Shelly Voorhees at BlackRock

Just a few weeks ago I reminded all of you that BlackRock Center for the Arts in Germantown, MD has one of the most beautiful and dramatic gallery spaces in the region, and the other day I happened to be in that area again and dropped in to see the new show there.

Currently on exhibition are the monochromatic ethereal paintings of Shelly Voorhees, on exhibition through August 28.



It's hard to describe this exhibition without using synonyms for the word "ethereal", and since I've already dropped that adjective once, plant that description in your mind and walk with me through words.

As one enters the very large and very tall space that is the gallery at Blackrock, Voorhees' paintings, most of which are very large, fit well into the space, not only because of sheer scale, but also because of the monochromatic uniformity that they present.

Until you look to your left, that is.

That wall hosts a series of very small, we're talking a couple of inches or so, very well done, and very attractive set of miniature portraits. See some of them here. Every single one of them is a jewel and showcases a very strong technical talent by Voorhees.

You see, as any painter will tell you, it is more often than not harder to create a small, in this case, tiny, work of art that carries a punch, than a larger one. Voorhees succeeds admirably and the wall of tiny works resonates in a visual paradox in this very large gallery.

Salvador Dali said it best when he said: "If you can't paint well, then paint big."

Voorhees has titled the exhibition "Apparitions" and writes about it:

This exhibition is a black and white mixed-media portraiture series of female spirits dynamically represented in moments of contemplation and emotional transition. Besides the apparitional theme, the incorporation of specific artistic elements of texture, depth, layers, luminosity, and motion, are equally important in the expressing of the merging of life's energy with the portraits ethereal.

In this series, I've incorporated the expansive landscape views from my window of Lake Champlain. The natural background of the lake balances the figures beauty with their emotions. The power of the waters help to calm the viewer, and the abstracted horizontal strokes reminds us of the life that moves through us. The women are painted thinly veiled so that you can see the abstracted landscapes through their bodily shapes. I found interest in the translucent figures appearing as if their souls still remain with us. I've exemplified my own take on the traditional idea of apparitions, attempting to humanize the spirits by painting them with simple gestures in unguarded moments of contemplation and transition. These moments are expressions of the duality between movement and the still,landscape and the figure, real and the ethereal. They are psychological portraits that reflect the emotional undercurrents present in even the most unremarkable moments in life, they give tribute to women and the essence of their spirit that is eternal.

While I was there looking at the show, I sat down and observed several families who were walking through the exhibition. The comments from the children seemed to imply that the artist had achieved her goal, as the comments all had a sense of the unusual, ghostly and transitory. The adults mostly commented on the beauty of the works themselves.

Therein lies the key to viewing all these works at once. Voorhees uses resin and acrylic skillfully to deliver a sense of atmospheric presence in the paintings that offer the women subjects as almost a transition in the fog of grayscales, rather than a physical object. She has also chosen a sort of 19th century romantic period "look" for her models, that gives us the kind of women who Julia Margaret Cameron would have loved to photograph.


Shelly Voorhees, Waiting, Acrylic/Resin, 38x26 inches
And yet, as soon as I state this I am confronted by a sense of the opposite in the sense that there also seems to be a modernistic transition in the "look" of the women, trapped in my mind in a 19th century gaze and feel, to a sense of today looking from the past. This is perhaps most visible in "Waiting," which shows a very young 21st century woman lost in 19th century thoughts.

See the show online here.

Alexandria Call for Public Art

Deadline: October 1, 2009, 4 pm (EDT)
Budget: $300,000
Eligibility: Open to all artists or design groups. No geographic requirements.

Description The City of Alexandria, Virginia seeks to commission public art for the new Charles Houston Recreation Center. The process will be managed by the Office of the Arts, a division of the Department of Recreation, Parks and Cultural Activities, with the Alexandria Commission for the Arts Public Art Committee. The City will conduct the search for qualified applicants through a Request for Qualifications (RFQ).

The art will be paid for by private donations.

The purpose of the project is to honor and memorialize Charles Houston and to recognize the historical importance of the former Parker-Gray High School, Alexandria’s first African-American high school.

