Artist Statements

Robin Adler
I create art to connect to my own spirit and to transcribe experience in a way that can not only be understood, but felt, by others. My work articulates movement, kinetic growth, conversations between shapes. A thriving metamorphosis that continually changes with layer upon layer of paint or ink.

I work intuitively. My brush strokes are rapid and gestural. I scratch into paint, employ squiggles and energetic lines to encourage tempo and rhythm. Vibrant color excites me, I combine hues that sing together or possibly provide an interesting contrast. The canvas is a living, breathing form for me that is emerging, changing, always growing.

As a practicing therapist and an artist, I discern countless visceral emotions through color. Identifying feeling in its most raw, unfiltered state, I can better understand the origin of emotion. I am interested in knowing more about the source of their creation, their beauty, and our shared humanity and sense of connection.

In bringing color and form to the canvas, I create a space for dialogue. My intention is that the viewer and the artwork find commonality that extends both beneath and beyond language.

Joan Barker
The relationship between an abstracted landscape using photography and painting and the abstraction of the landscape lies in how both mediums and processes reinterpret reality, distilling the essence, form, or emotional experience of a place rather than documenting it literally.
My painted photographs of Hudson Valley landscapes serve as a bridge between reality and interpretation, highlighting our multifaceted and complex relationship to nature. The final images are personal responses, simultaneously abstract and literal.

The transformation of objective reality into an expressive painting elicits memories and associations that go beyond the specific place and time. The line between recorded image and imagined space mysteriously disappears. The natural environment connects us and reminds us of our common ground. The layered visual experience of the final image is a commentary on our deeply rooted emotional and psychological engagement with the landscape.

In my images, both photography and painting reimagine the landscape not as a place to be documented but as a subject to be emotionally or conceptually experienced, emphasizing perception over representation.

Isabel Cotarelo
I choose to represent the water crisis as a means to transcend literal interpretation and evoke deeper emotional responses. By employing abstraction, I aim to capture the complexity and duality of water—its capacity to nourish life while simultaneously wreaking havoc. This approach allows me to convey the urgency of the climate crisis without getting bogged down in specifics. The fluid forms and vibrant colors in my work symbolize both the beauty and chaos of water, inviting viewers to engage with their feelings and perceptions. Through abstraction, I hope to inspire reflection on our collective responsibility toward this precious resource, encouraging a dialogue about sustainability and our connection to the environment. My pieces serve as a meditation on the pressing issues we face, urging awareness and action in the face of growing challenges.

Maxine Davidowitz
My work is a dialogue between loose, painterly textures and geometric hard edges—in this series creating bands of what can be perceived as ‘fractured landscapes’. I work with brilliant chemical pigments, contrasting them with more neutral hues, and am constantly searching for a balance between horizontal geometric forms and intuitively applied areas of paint, to create a dynamic composition. Viewers see horizontal lines, no matter how abstractly applied, and immediately fill in the missing information to create an understandable landscape. I work to subvert that effort to varying degrees, riding the border between evoking a sense of landscape and pure abstraction.

Ted Dixon
When working in the studio, I try to capture a moment in time that has a certain feeling and meaning. I have a particular interest in what enables and stimulates artistic expression.

How do we learn to see what we cannot yet see? What are the things that influence our ability to perceive? I describe my paintings as abstract compositions influenced by personal experiences and efforts to capture moments in time.

As the second child of seven, my idea of less being less and more being more has always been relative. My work reflects the investment in the belief that less is more. And in today’s world of visual and verbal overload, I attempt to send the viewer on a journey of discovery and clarity across the painted surface.

I hope the viewer experiences “abstract” sensations–finding quiet, serenity, restlessness, or tension. My goal is to create paintings that speak to a point in time that someone will embrace, be moved by… and cannot live without.

Reidunn Fraas
To me, painting means creating a happening, often surprising myself with the unexpected. Abstract painting is a visual language for me––forms, shapes, textures, and colors that can be interpreted in amazing ways. I paint and experiment, and am fully involved with the revelations of the search. In many of my paintings, I find my inspiration in nature. These paintings have all been completed these past three years, with all its many challenges. They are all acrylic paintings on canvas.

