Allan Appel Photo
“Power Tools,” 2008 oil on canvas by Becky Franco (pictured). “I never go out without my make-up,” she said.
Becky Franco was the first woman and first Hispanic to join the Sign and Pictorial Display Union, Local 230 in New York. For 15 years until computer-generated graphics changed the business, she climbed the ladders and hand-painted billboards all over the metro area.
Now she’s displaying her own art work. It’s still big and brash, only you don’t have to crane your neck up or be cruising by on the highway to see it.
“Power Tools” and other acrylic-on canvas paintings by the Havana-born and New York-based Franco are on display at Arte, Inc. on Grand Avenue in Fair Haven.
Photo provided by artist.
“Sunstone,” 2011 silkscreen by Miguel Trellis.
Her work is part of a just-opened group show called “Crossroads.” It also includes Felipe Molina, Benjamin Casiano, and Miguel Trellis, whose silkscreens make you wonder what a Rolling Stones concert would have been like at a stadium event organized by the Atztecs.
The show of the four artists, diverse and wide-ranging despite its compact nature, is viewable at Arte Saturdays and Sundays from noon to 5 p.m. or by appointment (203 – 469-4536).
Felipe Molina with his mixed media “Man in Love with God.”
At a festive reception on Friday night Molina, who also curated the exhibition, said, “I wanted [“Crossroads”] to reflect mid-career artists who are making a contemporary statement.”
Important to Molina, who’s now based in Kentucky but in years gone by served on New Haven’s Arts Council, is that all the artists in the show have a sense of art history. He said that for an artist to have such a sense you have to be mid-career and have truly followed your own true path, which will inevitably also reflect on whose artistic shoulders you stand.
As he put it, “It takes time to cultivate your own language.”
In Molina’s case, he was diplomatic in answering whether his “Man In Love With God” stands on the shoulders of, say, Marc Chagall‘s folkloristic black-coated Jews, so in love with their god and so innocent they can take flight.
Photo provided by artist
Molina’s “Madre de Newtown,” oil on canvas.
“I don’t start with a narrative. I paint this way since I was a child. I’m a religious man,” he said.
He added that he used to live barely 50 miles form Newtown and has two of his four children of elementary school age. The Newtown shootings also therefore evoked another work in the show.
“I can’t hug every mother and say it’ll be OK, but my painting expresses solidarity,” he said.
Ben Casiano’s “Sunset” is an emotional response to color, clearly animated by abstract expressionism, he said.
Ben Casiano with his mixed- media “Tango.”
Yet in other work he shows in “Crossroads,” the big chunky arms of Picasso’s and Georges Braque’s cubism are also readily apparent.
Instead of an anxiety of influence, there’s a pride of influence evident in these artists.
In his color studies, like Sunset, Joseph Albers and Marc Rothko are in evidence, although Casiano said he’s interested in dramatic contrasts more than sinking into the spirituality of a single color.
“I’m inspired by Albers,” he said, but his lifelong ambition is to continue to achieve something distinct enough “so they [people] say, ‘That’s a Ben.’”
Becky Franco said shortly before she finished her BFA at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1974, she went to a Whitney Biennial and saw the huge photo realist works of James Rosenquist.
Instantly she found a path: “I decided I wanted to paint big and real,” she said, which is where works like “Power Tools” comes from.
Before Rosenquist made it big, he was also a sign painter and member of … which union?
Answer: Local 230. Just this year Franco began to receive a pension from the union.
In brief remarks Arte co-founder David Greco said that since it opened in 2004, the organization, dedicated to promoting Latino culture in town, has raised and given away $47,000 in art scholarships to kids and sold $67,000 worth of art.
Arte also operates six classes in six public schools, four art classes and two in life skills.