basha maryanska

Review

Painter hosted and another master excellent teacher International Basha Maryanska

Featured Artists at Scenic Hudson River Center in Beacon, NY.

Another on the Fine Gallery&Studio Foray in Beacon

Arts Journal Website

Residency at The Red Barn during May in Beacon, NY and, as always, it did not disappoint, displaying 13 artists with a broad range of superb talent. Maryanska, as curator and driving force behind the residency and exhibit, likens herself to an accomplished conductor who blends the visual aspects of each artist’s work into



integrated whole as a joyous cornucopia of artistic invention— an entire symphony of broad tone, narrative story- telling and emotional release. Selecting the artists is a six month process and choices of participants are partially based on her wide artistic knowledge, her own visceral reactions to the pieces, built on a deeply expressive foundation of brilliant color. Her philosophy, that art mirrors life in all its diversity and majesty is formidably displayed in this outing in this bucolic Hudson town.

Virginia Donovan, Kathryn Hart, Basha Maryanska, Neela Pushparaj, Mietko Rudek and Ilona Wojciechowska, returning participants, were joined in the show by newcomers Amanda E. Gross, Eva Lachur, Dorota Michaluk, Jack Rusinek and Esther Sternberg along with Maryanska’s students Arlene Robin and Annie Vallamattan.

Virginia Donovan’s painting boldly evolved from the last year’s work in an experimental stenciled piece, along with a wall hanging of painted canvas, where she intuitively applies multiple layers of sensuous blues and muted greens under scraped azure tinted blacks and bright yellows. She entitled it “Big Blue,” perhaps as a sly reference to her years working for IBM. Donovan lays down pigment on a large canvas placed on the floor like an athlete following through, using her whole body in the act of painting. The final effect is a vision of water rippling over the painting’s surface—Donovan expressing her emotions with new freedom and finding a fresh and exciting path in the work.

Kathryn Hart lends her formidable talents to the show by exhibiting low-keyed abstract photographs of ancient animal bone; an extension of her “Searching” series of work on display in numerous galleries in New York City during May and June. The photos of bleached bones in these pieces are one-time occurrences, never to be repeated, where the sculptor transforms reminders of mortality into sensuous, unexpected, mysterious markers of eternal energies.

Floral watercolorist, Neela Pushparaj, currently participating in a one-woman show at Jadite Gallery in Manhattan, ventures into new areas in her watercolor, “Nature’s Flow,” with leaves floating in waves across the page, contrasting their warm fall colors with cool mossy areas indicative of the changing seasons. The painter’s splattering and splashing of water paint, a departure from her more tightly realized floral paintings, brings luminosity to the work, the dappling creating abstract passages of personal autonomy with color brushstrokes cascading across the work’s surface. Her piece, “Come Walk in My Garden,” painted in Poland, depicts green leaves as a frame for rich blooms, contrasting detail with dreaminess.

Photographer Mietko Rudek plays a key behind-the-scenes role in this exhibit, as his skills as a

commercial artist allowed him to provide the publicity materials for the show along with giving us the opportunity to enjoy a series of New York

and Paris photos of rich atmospheric color. This indispensable participant exuberantly interprets these two cities in all their beauty of metropolitan light.

Another returning exhibitor, Ilona Wojciechowska, presents her painted interpretations of Manhattan in new abstracts of the lower part of that island, juxtaposing delicate details of buildings with large abstracted geometric edifices. She also displays a significant wall hanging of the militaristic tragic history of Poland in collaged photo prints on the canvas with color choices as those found in the Polish flag. This piece’s seriousness is tempered by her inclusion of whimsical small fiber sculptures in homage to Picasso’s and Miro’s treatments of line and form.

New to the residency this year, Eva Lachur shares with us her prodigious talents in costume design and painting with examples of award winning work done for the Actors Shakespeare Company. At the Red Barn her costumes include dresses for a dark Queen Gertrude, a sweet Miranda and a simple Phoebe. Complementing her work as a designer of vision are three paintings in egg tempera on wood where swirling and beautiful thick natural dye colors are almost sculpted into the surfaces; the greens of the paintings glittering from subtle touches of gold leaf in sparkling celebration of nature.

Amanda E. Gross, also a newcomer to the residency, provides the viewer with a series of small paintings of birds in phantasmagoric colors, along with a tree almost scarily anthropomorphic where bark knots become intimations of a monster’s maw thus underscoring the beauty and terror of the natural world. The artist also shows her illustrative skills with psychologically tinged portraits of people, imbuing clever humor in them and presenting a worldview free of pomposity through a lens somewhat askew.

Dorota Michaluk, an artist residing in France, is inspired by myth and history while showing elegant graphics, as they are reminders of the age of chivalry where noble ladies were ensconced in medieval castles. There is a dreamlike quality to her work with fleet-footed winged Pegasus, jockey astride, urging the horse onward over the castle’s parapets. Could it be the rider is the lady’s Perseus charged with rescuing his Andromeda from harm? The artist leaves her work open to intriguing interpretations.