Ali Herrmann
Embodying the realm of non-objective abstraction, I combine familial and personal narratives of quilting with geometric shapes while working in paper, paint and collage. The layering process develops to emulate the interplay of light and translucency, while the placement is similar to piecing a puzzle together. Creating these works invoke a vibrancy that is balanced with a calm, fluid, and spiritual quality.

Having a lineage of sewers and quilters in my family, these collages are created much like the piecing and patterning similar to quilting, but more like the challenge of putting a puzzle together. Using a myriad of colors and pieces to construct the whole, I create these with no pre-formed or organized plan; rather, letting the colors, sizes, and shapes dictate the placement while working. This subconscious process of working is very contemplative and meditative, combining bits of this with remnants of that, all the while exploring playful approaches to color, light and structural space in pure abstraction.

Martha Hill
Art is essential for me to express what I can only share through a visual language. As long as I can remember, I’ve interacted with the world primarily visually, noticing color, pattern, and contrasts in light and dark. Painting allows me to share my experience with others and at the same time process my emotions and responses to the world. Drawing in my sketchbook and creating monotypes also play a role in my artistic practice, supporting and enriching my primary focus on painting.

Intrigued by color and movement, my paintings often stem from a memory of colors, an emotion, or mark-making. To start, I make a few pencil marks to break up the space, mix several colors, then begin applying paint with palette knives. As the piece progresses, observing how colors and shapes relate and echo each other, I continue to shape the composition by adding and removing paint.

Each artwork feels like creating choreography or a musical score as I interact with the space. Working intuitively, references to landscape may emerge or the work may remain abstract. I find that people bring their own experiences to viewing art, especially abstract work. To me, my work feels like inner landscapes or atmospheres. It evokes a sense of place yet allows the viewer to decide where that place might be.

Yoko Izu
From the very beginnings of my art practice, my work has been infused with the influences of Japanese culture. Yet, it’s only recently that I’ve started to uncover the story that weaves its way through each piece. Binding bold abstract shapes with the imperfect torn edges of delicate paper. Loose threads that signal incompleteness. Messy lines smeared and covered, cracks repaired with gold. Piecing together all the fragments of identity, born from straddling the line between my Japanese roots and American upbringing.

This canvas is part of my first large-scale quadriptych and a continuation of my exploration of construction and deconstruction. Created with the intention of breaking it apart to present four standalone paintings, the work was an experiment in simultaneously engaging with the whole and the part. A reminder that there’s beauty to be found in the broken; that a fragment is not incomplete, but simply different.

Roxie Johnson
My creative passion is significantly influenced by a fascination with those relationships that lie beyond our ordinary field of awareness. I enjoy inventing intricate spatial environments where apparent randomness and disorder suggest an organization happening on a different dimensional level. Comprised of painting, drawing, and print, this current body of abstract work draws attention to life’s moments where both chaos and order appear able to co-exist and cooperate. Perhaps, even thrive.

The integration of organic and inorganic form plays a vital role in my visual vocabulary and reconstructive approach. Incessant layering, erasure, and excavation are no doubt embedded in my genetic make-up. I feel at home when foraging amongst those things fragmentary, discarded and lost. And rarely are my results premeditated. I love this process for its ongoing definition and redefinition of densely layered surfaces and traces of human presence. It is where I sense a visceral dimensionality and intangible tension pulsing within each and every shifting shape and gestural mark I set down.

The studio is my tool for introspection, my unadulterated open space. It’s where I lean into those invisible, in-between places. I rely on it to find comfort in embracing paradox. And I feel gratitude there for our shared humanity, vulnerability, and resilience in a world of such rapid change, decay and renewal. Join me in the conversation.

Chong Kang
I share Le Corbusier’s affinity of familiar shapes and colors.

Drawing out the simplest familiar shapes such as lines and circles with primary colors accented
by exaggerated tones narrates my perceptions and concepts of my surroundings and the
events that take place therein.

Harriet Livathinos
I am currently involved in the practice of making abstract works on various surfaces with the goal of depicting how we may think and feel about some things as opposed to how those things look. From a freewheeling starting point of drawing from the subconscious (sometimes blind) with the utter joy of mark making, my process moves to tackling compositional, linear, and spatial concerns.

