Allan Appel Photo
Shea with his detailed image of a 16th century suit of armor, which won the club’s Community Foundation Prize.
Greg Shea has had a very busy week.
As one of a team of art preparators and installers, he helped to hang the gazillion works of art at the Yale Center for British Art that recently reopened after a 15-month-long renovation.
Then, on Wednesday, as vice president and chief installer of the venerable New Haven Paint and Clay Club, he put the finishing touches on hanging 60 works in the club’s 115th annual juried exhibition.
And a work of his own in the show won an award.
Gallery Photo
“Under the Williamsburg Bridge,” by Sandra Kensler was purchased by the club for its permanent collection.
Shea’s small but striking painting, along with 59 other works — predominantly representational compositions and lots of solid portraiture — are hanging in the sunny two-floored gallery of Creative Arts Workshop on Audubon Street.
The exhibition runs through June 10, with the opening reception open to the public this Friday from 5 to 7 p.m.
The club has never owned a clubhouse of its own, but from the early 1960s until recently, it made its home at the John Slade Ely House on Trumbull Street. There the club held its two main events, a juried show open to all and a members show, for five decades. It had to leave the Ely House for at least 18 months while the building, now owned by ECA/ACES, undergoes renovation. The New Haven Paint & Clay Club thus looked for another venue, and CAW greeted it with open arms, said the club’s president, Jeanne Ciravolo.
“Ascending, Descending,” oil on canvas, by Rachel Carlson, another prize winner also purchased by the club.
So much so that as the club looks to expand its activities, a third show might be added. That might take place not at the Ely House — where the club’s two venerable shows are expected to return in 2017 — but at CAW.
“We’ve gotten along great, and we’re in conversation,” Ciravolo added.
The annual juried show usually has had more than 100 works in it, but that was when it went up at the John Slade Ely House and there was more wall and floor space than at CAW.
Gallery Photo
“The Book, Lightscape,” wire and glass sculpture by Diane Platt
This year only half as many works are in the show. About 300 entries were submitted online. The judge for the show, Barkley L. Hendricks, was told to pick up to 100, with the club’s officials keeping from him that they only were going to hang 75, said Ciravolo.
It turned out Hendricks picked only 60 works, so this edition is a more selective show. The smaller number of works gave a bit of a break to the stalwart Shea.
Artist Photo
Shea’s “Cadmium and Steel,” acrylic on board, 2014
One of the issues was the light pouring in from the windows of Audubon Street, so Shea put works of sculpture and painting there, and nothing like a print, for which too much sunlight is a conservation no-no.
The process of hanging is one of running judgment of what looks good in terms of size, framing, color, and how the compositions “speak” to one another, he said. A particular challenge in a show with so many submissions of realistic, representational portraits was whether to vary them or run some walls with one portrait after another.
On one wall of the upstairs gallery, Shea chose to do the latter. “I could have put a tree in” to vary them, he said, “but that doesn’t help.”
Running the portraits one after the other, most equally sized, gave the viewer a chance to compare techniques and approaches, he added.
One of the sweet aspects of the show is that half a dozen awards are given, all monetary if modest, for a total of about $4,000. Artists selected to be in a juried show twice are automatically made lifetime members of the New Haven Paint & Clay Club, as long as they pay their equally modest dues.
The top prize winner and the Club Prez Ciravolo.
The top prize winner in the club’s 115th annual show was Alfonsina Betancourt’s large oil on canvas painting “La Chica del Humo.”
Shea placed the nearly life-sized work on a wall with half a dozen other portraits with piercing glares, or smokers.
“I call it my film noir wall,” he said.
The club annually purchases up to three works every year from its members or participants in the juried show and deploys about a third of them out in the community.
The pictures are on long-term loan at city institutions such as the Mary Wade Home in Fair Haven and the Connecticut Hospice in Branford.
Other plans for the club include increasing the number of arts scholarship it gives out and adding more programming.
Much depends, however, on when the club — along with its sister group, the Brush & Palette Club — return to the John Slade Ely House.