Press Release

Spanierman Gallery, LLC at East Hampton is pleased to announce the opening on March 20, 2008 of Light of Spring, including the works of ten contemporary painters who are inspired by the special light of Long Island’s East End.  Some of the artists use landscapes and flowers as their vehicles of expression, while others give little attention to natural forms, focusing primarily on light.  Several of the artists portray explicit imagery, but their images are imaginative rather than literal translations.  The artists’ various ways of “seeing” complement each other, capturing each of their unique feelings and responses to their subjects and experiences.

Shari Abramson creates abstract paintings in which shapes informed by nature and light glide through translucent fields of color and line, evoking qualities of depth, atmosphere, and reflection. For example, in Spring colorful, soft-edge elements seem weightless and wind-borne on the white ground, suggesting active landscape elements against an open sky.  Roy Nicholson also creates abstract works that capture experiences of light.  In his Vernal Passage series elements of nature are simplified to essential forms that fill the picture plane as though he has cropped bits of a landscape through which white light emerges.  Zenlike quietude emanates from the works of Jane Wilson, in which large oils are often filled mostly with interactions of clouds and sky from which light emerges from depths of deep color; Frank Wimberly, who carries on the East End abstract expressionist tradition of de Kooning and Kline, but uses his own voice in works in which he is deliberate and in which his use of light is often spare and mysterious; and Pamela Sztybel, who isolates particular places and abstracts them through a sfumato effect of shifting atmospheric light and dark to capture their elemental aspects. 

In works in acrylic on heavy paper mounted on canvas, Deborah Black’s loosely painted textural blues, green, and purples provide definite suggestions of trees, water, and pathways against light skies.  Priscilla Bowden creates more recognizable landscapes, often recording places that have been radically altered by development.  Her approach to color is soft and subtle, as in Forsythia (2008), in which the spring light is chalky yet translucent.  Ty Stroudburg and Gerson Leiber are two other artists whose colorful landscapes combine abstract and representational elements. Using intense, vivid colors, their works are expressive bursts of luminous color.

Robert Dash has enjoyed a long career in which he has moved back and forth between representational imagery and abstraction.  In two works from his Sag Main series, he takes one area of a tree-lined street and records variations of color and form against a white ground, giving a dimensional quality to his art and evoking paths and architectural expressions.  

While each work in the exhibition reflects an individualistic point of view, common threads of thought regarding spring light and its distinctive qualities on the East End are carried among them, creating an all-encompassing multi-leveled experience for the viewer that bridges the boundaries of meditative, sensuous, and philosophical awareness.