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Brian Slattery |
Feb 19, 2025 2:45 pm
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Lois Conner
West Lake, Hangzhou, China.
At first glance, Lois Conner’s image might read as a great mid-century abstract painting, full of bold shapes, strong lines, and vivid contrasts. But it’s not; it’s a photograph of desiccated plants and their reflections in a still body of water. The image collapses the line between observing nature and interpreting it. It has both documented a moment in time and also given us some commentary on it, a way to feel about it, and to be drawn in.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 14, 2025 9:32 am
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Though the style of the paintings is utterly contemporary, the mood somehow evokes both family photos in the living room and a formal ancestral shrine, cozy and familiar yet also reverential. The paintings are of the artist’s family, their humanity captured and elevated by the painter’s keen eye and steady hand. The photographs help in showing what the artist is up to, how he sees the people he loves through the way that he works. They’re also a first step in understanding, in the context of his artistic practice, what the artist means by “family.”
While a NIMBY-stalled building plan leaves a stretch of Grand Avenue covered in blight, two grassroots artists picked up their brushes Wednesday to offer the neighborhood some temporary respite.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 7, 2025 10:31 am
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Scott Azevedo
Untitled (A Delightful Children's Room).
Scott Azevedo’s Untitled (A Delightful Children’s Room) appears somehow both peaceful and volatile. Peaceful because of what it depicts, a woman sitting in a cozy room, and the colors chosen — warm and vibrant. But something in the execution makes the image unstable, like a half-lost memory, full of glitches and errors. The lines emanating from the figure might be flames. The person in the painting may be cherished, but the perception of her is somehow shot through with difficulty.
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Mickey Mercier |
Jan 27, 2025 1:30 pm
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From an Askew album cover.
Ed Askew, a Yale-educated painter who achieved wider renown as a singer-songwriter, died in New York City on Jan. 4 at age 84. The venerable music publication NME described him as a “psychedelic folk musician.” People magazine called him a cult figure.
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Jamil Ragland |
Jan 20, 2025 7:15 am
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God's Kiss, 2021
In the Dark Night, 2021
Spirited Franciscan Inspired Quotes Clare Gallery St. Patrick – St. Anthony Church Hartford January 17, 2025
I once locked myself in a dark closet and said I was going to pray there until I finally heard the voice of God. Instead, my mother found me asleep, sweating underneath a blanket a few hours later. I’ve still never heard the voice of God, although I feel like I’ve seen the banks of God’s river every now and again.
I thought of my experience with faith when I views “In The Dark Night,” one of the pieces on display at my favorite gallery, the Clare Gallery at St. Patrick – St. Anthony Church in Hartford.
Despite the title, the image is quite bright and colorful. I thought that the streaks of light blue, white and aquamarine represented a flame at first, burning eternally as a representation of faith. But when I read the text, the image of a river became clear.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 14, 2025 9:30 am
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The tower is made of small wooden pieces. But as assembled on the floor of Kehler Liddell Gallery, it echoes natural forms, created by ants or bees. Not far away, an abstract piece reveals itself to involve not just pigment, but mirrors, so that the piece changes from every angle you look at it. Not far away, a small sculpture of a figurine in a sled is made, partly, from the shape of a gas mask.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 7, 2025 9:47 am
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William Frucht
Packard Plant, Series 2 #18.
On the day this reporter visited “Making and Unmaking” — a group show running now at City Gallery on Upper State Street through Jan. 26 — artist Barbara Harder’s installation intentionally drew attention to its incompleteness. Three pieces of decorated and textured paper, Harder’s chosen medium for decades, were artfully arranged into a collage of soft colors and jagged edges. But on it was also a sign, written on a piece of scrap paper: “In progress as usual!”
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Lisa Reisman |
Dec 23, 2024 4:12 pm
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Santana Brightly's “You Have The Power To Determine Who You Are."
A camera, held by a man in a hoodie, dominates a scene of seeming chaos. Two more hands help hold it up. Someone else’s finger rests on the shutter button. Still another hand shifts the lens. Look more closely and virtually everyone in the crowd is shooting pictures.
The piece, “You Have The Power To Determine Who You Are” by Santana Brightly, was among the works spotlighted at the opening of an exhibit on Saturday at Stetson Library. Santana, a seventh-grade student at Hamden’s Sahge Academy, produced the piece while taking part in a month-long graphic arts workshop in AI Art this summer at Stetson.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 18, 2024 9:45 am
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Constance LaPalombara
New Haven 1 (Harbor).
It’s a misty day and there aren’t a lot of details to go on — no buildings or inland rock formations as landmarks. But because of painter Constance LaPalombara’s eye for including the right and necessary details, the scene is recognizable if you’ve ever been along the shore in, say, Morris Cove, and looked northward into the mouth of New Haven Harbor. With the defined sense of place comes a deeper appreciation for what LaPalombara is doing. She’s not capturing every detail, but she gets the details that matter. She grounds the viewer in a specific spot and then doesn’t just paint what the viewer might see through a camera lens. You could say she paints the atmosphere itself, the feeling of the air; if you concentrate enough, you can almost feel it.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 13, 2024 9:21 am
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Altered Futures.
