Photo by artist
“Girl with the Blue Paint,” archival pigment print by Tom Peterson, 2015.
He wasn’t sure how large to make the portraits he had just photographed. At what size does a face staring at you seem not intimate?
She wasn’t certain about the balance between light and dark in some areas of her compositions.
Three months ago, Tom Peterson and Paulette Rosen presented the issues to the fellow members of their artists’ cooperative in a “crit,” or informal response session of the kind that is common in art school.
Rosen with her painted digital scan, “Pods,” 2015.
Result: Peterson’s and Rosen’s works, to their own and their colleagues’ satisfaction, are now on view in the latest show at City Gallery.
Their photos and mixed media exhibition, along with Susan Newbold‘s large-size mixed media drawings, comprise “3 Outdoor Views.”
It runs through Jan. 31 at the gallery’s Upper State Street venue, with a reception open to the public on Friday between 5:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m.
Crit sessions are common in artists’ training, especially at art school. Yet once school is out, many artists no longer can avail themselves of that very useful session, with other eyes looking at their work offering confirmation or suggestions for changes in direction.
City Gallery, a cooperative gallery, solves that problem for its 18 members. They share not only gallery rent and upkeep, gallery-sitting time, publicity, and other expenses and duties; they also meet regularly in small groups to respond to each others’ works in progress.
Rosen and Peterson in front of Newbold’s mixed media drawing “Summer.”
“Everyone knows how to do it,” said Rosen whose painted and drawn-over digital scans of birds — many from the Peabody Museum’s collection — fill up one side of the sunlit, white-walled gallery.
“Eye On You,” mixed media drawing on archival pigment print, by Rosen.
“Any artist when he finishes [a project or a series of works] second guesses,” said Peterson, whose Whitmanesque wanderings with a camera take him to urban streets in search of visual surprise. (Click here for a story about one of his previous shows at the gallery.)
In the fall he found a bounty on the Bowery in New York City. There he came upon an entire wall festooned with graffiti and photographs pasted on by unknown hands.
Peterson was entranced and took 16 photographs of what appear to be copies of early 20th-century photos. He was intrigued by the swatches of color framing and animating the rather severe, penetrating eyes of the sitters.
He knew he wanted to perform a kind of visual rescue and he photographed the images before time, weather, or other hands removed or pasted over.
Yet Peterson wasn’t sure what size to print the images after he had Photoshopped them and made other enhancements.
Peterson discovered the red only when he printed the photo.
So he brought all 16 in two different sizes, 8 by 12 and 20 by 13, to the crit session back in November.
He said a serious discussion ensued about the appropriate dimension for a human face.
“The larger-than-life size didn’t seem right,” said Rosen, who is also head of the book arts department at Creative Arts Workshop. She was in attendance at the crit.
“Everyone loved the images. That was a real confirmation,” said Peterson. But they also helped him come up with the final sizing, which is 16 by 10.5.
Now his human faces, saved from evanescence, face off, as it were, with the painted faces of birds.
Rosen said a fixation on birds entered her life when she was very small and noticed her dad’s copy of Roger Tory Peterson’s foundational Field Guide to the Birds.
She said she began practicing her letters in its pages. A few years later, maybe at the age of six, she went out on a walk with other kids in the woods and came back with a dead bird.
Now a serious birder, Rosen’s art in part is to call viewers’ attention to the presence of these remarkable creatures, she said.
Her method is to scan the birds, sometimes along with other objects like flower pods, while also adding a fabric background over them. Then she enhances color or makes other adjustments on the printed sheet.
The images have a quiet, haunting power, achieved in part by aerial and other unexpected positioning. You know they’re dead, but they’re also vibrant, and the tension between the two visually evoked responses sends an eerie, sobering message.
Photo provided by gallery
“Summer,” mixed media by Newbold, 2015.
Completing the show, on the far wall of the gallery, is a third aspect of the outdoors — nature without humans, birds, or other visible creatures. It’s on black-and-white display in Susan Newbold’s large mixed-media drawings.
Rosen, Peterson, and Newbold will be on hand Jan. 24 at 2:00 p.m. at the gallery to give a tour and artists’ talk.
No word yet on whether a crit will also be allowed.