Recent Works

paintings by Inverna Lockpez and encaustics by Fawn Potash

2007 Oct 5 - Nov 25

Opening Reception for the Artists Saturday, Oct 6, 5 - 7 p.m.

Best known for her famed Noble Barn series of 2002, Inverna Lockpez returns to the Catskill Mountain barn as subject matter for one last time. This new body work is stunning, maintaining Lockpez's highly sought after use of texture and abstracted tree line while lionizing our area barns. "I have come to understand the profound connections between the forests that envelope these mountains, the valleys that meet them at the forest edges, and the sunlit fields and barns designed to serve our needs. The Noble Barn commemorates the mutually beneficial co-existence between nature and the work of human hands revealed through this artistic journey," says the artist, adding that his new body of work utilizes the "voluptuous Catskill landscape to counterpoint the barns' submission to nature which allows the quality of light to dramatize the architecture and fuse the barns with the natural world." Her paintings employ a romantic expressionism, evoking natural forces and contemplative quietism. A book entitled The Noble Barn, paintings by Inverna Lockpez will be released in summer 2008 with a signing at Chace-Randall.

Ms. Lockpez, a native of Cuba and well-known painter/curator in New York City, has been living and painting in the Catskills for nearly 20 years. Her accomplishments in the Catskill Mountain Region, as well as New York City, are numerous: While living in Manhattan she won a major outdoor competition for a 25-foot sculpture under the auspices of The Municipal Art Society. She received grants from The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS), CINTAS Foundation, and a CETA award. By the nineties her paintings had already been part of more than 80 exhibits around the country and for her work she received two NYSCA Decentralization Grants administered by the Roxbury Arts Group.

Celebrating her first exhibition at Chace-Randall, the elemental themes of Fawn Potash's work are barrenness and fertility, evoking the emotional sweep of our landscape. Ms. Potash uses a 1970's Polaroid camera with a film that renders both a negative and positive image. Working in winter, the film acts slowly in the cold and tends to develop only half way, solarizing the lightest tones. "These landscapes come across as other worldly, more like drawings of a place where twilight holds day and night in an odd balance; the seasons exist simultaneously; water, sky and earth remind each other of their common business. I am attracted to the inter-relatedness of it all, nature's miracle of cooperation," says the artist. The photographs are mounted on wood and then sealed in translucent encaustic medium (bees wax w/ a resin hardener). "I use etching tools to draw a response to the photograph, filling the etched lines with oil color. Several encaustic layers build an interpreted place, season and time of day. This process has obscured the work's photographic origins, moving more toward the world of printmaking and drawing," explains Potash.

Ms. Potash is a photographic artist and art educator whose work has exhibited in the Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC, Anne Reed Gallery, Sun Valley, and Elena Zang Gallery, Woodstock, among others. Her work is in collections worldwide, including those of Sony, Dow Jones, Standard and Poors Asia, and the Bibiliotech National. Potash's work has received grant support from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Puffin Foundation, Bell Atlantic Foundation, Fuji and Ilford, Inc. Her imagery has appeared in national and regional publications, including Harper's Magazine, The Sun Magazine, The New Yorker, Mirabella and Art News. For ten years she has been an instructor at the School of Visual Arts.