ARTISTS PROFILE
THE TERRIZZI-BRICHER FAMILY
by Kristin Nord
Not too long ago, the South Kent household of Terrizzi-Bricher served up a sumptuous mix of color, texture, warmth and light, at a time of year when the Connecticut woodlands are a sea of greys, sepias and ochres. Matisse would have happily sunk into the deep pink upholstered chair in their cozy yellow living room, or embraced the presence of light in Scott Bricher’s studio.
Scott Bricher sees himself as a primarily figurative oil painter, steeped in an awareness of art history and influenced by studies first at Parsons School of Design but later with Nelson Shanks at the Art Students League. The monumental scale of these narrative works-in-progress made me think immediately of Thomas Hart Benton or Diego Rivera, and I left eager to see where the work will take him. Memories, images and ideas drawn from his unconscious play a part in the conception of his storytelling, and objects drawn from an Ohio childhood often factor in. In a painting completed a number of years ago, my eyes were drawn to a child’s incense burner in the shape of a log cabin, a cocktail measuring cup and a glass jar with ribbon candy, icons that resonate for so many of us and are part of our family stories.
If these works feel far away from the freelance assignments he takes on for Sam Viviano, the art director at MAD Magazine, or for the art department of Crew Design, a Connecticut firm specializing in sustainable retail merchandising solutions, they should, for Bricher is also a master of 3D design and Photoshop. Glenn Carlin, president of Crew Design and a classmate of the couple at Parsons, described Bricher as a bona fide poly-math, while his editor at MAD Magazine said he has known with each and every Photoshop assignment that Bricher would elevate the original idea. Bricher designed the Captain Morgan statues we encounter in liquor stores, seemingly with the same pleasure he had spoofing the meals of a well-known chain restaurant.
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TWO ROADS DIVERGED…: VON MERTENS AT UMASS LOWELL
REVIEW
ANNA VON MERTENS:
COLOR: A LOVE STORY
UNIVERSITY GALLERY AT UMASS LOWELL
MAHONEY HALL
870 BROADWAY STREET
LOWELL, MASSACHUSETTS
JANUARY 22 THROUGH MARCH 3
by Greg Morell
There are two divergent roads of aesthetic departure for New Hampshire artist Anna Von Mertens. In one direction, we discover works of popular whimsy — a lighthearted exploration of the emoji. Fanciful, playful, vibrantly colorful and deliciously cute, it’s art candy you just want to eat.
However, the other path that Von Mertens explores is far different.
Both will on view in “Color: A Love Story,” an exhibition running from January 22 through March 3 in the University Gallery at UMass Lowell.
In the main gallery, Von Mertens will present two beds, side by side, in the open expanse of the gallery floor. It is not the beds themselves, but what is on the beds that is the point of the piece. Two hand-dyed, hand-sewn cotton quilts cover the beds, in what the artist perceives as conversation. It is basically a conversation of color, but how those colors got to where they are is the mystery in the stew.
This is hip-deep, highly intellectualized conceptual art. Each of these quilts is an exacting marathon of execution that includes hand-dyeing small squares of white cotton to the desired shade and the actual precise, mathematical construction of the quilt, in addition to the convoluted process of coming up with the motivation for the color, which boggles the limits of credibility.
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SCIENTIFICALLY MOVING: HIGLEY DRAWS US IN
REVIEW
KATE HIGLEY: PAINTING BENEATH THE SURFACE
GATEWAY GALLERY
GREAT BAY COMMUNITY COLLEGE
320 CORPORATE DRIVE
PORTSMOUTH, NEW HAMPSHIRE
THROUGH MARCH 2
by Linda Chestney
Living life on the edge artistically — that’s how I describe Kate Higley. She pushes past fear, embraces change and lives life large. She has the unusual ability to enliven the right brain and left brain simultaneously.
