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Check out our latest Newsletter to catch up
on all the exciting things happening at Cerulean Arts. To
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always, let us know if you have any questions or comments!
SUMMER
2010
Check out past newsletters here>
Review of Caution: Art in Here
Andrea Kirsh for the artblog
May 21, 2010
It’s no surprise that good artists know other good
artists; curators and gallerists always turn to artists
for recommendations. Nor is it surprising that artists fill
the ranks of museum art handlers. Art handlers are almost
exclusively artists, as are many behind the scenes museum
workers; all but curators, for some reason. What is a surprise
is how strong and varied the exhibition is that Hiro Sakaguchi
organized of work by thirteen of his colleagues at the Philadelphia
Museum of Art ( PMA), showing at Cerulean Arts through June
18. It’s a good indication of how pluralistic the
current art world is. I hope their museum colleagues from
other departments visit and are suitably impressed.
The miniature construction which sits in the gallery’s
window, a cart for moving paintings holding one of the museum’s
Alex Katzes, is perfect in every detail, down to the folded
step ladder on the cart (except that I expect the verso
of a museum’s painting would have a backing-board;
but showing the stretcher bars is much more interesting).
It was made by Nick Balko, James Coyne, Sam Faix, Eric Griffin,
Chris Havlish, Sebastien Leclercq, Beth Paolini, Joe Proiani
and Hiro Sakaguchi.
To read the full article, click
here
Press for our Group Exhibition
Victoria Donohoe for The Philadelphia Inquirer
January 29, 2010
Four who share a studio are exhibiting together
at Cerulean Arts.
Drawing is most clearly an issue in paintings by two Bulgarian
artists. Plamen Veltchev offers the show's most critical
view of the world in a big landscape with uneasy balance,
its tensions defining it.
By contrast, Nikolay Milushev jostles the
eye with a seemingly gleefully detailed, energetic surface
that comes close to overall notation. The mischief at work
is that of the satirist rather than the humorist.
Painter Kitty Caparella, who also is a staff
writer for the Daily News, wrestles with diverse tendencies
in experimental work. Yet her The Fast Lane encaustic, appearing
casually done, reveals a sophisticated draftsman.
Melisa Montiel's woodcuts produce taut fragments
of narrative, so that she comes across as evenhanded and
less shallow than Milushev in portraying social experience.
To link to the Inquirer article, click
here
Michael Kowbuz in the News
Holly Otterbein for Philadelphia City Paper
December 24, 2009
American men are so enchanted by their cars
that, for a photo, they'll wiggle into their finest leather
jackets, wax their mustaches, saddle up next to their rides
and beam proudly — all despite the fact that the 'ol
beater can't sputter its way down a driveway. You've no
doubt seen these pictures in your dad's albums.
Such is the loyalty of the subjects in Caddie,
Honda (pictured) and Rocket Car, three oil-on-canvas portraits
in Michael Kowbuz 's exhibit "Michael, Where Are You?
Altered States of North America." Though the show includes
16 pieces total — almost all of which involve cars,
a curious fixation given that Kowbuz doesn't own one —
these three works are by far the most compelling. They prod
the viewer to ask herself questions about identity, objecthood,
nostalgia and the dubious similarities between crushing
on a car and falling for a woman.
Kowbuz, co-owner of Cerulean Arts, is exhibiting
for the first time since opening his gallery in 2006, and
blames his laborious pointillist style for holding things
up. It was well worth the wait: In Caddie, Honda and Rocket
Car, his dots of paint look as elaborate as needlework,
and his layers of yellow, purple, red and opaque glazes
give the illusion of photographs left in the sun.
Kowbuz's method also deftly reflects the exhibit's
themes of nostalgia and the past. "To me, the dots
are like a dream, or memory," he says. "They are
coalesced now, but could in a moment dissipate into the
ether."
To link to the City Paper article, click
here
Tom Hunter in the News
Anne R. Fabbri for Broad Street Review
July 20, 2009
Tom Hunter's War Photography
Tom Hunter might not have found a home in
the army, but he certainly found his life’s mission:
documenting people, places and events that most of us will
never experience.