Using line, I’ve been exploring the use of formal elements to serve expressive purposes by investigating air, density, and depth, keeping in mind the qualities of various line weights and transparent overlay and interlacing of shapes. I use graphite, conte and pastels on a variety of papers, using a multitude of implements.

Added to linear concerns, I’m employing the intense color jolt potential as well as their inherent delicacy offered by colored inks applied with various brushes, pens, and sponges.

Some of my works are done with dry pigment, some with wet, and I’m often using both together for particular expressive effects on various papers. It’s the endless opportunity for surprise and invention that brings me joy–and the efforts to solve self -imposed problems and bring the work to maturity that make it rewarding. My recent work involves using watercolor and inks on waxed canvas, as a resistant surface.

Nancy Mahoney
My paintings reflect the voluptuousness of the overlooked. I chose oil paints because they are creamy, vibrant, rich, fat and wet. These are some of the adjectives Hildegard of Bingen uses to describe the activity of Spirit. Working from photographs I’ve taken and sketches to simplify, I focus on the colors and values and begin to paint. What the photograph so easily “captures” and “takes” I try to liberate onto the surface starting with palette knives to give a general structure and preceding to brush work for further development.

AND, I enjoy the immediacy of the drawing line, even the scribble. Its connection to writing and scrubbing, care-less-ly, with abandon; hastily; with urgency:

There are moments that cry out to be fulfilled….
There is nothing more pathetic than caution
When headlong might save a life,
Even, possibly, your own.” Mary Oliver

I’ve painted a series of snow banks from my street in winter. I admire the marshmallow forms and the layers imposed by freeze-thaw cycles, creamy confections studded with gravel.
In spring I began a series called “Ditch Love” which is of the water, rocks and living creatures abiding in the ditch beside the road. Daily I walk this road with my dog. Her alertness and attunement informs my seeing. However, I am not an objective receiver or capturer of information. I carry within me “the wild”, as writer Kurt Hoelting expounds. So, perhaps what is liberated and saved is this “wild” in me.

Water, rocks, the music they make and their ubiquitous presence has sustained me from my youth along the St. Lawrence and Raquette rivers and the creeks that feed them. Now they support me in their incarnations in the Catskill Mountains, close to home in my elder years.
I want to be intimate with the watershed that sustains me and I strive to be a watershed disciple (Ched Meyers) or apprentice to the wild (Kurt Hoelting) in a love that reciprocates. I invite you to join me.

Dorothea Marcus
I am a lifelong art collector who has always had a love of art and an eye for choosing it.

In the last several years, I have turned my focus to creating my own work. My “eye” now has a “hand” too, so I can manifest my vision.

I work primarily in collage, printmaking and photography, often combining them. I favor abstract imagery, and look for synergy in composition, color and texture. I work from the “id” rather than the “ego”, quickly and intuitively. My travels often inspire my work.

Sylvia Mueller
This collage is part of my Penumbra series, inspired by the 2024 solar eclipse. Across many cultures, solar eclipses have symbolized the unknown—something to be feared or revered. With that in mind, the cuts and final forms of these pieces interpret the shifting shadows cast during an eclipse.

The source images are not meant to represent the event directly. Instead, they reconstruct a nonlinear visual experience: bending horizon lines into circular compositions that radiate outward from a solid center. The results are not entirely abstract, yet they emerge from an abstract concept—the eclipse as a harbinger, a symbolic moment marking an uncertain future.

Susan J. Murphy
This piece springs from my innate visual interest in patterns for their own sake, which when brought together in a certain way tell a story, albeit a story so abstracted as to be cryptic, which I guess is the way of much abstract art, of a certain sort. I’m thinking of the shows that Robert Langdon had a few times at Emerge Gallery, where writers created stories and poems inspired by visual art. I’m wondering what kind of story my three might evoke!