Higley — whose experience is diverse — loves art and loves biology. But for practical reasons early on in her life, she chose to study nursing. She immersed herself in biology, anatomy and physiology, ultimately working alongside surgeons where she was spellbound by the intricacies and colors of the human body. She was mesmerized with blood traveling through vessels, which caused organs and structures to pulse in extraordinary color. Absorbingly fascinating.
Over her career, Higley has taught and studied biology while pursuing her love of printmaking and painting, earning a multi-disciplinary master’s degree at Wesleyan University. But as life changed — her husband took a job in Saudi Arabia — she found herself in the Middle East, where she was captivated by the beauty of the landscape. It was there she began printmaking, exhibiting her work in galleries and shows.
Eventually, the family returned to the United States, settling in the Washington, D.C. area. There, Higley taught near the National Institutes of Health and periodically exhibited her work in its hallowed halls. Many of her pieces sold at these shows because the viewers readily recognized her work. The cell-like structures; highly imagined subcellular forms; fleshy, pulsating muscle and organ shapes moving from macro to micro were something the cardiologists, biologists and others in that professional environment related to better than most.
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CUTTING-EDGE ART: SILVERMAN AT CONCORD
ARTIST SPOTLIGHT
SEMBLANCES OF PLACE
CONCORD CENTER FOR THE VISUAL ARTS
37 LEXINGTON ROAD
CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS
JANUARY 11 THROUGH FEBRUARY 10
by Lisa Mikulski
A closer look at Betsy Silverman’s work reveals more than what you think you see. This Massachusetts artist creates highly detailed and beautifully vibrant scenes of Boston using only carefully selected and assembled pieces of paper cut from recycled magazines. Not a single brush stroke of paint, nor a hand-drawn line from a pen, exists here.
The selections of paper Silverman uses to build these cityscapes are based not only upon elements of color, hue, texture and quality, but also for the individual text and content which allow her to create a multilayered visual story. It is an exercise in delight for one’s eye to explore her work and discover what lays in wait there — the red seating from Fenway becomes part of the city park’s summer leaves; Tom Brady’s jersey is now the reflection for a car window. There are famous faces, subway maps, lobsters, penguins, contextual phrases and so much more. One only needs to look, and I remain convinced that examining Silverman’s work will provide surprises for years to come.
Having earned a master’s degree in architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design, Silverman began working with paper and found it to be a versatile medium for representing structural concepts.
“I became particularly fascinated by the implications of the use of building materials, not solely from a design or aesthetic consideration, but from an environmental and moral consideration,” she said. “I was drawn to the efforts of the architect Shigeru Ban to create affordable, environmentally conscious designs for earthquake victims using paper tubes. My Master’s thesis project involved finding ways to fold and manipulate paper to discover its strengths, and how it could be used to define space. I built columns, floor pieces, and lattice roofs that played with paper’s translucent characteristics and the beautiful shadows it can cast.”
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CORNERED: OLIVIA BERNARD
INTERVIEW
WHAT LIES BETWEEN, RECENT WORKS BY OLIVIA BERNARD
ORESMAN GALLERY BROWN FINE ARTS CENTER
SMITH COLLEGE
22 ELM STREET NORTHAMPTON, MASSACHUSETTS
by Elizabeth Michelman
Olivia Bernard’s sculpture has always spoken through the fingertips to the whole body. No matter how flat a piece becomes, there’s always another side — and always a sense of inside and outside. It’s tempting to read her small glass panels and attenuated sheets of handmade paper as following within the traditions of abstract or color field painting. But Bernard is neither a painter nor a follower and has no interest in carrying forward the ideological, political or art-historical agenda of abstract painting today. Her 3-D sculpture and installation is grounded in minimalism, feminism and process art. Drawing has always been an extension of her 3-D exploration; she approaches the surface not as a field of visual experimentation but as an exploration of her personal boundaries.
