JOAN HARRISON

Exhibited and published internationally, Joan Harrison’s work is included in many private and public collections, most recently at the Morgan Library in New York City. She is a Professor Emerita of Long Island University where she taught art and photography for many years. She has had art residencies in Rochester, NY, and in Venice, Italy. Joan has a deep creative connection to nature and the North Shore of Long Island where she and her husband Michael Ach, a fellow artist, live, work and raised their daughters, who are also artists.

The artist’s chalk pastels are amalgamations of how the eye and the mind perceive light on the landscape. Alternating between the abstraction and specificity of nature, these paintings are a perceptual record of sea and sky. The intriguing dramatic Icelandic work above portrays multidimensional contrasts. We can feel the ice traveling towards us and floating away, its stark beauty both a breathtaking mystery and cautionary tale.   

 Joan has a broad range of creative work which includes photography, pastel paintings, collages and watercolors. Obsessed with paper as well as light, fantasy collages and small paintings fill her studio when conditions preclude landscape work. Pulling from bins of vintage ephemera and all matter of flotsam and jetsam collected from her travels, Joan combines drawing and watercolors, prints or threaded passages. These intimate and mysterious pieces draw the observer into a place of awe.

MARIE COLE

Born in New Jersey, after High School Marie moved to New York City and in 1963 to the Hudson Valley. She earned a BA at Vassar College where she studied art and taught at Dutchess Community College for several years before becoming a full time painter. Classes at the Woodstock School of Art continue to inspire her creativity, especially printmaking with Kate McGloughlin. Eric Aho influenced her work through workshops in Italy, Canada and Vermont. Travels through the United States, Europe, Mexico, Scotland and South Africa also impacted her work. Experiences of water bodies, mountains, bogs and farmland build her landscapes. Water and weather are two constant and significant themes.

“My studio faces the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains. Storms that come down the river are incredibly intense – sheets of rain, thunder and lightning roll across the mountains. In winter, ice forms and cracks and shifts on the river and snow blankets everything in white. The weather of fall and winter are exciting times of year to paint and a challenge to find color in the landscape. Summer and fall months provide brilliant, intense color. The process of painting is important to me, I love the paint, thick or thin, the viscosity, piled up in layers or scraped down to the canvas, creating texture or smoothness. Paint creates light and shadow, yet if you look closely, it is still just paint”.

Marie exhibits at galleries throughout the East coast and participates in the Art Studio Views open studio tour. Her paintings are in private collections from coast to coast. Her home and studio are in a renovated warehouse in Germantown on the Hudson River.Janine Dunn Wade’s work sways with luscious lyrical movement. The paint, applied in lush thickness here, fades away there, creating a multidimensional space even in the smallest scale. Her flowers and every day objects are depicted with colors that are both vibrant and subtle, and with forms that are both recognizable and abstracted, a contrast that perpetuates a wondrous dance. The artist says:

“Painting is a conversation. The subject, the paint and the artist get involved in a dialogue. There is a real ebb and flow. The artist must absolutely bend to the direction the painting has decided on. I love Bonnard's viewpoint: “the precision of naming takes away from the uniqueness of seeing." If the mind cannot make assumptions the eye can see so much more freely. Thus the heart can respond unbound. There is so much more in paint. In paint you can relive a passage of time. In paint you experience dynamic rhythm, color and sheer joy. In paint the entire artistic process is revealed at one moment, unlike in music, theatre and literature where it unfolds over time. In paint the human spirit can soar, emotionally, visually, and in the inherent wholeness of being. I work to connect with a specific moment in space and time. My intention is to see shapes of color in space and arrange them into something visually exciting with a touch of mystery. My perspective is always changing and so is the world. New visions, new problems, new solutions. Painting sustains my soul.”