painted with evocatively rhythmic forms and vibrant colors.

Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Kresch moved with his family to New York in the 1930s. He began studying figure drawing at the Brooklyn Museum, but soon enrolled in the Hans Hofmann School. There he met Leland Bell, Louisa Matthíasdóttir, Nell Blaine, Judith Rothschild, Robert De Niro, Sr., and Virginia Admiral among other artists of note. These friendships proved a source of inspiration throughout much of his life. In the 1940s, he exhibited abstract work in his first two shows at the Jane Street Gallery, at a time when Abstract Expressionism was gathering steam. He soon embarked, however, on an independent path, inspired by his friend Jean Helion to return to representational painting. Friendships with poets Denise Levertov, and Frank O’Hara reflect the breadth of his interests. His painting philosophy was a subject of Levertov’s poems “The Dog of Art” and “Kresch’s Studio.”

Kresch won a Fulbright scholarship in 1953, aided in part by a letter of recommendation from his friend Willem de Kooning. Recent exhibitions of his work at Salander-O’Reilly Galleries won favorable reviews, and he was elected member of the National Academy in 2005.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Kresch

Stanley Lewis
Stanley Lewis was born in Somerville, New Jersey on October 31, 1941. He graduated from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut in 1963 with a joint major in music and art. His painting teacher was John Frazer. He graduated with high distinction. In the summer of 1962, he studied with William Bailey and Bernard Chaet at the Yale Summer School of Art and Music. He received a Danforth Fellowship for graduate study and received an MFA from Yale University in 1967. His main teachers there were Leland Bell and Nick Carone.

He began teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1969 in the painting department, working under Wilbur Niewald for 17 years. He joined the Bowery Gallery in NYC in 1986. Stanley taught at Smith College from 1986-1990 and then at American University from 1990-2002 working under department chairman Don Kimes. He retired from AU in 2002. He has taught summers at the Chautauqua Institution’s School of Art since 1996 and was on the faculty at the New York Studio School until the end of 2011.

In Sept. 2004 he was in a two man show at Salander-O’Reilly Galleries. A long-time member of the Bowery Gallery, his most recent shows there were in February, 2005 and March, 2008. He was then represented by Lohin Geduld Gallery and had a one man show there October 13- November 13, 2010. The gallery closed in December of 2011. From Feb. 17 through April 8, 2007, he had a major retrospective at the Museum in the Katzen Art Center, American University, Washington, DC. There was a smaller version of that show at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, NJ, that spring. In 2005, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been elected to membership in the National Academy.

http://www.bettycuninghamgallery.com/artists/stanley-lewis

Elizabeth O’Reilly
Elizabeth O’Reilly grew up in Ireland and moved to the US in 1986. She received her MFA from Brooklyn College, and her B.Ed from the National University of Ireland. She has participated in residencies at the Ballinglen Foundation, Ireland, the Ucross Foundation, Wyoming, and the Ragdale Foundation, Illinois. She has received numerous awards, including a Pollock Krasner Foundation grant, a Charles G. Shaw award for painting and a Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant. A documentary on her work, Ealaiontóir Thar Sáile (An Artist Abroad) was shown on network TV in Ireland. O’Reilly has been showing at the George Billis Gallery in Chelsea, New York since 2000, and she participates regularly in the Royal Hibernian Academy annual exhibition in Dublin, Ireland. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, The New York Sun and Art News, among others, and is found in many corporate and private collections both in the US and Ireland. Her paintings are in the State Department, Washington DC, the Office of Public Works, Ireland and the Memphis Brooks Museum in Tennessee.

http://www.elizabethoreilly.com/

Tony Serio
Working from observation, Tony Serio turns his focus to the urban landscape and Hudson River in Northern Manhattan. Using palette knife and brushes, he explores the terrain and architecture with a richly built-up paint surface full of light and atmospheric color observed in the moment.

Serio studied at Yale School of Art and Maryland Institute College of Art. Solo shows at the Bowery Gallery and other New York venues. Group shows include: Alpha Gallery, Boston, MA; The Drawing Center, NY; The Babcock Gallery, NY and The Hopper House, Nyack, NY. Awards include: Alice B. Kimball Grant for traveling in Italy, Yale University; Drawing Center Show Award and NoMAA (Northern Manhattan Arts Association) Grants in 2008 and 2011 to paint a series of Hudson River Greenway landscapes. Collections include Donald and Allison Innes, Columbia University and various other private collectors.

https://www.tonyserio.com/

Kamilla Talbot
Kamilla Talbot studied at the New York Studio School and The Rhode Island School of Design. Solo shows include Trygve Lie Gallery, NY; Charles P. Sifton Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Bruno Marina Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; and at the Johannes Larsen Museum, Kerteminde, Denmark (2017). Artist residencies include a fully-funded residency at the Vermont Studio Center, as well as grants to paint in Maine, Italy, Newfoundland, and Iceland. In 2013 she was awarded a full fellowship to the Austevoll/Marstein Fyr residency in Norway. She teaches or has taught at the National Academy School; Brooklyn Botanic Garden; New York Studio School; New York School of the Arts; The Art Students League; as well as privately.

http://www.kamillatalbot.com/

EVENTS:
MARCH 5: An opening reception will be held 2-6pm

MARCH 14:Karen Wilkin will present a Zoom talk, “Nature and Culture: Some Contemporary Landscape Painters” at 7pm,
Visit www.light-of-day.com for details and to register.

CATALOG
A catalog with essay by Karen Wilkin accompanies the exhibition; preview and purchase at www.light-of-day.com.

GALLERY HOURS:
1-6pm, Wednesday through Sunday.

INFORMATION
For more information, please visit light-of-day.com r contact Diane Drescher at (917)660-0684.

ABOUT THE CURATOR:
New York-based independent curator and art critic Karen Wilkin is the Contributing Editor for Art for The Hudson Review and a regular contributor to The New Criterion, Art in America and The Wall Street Journal.