LOUISA GOULD’S SECOND ANNUAL ABSTRACT ART SHOW: VINEYARD ARTISTS’ ABSTRACTIONS:  CREATING NEW PERSPECTIVES 

The Louisa Gould Gallery Second Annual Abstract Show, titled, “Vineyard Artists’ Abstractions:  Creating New Perspectives” runs from October 2, 2009 through October 18, 2009. The opening reception is on October 3, 2009, 5-7 p.m. The group features the work of six (6) artists using different media: works on canvas (Louisa Gould and Edwin Cohen), photography (Jeanne Campbell), wall sculptures (Jack Greene), mixed media on canvas and paper (Deborah T. Colter) and mixed media and collographs (Roberta Gross). These artists play with colors, textures, shapes and lines to create their personal vision and provide us new perspectives on our world. 
 

Louisa Gould, well known on the Vineyard for her daring sailing photography and traditional painting, has approached abstract art with her usual sense of openness and adventure. She completed the four colorful paintings on exhibit during the dreary month of March (which was made even drearier for her because of visits to a physician about her knee injury).  Her paintings use colors which are “nice, bright and bold because the landscape then (March) is so void of luscious colors”.  One painting is a play with red and blue and shape: a regatta with different elements such as boats.  Another is her impression of an aerial view of the Cape “painted with colors I love on a bright, sunny day”. 

Deborah T. Colter uses muted green-grays and purples or vibrant yellow-oranges we may see along the Vineyard shores and wet lands during the fall to create what she terms “un-still lives, at once frozen and in motion”.  She uses her abstract language - a collection of marks, textures, colors and repeating shapes and forms- to capture fleeting memories and images traveling through her mind. These marks often will reflect “architectural landscapes, roads, maps, repeated patterns, or colors as if seen from above or as recalled from within.” 

Roberta Gross – this summer’s Abstract Artist in Residence  at Featherstone Center for the Arts - composes and layers with texture and color whether in her collographs (a print media using textured, collaged ink plate for the image) or mixed media paintings, suggesting organic and geometric landscapes, monoliths, monuments, and urban scapes. For Roberta, collographs provide her a unique way to paint with texture created from diverse common, everyday objects- lentils, rug runners, embossed plastic- which are embedded in her collograph plate, overlaid with ink and printed on a press. She layers her prints and paintings with colorful, transparent papers which reveal earlier stages of the work, a process by which she deliberately reveals the creative process.  

Jack Greene is a multi-talented artist.  Earlier in the season, he had a solo exhibit of his air brush paintings at Featherstone Center for the Arts where he also taught airbrush painting and other courses. For this exhibit, he has created colorful, quirky, curvilinear wall sculptures, a new body of work.  Interspersed through these sculptures are some earlier framed geometric and curvilinear texture paintings.  For him, abstraction is “a door to the freedom of imagination, (it) offers unlimited avenues to explore.”   

Jeanne Campbell explores the world around through both realistic and abstract photography. Previously, she has exhibited her visually lovely, usually close-up photographs of flowers and other outdoor elements at the Louisa Gould Gallery.  In composing her abstract photography, she tries to capture patterns, rhythms, strong lines, graceful curves, or explosive colors. She sometimes provides a hint of the subject matter but in the process creates a new, intriguing visual world.   

Edwin Cohen’s intriguing, abstract, gestural paintings reflect his ability to balance impulsiveness, chance effects and control.  Patterns of luscious drips and flows are distributed across a shiny black or white field of the painting surface.