HANDS, FEET AND FINGER PAINTINGS BY WILLIAM DILWORTH
EXQUISITE EPHEMERA: SELECTED COLLAGES BY JEANNE STRAUSMAN
WILLIAM DILWORTH’s colorful and dynamic abstractions command our attention and encourage us to seek a narrative. His paintings on Formica both assault and engage us with the same energy he states that he found working with this uncommon material 30 years ago. “…I found that painting on Formica was liberating. ….it was ideally suited for oil paint, proving to be completely stable and amazingly versatile. (Formica) holds what I want it to keep and allows for what I don’t want to be entirely erasable.” Dilworth credits “the freedom of DeKooning, the care and spareness of Ryman and the draughtsmanship of Marden as the most important influences for his artmaking.
Employing mainly hands and feet because he felt his mark making became predictable, Dilworth uses paintbrushes to lay down material and for touch-ups. He will, however, use shoes as paintbrushes.
Although there is an intimacy to his smaller format work, they retain the energy of intelligent fingers and hands activating paint into intensely personal works of art.
“When I make a painting I take away as much as I put down…what is left is the middle of those spaces…the completed artwork being a settled and mysterious place. To look at them is to occupy that place in wonder.”
Originally from Detroit, Dilworth came to New York because “it seemed to have no limits” however, the evolution of the art world into the art market inspired him to go underground with his own work, exhibiting in selective venues such as City Without Walls, Newark NJ 2013; Hardscrabble/Tough Au Sable/Forks/Detroit, Tahawas Lodge Center, NY 2012; We’ll Know When We Get There, Cneai, Chatou, France, 2009.
He is the manager/caretaker of the Dia Art Foundation’s Earth Room since 1989, (a 1977 installation piece by Walter de Maria) which he credits as a continuous influence on his life and art. “The routine care and quiet of the Earth Room balances busy and noisy city life. Tending the (280,000lbs of) earth has been grounding. I am saturated in earth, art, timelessness and quiet. That’s a great place from which to approach my own artwork.”
You can see a WNYC Culture’s Video Profile of Bill at http:/www.wnyc.org/& on YouTube
JEANNE STRAUSMAN: EXQUISITE EPHEMERA
Jeanne Strausman collects and creates memories. From her treasure trove of tarnished papers, old handwriting, bits of textiles, and dried organic material, Strausman carefully constructs settings for story telling. She has stated that her work reflects her interests in nature, women’s issues and American History. To that end, Strausman’s collages read as intimate assemblages and dreamlike echoes of personal and collective histories, or stories passed down.
Her influences include her husband, Albert Strausman, now deceased, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Motherwell and Antoni Tapies.
Strausman is an of Kurt Schwitters, Ann Ryan and Hannalore Baron. Her balanced compositions and spatial fluidity, deft handling of texture, color, shape and line, pay homage to them but allow for her own originality.
Strausman states that she will use “anything well loved and cast off”; her collages transmit this sensitivity for all to enjoy and contemplate.
Ms. Strausman, a former student of Color and Textiles/Surface Design at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, has been living and working in the Hudson Valley for more than twenty years. Residing now in Rensselaerville, NY, she concentrates her attention on the natural world and the study of art in many of its forms.
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