Longyear Gallery Exhibition, June 2021

Longyear Gallery Artists will be featured at Green Kill in the month of June.

Artists from Longyear Gallery will be exhibiting at Green Kill from Saturday, June 5 to Saturday, June 26 with an opening on Saturday, June 5 from 5-7 PM.

Exhibiting Artists

Robert Axelrod, Marcia Clark, Anna Contes, Neil Driscoll, Gail Freund, Ann Lee Fuller, Elaine Grandy, Robin Halpern, Jennifer Jefferson, Louise Kalin , Helane Levine-Keating, Hedi Kyle, Linda Lariar, Gerda van Leeuwen, Margaret Levenson, Patrice Lorenz, Anthony Doug Maguire, Alethea Maguire, Frank Manzo, Helene Manzo, Anthony Margiotta, Gary Mayer, Richard Mills, Bonnie Mitchell, Wayne Morris, Tom Rapin, Deborah Ruggerio, Victoria Scott, Amy Silberkleit, Marilyn Silver, Corneel Verlaan , and Linda Webb Varian

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New Normal health concerns are a primary. The customary Green Kill opening of beverages with finger foods will be covered for protection. If you wish to come on opening day, please understand that 10 people are permitted in the gallery at one time, that all attendees must were face masks, and we will us a “Non-Contact Infrared Digital Thermometer” and “Pulse Oximeter Blood Oxygen Level Monitor” for screening. There were be outside seating for your convenience. Green Kill is equipped with a heat pump so the air is constantly refreshed and the space is, as always, sanitized. 

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Longyear Gallery

Longyear Gallery is an artist-run [nonprofit 501(c)(3)] cooperative presenting professional artists from the New York Metro area, and rural NY State. To assure the highest standards of work, and a broad range of styles and media, artists are juried into the gallery. Exhibits change monthly featuring two solo exhibitions with a new group show of gallery artists. An invitational exhibition "Artists Choose Artists" and a special Holiday Exhibition rounds out the year. It's a long year indeed. 
Since the gallery’s founding in 2007 word has spread, and the gallery has been visited by art lovers and collectors from all over the United States and abroad. You are encouraged to join them. We expanded our gallery space and roster in 2018.

Longyear Gallery is approximately 2-½ hours from Manhattan, located in the historic Commons Building in Margaretville, NY on the edge of the beautiful 700 thousand acre Catskill Park.

For travel directions, please phone the gallery at (845) 586-3270 or Mapquest: 
www.mapquest.com/us/ny/margaretville-28…

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Robert Axelrod

My paintings on view at Longyear Gallery are, for the most part, images from the immediate area, the Central Catskills, its fields, streams, mountains, woodlands, barns. I’ve been painting in the Catskills for the past 30 years, mostly in spring, summer, and early autumn.  

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Marcia Clark

Marcia Clark has exhibited at venues that include the  
American Academy of Arts and Letters, Museum of the City of New York, Albany Institute of History and Art, Babcock Galleries and the University of Rhode Island. She has been a recipient of the Childe Hassam Award, a National Endowment of the Arts Artist in Residence grant and has written for Smithsonian Magazine, retracing travels of Thomas Cole, first of the Hudson River School painters. She was guest curator for an exhibition of contemporary panoramas at the Hudson River Museum and is currently artist/director of Blue Mountain Gallery. Clark has a BFA degree in painting from Yale University and a MFA degree from SUNY New Paltz. 

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Anna Contes

A New Yorker by birth, as a teenager, I escaped to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with my bagged lunch, every Saturday morning for several months of each high school year. At sixteen, I enjoyed a painting scholarship from the American Art School, in NYC, then went on to receive a B.F.A. from Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, NY, and an M.S. at SUNY New Paltz. At The Edwin MacDowell Art Colony, in Peterborough, NH, I was awarded a summer painting fellowship. 

As an artist, my reality is a pulsation of color vibrations. To translate this, I formulated my own hand made, fade proof, non-toxic pastels. My research in pure pigment came from working in traditional egg tempera as a Greek Orthodox Church iconographer and muralist, in the Byzantine style. Pastels require that one think in color since each color choice is made separately.