In October, at Smith College’s Brown Fine Arts Center, Bernard will be showing two groups of smaller, relatively flat, wall-mounted work. These employ simple, low-tech materials, as usual, to explore the sensation of translucency. As in her larger sculptures and installations, which have shifted from poured Hydrocal carapaces to handmade paper over wire mesh, the materials in the current works are vitalized in an alchemical transformation from liquid to solid. The “Glass/Wax” series involves a process of dipping glass panes in hot wax, while the “Embedded” series fixes linear structures into stable forms in wet paper pulp.
The materiality of Bernard’s works forces us to reconsider our notions of both “flatness” and “drawing.” Her avoidance of traditional frames forces us to see these forms, in spite of their thinness and rectilinearity, as objects. In the “Glass/Wax” series, the work is not hidden behind glass; the glass pane, which serves as both surface and structure, is itself the work. Leaning against the wall and supported only by a narrow steel flange, each naked pane is at risk from vibration and mishandling. Likewise, Bernard refuses to confine the handmade paper sheets of the “Embedded” series. She floats them over an invisible Plexiglas substrate projecting a few inches off the wall, where they are subject to air currents, gravity, and electrostatic attraction.
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BLAUWW: CELEBRATING BLUE
EXPLORING HUE AT VAN VESSEM
by Don Wilkinson
Tiverton, Rhode Island – Along with red and yellow, blue is part of a holy trinity of primary colors from which all other hues are born. Its manifestations include navy, azure, baby blue, indigo, periwinkle, the absurdly named “true blue” and many others. It is ripe with symbolism: tranquility, peace and relaxation; conversely, it can be the avatar of melancholy, sadness and depression.
In some parts of the world, it is the color of conservatism, while in the United States, blue connotes liber- alism. In religion, it was the favored hue to celebrate Jupiter, top dog in the ancient Roman pagan pantheon. In Catholicism, it is associated with the Virgin Mary; in Hinduism, it is the skin tone of Shiva, Vishnu and other gods.
It is the color of the police, of the Navy, of one of the items a bride should wear for luck, of Brooke Shields’ lagoon, of the bird of happi- ness, of the Smurfs and the blood of Boston Brahmins, of the tiny blue pill for aging Lotharios, and of the Christmas that Elvis will have without you. And it is the subject of the current exhibition at Tiverton’s Van Vessem Gallery.
Gallerist and curator Marika Van Vessem has gathered nearly three- dozen artists in a wide range of disciplines to offer their takes on almost everyone’s favorite color in “Blauww,” the Dutch word for blue.
Mixed-media artist Lasse Antonsen, in perhaps a playful nod to Van Vessem’s Dutch origins, presents “Spinning Blue.” It’s a large plastic children’s toy top to which blue- and-white fanciful fabric has been adhered. It resembles an ornate candy dish or serving vessel in the style of Delftware, a centuries-old pottery style developed in the city of Delft in the Netherlands, itself an imitation of older Chinese ceramic work.
Kristin Street’s “Blue Point” is a small mixed-media work in which a rectangular frame of vivid yet deep blue surrounds a morass of short strands of wire or pins. Even though those strands are as stiff and sharp as porcupine quills, there is something oddly voyeuristic about the assem- blage, as if we are looking through a window to something we have no right to be looking at.
“Blossom: Girl in Aquarium Blue” by Tom Culora is a large-scale, fuzzy video still image, likely taken from the Internet, of a young Chinese woman in military garb (oddly pastel blue) holding an automatic weapon close to her chest. It is a fair guess that the Chinese characters below the image translate to “blossom” and could reference the color of her garb, her development as a woman or her advancement as a member of the army. As he often does, Culora delightfully mangles our expectations about gender, national identity and the language of propaganda.
Sculptor Fish Wells’ “Son Brings the Blue Fire” is the goofily cheerful head and upper torso of a tyran- nosaurus rex, mounted to the wall as a hunter’s trophy. The surface of the skin is studded with shell–like objects, and beneath the
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