Hunter enlisted in the U. S. Army the day
after he graduated from high school in 2003. After being
assigned to the Airborne Infantry section of the Military
Occupation Service, he was deployed three times, once to
Iraq and twice to Afghanistan. Each time he took a better
camera with him.
He returned home with more than 2,000 photos,
39 of which are on exhibition along with one video at the
Cerulean Arts Gallery until August 7. Now that he’s
returning to civilian life, Hunter plans to study photography
full-time. Some of these photographs radiate such immediacy
and, inadvertently, such strange beauty that you wonder
what more he could possibly learn in class.
Among the photographs are isolated instances
of beauty in nature, such as a tree in bloom amid devastation,
a vast mountainous landscape and an Afghan boy’s portrait.
There are candid shots of groups of boys enjoying bubble
gum or a close-up of a soldier at rest— a youth who
looks too young to shave, yet here he is in northeastern
Afghanistan, a forbidding area with the most-attacked U.S.
military installations. A photograph of piles of ammunition
transforms agents of death into an aesthetic design.
Some of the photographs seem to be fleeting
glimpses of daily life and its basic routines. They capture
the dreary boredom and fragmentation of life on the front.
You begin to feel as if “You are there,” and
what a relief it is to look out the gallery’s window
and view the passing parade on the street. Yet something
draws you back to look again at Hunter’s scenes of
our soldiers in this remote territory.
Watch the ten-minute video, War All the Time,
with the sound on: loud heavy-metal music competing with
the noise of gunfire. It ends with one shouted phrase: “That’s
it.” And I guess that sums it all up.
Hunter chose to include photographs only of
soldiers who are still alive— or were when he last
knew of them. He brings us a sense of what it must be like
for our men at war: their routines, the Afghans they encounter
and their mission.
Leaving the gallery, out in the warmth and
sunshine, it occurred to me that only men and women over
40 should be allowed to enlist. Then let’s see how
many wars will be fought.
I’m glad Hunter was perceptive enough
as a teen-aged enlistee to carry a camera with him to document
the reality of his experiences. Now we can get an idea of
what’s really happening behind the headlines. It isn’t
pretty, but it is fascinating.
To link to the Broad Street Review article, click
here.
******************************
Edith Newhall for The Philadelphia Inquirer
July 12, 2009
Tom Hunter, a sergeant in the 173d Airborne
Brigade who recently returned from the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, began taking the photographs he is showing
at Cerulean Gallery while he was stationed in Afghanistan
in 2007 and 2008 as a way to come to terms with a situation
he described as "hell on Earth."
Hunter's mostly black-and-white landscapes, portraits, and
still lifes suggest a contemplative state of mind, but a
video he shot, also on view in the gallery, tells a starkly
different story of daily ambushes by Taliban fighters.
This is a sophisticated debut and well worth
seeing. Hunter, who plans to embark on a career in photography,
will speak about his work at the gallery next Sunday at
2 p.m.
******************************
Also check out the interview with
Tom Hunter by Greg Adomaitis for Phawker here>>
Paul Hamanaka in the News
Victoria Donahoe for The Philadelphia Inquirer
June 5, 2009
Yasuji Paul Hamanaka, a Tokyo-born Philadelphia artist,
rejects gestural, precious-object assumptions about art
in his show "Look Closer - Set Me Free" at Cerulean.
Here he applies the yin and yang concept - the two opposing
forces that together make up the unified world. These polarities,
he believes, enhance our artistic vision dramatically. And
by combining the two disciplines of painting and sculpture,
"Mr. Feel-it" makes the emotional potential of
his work a major issue.
Confronting viewers in the gallery are sizable,
box-shaped pieces attached to the wall. Made of coarse materials,
these perfectly neutral, arid shapes each have a couple
of deliberate surface cracks in front.
Lit from within, these reveal to viewers who
look closely enough a painting of a smiling (or weeping)
woman. Glimpsed this way, these hidden images have an oddly
powerful intimacy that enfolds their natural poignancy.
Hamanaka's installation of an earthwork beneath
a towering Asian empress tree in Cerulean's sculpture garden
further amplifies this feeling.
Press for The Air is Thick
Lori Hill for The City Paper
Apirl 1, 2009
Continuing the theme of density and stimulation,
"The Air Is Thick" is rich with color and texture,
brimming over with the intensity of the artists' expressions.