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Neil Driscoll

Neil paints the soul of his subjects in an eclectic style that is both folk inspired and impressionistic. One never knows what subject will appear on a Driscoll canvas. His alluring works are serious, abstract, flippant, and insightful. 

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Gail Freund

After living in Manhattan for most of my life, being surrounded by trees is a stark contrast. Now living in Highmount, NY full time since 2016, I observe the distinct seasonal changes in this region of the Catskills. Recently I capture this landscape using various mediums: sandpaper, India Ink, and embroidery with painting on linen. I like the immediacy of drawing and painting on sandpaper and the bravery of that first dramatic stroke onto this paper, which clearly reveals the push of the gesture in the edges of the strokes. I am attracted to the relationships of trees to each other and the spaces between them, and myself - in that ever-changing landscape, where I discover an order for me to capture.

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Ann Lee Fuller

My work might be viewed as a combination of literal and abstract, a meeting of contrasts. The paintings are inspired by the intrinsic abstraction of the sky with its unique moments of light, layer, and color. For me, the sky is a metaphor for time, as each moment has never happened before and will never happen again. My aim is to stir feelings of longing, promise, and the passage of time, while my process has become a response to color, suggesting rather than spelling out detail. MY paintings have been called “dream-like”, composed of generous skies, mist shrouded mountains, and low horizons. None of the works are of actual places. They all are bits and pieces of observation stored in my mind’s eye. 

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Elaine Grandy

My back story is that I have been a Massage Therapist locally for many years. My formal education was at Columbia and New School for Social Research including a Masters Degree. 
I raised a family in Roxbury. I took watercolor classes and photography workshops over the years and always had a little studio tucked away wherever I lived. I have no formal training in the arts.

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Robin Halpern

Robin Halpern earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting from the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University. 
She studied under noted figurative painter, Jerome Witkin, and George McNeil, the founder of The American Abstract Artists. 

Following art school she became drawn to the interior world of the human psyche and has spent many years working as a psychotherapist while resuming life as a painter. 
This path is expressed on various levels in all of her work. The link between these two passions is derived from her particular lens depicting the interior world of emotion and mood.

Tom Rapin

My works are all imperfect representations of internalized ideas about light and nature. I do take comfort in that fact.

It is an odd dance of ideas, things and the hand but Work is the truest way for me to feel meaning.

When I compare my existence against that of nature and light I feel inconsequential, but it is a humbling comfort to deal with issues of light and nature in my work. I enjoy handling materials that are ions old. I am engaged when the permanence of light is captured within the impermanence of paint…. or something like that.

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Jennifer Jefferson

My paintings are inspired by the natural world, a fusion of scenes both remembered and imagined. From the simplicity of a single wildflower to the complexity of the deep sea, I aim to give fresh insights and perspectives to my subjects. I am outside, observing, as much as possible, and study field guides and natural history books to learn more about what I see. Edges interest me--from shore to sea, meadow to mountain, reality to abstraction. Tides change, the sun sets, borders blur.   
Influenced by the abstract gestural painters, such as Helen Frankenthaler, and color field artists, such as Mark Rothko, most of my work meanders along the border that separates abstraction and realism. I want to give the viewer something to hold onto (a hill, a pond, a wave) but then take them beyond that object into something deeper. I am painting a visual image, but also trying to convey a sense of the scene, a feeling, to tap into the viewer's memories and longings. 

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Louise Kalin

IMy work has everything to do with growing up in the Catskills and on Cape Cod. I was an outside child. We walked miles up through cow pastures, made rooms in the woods, and drew in sand. The layers, the patterns and colors of my natural surroundings are the source for my art. My reverence for nature and the environment is embedded in my images.

Since graduating from Rhode Island School of Design, I’ve worked as a graphic and exhibition designer for arts and academic institutions in New England and New York, and spent six years as a Gallery Director, while maintaining a printmaking studio in New Hampshire from 1982-1990, and from 1998 through the present in Tivoli, NY. During those years, I’ve had fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, a residency at St. Anselms College, and mentorships at Zea Mays Print Studio in 2016, and 2018.

My prints have been exhibited widely in solo and juried exhibitions, and are included in over eighty corporate and private collections, and in the US government Art in the Embassies Program. I am a current member of Longyear Gallery in Margaretville, New York; The Boston Printmakers, the Monoprint Guild of New England, and the Zea Mays Print studio in Florence, Massachusetts.