Suzanne Parker
Captivated by process, my works tends to ricochet between painting, sculpture and mixed media, which I pursue as the whim(sical) takes me. In a world full of grim realities, I try, whenever possible, to inject a little lightheartedness. It’s in my artistic DNA to respond to adversity with humor and by mocking symbols of power and authoritarianism. This spirit extends into my abstract work, where I abandon rigid structure to chase a pure sense of playfulness and imaginative freedom.

Lindsay Peyton
The point of view of landscape is no longer still, is instead a matter of practice and transformation.

— Susan Stewart, On Longing

My paintings explore the concepts of home, travel, migration and movement. Each is part of a larger theme of dislocation. The work is not about place in general, but rather of being out of place, which includes nostalgia, longing and looking into the past. At the same time, exploring memory and time, both intimately tied to place, only seems sensible if a larger purpose emerges. Looking at the past should be used to create the present.

Scale plays an important role in allowing the paintings to become a place themselves and to reference space in general. I am interested in pushing more into a three-dimensional realm with my work. Landscape, place and space themselves can be consuming and overwhelming. It seems fitting that a larger presence for painting can better describe the more chaotic reality of an environment.

The internet allows inspection of my hometown from a distance. For source material, I use Google Maps to find the places where I used to go and combine the images with my personal photographs and memories. By using multiple images of a setting, I create a new interior, reimaging the space in a new light. Then, I define the color palette of a place to pin down its emotional effect.

I also incorporate text into my work, digging through my old journals and finding entries that mention place. In the past, I made a practice of stream of conscious writing, meant to make sense of my thoughts and emotions. This brain drain exercise is designed to plumb the subconscious forces behind actions and to reach clearer conclusions.

Once I select a passage, I begin copying it repetitively onto a large canvas through various means, including tinted gesso, charcoal and paint. The process becomes an automatic drawing, like the Surrealists employed to tap into the subconscious. By reproducing the text over and over again, mark-making begins to take precedence over the words. The meaning of the journal entry is second now to rhythm, repetition and line. I also allow the lines and shapes of the letters to take over, allowing for a new space to form.

My paintings are large. Physical interaction with the gestures is important, similar to an action painting. I turn what was intimate, like a journal entry or my own personal memories, into something public. By obscuring and altering visual elements and text, I can transform and transcend the past and give it a new form in the present.

Steven Rushefsky
I paint and draw in layers. The first layers are typically in paler colors. As the artwork progresses, selected areas become bolder and always some of the underdrawing layers peek through. This is the part of looking at artworks that I love the most – seeing the artist’s hand at work, and being a bit of a detective studying underlayers to determine how the final piece came to be.

In recent years I typically work figuratively. In previous years I would alternate between figurative and abstract work. Periods of abstract work would typically add both freedom and punch when I returned to figurative work. Today, for example, I work to ensure that a figure leaning on a diagonal works both as an abstract tilted shape AND a figurative form with depth. Best of Both Worlds.

Vincent Serbin
In my work, I explore the nature of abstract reality—a mysterious territory where countless possibilities emerge, new realities are formed, and rational thinking is pushed to its limits. It is a state of consciousness in which an unfamiliar arrangement of colors and shapes depicts an
alternative way of being. I navigate the realm of indistinct boundaries, contrasting soft focus with hard edges, and organic textures with architectural solidity. I truly believe that this form of expression reflects the essence of our contemporary culture. It embodies the chaotic, cartoon-like condition of society—a culture immersed in caricatures of alternative realities. It captures the ghostly nature of the past while hinting at an uncertain future.

Gloria Tanchelev
In this series of paintings, I am working within and against the tradition of geometric abstraction to destabilize the viewer’s sense of space and self.

Images of shapes bending space arise in my meditation practice. The shapes are asymmetric and off-axial. The paintings are architectural, challenging the picture plane, the edge, the square to address the viewer and the room.

These paintings were begun in response to the extremity of our moment. They are painted in oils for oils’ physicality and authority. They are painted in white and black and white and red for these pigments’ power.

I have a 46 year painting practice, one in which scale and space — activating the space between the painting surface and the viewer have been consistent concerns.

“Untitled (Red Byrdcliffe)” 2025 is a new development — the shapes are drawn from the “flying buttresses” of one of Byrdcliffe’s A.I.R. cottages where I worked in 2024 and 2025.