The idea was to unite painters with alternative
approaches to traditional landscape: Laurie Riccadonna's
garden-inspired explorations, Christopher Schade's surrealistic
geometric puzzles, Marc Connor's sculptural topographies
and Zoe Pettijohn Schade's glittery celestial planes.
Riccadonna's Latitude is a feast of flora
and exquisitely patterned patches of design. What fun it
would be to get lost in one of her paintings — a maze
of exotic plant life and swirling grains of color.
It's hard to know where one stands with Christopher
Schade's work. Perspectives are skewed, the visual plane
shifts and the subjects are enigmatic. Schade seems eager
to confound, but when the bottom falls out of the ocean
(sky?) in Horizon Island, it's a pleasure to dream about
where it will drop you. Like a 3-D topographical map,
Connor's works toe the line between painting
and sculpture. His application of paint builds until it
takes on the shapes of the natural forms he's representing.
Like the rest of the show's paintings, the
ethereal images of Zoe Pettijohn Schade challenge the notion
of landscape. In Father's Space, gauzy layers of fabric-like
patterns share space with floating triangles and glowing
drops of light.
To link to the article, click here>>
Also check out the news coverage from Art
Knowlege News , and The
Philadelphia Inquirer!
2009 Phlower Power Window Decorating
Contest
 
Cerulean Arts received the "Newcomer Award" for
the 2009 Flower Show window decorating contest sponsored
by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. Our
winning window featured raku pots by Sarah Roche and photography
by Brian Piper.
Anne Canfield
in the News
Tiny Tales by Edith Newhall for the
Philadelphia Inquirer
December 14, 2008
There is no shortage of drawing with a surreal
or fairy-tale kind of narrative. Anne Canfield, who is showing
her new series, "Territorial," at Cerulean Arts,
falls into that camp, but her stories are so genuinely strange,
and her drawing so meticulous, that you're taken along for
the ride whether this is your cup of tea or not.
For one thing, there's a mermaid who appears to have mesmerized
a pride of Maine coon cats; for another, there's a girl
living in an underground chamber; fortresses; gondolas;
and a sea monster. The mermaid and the cats are the constants,
though the former isn't always recognizable as such (one
view of the back of her tail leaving through the window
of a Victorian parlor looks like a pair of deer's antlers
mounted on the wall).
I happened to see a large painting of Canfield's
in a group show at the Icebox Space (see below) on the same
theme and thought these tiny, delicate drawings more conducive
to her fanciful tales.
Cerulean
Arts celebrates its 2nd Anniversary
Click on the image below to read the article
by Eileen Talone featured in the Home News September 11,
2008.
 
Richard Estell in American Artist
We’re excited to announce Richard Estell’s
work from our current exhibition Portraits of Places is
featured at length in the July/August 2008 issue of American
Artist magazine. “Planning for Spontaneity”,
written by editor-in-chief and publisher M. Stephen Doherty,
not only captures Estell’s thoughts on the process
of watercolor painting, but also his lifelong inspiration
from fellow Ohio-native Charles Burchfield.
To read the full article, click
here.
Judith Jacobson in the News
Face Time by Edith Newhall for The Philadelphia
Inquirer
Friday, April 25, 2008
Stand back! You have to, in order to see Judith Jacobson's
own face (or those of people familiar to her) emerging from
her new paintings at Cerulean Arts. And even then, her hair,
nose, lips, cheeks and chin are difficult to discern in
these colorful oil-and-sand-on-canvas works. The skeins
of painted lines aren't a new riff on abstract expressionism,
you soon realize, but the wrinkles and crevices of her baby-boomer
skin.
I prefer Jacobson's much smaller, black oil-and-sand underpaintings
and rapidograph ink drawings, which show her face more clearly
and seem more tangibly the result of her process of working
from multiple photographs and direct photocopies of her
face (yes, she presses her face to the actual machine).
Jacobson's underpaintings, in particular, capture the look
of photocopies, with the tooth of the canvas showing through
them. Their white edges add to the resemblance to paper,
and suggest that she paints her works on unstretched canvas,
then later stretches them with the intention of letting
that unpainted edge creep over. Their velvety darkness also
brings Seurat's drawings to mind.