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Hedi Kyle

My work focuses on the book as a three-dimensional object that still holds features of historical examples. I am drawn to lesser-known book forms that have come to light as a result of scrutinizing the holdings of libraries as a book conservator and being made aware of unusual findings by colleagues and curators. 
I digest what I see. I experiment, divert, re-build and alter. I feel free to concoct structures that display content beyond words and images. My concern is to keep the book alive as a mechanical object of extraordinary diversity.

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Helene Levine- Keating

The challenge for any photographer in this current era of easy digital photography is to make one's images transcend a snapshot, so that when I photograph flowers, the mystery and sensuality of a flower's inner beauty is evoked. I seek to reveal this mystery and emotion as well in my images of landscapes and medusae (jellies), which will often mean that one is not always certain that the image is indeed of a flower or a tree or a jellyfish but appears to suggest some other unknown being that has heretofore been hidden from human view. I'm interested in making photographs that blur the line between photography and watercolor, my first love, and only by printing my own work am I able to achieve that effect. As in painting, light is central, and over the years I've become attuned to the constantly changing light of beautiful New Kingston, and I've been blessed to be able to take many of my images of my homegrown orchids and amaryllises and calla lilies as the late afternoon light illuminates them through my kitchen window. The striking vistas of the New Kingston Valley have provided magical opportunities for capturing amazing landscapes in all seasons and weather from dawn to dusk. A chance visit to the Monterey Aquarium in California opened the door to underwater photography for one who snorkels but doesn't dive. The astonishingly beautiful gardens of my friends and neighbors both in New Kingston and surrounding areas have been gifts for the eye and soul. 
Having switched from shooting with film to using a digital SLR in the last two years, I shoot in RAW, the digital equivalent of a film negative, and use Photoshop not for manipulation but as a digital dark room allowing me to reproduce more closely on paper what I see through the viewfinder. In printing my own archival photographs, I experiment with archival papers such as different rags and watercolor papers, metallic paper, and Japanese mulberry and rice paper, among others, which enhances the painterly technique I embrace. I print my images in various sizes, depending on the image itself, from 5" x 7" up to 16" x 20". 

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Linda Lariar

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Gerda van Leeuwen

Gerda van Leeuwen received her Arts Education in Printmaking and Painting at Academy Artibus in Utrecht, The Netherlands. She received a work/travel grant from Arts Group, Kunstliefde to study Prints by artist Piranesi in Italy. A grant from the Dutch Cultural Counsel made it possible to buy an etching press. She set up a fully equipped printing facility and collaborated with other artists in making print portfolios and art books. 

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Margaret Levenson

My paintings focus on light. It is the mystery of form revealed by light and shadow that draws me to a particular subject. I lock the forms together in stasis, but the effect is illusory. Although objects are caught in time and space, the stasis vibrates with life. Thus, each painting encloses a paradox. Analyze it too closely and it dissipates. Allow the encounter to be suffused with the oblique penetration of reverie and the paradox expands to envelop and reinvent the viewer. 

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Patrice Lorenz

Since establishing a studio in rural NY State’s Delaware County, Lorenz began to work in plein air. Her sketches, made by a roadside or in a field, are developed into finished paintings or pastels in her studio. The images she makes rest between representation and abstraction, capturing the fleeting moments and enduring rhythms of the natural environment. In each piece she seeks to integrate objective and subjective perspectives that, together, evoke the artist’s intimate experience of a particular time and place. Fellow artist Fred Guyot states, “Lorenz captures her subject matter with authenticity and honesty. Her remarkable facility with the formal art elements, support her in her work.”

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Doug Maguire

I finished two years at Pratt on partial scholarship and dropped out to work, to raise the money: to continue my education. I went to work for a display company as a builder/artist. At the 1964 World’s Fair, I worked to build, finish and install scale models of the world’s mountain ranges. Before returning to Pratt I attended classes in philosophy and sculpture, at the New School for Social Research in NYC. I returned to Pratt in 1965. In1967 I graduated from Pratt with a BFA in Art Education and a NY Provisional Teaching Certification for grades K-12. Later on I received an MFA from The City College of New York.