Also exhibiting first time at the residency is sculptor Jack Rusinek who came from Poland to the United States when he was ten years old and is now the scenic designer for the current Broadway production of “Jesus Christ Superstar.” The work shown here in Beacon includes large fantastical pieces, the results of his use of resins, polymers and paints in their construction. His tall indoor sculpture, “Ice Bloom,” made of urethane foam of rivers of blues and greens, is reminding me of a fantastic mushroom. He also displays a crazily realized credenza holding more of his sculptures in miniature. Colorist painter Esther Sternberg channels Chagall, Monet and Van Gogh in the compositions and pigment choices of her luxurious pieces, applying paint directly from the tube, moving the viewer’s eye across the pieces’ surfaces in bright strokes of hue. Her rendering of a feather in her work has great significance for her as it is symbolic of her memory of her late husband whom she saw in a dream, after

his death, where he was writing on papyrus with a quill pen. In real life, feathers float through the air quite often and randomly around her and she sees this as a spiritual sign that her husband still watches over her. Sternberg truly is an artist of deep awareness.

Basha Maryanska also showed artwork by two of her students, Arlene Robin and Annie Vallamattam. Robin, a nurse and art therapist, has been studying with Maryanska for one year and Vallamattam, four. Robin’s work is of small abstract expressionist studies, what her teacher calls art blueprints, assigned to Robin to free her up for larger works. Using a small palette knife and brushes, Robin creates small gems of which Willem de Kooning would have been proud. Vallamattam began as a self-taught artist, blossoming under Maryanska’s tutelage and resulting in participation in this residency by showing a striking India ink detailed semi-abstract portrait of a bearded man with glasses—the young artist successfully bringing out the serious demeanor of her subject.

The entire marvelous event would not have been possible without Basha Maryanska, an accomplished expressionist painter who at the residency provides the viewer with another dimension of her talents in large fiber wall hangings that she humorously names, “shmatas.” Maryanska uses eclectic materials for them—burlap, chenille, pearl beads, string, feathers and costume jewelry, exalting women’s prosaic every-day dress, elevating the garments into pieces of art. In one hanging she uses different transparent layers of fabric creating forceful, totemic art. One of the pieces combines painted canvas strips from other works with a swinging pendulum, the artist providing meaning to the piece by saying life is a continuous ebb and flow of the experience of living. Maryanska also includes an expressive abstract in tribute to her recent trip to the Hawaiian rainforest, depicting its beauty in saturated colors applied to the canvas in lashing, vertical strokes.

A potpourri of diversity and energy, this year’s residency champions creativity under a great teacher’s auspices. This is an annual chance for artists to explore new territory and display their broad range of gifts in a welcoming space. It is important that this residency keeps on at The Red Barn so that artistic expression continues to be nurtured and realized. I look forward to more opportunities to view such talented people in future exhibits in Beacon under Maestro Maryanska’s baton.

—Anne Rudder

5th International Artists Residency Recently seen at The Red Barn – River Center 8 Long Dock Road, Beacon, N.Y.

GALLERY&STUDIO ARTS JOURNAL 2018

Showcasing Five Artists at New Century Artists Gallery

Bold in scope and invention, ART•5!, a brilliantly diverse show at New Century Artists Gallery.
As curatorand artist Basha Maryanska says: “Each of the artists in this show follows his or her own vision. They have searched and experimented to arrive at what is truly
all their own, not what others do.” Each demonstrates not just an intense personal vision, but courage, perseverance, and the self-confidence to pursue highly individual work.

John Lechner is a fine art photographer who lives in Hunter Valley about two
hours north of Sydney in New South Wales, Australia. His work reflects a deep reverence for nature and the mastery of what he calls “the magic moment,” the perfect angle of the sun, the beams of light on sedimentary rock, the mist slowly rising from a cold sea into warm air. The tonal qualities in his “Golden Morning” fine art print are totally devoid of manipulation. Relying on his own eye, every perceived fluctuation of light and shade, and his knowledge of composition, Lechner has created a portrait of sunrise just as it greets the rural farmland where he lives.

Nature is a recurring theme in Lechner’s photographs, all previously unseen in this country. He celebrates dramatic landscapes—waterfalls, a black gumtree split by lightning, sandstone rock formations—scenes of an Eden untouched by human hands. If there is an underlying message in these painterly works, it is that the pristine places of this world need to be not only enjoyed but also preserved.

