The Artists’ Studio: June 14, 2012

Creative Couples

Photographs by Lesli and Kirk VanZandbergen will be featured along side clay works by Archie Johnson and Ruth Cohen of Mud and Fire Potters in a new exhibit opening Saturday at The Butternut Gallery. Playfully titled “Llama, Llama, Duck & Clay,” the exhibit will remain on display through July 8.
The Van Zandbergens operate studios in Conklin, NY and Brackney in rural Susquehanna County, where they produce both fine art and commercial work, documenting musical and sporting events and shooting corporate, family and individual portraits. Find them on line at www.vzphoto.com.

Elegant Corrosion

Anyone can see the beauty in the brilliant streaks of color painted across the sky by a rising sun, a blooming flower or a young model’s face. What makes an artist an artist, is his ability to see the charm of the decaying things we’ve discarded, and the successful transfer of that vision from his eye to the viewer’s.

Washington DC based photographer Colin Winterbottom is not the first to be entranced by the obsolete rail cars left to rust and peel in the Steamtown National Historic Site rail yard. His documentation of the toll from decades worth of exposure to the elements have had on these once formidable engines and freight and passenger cars will be exhibited July through October in the park’s Changing Exhibits Gallery.
Winterbottom’s colorful abstractions were achieved by means of macro-photography camera lenses that hone in on the texture and patterns of his subjects.

Eggplant Leaves and Bolt. Photo by Colin Winterbottom

“People often see these images as topographical satellite photos,” Mr. Winterbottom shared via press release. “What I’ve come to appreciate … is that there are a limited number of shapes and patterns in nature, so the path [that] years of rainwater will travel as they run down the sides of a rail car are uncannily similar to the path a river cuts across a landscape.”

The photographer has received grants from the District of Columbia Commission on the Arts and Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts and is best known for his black and white urban landscapes of cities including New York City, Paris, and Moscow.

“In my photos of urban landscapes, I shoot entirely in black and white because I find color can distract for textures,” he noted. “When I first started shooting this series at Steamtown I was shooting in black and white, but found there was something missing from the photographs. I learned that when it comes to rust and corrosion, color is integral to the textures rather than distracting. So you could say I came to Scranton to discover color.”

The Steamtown National Historic Site is located on Cliff Street just off Lackawanna Avenue in Scranton and is open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission to the Park’s museums, theater and walking tours is $7 or free to children ages 15 and younger accompanied by an adult. Call 340-5200 for more information or visit the Park website at www.nps.gov/stea. The artist’s website is online at www.colinwinterbottom.com.

Beirut Morning, Leslie Shaw Zadoian

Existing in Layers

“I love to use found objects in my work—rescuing discards and transforming them,” artist Leslie Shaw Zadoian says of her assemblage paintings, which bring objects in metal, wood, and other materials to her canvas with acrylic paints, pastels and other traditional media. “I find beauty and formal elegance in unlikely combinations.”
A new exhibit of Zadoian’s work opens at the Alliance Gallery at the Delaware Arts Center just over the river in Narrowsburg, NY this weekend with a reception Friday from 7 to 9 p.m. A native of Massachusetts, she spent her formative years in New York City and now resides part-time in Liberty, NY.
“Equally important are textures, energy, and space often sensed rather than seen—mystery, spirit, the layered nature of existence,” she further explains in an artist’s statement. “Each piece is a new beginning with no agenda. Inspired by nature, the world of manufactured and discarded objects, and the inner journey, my assemblage paintings and other works transform disparate elements and integrate them into a new universe. Standing in the here and now, artist and viewer can sense the unseen.”
Assemblage Paintings: Leslie Shaw Zadoian will remain on display through July 7. Upstairs in The Loft Gallery, an exhibit of art chairs by Daria Dorosh will run concurrently. The Delaware Arts Center at 37 Main Street. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. For more information, call (845) 252-7576 or visit www.artsalliancesite.org.