September 7 - September 26 2018
MEGAN HINTON | JACKIE LIPTON | JUDITH MOTZKIN | JOHN DAVID O'SHAUGHNESSY | CHAMPA VAID
Opening Reception: Friday, September 7, 6-8 pm
Megan Hinton
Future Gatherings
“My paintings are objectively abstract, making the viewer question how far reality can be pushed before it will yield the powerful essence of what is seen. That is to say, I endeavor to eliminate the dross from my observations in order to focus on what is essential. Control and spontaneity are at the core of my process. To this end, my work is in conversation with 17th Century Dutch Genre Painting, Automatism, Neo-Expressionism, and ReModernism to name a few.
In recent years I have been painting figures assembling, lobster traps washed ashore, and ruined structures. This varied subject matter is unified by the approach in which I paint like an abstract impressionist to exentuate the appearance of the mass, object, or structure.
A secondary subject is often implied beyond the picture plane: a protest, distortion, or civilization that once existed for example. These bodies of work relate to the idea of transformation of people, objects, and architecture. My intention is to convey the very essence of such subjects, without spelling out the details of form. This way the viewer may interpret beyond what is immediately infront of them and have their own transformative experience.”
Megan Hinton has been exhibiting her work in New England and beyond for over fifteen years. Hinton holds degrees from Ohio Wesleyan University, The School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and New York University. Hinton has been awarded artist residencies from The Women’s Studio Workshop, The Vermont Studio Center, Nantucket Island School of Design, and Les Amis de la Grande Vigne in Brittany, France, and The Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium. She has been the recipient of three local Massachusetts Cultural Council grants for recent exhibitions in Wellfleet, Massachusetts at Preservation Hall and The Harbor Stage Company. Her paintings are included in the permanent collections of The Cape Cod Museum of Art, The Provincetown Art Association and Museum, and The Artists Association of Nantucket. Megan is an art writer, educator, curator and avid traveler. She lives in Wellfleet, Massachusetts and her work is represented by AMP Gallery in Provincetown.
Jackie Lipton
Paintings
Eileen Myles, well-known and much-admired poet and art critic, wrote an essay, "Lavish Interiors" about Jackie Lipton's paintings, published in Provincetown Arts magazine. In the interview she conducted with Jackie at Ms. Lipton’s studio, when asked about creative process Jackie discussed her lifelong need to paint and be working actively in the studio, where she equates painting with survival. Describing her motivation for painting, Jackie is quoted as stating her intention in doing art and painting as an idea is to touch you and shake you.
Jackie Lipton has an active career spanning decades. She has received grants and awards for painting and drawing, from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, granted three times, and from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation's special funds. She received a NYFA boot camp award, and earlier a NYFAI collaborative arts award, among others. Her fellowships and residencies include the MacDowell Colony, the Cummington Community of the Arts (no longer there), and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; in Iceland, she was awarded a grant at a small residency program from the Gallery Boreas, of a studio and apartment in Reykjavik.
Selected exhibitions include ARC at the Whitney Museum, the Art Resources Center of the Whitney Museum’s Gallery, the Aldrich Museum, Condeso/Lawler Gallery, WARM Gallery, the Art Resources Transfer Gallery, Gale/Martin Gallery, Gallery Boreas, Corinne Robbins Gallery, Life on Mars Gallery and Westbeth Gallery in NYC; the Schoolhouse Gallery and AMP Gallery in Provincetown, Mass. She is currently showing work at AMP Gallery where a show of new paintings and prints is planned for May/June 2017 and at Anthony Philip Gallery. Lipton works in her studio in Chelsea and lives in Westbeth Artist Housing in NYC with her life partner, J. Christopher Bolton and their two amazing cats.
Judith Motzkin
A Taxonomy of Sorts
“I repurpose, create, and combine in a search for affinities among objects that together come to speak of something more. I experiment with geologic processes to tumble clay shards with sand and water. These small stone-like forms, inspired by those the sea turns up, led me to contrasting big flat clay stones that, when strung together, came to speak of weight. With found block and tackle we are able to experience that weight. Forms left from the production of one thing are gathered to find form together or are sorted in invented taxonomy. The installations are responses to the physical nature of these parts--the weight of the clay, the natural way a pile of arcs forms and falls, the way objects speak to each other.”
Judith Motzkin studied Asian Studies at Cornell University ’76, focused on Asian Art, History, and Chinese. It was there that she began working with clay while studying the history of ceramics in Asia. Influenced by travels to Mexico and China, while at Clay Dragon Studios (1977-1985), she began to experiment with smoke and fire on polished classical, sensual clay forms. She went on to establish her own studio in an old stable next to her Cambridge home. Over time, her work has expanded to include mixed media, assemblage, installations and photography.