A Judith Jacobson underpainting, "Looking Forward,"
oil and sand on canvas, at Cerulean Arts.
Jaime Treadwell in the News
Taken from X Symbols: Two Philly painters play the
subconscious like a banjo by Roberta Fallon for Philadelphia
Weekly
September 12-18, 2007
"The most successful artists use symbolism in an
elliptical or ambiguous manner that allows humans to do
what they do best—decode the subtext. Humans are
natural decoders; we’ve been interpreting signs
since the cradle. It’s not for nothing that car
ads feature beautiful women caressing or looking longingly
at the vehicle. Buy the car and get sex. It’s crude
but it works.
P. Timothy Gierschick II and Jaime Treadwell are two
young Philadelphia artists whose work is fueled by symbolism."
"Jaime Treadwell’s brightly colored landscape
and figure paintings are symbolic tableaux. Pink—the
shade in overwhelming evidence—colors the sky, the
land and the people in it, and is itself a symbol of sickness
in a post-apocalyptic world. Unlike Gierschick’s
works, Treadwell’s paintings aren’t ambiguous.
They’re clear cautionary tales.
Uniformed children—some with missing limbs—play
in militaristic vehicles. Treadwell includes high fashion
models in ’50s-era splendor posing for postapocalyptic
Carnival Cruise Lines. The children aren’t particularly
fierce, yet there’s weirdness in their faces. They’re
like Caleb Weintraub’s ballistic babies seen at
Projects Gallery last fall. In this world everyone wears
a buglike helmet with an antenna that makes them look
like they’re receiving messages from Big Brother.
Several works replace the pink with dark brown voids of
sea and sky, evoking the dark night of the soul and the
dark varnish of a Dutch master’s painting.
The young girl in a boat in Exile II wears a Vermeer-like
tunic and white blouse, and stares out serenely, evoking
Thomas Eakins’ The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt
in a Single Scull). Treadwell, quoting from the masters,
is like them in that his concern for humans and his love
of nature is real."
To read the full article, please click
here.
For additional images from the exhibition, visit Roberta
Fallon's flickr site here.
Taken from Roberta Fallon & Libby Rosof's artblog,
posted August 19, 2007 by Libby Rosof
"Neo-Pink, Jaime Treadwell's one-man show at Cerulean
Arts Gallery, combines off-the-hook oil painting technique
with a post-Apocalyptic world in cotton candy pink.
The lipsticky desolate landscapes with overturned vehicles
and used-car-lot pennants or blobs of falling oobleck
are sad and interesting. They have a sense of Mad Max
finding his way through what's left and making the best
of things."
To read the full article, please click
here.
Cerulean Arts & PhillyCarShare
Cerulean Arts is teaming up with PhillyCarShare,
a non-profit organization and Philadelphia's premier car
share service, by participating in their Key to the City
program.
Cerulean Arts is happy to offer the 16,000+ PhillyCarShare
members a 15% discount. Just present your incentive
tag to receive your discount on our unique selection of
decorative arts including handmade jewelry, vases, picture
frames & more. (Discount can not be combined
with any other offer and excludes exhibition sales.)
For more information about the Key to the City program
or to join PhillyCarShare, please visit
www.phillycarshare.org
Ann Northrup in the News
Down to the Sea by Edith Newhall for The Philadelphia
Inquirer
Friday, July 20, 2007
"Since 2001, Philadelphians have known Ann Northrup
as the artist behind such monumental outdoor murals as Our
Backyard at Capitol and Brown Streets, Pride and
Progress on the William Way Community Center at Juniper
and Spruce Streets, Growing Up in Germantown on
Rittenhouse Street near Germantown Avenue, and Sandy's
Dream on the Propper Brothers Furniture Store in Manayunk,
at Levering and Main Streets.
But Northrup handles a far less grand scale and a far more
quixotic medium than house paint with similar ease. Her
plein-air watercolors of California's dramatic Marin County
Headlands, close to her childhood home of Sausalito, capture
the stark beauty of that rugged mountainous coastline by
staying as emphatically stark in paint as their subjects
- Fort Cronkite Beach, Tennessee Cove, Muir Beach, and Point
Bonita Cliff - are in real life. They're a compelling argument
for painting the outdoors outdoors.