This month there’s a small stretch of forest in City Gallery on Upper State Street — evergreens, ferns, moss — surrounded by a patch of dirt. It might take a moment to see that the plants aren’t rooted in the dirt, however. Rather, they’re planted in a woven aluminum boat, redolent of an ark. It will allow them to leave the gallery alive; maybe it will protect them from what’s coming.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 12, 2024 9:47 am
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Merik Goma
As I Wait, Untitled 6.
A man stands in front of the bathroom mirror in a towel. He’s just getting in the shower, or just getting out. At first glance it might appear he’s shaving, or putting on cologne. But the object in his hand isn’t a razor or a bottle. It’s something else. And maybe that’s when you also notice the sink is overflowing with fruit. “Some people may not recognize it as an old fire extinguisher,” artist Merik Goma said of the object the man is holding, or “they may be drawn to the fruit.”
“Where is he going? What is that thing supposed to be? Is it a symbol? Is it literal?” Goma said. “It can mean a lot of things.” And that’s part of the point. Goma starts the story. It’s up to us to finish it.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 4, 2024 9:23 am
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Craig Frederick
Breath.
Craig Frederick’s Breath looks lighter than its materials. If it were a sea creature, it appears like it could be spiraling through the water. If it were in flight, it could seem like it was made of paper, corkscrewing through the air. It makes space for itself in the gallery, as if it’s just passing through, and we happen to be there when it stops for a minute.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 26, 2024 8:27 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Parlay Droner, with his "toys."
Music on stage. Art on the walls. Pizza and drinks on the table. Pickles in the corner. The latest installment of Mood Maker Mondays at The Cellar on Treadwell in Hamden featured all of the above, mixed together for a healthy-sized Monday night crowd who came out to hear experimental musician Parlay Droner and veteran surf rockers the Vulture, partake of Jam City Pizza’s Detroit-style pizza, check out the fantastical art of Thomas Drew, and sample the vinegar delights of Mo Piklz.
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Jamil Ragland |
Nov 21, 2024 7:30 am
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A piece of pottery by Robin Simpson on display in the Etcetera exhibit
Etcetera Exhibit Manchester Town Hall Manchester Nov. 18, 2024
Art is not just what we can see and hear. It’s also what we can feel.
I was reminded of that by the Etcetera Exhibit located at the Manchester Town Hall. The Manchester Art Association has an ongoing exhibit at the town hall, where for three months they feature a different single medium. This quarter’s medium is “Other,” which includes artwork that doesn’t fit into the other traditional categories of pastel, oil & acrylic, watercolor, and photography. As such, there was some fascinating art on display that catered to the sense of touch (not that I touched them; this is an art exhibit after all).
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 20, 2024 8:09 am
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Raheem Nelson
The Alchemy of Art.
The small portrait of New Haven arts maven Ann Lehman welding in her studio is instantly recognizable to anyone who visited “The Alchemy of Art,” the show devoted to her work last year at Creative Arts Workshop. But New Haven-based artist Raheem Nelson’s graphic surrounds that portrait with a constellation of ideas that distills much of that complex exhibition and the various reports of it. In less than 10 seconds, we get a snapshot of who Lehman was, what her contributions to Creative Arts Workshop and the city were, and why we continue to celebrate her legacy. And our curiosity, perhaps, is whetted for more.
Payton, Ellis, and Anaya with muralists Jessie Unterhalter and Katey Truhn: “This is why we’re doing this.”
The challenge was steep. To scour the globe for a muralist to lend such pizzazz to a 240-foot blank warehouse wall that it would bring life to a faded stretch of town.
In the end, one factor sealed the deal: cartwheels.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 19, 2024 8:17 am
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Bill Healy
Self Portrait, King Nothing, Princess Leia.
Bill Healy’s three collages cover three subjects, from the real to the imaginary, but are united by their distinctive personalities, half playful, half unsettling. In each face, there are a few delightfully recontextualized shapes. In Self-Portrait, the grimace is an Amazon smile turned upside down. One of King Nothing’s eyes is a bowl of soup. The middle of Princess Leia’s face is a tire. It’s the kind of lateral thinking that marks the most engaging collage art, and in another place, another space, the artist might be parlaying it into a social media following. But Healy — along with the rest of the artists in the show — isn’t on social media, and the work might not have made it to a gallery wall without a keen eye paying attention.
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Jamil Ragland |
Nov 15, 2024 7:00 am
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An image of a father carrying his children at the Devotion exhibit at the Widener Gallery.
Devotion: Photographs from the Collection of the Watkinson Library at Trinity College Widener Gallery Austin Arts Center Trinity College Hartford Nov. 11, 2024
Devotion is an exhibition of 25 images from the collection of the Watkinson Library, developed between 1925 and 1981 by 11 different photographers. The exhibition covers subjects from sexuality to children playing; the images of family caught my attention most.
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Brian Slattery |
Nov 14, 2024 9:33 am
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Robert Jacoby
Essence 13, Essence 15, Essence 9.
The three paintings are a celebration of abstraction, and abstraction of a particularly kinetic variety. The canvases convey the energy of a brush moving fast, decisions made at speed, less like deliberation and more like reaction, like a skier weaving through the woods. But the painter’s experience shows in the overall decisions made about the painting. The color choices set them off from one another, making each hue vibrate just a little more intensely. Most important is the decision of when to stop; even moving fast, the artist kept an eye on the whole, and in this case, let all that white space speak for itself.
