Since The Lodge at Woodloch’s inception in 2006, Kiesendahl + Calhoun Fine Art has been curating seasonal art exhibits in our Gallery Hall that feature approximately fifty works by two artists. The gallerists choose work that evokes tranquility, joy, and contemplation; lush landscape paintings, exuberant abstract art, expressionistic portraits, photography, and collage.
Marie Cole has shown here with us at the Lodge Gallery numerous times over the last eighteen years. The artist exhibits with galleries throughout the East coast and participates in the Art Studio Views open studio tour at her home and art studio housed in a renovated warehouse in Germantown on the Hudson River.
Born in Southern New Jersey, Marie moved to New York City after high school, and then to the Hudson Valley in 1963. The artist earned a BA at Vassar College where she studied art and taught at Dutchess Community College for several years before becoming a full time painter. Classes at the Woodstock School of Art inspired her creativity, expanding her work into printmaking with Kate McGloughlin. Eric Aho influenced her work through workshops in Italy, Canada and Vermont. Travels through the United States, Europe, Mexico, Scotland and South Africa also serve as an ongoing source of stimulation. The artist paintings build on experiences observing seas, rivers, mountains, marshes and farmland. Water and weather and the interplay of dramatic light are two constant and significant themes.
“The windows of my studio face the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains. Storms that come down the river are incredibly intense – rain comes down in sheets, and thunder and lightning roll across the mountains. In winter, ice forms and cracks and shifts on the river and snow blankets everything in white. The chilly weather of fall and winter are especially exciting times of year to paint and a challenge to see how much color can be found in the landscape. Summer and fall months provide brilliant, intense color. The process of painting is important to me, I love the paint, thick or thin, the viscosity, piled up in layers or scraped down to the canvas, creating texture or smoothness. Paint creates light and shadow, yet if you look closely, it is still just paint”.
Leonard Stokes attended Yale University as an undergraduate. His classes were conducted under the faculty assembled by Josef Albers during his tenure there. Chief among the extraordinary educators were Sewell Stillman, Erwin Hauert and Neil Welliver. The artist says that those years marked the moment when he first began to see, and when the centrality of perception, color and form became deeply ingrained. While he remained at Yale for graduate studies in painting, Stokes also realized that teaching was an art and noble calling. In the 1970s, early in his professional career, he abandoned painting and embraced paper collage. After working with paper collages, by 1996, Stokes began to compose by means of computer. He now works exclusively by digital montage.
Stokes has had numerous one-person exhibits in New York City galleries, such as Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery. He has also shown in Beacon with Kiesendahl + Calhoun, in Katonah and Purchase, NY, in Dallas, Texas and Philadeplhia, Pa. He has participated in many two person and group exhibitions all over the USA. Stokes’s work can be found in both corporate and public collections — the Newark Museum, The Newberger Museum, The Reader’s Digest, and IBM to name a few. His teaching career included Professor Emeritus at Purchase College (SUNY) School of Art and Design, visiting professor and chair at the University of Pennsylvania 1990-1993, the Lacoste School of the Arts, Lacoste, France, The Cooper Union and Yale University. “…I’ve come to think of the most recent work as fauxtographs, compositions that appear at first to be pictures taken of objects arranged on a ground plane before being captured by a lens. Rather, they are composed of objects that have never been in the same place at the same time until I and the software worked our will upon them…”
The artist creates an intriguing topography that takes us on a voyage through layers that reference and reconfigure early Italian renaissance images, fairy tales, buildings, mountains, curious characters and every day utensils. His work is a source of wonder and exploration.
Being outdoors in the landscape anchors and inspires the artist. She relishes working outside with oils, in changing light and fleeting conditions. Working between vantage points and the painting’s surface, the artist navigates the boundaries of representation and abstraction. Schellenberg’s broad vertical and horizontal fluid brush work reveals spatial swaths with lively complements of surprising colors and dancing light and shadows in spaces between buildings, backyards and hidden views.
We are thrilled to welcome Lou to exhibit at the Lodge with us for the first time. We hope her paintings take you to a place of wonder, delight and pensive observation.
| Any questions or interest, please contact: Kiesendahl+Calhoun Fine Art, Ltd. www.kiesendahlcalhounart.com 914 325 5496 Nancy Bloch 914 844 6296 Camilla Calhoun |