Northrup is also showing a series of semi-abstract
postcard-size collages inspired by her childhood haunts
- until 2004, she had not been back to Sausalito in 40 years
- which are nearly opposite in character to her revelatory
watercolor seascapes. These are meditations on her early
memories of her first home, as mysterious and tantalizing
to the viewer as they may be to Northrup herself."
PaigeS Jewelry at Cerulean Arts
Cerulean Arts was pleased to have Philadelphia jewelry maker
Paige Bronk Schwab display her latest creations on May 6.
 For
those who missed the show - Cerulean Arts now has a new
selection of PaigeS jewelry from which to choose. Beautiful
blue, green and pink gemstones are here just in time for
the summer! Paige's interests in color and composition
are evident in her hand-crafted jewelry. Each piece
is created with carefully chosen precious & semi-precious
stones, pearls, bamboo and shell. Hand-knotted on
silk thread or on a wire, PaigeS jewelry is sure to make
a statement.
Taken from the article "From Dust Till Dawn" by
Roberta Fallon in the January 24th, 2007 issue of The Philadelphia
Weekly .
"By day Sarah Roche dusts and polishes precious
objects in the Art Museum’s multimillion-dollar
collection. By night she creates paintings and sculptures
that translate her museum maintenance staff experiences
into moody dreamscapes that evoke Alice’s descent
down the rabbit hole.
By focusing on the art, frames and glass protection systems,
Roche creates her own museum collection. It contains objects,
but the main interest is the ambient experience of people
and life intermixing in grand rooms filled with priceless
wonders."
Taken from an article by Edith Newhall for The Philadelphia
Inquirer, Friday, January 19, 2007.
"To be an off-the-beaten-path gallery in Philadelphia
seems more usual than not these days. Cerulean Arts Gallery,
in the block of Ridge Avenue just south of the old Divine
Lorraine Hotel, is typical of these newer spaces, and
even closer to the heart of the city than many of them.
The works of Sarah Roche, which make up the gallery's
third show since its September 2006 inaugural exhibition,
were more than I expected. That is, I assumed Roche was
a painter, which she is, but didn't realize she is also
a ceramicist until another gallery-goer pointed out that
the hulking janitor's cart in the center of the gallery,
carrying spray bottles, dusters, and mops, was not evidence
of a recent cleaning job but a porcelain work by Roche.
Along with the cart, Roche, who works as part of the
Philadelphia Museum of Art's maintenance crew, has made
haunting paintings that express her insider's view of
some of that museum's artworks, objects and period rooms,
many of which contain her own face, figure or reflection.
Roche is not after facsimiles. Her cart is just a likeness
of one, and her paintings are soft and moody, not even
particularly finished-looking, like a song whose lyrics
you've forgotten. What she has captured, you soon realize,
is her mind's eye."
Article from Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof's Artblog, posted
September 18, 2006 by Roberta Fallon.
"Michael Kowbuz and Tina Rocha bought the three-story
building at 1355 Ridge Ave. two years ago and had a lot
of work to do on it (the floor in the gallery space needed
replacing due to termite damage). But Tina's an architect
and she designed what they wanted and with help from Clifton
"Cliff Cliff" Grant, their next door neighbor
whose Blues club is slated to open soon, they attacked the
space and came up with something gorgeous -- light and airy
and with a lovely big park-like rear garden in which they
hope to put a pond.
Kowbuz, Director of Continuing Education at PAFA and himself
a  PAFA
alum (MFA, 1996) will be offering drawing lessons out of
the back space starting in January and speaking of the back,
the gallery's large front room opens on a slightly smaller
space that is a crafts boutique in the rear." To read
the full article, please click
here.
The innaugural show is a group show celebrating the 10-year
anniversary of Kowbuz's PAFA graduating class. Works by
some of the town's power players (Pew fellows and Fleisher
Challenge winners) dot the walls. Here's who's in the show:
Astrid Bowlby, Pat Boyer, Eric Brown, John
Bybee, Alexander Cheves, Michael Kowbuz, Nancy Lewis, Yuri
Makoveychuk, Meg McDevitt, Hiro Sakaguchi,
Mark Shetabi and Kevin Strickland.
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