Judy has had several solo shows and her work included in gallery and museum exhibits nationally and internationally. She was founding director of the original Cambridge Artists Open Studios (CAOS), one of the first neighborhood based open studios events, carrying on a tradition of inviting people into the working studio begun at Clay Dragon. She curated “Smooth and Smoky” (2009) an international exhibit of pit, smoke, and saggar fired ceramics at Vessels Gallery, Boston, and co-curated the exhibit “Legacy of Fire: Clay Dragon Studios Revisited” (2015) at Fuller Craft Museum. Her saggar fired work is in permanent collections including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Crocker Museum of Art, and Jingdezhen Ceramics Museum in China. She has taught at MIT, Harvard, and Castle Hill Center for the Arts, as well as other workshop venues.
John David O’Shaughnessy
Ocean
"My painting involves a process of discovery through building up and breaking down of the surface. The process involves building parts of the painting and then wipe out large areas, in a dance of visual language. I try to allow each part of the painting to be moveable and changeable, I like to knock elements off balance and then bring the painting back to center. The human quality of painting is important as a means of communication in my work, it allows for vulnerability and honesty.
To me, the ever changing motion of water is primal and visceral to the human experience. These ocean paintings are direct responses to nature, time, place, memory, light phenomena, color, shape, texture and form within the singularity of two dimensional form. They are painted on location and are a direct response to the changing environment of water, tide, sky and light experienced through the senses. I strive to achieve a relationship between the physicality of paint and the consist change and of the coastal experience.
It is my hope these paintings are experienced on a level deeper than appearances, alluding to the unattainable and unnamable, beyond self while establishing a sense of place."
John David O’Shaughnessy was born in New Brunswick New Jersey. He studied Painting at Massachusetts College of Art with Rob Moore, Jeremy Foss, Dan Kelleher and George Nick where he received his Batchelor degree in Fine art in Painting. He has developed his eye over the years through work in fabric design, window display and product design. His paintings are known for carrying an intensity of movement that are held in bold gesture, saturated, improvisational color, and an unrelenting pursuit of fugitive light. Recent years concentrate John works into an intuitive translation of nature pulled fresh from the ocean, skies, lakes, or mountainsides. He can often be found painting seascapes directly from life in all shifts of weather along the coast of Maine, or on the edges of hidden coves along the New England coast. He was inspired by his study in Stonington Maine for two summers in recent years with the late Jon Imber, breaking into a new phase of language in his paintings. John teaches drawing, painting and printmaking at the Currier Museum of Art along with other venues. He shows his paintings in galleries throughout Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont. He is a member of Ogunquit Art Association in Maine.
Champa Vaid (1930-2017)
Retrospect I
In Champa's words from 2012: "I started writing poetry at the age of 60, at a time when most people stop. I could tell you that I started writing late because an Indian woman of my generation with kids raised them until they were done with their studies, and had no time. That is a convenient explanation. But the fact is that creativity has its own clock. It does not see age, or being overworked, or not getting enough time to be with oneself. When it comes, it comes.
Thus I came to painting very late in life, at the age of 76. The reason was, ironically, my declining health. I could not think or write, so I started drawing on paper. In our family, nobody was a painter. But I had the urge to create, so I took to colors and paper, and then to canvas. Though I had no formal training, I spent a lifetime seeing art and artists. My husband is also a writer and our passions have always involved art, music, literature, dance and the world of ideas. Our closest friends are poets, writers, artists, dancers and playwrights. I think that context of friendships, exhibitions, museums, readings, concerts and support informs my work.
Today, I am still painting, I breathe through them, continuing to produce a lot of work. There is something that pushes me through to keep going regardless of age. I call it a dialogue with myself. First, it was with words, and now, it is with colors. Colors are my best friends. I talk to them in their language before they become one with me during the time I am working. They remain with me in my dreams also. And I want to share my enthusiasm and the language of colors with others. Whenever I get waves of energy, I immediately transfer them to my painting. The choice of the colors becomes automatic. They surprise me in the end. I do not want to say much about my own work except that it gives me a reason to live and happiness."
Champa Vaid was an abstract painter and poet who lived and worked in Texas. Born in 1930 in India, she started painting in 2006, at the age of 76. Her bold and confident acrylic based paintings were/are characterized by energetic strokes, experimental style, and a unique blend of color, texture and emotion. Vaid’s paintings were featured in three group shows held in New Delhi in 2007. She had four solo exhibitions in India, two in Delhi—at India International Centre and Ekatra 2008; one at the Alliance Francais in Bhopal 2009, one at Indore sponsored by Sanskriti Prashad, also in 2009. The AMP Gallery exhibition in Provincetown was her first solo show in the United States in July 2012.
Champa Vaid was the author of five books, including four collections of poetry in Hindi and one collection in English titled, The Music of Bones (New Delhi: Vani Prakashan 2011). Educated in India (M.A. in Hindi from Panjab University) and the U.S. (M.Ed. from Boston University), she was a mother and grandmother, and was married to the Hindi writer Krishna Baldev Vaid.
