FINISSAGE, FROM THE ROMAN STUDIO

by Wendy Artin

Andrew Kohji Taylor

Andrew Kohji Taylor‘s exquisite Bach at the Finissage of the exhibition From the Roman Studio, gave a magical touch to this First Friday, December 4th, at Gurari Collections in Boston’s artistic SoWa neighborhood of the South End.  During the evening, the original watercolor below, Long Paintbrush on Blue Watercolor Puddle, was sold in a Silent Auction benefitting Lung Cancer Research under Dr. Alice Shaw, at Massachusetts General Hospital, in memory of Bruno Boschin.

Known and Mysterious, by Grace Dane Mazur, November 2015 review in ArtsFuse

Being in Time, by Jessica Fisher, catalogue introduction, From the Roman Studio

Wendy Artin, Long Paintbrush on Blue Watercolor Puddle, 9″ x 21″, 2015

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Some photos from the November 6th Opening Reception:

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More than 50 recent watercolor paintings are currently on display in this exhibition: small and intimate colorful paintbrushes, large and small sanguine figure paintings, and a variety of monochromatic watercolors of classical statues.

A bit of the Gurari Collections press release:

“…From intimate portrayals of paintbrushes awash with color to monochromatic ink-like paintings of the figure and classical statuary, the delicate and powerful images of From the Roman Studio waver and melt between abstract mark-making and impressionistic realism…. Each spot of paint on the handle of a well-worn brush evokes a joyous moment: the starry blue sky surrounding the children’s beds, the gigantic green cardboard Christmas tree, the brilliant white Roman sunlight on the walls… The images are personal relics of the sort that are found in all our tool closets; they are a simple and profound appreciation of the present as it reveals all of the traces of the past. Age, for Artin, is to be relished.”

“Wendy Artin’s delicious figure paintings are about immediacy, universality, reality. We can feel the poses of her expressive models: we are drawn into the language of the body, into the space of the paper, into the light as it becomes flesh and contour.”

A beautiful catalogue of the works in the exhibition is available at the gallery,
with a preface by American poet Jessica Fisher, excerpted here:

“…In the nudes and in the paintings of classical sculptures, Artin shows opposing sides of the same coin; but as she turns it around and around, the two sides begin to merge. Artin transforms in the alchemy of her eye one form of being into another, enacting a metamorphosis no less startling than those Ovid describes. Her work brings both the living model and the sculptures from antiquity into a paradoxical and fascinating space: in the living medium of watercolor, they are no longer flesh or stone, living or dead – those easy antinomies – but rather enter the mysterious space of representation, in which the particular is abstracted and the abstract is made once again particular.”