Charles Hamilton Houston was a nationally-known civil rights leader and NAACP attorney who fought for equality in public education. He became involved with Alexandria when, in 1941, a group of concerned citizens began to petition for a new school and eventually appealed to the NAACP for assistance. Houston took on this challenge and used his knowledge and influence to aid the community in their fight. Their efforts were successful and a new Parker-Gray High School was built in 1950. When Charles Houston passed away one month before the school was dedicated, the community requested that the former Parker-Gray School be renamed the Charles Houston Elementary School in recognition of his important contribution. Years later, the school was demolished and a recreation facility was built that retained the Houston name. This building was later razed to make room for the new, state-of-the-art Charles Houston Recreation Center which opened in February of 2009. When plans for the new facility began, the community indicated their interest in seeking an appropriate way to not only memorialize Houston and his contributions to Alexandria but to also find a way to preserve the history of the Parker-Gray schools. The project's overarching theme is Education and Civil Rights.

Process: Three finalists will be invited to submit proposals. Each will receive a $2,000 honorarium.

Anticipated Award Date: May 2010

Anticipated Installation Date: April 2011

Web Site: http://alexandriava.gov/arts - click on Charles Houston Public Art Project.

Artists or design teams interested in applying to the Request for Qualifications (RFQ) are encouraged to register with the City of Alexandria's e-procure system located online here. All inquires regarding the RFQ should be directed to Dominic Lackey at the City of Alexandria Procurement Department.

Questions may be sent by fax to 703.838.6493 or by email to dominic.lackey@alexandriava.gov.

Please reference the solicitation number and title on the fax or email. For general question related to the solicitation, you may call Dominic at 703.838.4946, extension 600.

Forthcoming Frida Kahlo book denounced as fake

A collection of Frida Kahlo oil paintings, diaries and archival material that is the subject of a book to be published by Princeton Architectural Press on 1 November has been denounced by scholars as a cache of fakes. Finding Frida Kahlo includes reproductions of paintings, drawings and handwritten letters, diaries, notes, trinkets and other ephemera attributed to the artist. They belong to Carlos Noyola and Leticia Fernández, a couple who own the antique store La Buhardilla Antiquarios in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. The publisher describes it as “an astonishing lost archive of one of the twentieth century's most revered artists...full of ardent desires, seething fury, and outrageous humor”.

According to an interview in the forthcoming book, and to emails from Noyola to The Art Newspaper, the couple acquired the items incrementally from 2004-07 from a lawyer who in turn had acquired them from a woodcarver who allegedly received them from the artist. Noyola tells The Art Newspaper he has more than 1,200 Kahlo items in all.

Read the story in AN here and check out the book here.

Hitler Watercolors Hit the Auction Block

A series of three paintings by Adolf Hitler will be sold on September 5 at Nuremberg’s Weidler auction house. Bidding for the three signed watercolors, made in 1910 and 1911, will begin at €3,000 ($4,270).

Read all about it at AFP here and see the watercolors here.

When actors bite write

"Actress Claire Forlani is accused of wielding a pen that is indeed mightier than the sword ... and killing the reputation of an art dealer in the process.

The former "CSI NY" star is being sued for allegedly crushing the "fragile and intangible" reputation of art dealer Paul Rusconi in a mass email she sent out to a bunch of her friends."

Read the TMZ story here.

Artists' Websites: Grant Silverstein

If my memory serves me right, the second or third show that we ever did back in our first gallery in Georgetown was the amazing work of Grant Silverstein.

Her brother's arrest. Intaglio Etching, 8x8 inches by Grant Silverstein.
We sold a lot of Grant's gorgeous etchings (they are priced as low as $35) and we thought naively, "hey! this gallery business is gonna be easy!"

Tribulations of a Childless Couple. Intaglio Etching, 5x6 inches by Grant Silverstein.

This self-taught artist is a throwback to the masters of printmaking who toiled along and discovered, step by step, the secrets of the printing press. His meticulous etchings have the look and feel of the 15th century but the resonance and dialogue of the 21st.

See his works here and his prices are a great deal for the money.

The Franz and Virginia Bader Fund

Deadline: September 15, 2009

The Franz and Virginia Bader Fund welcomes applications from visual artists aged 40 years or older, who live within 150 miles of Washington, D.C. and can demonstrate that they have the potential to benefit as artists from a grant.

The Franz and Virginia Bader Fund does not, however, accept applications from filmmakers, video artists, and performance artists.

The deadline for applications is September 15, 2009. Application forms may be downloaded from the fund's web site: www.baderfund.org or may be requested by sending an email to grants@baderfund.org or by sending a request to:

Bader Fund
5505 Connecticut Avenue, NW #268
Washington, D.C. 20015