On Thursday, May 9 “Time and Place,” the final show of the Flinn Gallery’s 19th anniversary season, opens and features works by four artists who direct their talents to present individual impressions of spaces they encounter in their daily lives. Each transmutes perceptions with a different style and creates works that reflect the interests, concerns, and beliefs that drive their creativity. Frances Ashforth’s paintings of horizons, rock formations, and nature’s motion highlight her environmental focus. Lori Glavin paints abstract recollections of her domestic and garden worlds with attention to the accumulated clutter that inevitably attaches to familiar surroundings. Justin Kim uses his memories of specific places and reconstitutes colorful scenes according to his perceptions of the experience. Shona Macdonald presents reflective landscapes of nature’s transience that are almost ethereally charged. The paintings invite viewers to regard familiar spaces in new ways.
Fereshteh Priou and Ruth Sutcliffe-Heagney are the curators of this exhibit which opens with a reception on May 9 from 6-8 at the Flinn Gallery and runs until June 20. There will be two artist talks scheduled for Sunday, June 2 and Sunday, June 9 from 2-3:30. Addressing the title concept, Professor Alex Priou will give a talk titled “Plato on the Self: How Time and Place Shape us” at 2 p.m. on Sunday, May 19. All are welcome.
A Connecticut resident Frances Ashforth comes from a family of artists whose youthful fascination with nature developed on her grandparents’ farm in the Connecticut River Valley. Staring at the horizon, she found herself mesmerized by the shapes and patterns light created on rock formations. She studied art, printmaking, drawing and architectural history at Skidmore College and later in London. The ever changing relationship of land, water and sky continue to dominate her canvases and validate her need to study the balance and tension along the horizon line. She remains mindful of environmental issues and respects both the power and the fragility of nature.
Now located in Norwalk, Glavin is a Rochester, N.Y. native who studied art at Syracuse U. and worked as a graphic designer, an art director for several magazines, and for various companies, including her own, before co-founding Wilson Avenue Loft Artists. Her abstract works trace their origins to the mundane places she knows best around the home, but they also pay attention to our human urge to accumulate objects around us. Her colorful pieces are spontaneous and intuitive, developing without a plan into what she terms as “happy accidents.” Her technique involves applying gouache to paper, cutting it, and using the collage-like scraps to build invented places. She terms the results as “selective memories—you embellish some and you edit others.”
Yale and American University provided the educational background for Hartford native Justin Kim’s artistic talent. While a student, he interned for the illustrious David Hockney. He combines traditional and modern in his landscapes by advancing a 21st century sensibility to customary landscape painting. He is adept with color and figures which allow him to create pieces that are busy yet clean at the same time. Kim aims to depict his perception of his experience of being in a particular place at a certain time, generating a tension between artifice and reality. Viewers are aware of contours and shapes. He employs sketches, photos and media to reconstitute his personal reality. He stated, “Painting should reflect what you find to be important, beautiful, and true.”
Scottish born Shona Macdonald studied in Glasgow and Chicago before assuming her position as an art professor at U. Mass, Amherst. She depicts landscapes as uneasy, mysterious, and unpredictable places. Her works have an ethereal, other worldly aspect. In creating these images, she draws on the classical tradition of including water for its reflective quality which may distort or exaggerate stressing nature’s transience. Growth and decay coexist as do beauty and threat. These paradoxes of perception are evident in her diaphanous drawings which suggest that what you see may not be the reality even though it appears real—it may just be a reflection. All the artists in this show strive to heighten our awareness of our surroundings by presenting varied interpretations of “Time and Place.”
The Flinn Gallery is sponsored by the Friends of the Greenwich Library, and is located on the second floor of the library, 101 West Putnam Ave. Gallery hours are Monday-Saturday, 10-5; Thursday until 8; Sunday, 1-5. All works are for sale.
Programming information:
5/17 Lounge Date & Movie – Tyrus 7:30 pm
5/19 Professor Alex Priou Talk – “Plato on the Self: How Time and Place Shape Us”
6/2 Artist Talk – Frances Ashforth and Lori Glavin
6/9 Artist Talk – Justin Kim and Shona Macdonald
6/9 Tax Free Day for sales
