Vanishing Point
James Bleecker, Sue Bryan, Susan Hope Fogel, Tracy Helgeson, John Kelly, Andrea Moreau, Eileen Murphy, Joseph Rapp and Judy Reynolds
Opening Reception
Saturday, Dec. 2, 4-6pm
Carrie Haddad Gallery
622 Warren Street
Hudson, NY 12534
Carrie Haddad Gallery is pleased to present Vanishing Point, a group landscape exhibition with paintings by Susan Hope Fogel, Tracy Helgeson, John Kelly, Eileen Murphy, Joseph Rapp, and Judy Reynolds; mixed-media works by Sue Bryan and Andrea Moreau; and photography by James Bleecker. The exhibit opens December 1 and remains on view through January 28. All are welcome to attend the artists’ reception on December 2 from 4-6 p.m. during Hudson’s annual Winter Walk event.
Painters are often lauded for their handling of light, but it is the depiction of darkness that so distinguishes Sue Bryan and Susan Hope Fogel. It’s always twilight inside Bryan’s picture plane; upon dim sighs of sunlight, she renders thickets of umbrage in charcoal and acrylic paint. A native of Ireland, Sue Bryan is primarily a self-taught artist. Her work has been selected for numerous juried exhibitions in the US and abroad, and she currently has representation in France and England. Susan Hope Fogel employs watercolor and gouache to realize her brooding landscapes. Whether she’s painting a stormy metropolitan scene — complete with ghostly, nondescript passersby — or a sparse pastoral like “Golden Till the Storm,” Fogel draws out glimmers of brilliance from her waterlogged visions. Susan Hope Fogel studied various techniques in painting at schools in New York City and is a member of The American Watercolor Society.
Color is the lead actor in the works of Tracy Helgeson and Andrea Moreau. Helgeson offers a selection of paintings that riff on the tradition of color field painting. Helgeson literalizes the “field” as a rural landscape, and yet her principal endeavor remains the association of rhapsodical hues achieved by her signature underpainting and use of glazes. Helgeson attended Philadelphia University of the Arts and currently resides in Cooperstown. Andrea Moreau’s mixed-media works, on the other hand, walk a tightrope between context and isolation. Moreau selects a postage stamp to serve as the starting point for a piece on paper, then “completes” the image with colored pencil. These stamps may become lost in a frenzy of Moreau’s mark-making, as with “Mexico (Flowers) #15,” or left comically obvious, like in “USA (Barbershop Quartet).” Moreau has an MFA from The Ohio State University and has received honors and distinctions for her work, including the NYFA fellowship in Drawing and Printmaking.
Through wicked branches, we peer into the worlds of photographer James Bleecker and painter Eileen Murphy. Bleecker’s sepia-toned photographic prints obfuscate time and place, transforming recognizable subjects — from the arches at Washington Square to historical buildings in the Hudson Valley — into monoliths that rest upon one’s imagination. Bleecker earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and has received commissions from New York State Council on the Arts, David Rockefeller, The Frick Collection and The Morgan Library and Museum. Eileen Murphy’s realistic oil paintings direct our attention to the sky, where moons of many phases loom and return a steadfast gaze. Each scene merges her mastery of technique with a penchant for geometric abstraction to conjure an atmosphere. Murphy has an MFA from Pratt Institute and will debut in Seoul, South Korea with a solo show in February 2024.
John Kelly, Joseph Rapp and Judy Reynolds are the most traditional in their approach to the landscape. A carpenter by trade, Joseph Rapp’s craftsmanship is apparent in the sense of stability that reinforces his vistas. He expresses the expansive moodiness of Columbia County’s scenery in terms of weather, natural light, and seasonality. John Kelly paints en plein air and leans into the physicality of painting as an act. With an energetic charge akin to gestural abstraction, he straddles impressionism as he chases to capture the light and shadow of a particular moment in time. A hushed harmony permeates the paintings of Judy Reynolds, whose handling of color quietly implies an underlying fantasy in the real. Much like the artists of the Hudson River School, Reynolds condenses multiple aspects of a landscape into one terrific instant frozen in time. viewer is tag-teamed by sunlight and a biting cold in “Winter Cornfield” as readily as they are intoxicated by the humid romance of a summer night in “Marsh Moon” — a testament to the artist’s ability to evoke sensory experiences with her paintbrush.