In September of 1967 I began teaching art on the middle school level as a regular substitute. I taught full time in the NYC school system. Also, I began doing graduate coursework, evenings, in drawing and painting at Brooklyn College of CUNY, as a non matriculated graduate student. 
For the 67/68 school years, I taught and studied and painted. In the summer of 1968 my wife Anna and I accepted an artist residency, each, for two months at the Edwin MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Anna and I had married in 1966. That summer we paid our first visit to Mexico.

We worked as secondary art teachers in rural school districts at home. I managed to do some college level teaching and lecturing at Columbia-Greene Community College, via an evening course for adults in painting. Further, I taught at Boston University as a guest lecturer, at Bennett College as the Director of the Summer Art Program, and at the Woodstock School of Art; a summer painting workshop.

My family and I have been to Greece often over the years and it has informed me, as has Ireland, Maine and Puerto Rico of the endless variations of land, ocean currents and skies, foliage, atmosphere that I paint.

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Alethea Maguire.

With deep empathy for the Earth, my observations center primarily on the reaction and reclamation of nature. Aware of the wrestle between entropy and geometry, at odds within the landscape, I seek remote locations where atmospheric occurrences clash. More wild than tame, I visit places that can be intuited, having a definitive character or placehood. Often I meet with a space of natural phenomena that echoes expansion.

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Frank Manzo

Since photographs strive to capture the visual effect of the temporal changes in light that lend an atmospheric sense to a two dimensional image and the quality and changes of light inform the image, assuring that each image is unique, the challenge is to create both an interesting composition with painterly qualities that resent to the viewer more than one interpretation, thus allowing one to see different aspects each time it is viewed.

Viewers will perceive layers of images that require scrutiny to determine what is ‘inside’ and what is the reflection or ‘outside,’” notes Manzo. “In many reflective surfaces, the variation in the plane of the surface further breaks up the reflected image, creating and abstract comp

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Helene Manzo

Helene Manzo is a working artist living in New York City for over thirty years. In the summer of 2008 she was awarded an artists residency at Platte Clove, a nature preserve located in upstate New York. Found on 208 acres of wild, old growth forest and an ancient gorge with staggering multi-tiered waterfalls, it was an ideal setting for Manzo to explore further her deep fascination with water, a recurring theme in her artwork over the years. Manzo sees water as a powerful life force that is ever changing yet constant. She captures its movement, reflections of light, and colors as a counterpoint to the still forest around it.

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Anthony Margiotta

Tony was born in Saugerties, New York, in 1947. Having no formal training, Margiotta draws inspiration from his surroundings—the dense forests of his home in the Catskill Mountains, the urban landscapes of New York City—and the fantastical formations of his mind. Margiotta’s early life took him to college in Maine and upstate New York, before serving in the United States Military, and finally settling in Westchester. Retiring in 2005, Margiotta and his wife moved to Halcott Center, New York, where he found a flourishing and receptive local arts community. Since moving to the area, Margiotta has displayed his work in a solo show at the Zoom Gallery (July, 2013) and solo and group exhibits at The Arts Upstairs Phoenicia 2013 – 2014 - 2015, and in group exhibits at the Woodstock Artist Association and Museum (2013 – Present), where he is a active member."  Participant in AMR Open Studio Tour 2014 - Present . Group exhibits Commons Gallery Margaretville December 2014, April 2015, June 2016. Two person show Oreo 9 Woodstock May 2015. Two person show New World November 2015. Admitted as member of Longyear Gallery coop June 2016 – Present. 

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Gary Mayer

Gary’s work has been described as impactful and frenetic, kinetic but underneath is a framework built on a rich study of nature, of literature and of the history of art. Gary is prolific at all. His work is both lyrical and dark, sometimes using cartoon line a and sometimes highly expressionist brushwork. He has developed a broad organic vocabulary of forms which he reworks with a mastery of stroke whether it be a brush, a marker, or colored pencils. In 1982 he moved from his native Detroit to New York City where he exhibited at Exit Art. His work has since appeared in shows in his native Detroit and other parts of the country.