Anna Pietruszka’s four oil on canvas paintings are reflections of all that one
sees, feels, and experiences at a given time. “Since 1995 my work has emanated from
my fascination with textures and colors,” she explains adding that it is up to the viewer to interpret and find meaning in
her vivid, dynamic works. Like color field artists, her paintings are characterized by amorphous forms. Her colors are deep and rich containing astounding harmonies. To enhance the viewer’s reaction, she will use fingers rather than brushes to create the textures she seeks. Pietruszka, who works both in her native Poland and London, titles her paintings “City Puzzles,” as cities are
the catalyst for the paintings in this show, although there are no obvious allusions to specific subject matter. Her concern is to convey the unbound energy and rhythm
of cities. Yet in spite of her insistence on abstraction, in one painting you can almost feel the fog and soft rain of London in the spring.

Roman Choinka paints his memories. His subjects come to him in dreams and he often dates his paintings with the time of his dreams, rather than the date he painted

10 Gallery&Studio

them. He is interested in when ideas first come to him, as in the title, “November 9th, 1989,” painted last year. Choinka’s semi- abstract work, as well as his titles—“Sounds and places never forgotten,” or “Each change is lasting,”—for example, are deeply poetic.

In writing about his work, Choinka says that his childhood had a big influence on what he does which is why dreams
play such an important role in his visual language. “The world economic and social crisis causes reality to seem dim, gray, and colorless. That makes me more eager to paint with vigorous tones as an antidote to this situation,” he says.

Perhaps that is why the semi-abstract landscapes in this show are so optimistic. The bluest of blue skies is one of his main themes. Sometimes his sun is a blinding yellow while other colors interlock in vivid contrasts. In a few works, there are hints of elongated figures, but primarily as Choinka says:” I want to tell about my experiences, that are nonverbal. Not about me, but
about the world, people, their conditions, situations, their slavery and freedom—after all, art stimulates contemplation of the world, brings out emotion and thought.” Choinka in this show displays a sensuous and expressive handling of composition, paint, and line. He also gives us a sense
of an artist’s ways of interior and exterior seeing that perhaps only comes in dreams. This is the first of what should be many exhibitions of his work in the U.S.

Kathryn Hart, an abstract painter
and sculptor, is an international award- winning, extremely prolific artist, based
in Colorado. Hers are works to be studied, not simply glimpsed, as they are imbued with meanings that only become apparent after considerable thought. Consider “Eighteen Inches,” a mixed-media burlap and found objects work, seeded with quirks of meaning. The burlap has been tugged, frayed, pulled and stretched recalling the scene from “Gone With the Wind” when Mammy reduces Scarlett O’Hara’s waist to 18 inches. The struggle, then and now, the artist seems to be saying, is to be one’s own person and not what we are supposed to be for other people.

In “Unearthly Misfit,” a mixed media, burlap, and found object construction,
the artist’s palette is also subdued, though here black is the primary color. This intriguing work evokes the feelings of alienation characteristic of someone who never belongs, an outsider, always on
the periphery looking in. The canvas is gashed at the bottom, and partially stitched together leaving an irregular empty space at one end. “I work on them—stitching—until they breathe on their own,” she says.

Hart is clearly someone who has a profound interest in spiders and their webs. The stitching motif appears in much of her

work, partially because of her heritage as the daughter of a plastic surgeon whom
she often observed in his operating theater. Another possibility is that webs are not what they seem—fragile and gauzy. In fact, in her interpretations, they are three- dimensional, displaying a huge range of web architecture, elasticity, and strength. Whether in a piece entitled “Relentless Passage” which hangs away from the wall casting an eery shadow or “Pilar,” Hart’s works are deeply mystical constructions revealing inner truths about herself and women’s place in the wider world.

Basha Maryanska, a featured painter in this show and also its curator, works as well as teaches in her studio in Beacon, New York. “My painting comes from my interpretation of the Hudson River School” says Maryanska whose aesthetic vision
is shaped by the beauty and grandeur
of the Hudson River Valley. “In my art I work on motifs from the nature of this region, transforming what comes from my subconscious mind into abstract images,” she says.

Maryanska studied in Warsaw and Gdansk, Poland, where she obtained her MFA, followed by a scholarship at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris. A recipient of many awards and honors, Maryanska has shown her work around the world. But
she has another important role—helping artists get their work better known through the international residency programs she organizes.

Working with acrylics on canvas, Maryanska’s paintings may be semi- abstract, but her titles are explicit—“Rainy West Side Drive” or “City Dreams.”
There’s no escaping how the city appears to her artist’s vision, an agglomeration of impressions or a stream of brash, bright images that are her personal reaction to what she sees.There is always a level of detail in her work that separates it from the purely conceptual. “Red City,” a palette of brilliant reds is so fully saturated with color that at first glance it looks like
a tapestry and only on further study,
does it convey the speed and vitality
of the modern American metropolis. Using the city as a major iconographic element for the paintings in this show, Maryanska produces compelling images distinguished by forceful, gestural paint surfaces. Her preoccupation is with sharp angles, movement, and a strong sense of archetypical imagery.

—Bobbie Leigh

ART•5! is on view until June 27, 2015 at New Century Artists Gallery, 530 West 26th St. New York, N.Y. 212-367-7072.

Summer 2015