Seven women artists of the Hudson Valley are featured in the Summer Salon Show at the Woodstock Framing Gallery on Mill Hill Road. A sense of summery brightness — with a dash of dark humor — unites the wide but balanced variety of art that will remain on the walls through October 2.
“I love to bring together works that are very different but complement each other,” said gallerist Sneha Kapadia. Instead of keeping each artist’s pieces in a cluster, she skillfully mixes them, putting, for instance, Mariyah Sultan’s lively abstracts beside Anna Contes’ shimmering landscapes, allowing them to correspond and contrast in intriguing ways. “After all,” Kapadia pointed out, “in most people’s homes that’s what it will look like. This is a show I’m going to live with for six to eight weeks, and that’s how I like looking at my art.”
What could be more summery than laundry on clotheslines? Paintings by Harriet Livathinos show street scenes from Italy, Barcelona, and Bombay, evoking vacation travel and bright Mediterranean (or Subcontinental) light. The forms of the sharply delineated cityscapes are echoed in some of Sultan’s pieces, with dark rectangles suggesting doors and windows among a chaos of lines reminiscent of graffiti.
In a totally different vein, Katherine Burger’s collages depict alternately whimsical and menacing relationships between dolls and teddy bears. They find a parallel in Elin Menzies’ depictions of Red Riding Hood, who having made friends with the wolf, is living an idyllic existence in the woods. Other pieces from Menzies’ varied repertoire include dreamlike images of mer-teenagers in seashells on a beach.
Gladys Brodsky bridges the figurative and the abstract with still lifes that range off into Kandinsky-esque shapes in vivid colors. In a different style, Anna Contes’ landscapes play with light and texture, creating nearly abstract surfaces with Impressionist effects.
Trees and mountains take center stage in paintings by Woodstock Times photographer Dion Ogust, who is enjoying “breaking out of the mold of photography. Since it went digital, I’m spending so much time at my desk.” Curious about the transition, Kapadia visited Ogust’s studio and decided to build her summer show around the bright, frothy landscapes of the Catskills.
Kapadia is happy with the current selections. “I always know what I’m going for,” she commented, “but I’m never sure it will work until the day I install. It’s nerve-wracking, but it’s a lot of fun watching it come together.”
The Summer Salon will be on display through October 2 at the Woodstock Framing Gallery, 31 Mill Hill Road, Woodstock. For more information, see https://wfggallery.com.
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