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Richard Mills

I work from observation of spatial situations that attract me formally and subconsciously. The poetry of place is of my own personal mythology, a longing for lost homes; a remembrance of water; of daydreaming through windows, of silence. Sometimes I hunt for a subject, occasionally making a pilgrimage, sometimes it’s just there, in front of me. Times of day, seasons, the moods of weather: all are shifting. So too does scale and texture; of supports and material; of past, present and future directions; of an unexpected dialog between works. Looking becomes meditation and a search for process. Most important are the associations brought to me by space and light.

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Bonnie Mitchell

My photography life began when I was twelve and someone gave me a camera. Since then I have been in love with the medium and have continued to take photographs throughout all the ensuing, many years.

In the early 1970's, in my small Manhattan apartment, I set up a darkroom in the kitchen, where I spent many hours with the chemicals, trays, papers and red light, and loved the wonder of the emerging photographs.

I'm now using a mirrorless camera and am totally taken by the challenges of the new photo world, the intricate cameras and the magical post processing programs.

I am mostly self taught. I have also taken a few workshops with some experts, both in the field and on my computer. The Internet has been an enormous help to my learning curve.

Along with two good friends who are also members of Longyear Gallery, I co-founded The Creative Crones, a group which met regularly for several years. We talked about our work and progress, our joys and fears about being artists, and shared our most recent creations. It provided support for all of us to move on with our passions.

I have shown my work at The Roxbury Arts Group both at a show The Creative Crones presented, and also as a contributor to Art for Art's Sake.  

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Wayne Morris

My primary interest has been with the human figure because it is us. In recent years I have also been working with landscape because we live in it.

My ideas for paintings come from things I see, think, feel, know and experience. I do not make things up. Painting is a visual art form and must therefore speak in a visual language. If you can not see it, only think it, it is not there. I work whenever possible directly from the source. Visual reference allows more freedom and is more truthful. I concentrate on idea, color and structure for a feeling of believability and totality.

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Tom Rapin

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Deborah Ruggerio

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Victoria Scott

"Victoria Scott’s woods are a domestic idyll: trees, tilting ground and a studio clinging like a birdhouse to a sleep slope, another layer the soft curves of the western Catskills. Scattered about are more or less permanent easels; brightly painted perches. She works ceaselessly outdoors and indoors by a single window in the coldest weather. Her studio is lit by a string of white Christmas bulbs. Her work ranges beyond the idyll into symbolism, though the woodland paintings – in the hundreds – suggest a near psychedelic quest to see and feel every possible arrangement of changing light and pattern. Pinks, blues, green and grey are forever shifting shapes. Paraphrasing Peter Schjeldahl of another original, “she keeps her own counsel”. And that’s a good thing."  
- R K Mills

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Amy Silberkleit

Amy makes detailed renderings of natural objects and landscapes. Her medium is stone lithography, which allows a wide range of tones, the ability to make duplicates without resorting to electronics and the use of other techniques (Chine colle, additional colored inks, e.g.). The stone is an excellent ground for drawing with its fine uniform grain. 

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Marilyn Silver

My work is an expression of my deep-felt connection with nature and its power to move the spirit. I expect each piece to reflect my struggles and, hopefully, triumphs with the formal concerns of painting. But what concerns me more profoundly is my visceral response to a quality of light… a formation of land… an unexpected juxtaposition of elements – and my ability to communicate that response.

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Corneel Verlaan

Corneel Verlaan’s recent solo exhibition, “Intersections,” relates to the artist’s belief that painting involves “the transformation of three dimensions— Reality, Imagination, Physics—to Two, a flat plane that becomes an object in the real world.” 
While continuing to survey and paint aerial space with a horizon, Verlaan says that he remains “fascinated by a straight vertical point of view, especially as a way to observe the earth itself.” After recently encountering a group of vertical aerial photographs by Gerco de Ruyter, another Dutchman, Verlaan says he was immediately inspired by the way they revealed “multiple varieties of soil colors and formations, agricultural uses and tracks,” and thus “started at once on a series of paintings that share a central roadway, with one or more crossroads separating the visible characteristics of each plot of land.”

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Linda Webb Varian

Words don’t make it when I try to compose an artist statement. Words diminish experience in order to describe it. I’m definitely not a writer. I draw and paint because it takes me out of the world and into myself. It’s almost like a meditation.  When I’m composing and rendering a work I’m expressing me.  It’s mine. When you’re looking at it it’s yours. If you’re enjoying it, all the better.

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