David Hornung at John Davis Gallery with Leticia Ortega, Dionisio Cortes, Chris Bertholf, Philip Douglas Heilman and Lucy Reitzfeld

On Thursday, July 23th the work of the featured artist David Hornung was displayed in the main galleries. An installation, when skies hang, by Leticia Ortega and Dionisio Cortes was on extended display in the Carriage House atrium. Paintings by Chris Bertholf, Philip Douglas Heilman, and Lucy Reitzfeld were also be on view on the upper floors of the Carriage House. Main Galleries: David Hornung: Paintings "This recent group of oil paintings follows a series of experimental gouache paintings I made in 2008. As in the gouache paintings, I have retained my longstanding iconography, i.e., rude structures, garden architecture, tools, flora, fauna and other objects that refer to a rural existence. These elements appear within an equivocal pictorial syntax held together through the agency of varied and sometimes contradictory modes of representation. The tension that results when a picture's parts disagree with one another is an ongoing fascination of mine, especially when those contradictions add up, paradoxically, to a sense of psychological unity. I am also drawn to the quality of illumination, both in the representation of light and in its literal manifestation through color. The experience of light in painting is rich with poetic implication; its metaphorical potential enhanced by its inherent seductiveness. It can make us feel whole." David Hornung 2009

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Carriage House:
There are three artists within the carriage house: Chris Bertholf, Philip Douglas Heilman, and Lucy Reitzfeld in addition to a continuously changing group show of gallery sculptors on the first floor.

Second Floor: ChrisBertholf The Mysterious Landscape "The work in this show began as I fell in love with the landscape and the trees of the Hudson River valley. I'd work in my sketchbook from nature and then reworked the sketches into watercolors and, later, into oil paintings. I want to transform the essential elements of trees, and their relationship to the figure, into archetypes that can be interpreted through the prism of the viewer's experience. All interpretations are valid to the degree that they depend on the interrelations between the trees, the figures, the negative spaces and how these blend together into abstraction. These are the images that are meant in these works to grow organically, fusing into each other, shouldering aside quick impressions. Light and shade, life and death, growth and decay enable me to instinctually express the poetry that is intrinsic in these natural and geometric relationships." Chris Bertholf 2009

Third Floor: Philip Douglas Heilman Grids and Landscapes "I want to invent something that I've never seen before...paint what lay behind or before me in life. Academic statements make me suspicious. I've always felt a dual polarity in the cause for academic discussion vs. just getting on with the work at hand. Stanley Kubrick, when asked about what the meaning of his film 2001: A Space Odyssey said (and I paraphrase):"They are the areas I prefer not to discuss, because they are highly subjective and will differ from viewer to viewer. In this sense, it becomes anything the viewer sees in it. If it stirs the emotions and penetrates the subconscious of the viewer, if it stimulates, however inchoately, yearnings and impulses, then it has succeeded". Maybe I'm reaching just a bit. But the suspicious statement surely has roots in my training and background. One of my college instructors, painter Fred Mitchell, told me that if I wanted to teach, "...stay in college and get a higher degree. But if you want to paint" he said, "go to New York and open a studio and paint". I knew that I wanted to paint. So after college I headed to New York (West Haven Connecticut actually, but close enough having moved up from Baton Rouge. The move to New York City came eight years later). In his poem/treatise 'Arrivederci Mondernisimo': Carter Ratcliff said (again I paraphrase) "Arrivederci at last Modernisimo, dear--I was a young man in a hurry then, and I noticed that the history we were making had gotten into a funny habit of passing us by... I wanted to catch up. I wanted to be more myself". Academic; but real insightful. Duality indeed.I set out to be 'more myself'. I spent 15 years learning craft & discipline. Like all seekers of truth, all "artists" I had to investigate the enormous force of history that I deeply felt and embrace or discard the various art-isms in order to find the well spring of my own vision. But through the sidetracks and diversions a voice in my head told me to paint what lay right in front of me. 'If you can't find it in your own backyard you'll never find it'; another piece of sage advice from a former college instructor (a much more "Bookish" one). All those hundreds of bad paintings contained kernels of individual thought; pure invention, willful independence, forward progress. 'One must weed out the garden before the flowers can blossom'. I don't know who said that. I just like it. The act of painting itself becomes an act of invention; it's what painter Thomas Nozkowski calls "the territory of invention". Sources and inspirations are all around me in everyday life. So I paint what I know and what I see. I paint life in front of me. PDH Columbiaville, New York 2008

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Fourth Floor: Lucy Reitzfeld Mercer Street "Lucy Reitzfeld introduces a series of small oil paintings devoted to observations from windows of her SoHo loft. Completed over the course of several seasons, the series began as "studies" for larger works. Over time the artist began to delight in the small scale and decided not to transpose the works to a larger format. The smaller and often odd shaped panels provided great possibilities for studying patterns of shape and color. As the light and seasons change, patterns of shapes take on different hues. Reitzfeld is always searching for the meaning of color and light. Light is made of color. Color describes light and color describes form. Her paintings function as a cumulative response to the observed world. Certain elements appear and reappear and take on an iconographic character. The imposing Trump building with its orange passenger elevator, the water towers across Mercer Street, the small spots of distant buildings in the North view. "I do not set out to make a picture of anything. The fact that a painting might actually look like something is always a surprise to me. It is the unconscious gathering of sensations that builds a painting." Lucy Reitzfeld 2009